Why Pakistan fights India

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What do military dictators do for fun?

He enjoys the occasional drink, Night on the Town, and Game of Squash.

So generally you're playing to win.

Yes, are you going to be to win?

General Pervez Musharraf seized control of the Pakistani government in a military coup in October 1999.

The gates to Pakistan's parliament are locked.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his advisors under arrest.

The new leader may have been a military man, but he settled into political life instantly.

In his cricket-mad nation of Pakistan, he's got more spin than Mushtaq Ahmed and more menacing firepower than Shoah Bakhtar.

The general very quickly sought to portray himself as a father figure, a westernised, business-oriented chief executive officer of Pakistan.

You call yourself the chief executive.

Why is that?

Why is that a corporate title?

I think that is for your consumption.

This is an interview General Musharraf did with the ABC while playing squash a few months into his regime.

Chief executive

is a very palatable name.

Instead of a chief martial law administrator, which is rather draconian in concept and in name, I wanted to give it a civil facade.

A civil facade?

You're not supposed to say that's that's saying the quiet part out loud, dude.

But actually, calling the head of the Pakistani army a chief executive is kind of appropriate.

The army isn't just an army, it also owns dozens of big companies.

They make food, fertilizer, clothes, they own insurance companies, malls, event venues, even restaurants.

But unlike most chief executives, Musharraf also had the power to throw the elected prime minister in jail.

I always thought that he lacked capability and potential to run a government at that level.

The charges slapped on the prime minister potentially carried the death penalty, but executing him doesn't sound very chief executive-y, does it?

What I would like to say is that I'm not a vindictive man,

so we'll have to wait and see what the judgment is and then decide how to respond.

In 78 years since independence, Pakistan has been under direct military control for 34 years.

The country is still yet to have a single Prime Minister serve a full five-year term of government without being dismissed, resigning, being assassinated, or executed.

The Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of the army, but these days the head of the army isn't putting on a civil facade.

Don't you ever forget that you belong to a superior,

superior ideology,

a superior culture.

This guy talking about superior culture and ideology is the new head of Pakistan's military and he's not calling himself the chief executive, he's calling himself the field marshal.

We have sacrificed a lot for the creation of this country and we know how to defend it.

And he's got the Indian government very worried because he's promising to help the people of Kashmir overthrow them.

We will not leave our Kashmiri brethren in their heroic struggle, what they are waging against the Indian occupation.

The old saying goes that most nations have an army, whereas Pakistan is a place where the army has a nation.

In the last episode, we looked at how nationalist tendencies in India push their democratic leaders to talk very tough about Pakistan.

So will nationalistic rhetoric from Pakistan lead to another inevitable escalation?

And with the head of the military talking about superior ideology and assisting Kashmiris, will anything be able to stop this from turning into an all-out war?

I'm Matt Bevan and this is If You're Listening.

The morning of May the 2nd, 2011 was a very bad morning to be a Pakistani government official.

This is believed to be where Osama bin Laden was living in a large home on a secured compound in an affluent area outside Islamabad.

It towers over the neighbouring villas, its high walls topped with barbed wire.

For five years leading up to his death, that May morning in 2011, the leader of the terrorist network Al-Qaeda had been living a short walk away from the place where the Pakistani army trains its officers.

It's hard to believe Osama bin Laden may have been living here unnoticed for the past five years.

The Pakistani government not only missed the fact that bin Laden was basically their next-door neighbor, it also didn't notice the Americans flying two helicopters into the middle of the city of Abbottabad, spending 38 minutes raiding bin Laden's compound, and then flying back to their base in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the ISI, stands accused of either being incompetent or complicit.

The government insists it knew nothing.

I am guessing that the vibes at the spy agency HQ weren't great.

Rather than address the oversight, the Pakistani government tried to get everyone to just move on.

What we are trying to do here is to look to the future.

This

issue of the Osama bin Laden,

it's history.

And I think we do not want to keep ourselves mired in the past.

Unfortunately for this guy, getting mired in the past is my entire shtick.

And it turns out that other people are also interested in things that have happened in the past.

