The art of distraction: War drums, dictatorships, and the dance of nuclear madness

What was feared has happened. India has launched military strikes deep inside Pakistan, and Islamabad claims to have retaliated in kind. The spark? A terrorist attack over a week ago in Indian-occupied Kashmir. As has become tradition, New Delhi wasted no time in pointing the finger at Islamabad, offering no concrete evidence—only the kind of absolute certainty that usually accompanies nationalist fervor, not forensic investigations. Pakistan, for its part, condemned the attack and pledged cooperation in any investigation—knowing full well it would be ignored. In the theatre of South Asian crisis management, evidence is optional; outrage is mandatory.

Yet, behind this theatrical display of missiles and nationalist chest-thumping simmers a far more cynical reality. This is no spontaneous clash of civilizations or ideologies, but a coldly calculated gambit by two regimes that have discovered the utility of war not in victory, but in diversion. Two governments—each beset by domestic crises, faltering legitimacy, and swelling public anger—have reached for the oldest trick in the authoritarian handbook: start a fire on the border to drown out the blaze at home. When bread runs out, regimes turn to circuses. And nothing distracts quite like the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.

The Pakistani paradox: Generals at war with the people

Let us begin with Islamabad. Pakistan’s military establishment—the perennial khaki-clad custodians of state power who treat civilian governance as a temporary indulgence—find themselves confronting perhaps the most reviled moment in their long and ignominious history. Even Punjab, once the citadel of pro-military sentiment and the perennial recipient of state largesse, now seethes with resentment. In their crusade to crush Imran Khan and his political movement, the generals have inadvertently forged an unlikely unity: the people, long divided, are increasingly united not behind the military, but against it.

What follows is repression with bureaucratic precision. Censorship, mass arrests, torture, disappearances—Pakistan has operationalised the autocrat’s manual with such clinical efficiency that authoritarianism now resembles administrative routine. The digital sphere has been throttled, journalists hunted, judges coerced, and parliament hollowed into a ceremonial echo chamber. It is not merely martial law in spirit; it is martial law in everything but nomenclature.

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Cornered and discredited, the military has reverted to its most reliable formula: external confrontation. A few well-timed skirmishes across the Line of Control, a handful of fighter jets scrambled, and the public’s gaze is deflected from the men in uniform who truly imperil the republic. In a grim irony, Pakistanis may find themselves momentarily heartened to see their military finally aiming its arsenal outward, rather than at students, activists, and Supreme Court justices with the temerity to believe in constitutional independence. For once, the boot is pointed outward. Is this progress, or parody?

Delhi’s dance of demagoguery

Nor can one exonerate New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, though electorally secure, faces a fraying facade. The sheen of the “Gujarat Model” has dulled under the weight of rising unemployment, stubborn inflation, and the lingering political bruises of the farmer protests. Once deferential and dazzled, India’s middle class is beginning to murmur its discontent.

To a seasoned demagogue, this presents not a threat, but an opportunity. Domestic dissent is best neutralised with external aggression. Pakistan offers an enemy so electorally convenient that New Delhi barely needs to update the script. A terrorist incident occurs, the culprit is preordained, and the media spectacle begins. As in the past—Balakot comes to mind—claims of destroyed terror camps are made with great fanfare and minimal evidence. The truth is irrelevant; the tempo is paramount. In Modi’s India, perception is policy, and reality a dispensable casualty.

India’s media, once proudly adversarial, has mutated into a performative arm of state power. Television anchors play soldier, analysts don the uniform of jingoism, and hashtags like #SurgicalStrike2 trend with choreographed predictability. Journalism has not merely withered; it has been reborn as state-sanctioned theatre. The newsroom has become the barracks, and the citizen the audience to a war whose primary battlefield is the national imagination.

Meanwhile, Kashmir bleeds—quietly, invisibly. Stripped of autonomy, swamped by troops, and subjected to demographic experimentation and surveillance, its people have vanished from India’s moral conscience. The bulldozers roll on, and the world looks away.

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Nuclear brinkmanship: Roulette with Armageddon

That two nuclear-armed states are exchanging missiles should arrest the global conscience. But instead, both governments treat nuclear brinkmanship as a public relations device. Pakistan claims to have shot down five Indian fighter jets. India denies it. Somewhere in the fog of war and the frenzy of social media lies a truth too terrifying to quantify: deterrence has collapsed into theatre.

This is not strategic signaling; it is existential gambling. The logic of deterrence once implied mutual restraint. Now it merely supplies rhetorical ammunition. Nuclear arsenals, instead of stabilising the subcontinent, have become props in a macabre performance of national virility. We are no longer watching the choreography of rational actors, but the spasms of regimes in denial of their own decay.

Even water has become weaponised. India’s threats to abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty, once heralded as a rare feat of postcolonial diplomacy, represent not mere provocation but slow-motion environmental warfare. For water-insecure Pakistan, such a move would be nothing short of a biological siege. If bombs don’t devastate the population, drought will.

Global puppeteers: The return of the Great Game

Hovering above the subcontinental theatrics is a far grander geopolitical drama—one in which South Asia functions less as an autonomous arena and more as a chessboard upon which the great powers maneuver with calculated detachment. The current crisis, though ostensibly bilateral, is deeply entangled with the strategic imperatives of Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. What may appear as an isolated eruption of regional hostilities is, in fact, a subplot within the broader reanimation of Cold War rivalries.

