THE WAR THEY WANT PAKISTAN TO FIGHT

On Foreign Design, Sectarian Fault Lines, and the Existential Cost of Choosing a Side

On Mai Kolachi Road, the bodies were already on the pavement before the paramilitary forces stopped counting. Marine Security Guards at the United States Consulate in Karachi had opened fire on protesters who had breached the outer perimeter wall. At least ten dead. As many as twenty-two, depending on which security services were doing the counting and which ones had reason to count low. The protesters had come in the name of Khamenei. They had come because a bomb dropped by an American aircraft on February 28, 2026 had killed the Supreme Leader of Iran inside his compound in Tehran, and the Pakistani Shia community had understood immediately what that killing meant, in ways that Islamabad’s foreign policy establishment either could not process or chose not to acknowledge.

This is not a story about a protest. It is a story about what happens when the Pakistani state ignores the geography of its own population in service of a foreign policy calculus that has never once served Pakistan’s national interest. It is a story about fault lines that were mapped, measured, and then deliberately buried. And it is a warning, addressed to every general and minister currently reading the cables from Washington and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, about what awaits any government in Islamabad that chooses, under whatever rubric, to enter or facilitate a war against Iran.

Pakistan cannot survive that choice. The evidence does not require theory. It requires only arithmetic, history, and the intelligence assessments that Pakistan’s own security establishment produced during the era when these fault lines were first being manufactured.

Pakistan’s census does not record sectarian affiliation. This is not an accident of bureaucratic oversight. It is a deliberate institutional silence, a decision made and remade across successive governments because the number, if known precisely, would be politically inconvenient for administrations that have found it useful to treat the Shia community as a manageable minority rather than a constitutive mass of the Pakistani population.

Official estimates, sourced primarily from Western research institutions and cited selectively by Pakistani governments, place the Shia population at between ten and fifteen percent of all Muslims in the country. In absolute terms, with Pakistan’s population now exceeding 240 million, that figure translates to between 24 and 36 million people. Pakistan carries the second-largest Shia population on earth, surpassed only by Iran itself.

The official figure is fiercely contested. Community leaders and scholars working within Pakistan’s Shia institutions have consistently maintained that the actual number is substantially higher, in the range of twenty to thirty percent of the Muslim population, with demographic analyses based on provincial voting patterns, shrine attendance records, and community registration data placing figures at or beyond that upper bound. The official floor is an undercount. The political incentive to undercount has been present in every government since 1947.

In Gilgit-Baltistan, the Shia community is not a minority. It constitutes the majority of the population in a territory that shares its western border with Afghanistan and its northern border with China, and that sits astride every significant supply route into the Pakistani military’s strategic depth. In Karachi, the Shia population is woven into the commercial, professional, and political architecture of the city in ways that make sectarian disaggregation not just analytically meaningless but operationally catastrophic. In interior Sindh, in southern Punjab, in the Kurram Valley of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Shia communities are not peripheral. They are load-bearing walls.

Any government that decides to place Pakistan on the operational side of a war against Iran is deciding, whether it understands this or not, to ask thirty million Pakistani citizens, at minimum, to accept the killing of their co-religionists, their theological kin, the community that produced the revolution their grandparents watched with a mixture of fear and pride. It is asking them to do this while already living under conditions of sectarian targeting, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi assassinations, Muharram lockdowns, and the accumulated grief of thousands killed by Sunni extremist groups that the Pakistani state itself helped arm and organize.

The question of whether to officially declare Pakistan’s Shia community non-Muslim, as the Ahmadiyya had been declared non-Muslim by constitutional amendment in 1974, was not invented by street-level sectarian agitators. It was raised, structured, studied, and ultimately rejected inside Pakistan’s own security apparatus during the decade when anti-Shia institutional engineering reached its apex.

Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the militant Sunni organization formed in 1985 out of the Jhang district of Punjab with ISI patronage and Saudi funding, made the exclusion of Shia from the category of Muslims the central demand of its political program. This was not fringe rhetoric. ISI maintained formal covert links with SSP from its founding. SSP cadres trained in Afghan mujahideen camps funded through the CIA-ISI pipeline. General Zia ul Haq’s regime, as documented by the International Crisis Group’s 2005 report on his institutionalization of sectarian preference, saw SSP as a useful instrument to contain Shia political mobilization, which Zia’s intelligence chiefs read as an extension of Iranian influence following the 1979 revolution. Saudi Arabia and Iran were already running a proxy war inside Pakistan’s borders, funding their respective sectarian clients and arming madrasa networks on both sides.