For example, people were interested in all the times Pakistan actively denied that bin Laden was in their country.

No, we have no information about his

coordinates.

I think Osama bin Laden cannot be possibly in Pakistan if he is alive.

Now, Osama bin Laden isn't particularly relevant to the conflict between India and Pakistan, except that harboring and supporting terrorists is India's primary issue with Pakistan.

In view of this complete lack of concern on the part of Pakistan and its continued promotion of cross-border terrorism.

The police claim saying the group was aligned with the Pakistan-based insurgents in Kashmir.

But the government has blamed this attack on Pakistan-backed militants seeking to upset elections in Indian Kashmir.

The accusation by the Indian government is that the Pakistani army supports terrorist attacks in India to create conflict between different religious groups.

This is India's Achilles heel.

You can destroy India very easily by inflaming communal violence.

And I think we're going to see more attacks like this.

I'm quite sure of it.

Pakistanis don't buy that at all.

They point out that the Pakistani military regularly gives India tip-offs when they pick up information about a potential terror attack, but they can't prevent everything.

Indians, they always want to blame Pakistan regarding any matter to what happened in India.

They just blame the Pakistan.

But if Osama bin Laden can hide in Pakistan for nearly a decade, it's not too hard to see why some might suspect that Pakistan really is deliberately sheltering and aiding terrorists.

But were they?

It would be impossible to know the answer to that question, unless, of course, you had access to some sort of classified document about the internal workings of the Pakistani government that was leaked to a media organisation.

A classified document like the one that was written 12 years ago by the Pakistani Supreme Court, which is actually, technically, still classified.

The only reason I have it is that it leaked to Al Jazeera in 2013.

This document is the result of an 11-month investigation, and it's actually a real page turner.

It's probably the most sarcastic and passive aggressive official document I've ever read in my life.

An official Pakistani report lays out a litany of negligence and incompetence that allowed Osama bin Laden to live in plain sight for a decade.

Literally everybody cops a jurisdictional kick in the nuts from this document.

The local official who approved the building plans for bin Laden's giant barbed wire fortress.

The official who never collected any land tax from the property.

The police officer who didn't recognize bin Laden when his car was pulled over for speeding.

The document concludes by saying the Pakistani military and political leadership displayed a degree of incompetence and irresponsibility that was truly breathtaking and indeed culpable.

While the report says that it can't rule out some complicity, it says the failure comes down to incompetence rather than a conspiracy.

This is certainly what internal critics say is the real problem with Pakistan.

We are an agricultural country.

We are a rice-growing, wheat-growing country that can't afford to feed its own people anymore.

That either comes from incredible incompetence

or a combination of incompetence, corruption and self-destruction.

This is Fatima Bhutto.

She's a member of the powerful Bhutto family which has been in charge of the government of Pakistan on four separate occasions.

We are a nuclear-armed country that missed our millennium goals to eradicate polio because we couldn't refrigerate the vaccines.

That's the effect of corruption in Pakistan.

It's this kind of corruption and incompetence that's meant that India has left them behind economically since 2010.

The aid that goes to Pakistan and its billions and billions of dollars worth of aid money doesn't reach anyone except the state.

Bin Laden lived in Pakistan, not because he had help, but because he knew the government was too cooked to find him.

It's a similar situation with the jihadist group that's primarily responsible for terror attacks in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Now, the man who founded and leads this group, Jaish-e-Mohammed, he was a one-time associate of Osama bin Laden.

Jaish-e-Mohammed, or JEM, as it's known, aims to use violence to push Indian forces out of Kashmir Kashmir and put the region under Pakistani control.

It's been a designated terrorist organisation in Pakistan since 2002, and yet it's managed to keep operating inside Pakistan and Kashmir for more than 20 years.

The Pakistani army is denying that Jayishi Mohammed has a presence on Pakistani soil.

But given that they didn't know Osama bin Laden was there for nearly a decade, How can we believe them?

In any other country, the Abbottabad Commission report would have been declassified the second the government changed.

New governments love dumping dirt on their predecessors.

But in Pakistan, while the party with control of the parliament might change, the army never loses an election.