The United States, in its now habitual register of bureaucratic understatement, acknowledged having had “advance notice” of India’s strikes—a phrase that functions less as a diplomatic admission than as a geopolitical smirk. Long disillusioned with Pakistan’s duplicitous role in the so-called War on Terror, Washington has recalibrated its calculus: Islamabad is no longer a problematic partner, but a liability tethered too closely to Beijing. In the zero-sum game of Indo-Pacific containment, Pakistan’s allegiance to China cannot go unanswered.

At the heart of this shifting alignment lies the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project that has, in Western eyes, morphed from a developmental initiative into a geostrategic provocation. The port of Gwadar, once marketed as a commercial gateway, is now viewed by American defense planners as a potential node of Chinese naval expansion. What CPEC promises in roads and energy, Washington sees in surveillance and submarines. The paranoia is not without precedent—great powers have always feared their rivals’ infrastructure as prelude to encroachment.

In response, Pakistan’s military elite have doubled down on their entanglement with Beijing, offering a blank check in exchange for lifelines: basing rights, intelligence cooperation, and infrastructural sovereignty are all seemingly negotiable, so long as Chinese capital continues to flow and American ire is kept at bay. Islamabad’s desperation is palpable; its strategic autonomy has been mortgaged to external patrons in a last-ditch attempt to remain relevant on the global stage.

Compounding this vulnerability is Pakistan’s evaporated leverage in Afghanistan. Once hailed as the architects of “strategic depth,” the generals now find themselves outmaneuvered by the very militants they once courted. The Taliban, having transitioned from proxy to power broker, now engage in transactional diplomacy with both Washington and New Delhi. Pakistan’s ideological investment in jihadist realpolitik has yielded neither loyalty nor dividends—only a fickle client who charges for services rendered and maintains multiple phone lines.

Thus, the subcontinental conflagration is not simply a crisis of borders, but of sovereignty in the age of great power rivalry. South Asia is being reabsorbed into a larger matrix of imperial inertia, where its governments perform sovereignty while subcontracting their futures to the highest bidder.

Kashmir: The vanishing moral center

Amid the din of missiles and nationalist spectacle, Kashmir remains the most profound—and most tragic—casualty of this conflict. Its people, long subjected to occupation, surveillance, and the slow grind of dispossession, have been rendered voiceless in a conflict that purports to be about them but consistently excludes them. The region, once central to diplomatic discourses and humanitarian concern, has been relegated to a kind of geopolitical purgatory—invoked when convenient, ignored when inconvenient, and perpetually punished in the name of unity.

Neither Delhi nor Islamabad offers the Kashmiris agency. India continues its project of demographic reengineering and militarised governance with ruthless efficiency, treating resistance as terrorism and dissent as sedition. The revocation of Article 370, the mass detentions, the communications blackouts—these are not anomalies but instruments of a policy that views Kashmiri identity as a problem to be administratively erased. The machinery of the Indian state now operates with a chilling precision that would make colonial administrators nod in grim approval.

Pakistan, for its part, trades in rhetorical solidarity while offering little substantive support. For decades, Kashmir has served as a moral shield for Islamabad’s strategic duplicity—a sacred cause used to mask cynical geopolitics. Today, that pretense is threadbare. The Pakistani state invokes Kashmir’s plight in international forums, yet fails to offer even the most basic dignity to those within its own borders who dare to dissent.

The international community, once willing to offer at least token condemnation, now maintains a deafening silence. Human rights organizations are denied access. Journalists are blocked or intimidated. Multilateral bodies bury Kashmir in the fine print of strategic partnerships and arms deals. What was once a moral crisis has been reduced to a logistical inconvenience in the corridors of global power.

In truth, the Kashmiris have become collateral damage in a regional contest that has almost nothing to do with them. Their suffering is exploited by one side, erased by the other, and forgotten by the rest. Theirs is a tragedy without witnesses.

A death wish in formal attire

What we are witnessing is not a new crisis, but the latest iteration of a dangerously familiar script. The military salvos, the political chest-thumping, the denials and counter-denials—all follow a pattern that grows more reckless with each performance. But unlike past confrontations, this one exudes a different kind of desperation: not calculated strategy, but nihilism masquerading as nationalism. It is not a rehearsal for war; it is a gamble with extinction.

The danger lies not in escalation alone, but in the normalisation of brinkmanship. One cannot continually flirt with catastrophe without inviting it in. Each close call erodes the norms that have so far prevented a full-scale conflagration. Each crisis lowers the bar for the next. And each silence from the global community reinforces the illusion that this region can keep playing with nuclear fire without eventually being burned.

Yet in South Asia, political survival increasingly hinges on distraction. And few distractions are as potent—or as perilous—as war. Bread is scarce, but flags are plentiful. And in both India and Pakistan, political elites have mastered the dark art of manufacturing consent through fear, spectacle, and the selective invocation of patriotism.

Thus, we wait. Not for peace, which has long ceased to be a serious objective, but for the next orchestrated diversion. Because in this region, distraction is not a symptom of crisis—it is the crisis. And unless the people of both countries awaken to this tragic choreography, they will remain, like Kashmir, voiceless passengers on a train hurling toward catastrophe.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.