So documents like this stay classified forever.

The joke in Pakistan is not that we have elections, but rather we have selections.

If it weren't true, it would be more funny.

Back in 2019, Jaish-e-Mohammed carried out a suicide bombing attack on an Indian military convoy in the Kashmir Valley.

We talked about this at length in our last episode.

It was followed by a two-day air war between India and Pakistan, which ended with an Indian pilot with an incredible mustache being detained by the Pakistani army.

Pakistan says it has the pilot of one of the planes in detention.

It was an incredibly tense couple of days.

Pakistan had to decide rapidly what to do with the captured pilot.

A special session of parliament was called so that the Prime Minister could explain what they were going to do next.

This is Imran Khan, the greatest ever Pakistani cricketer and its 19th Prime Minister or Grand Vizier as they call it there.

The key thing he was going to announce that day was that they were releasing the pilot.

Needless to say, the stakes were high.

This was a very important diplomatic speech.

He was hoping to prevent escalation to all-out war between two nuclear-armed powers with a gesture of goodwill.

Now, I want to point out here that I'm reading the words I'm saying right now from a script.

I'm doing that because if I say the wrong thing, it's a massive pain for my producer Kara to fix up.

But Imran Khan, the Grand Vizier, had decided that he didn't need a teleprompter or even a script to make this speech.

So he starts talking about how much he'd love to have peace with India.

He says the Kashmir issue is the only thing preventing Pakistan and India from being friends and working together to boost living standards for everyone on the subcontinent.

He complained a bit about the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi not returning his calls and said that Modi probably wanted to milk the crisis for votes in his upcoming election.

He riffed on all of this and then sat down without actually announcing the most important thing: that they were releasing the mustachioed pilot.

Dude, you had one job.

Have a post-it note or something.

Oh, he's getting up again and signaling to the speaker.

Sorry, my jeez, Kenny Bulgaria and me.

I'm as a peace gesture.

Iga, we're releasing the pilot as a peace gesture.

He got there in the end.

Now, contrast Imran Khan with someone who definitely is always following a script.

This speech was given in April 2025 by the head of the Pakistani Army, General Asim Munir.

I'm really humbled to see these sentiments that you have shown towards the armed forces, and I'm extremely grateful to each one of you for these sentiments and for these emotions that you have for us.

Our sentiment and

we haven't edited that clip at all.

That is how it came from the Pakistani army.

But if you listen closely, you will see that someone has edited it quite a lot.

You are the light of Pakistan, which shines on the many countries of the globe

and the way that you are contributing for your country.

Yeah, applause doesn't just naturally start and stop like that.

This clip is really heavily and quite poorly edited.

All of General Munir's public remarks are tightly scripted and heavily edited.

His public image is carefully crafted.

He's always immaculately dressed with a clipped mustache and a tidy haircut.

Now, General Munir is basically the exact opposite of Imran Khan, and that's because over the last six years, the two of them have have become each other's arch-nemesis.

See, after the Pakistani Intelligence Service failed to warn Imran Khan of the Jaish-e-Mohammed attack on the Indian convoy or the subsequent Indian airstrikes, he was angry and he blamed the head of the Pakistani Intelligence Service, who just happened to be our immaculately groomed General Asim Munir.

So he was demoted and he was pretty salty about it.

The whole thing seriously soured Imran Khan's previously good relationship with the army.

And in 2022, the army reportedly orchestrated his dismissal as prime minister and charged him with multiple crimes.

Police filed terrorism charges against Mr.

Khan, accusing him of making threats against state officials.

Now this sounds pretty intense, but it's kind of expected.

This happens to basically every Pakistani Prime Minister.

Although he has now been granted protective bail until Thursday.

But then, curiously, General Munir, the guy Imran Khan sacked, was promoted to be the head of the army just six months later.

And his old arch nemesis, Imran Khan, found himself under arrest.

It was the army which abducted me.

And nothing happens without the permission of the army chief.

That's how the army works.

They have decided that the only way they'll allow elections is if I'm inside jail or killed.

Imran Khan has now been sentenced to 14 years in prison and he specifically blames General Munir.

If you have a man up there who in order to preserve himself is dismantling our democracy, our constitution, fundamental rights, he's basically dismantling the future of this country to protect himself.

Since then, General Munir has been generally referred to as the most powerful man in Pakistan.

So what does the most powerful and tightly scripted man in Pakistan want to do with all that power?

Well, he wants to crack down on terrorists who attack Pakistani people.

You think terrorists they can take away the destiny of the country from us?

If this great Pakistani nation and the Pakistani armed forces,

if 1.3 million Indian army, if they cannot intimidate us and they cannot coerce us, these terrorists can subdue the armed forces of Pakistan.

He says if India's 1.3 million strong army can't intimidate Pakistan, how could a group of 1500 terrorists?

Inshallah, you will see that we will beat the hell of these terrorists very soon.

There's that weird edited applause again.

Anyway, the theme General Munir continually comes back to is that the entire point of Pakistan is that it is not India.

That the two countries were divided so that Muslims lived in Pakistan and Hindus lived in India.

We are different from the Hindus in every possible aspect of life.

Our religion is different.

Our customs are different.

Our ambitions are different.

We are two nations.

We are not one nation.

And according to him, Muslim-majority Kashmir is not a peripheral province, but the jugular vein of Pakistan.

It was our jagular van.

It is our jugular vehicle.

and we will not leave our Kashmiri brethren in their heroic struggle, what they are waging against the Indian occupation.

This is hardcore nationalism.

It's dangerous for everyone.

But if the army that dominates your society is corrupt and incompetent, they need an enemy to retain their legitimacy.

And for as long as we have those brave mothers who proudly sacrificed their sons for the sake of the country, Pakistan will not fall.

Following the terror attack in April and exchange of drone and missile strikes in early May, General Munir got himself promoted to a military rank usually reserved for kings or wartime generalism.

Ladies and gentlemen, in recognition of his distinguished military leadership, extraordinary courage, General Sayed Asim Munir, Nishane Imtia's military, is elevated to the rank of Field Marshal.

This is a clear sign, either that Munir is now the de facto ruler of Pakistan, or that they are preparing for war, or I suppose both.

20 years ago, General Pervez Musharraf, the squash-loving CEO/slash-military dictator of Pakistan, took a trip to India to watch India play Pakistan in a one-day international in New Delhi.

It's been a colourful weekend of cricket diplomacy in New Delhi.

Wearing a business suit, Musharraf shook hands with the Indian team before watching the Pakistanis absolutely demolish them.

Pakistan's team walked away with victory in both the Test and One Day series, and their president wore a pink turban and offered prayers for peace.

Musharraf subsequently proposed a peace plan for Kashmir in which Pakistan would give up its claim to the Indian-occupied area, including the Kashmir Valley, in in exchange for the withdrawal of Indian troops, free movement for locals across the shared border, self-government for Kashmiris, and a supervisory role for Pakistan to make sure the rules were being followed.

Obviously, it didn't take.

India didn't trust him.

In fact, neither side trusts the other, and for good reason.

But like Imran Khan said in his improvised peace speech in 2019, the issue is holding both countries back.

But at the moment, both sides have strong nationalistic voices that benefit from division.

The next cricket match scheduled between India and Pakistan is in September.

It's meant to be in India.

It will be interesting to see if General Munier books a ticket.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nipperhart.

Next, we're going to take a bit of a step back from potential nuclear war and look at what the deal is with fluoride.

I sound like Jerry Seinfeld here.

But putting fluoride in drinking water has often been called one of the most successful public health measures in human history.

But since the beginning of fluoridation programs in the 1940s, it's been plagued by misinformation and furious opposition.

Now, with Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

at the helm of the U.S.

Department of Health, the Trump administration is leading the charge to get U.S.

states to ban the use of fluoride in water.

So how did this get started?

And can it be stopped?

That's next on if you're listening.

Hi, it's PK here, host of the new politics podcast, Politics Now.

I'll be joined by the ABC's sharpest political minds to break down the biggest political stories of the day.

It's called Politics Now, and you can find it and follow it on the ABC Listen app.