But the question was asked internally: should Pakistan go the full distance? Should the state do to the Shia what Bhutto’s government had done to the Ahmadis? Should a constitutional or legislative mechanism be deployed to formally exclude the Shia from Muslim status, removing them from the citizenship protections that formally accrued to the Muslim majority?

The answer from within Pakistan’s own security establishment was no. Not because of theological scruple. Not because of democratic principle. But because the numbers did not permit it. The internal calculation was straightforward: declaring thirty million Pakistanis non-Muslim in a country whose founding legitimacy rested on being a homeland for Muslims would not produce a manageable minority problem. It would produce civil war. The Ahmadiyya, numbering two to three million and concentrated largely in urban commercial settings, could be expelled from Islamic identity by constitutional fiat and driven underground without fracturing the state. Doing the same to the Shia, distributed across every province, embedded in the army, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the commercial class, and the landowning families of Sindh and Punjab, was not a sectarian policy. It was an act of national suicide.

The internal conclusion held. The formal declaration was never made. What was made instead was the covert infrastructure: SSP given free rein, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi spun off as the assassination arm, Shia professionals and scholars and clerics targeted for killing across the 1990s and 2000s with the security services alternately facilitating, ignoring, and ritually prosecuting the perpetrators.

The lesson encoded in that internal calculation applies today, rewritten in the language of military alliance rather than constitutional exclusion. What Islamabad could not do through law in 1985 without destroying the state, it cannot do through war in 2026 without the same result by different means. The fault lines have not closed. They have widened. The community is no smaller. And the external provocation, a US-Israeli war that has killed the Supreme Leader of the neighboring state that is the theological and political center of Shia identity worldwide, is orders of magnitude larger than anything the Zia era produced.

Let us be direct about what is being proposed when Washington’s allies, or Washington itself through its Gulf intermediaries, signal that Pakistan should align with Operation Epic Fury. The signal is not, as it is invariably framed, a request for strategic solidarity. It is a request for Pakistan to perform its own internal destruction on a publicly visible stage, with American diplomatic cover and Gulf financial incentive as the fee.

Pakistan has been here before. In 1979, Pakistan agreed to serve as the logistics base and recruiting ground for the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The immediate payment was American weapons, Saudi money, and a temporary suspension of nuclear program scrutiny. The deferred cost was the militarization of the Pakistani state, the institutionalization of non-state armed groups as instruments of foreign policy, the flooding of the country with weapons and narcotics, and the destruction of any functional distinction between the Pakistani security apparatus and the jihadi networks it had created. That cost is still being paid. Operation Zarb-e-Azb, launched thirty-five years after the first mujahideen crossed the Khyber Pass, was Pakistan’s military attempting to dismantle infrastructure its own intelligence services had built.

The request being made now is structurally identical. Align with the US-Israeli campaign against Iran. Deny Pakistani airspace to Iranian responses. Close the border to any Iranian supply line. Signal to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that Pakistan has chosen its side. Receive, in return, the promise of Gulf liquidity to service the next IMF tranche, continued access to the Saudi labor market for Pakistani workers, and the borrowed geopolitical respectability that comes from being on the winning side of a war whose planners believe it will be resolved within four to five weeks.

The analysis underwriting that offer is catastrophically wrong. But even accepting its premises, the calculation fails on its own terms. The Gulf states being asked to finance Pakistan’s alignment are not unified. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are running distinct and partly competing agendas within this conflict. Iran has already launched 167 missiles at UAE territory in the opening days of the campaign. The Emirati financial architecture that has penetrated Pakistan’s institutional fabric through the SIFC, through DP World’s logistics stakes, through Dubai’s role as the offshore banking center for Pakistan’s ruling class, is exposed in ways that Islamabad has not fully mapped. Pakistan cannot be simultaneously the financial client of Abu Dhabi and the military instrument of a war that Abu Dhabi is absorbing Iranian missiles for. The contradiction is not theoretical. It is operational.

More fundamentally, the foreign design does not need Pakistan to win a war against Iran. The design needs Pakistan to enter the war, to be seen entering the war, to generate the internal rupture that entry produces, and to emerge from that rupture weakened, fractured, and more dependent than before on the external patrons who manufactured the crisis. A destabilized Pakistan riven by sectarian civil conflict is more valuable to certain actors than a stable Pakistan that stayed out. It provides a rationale for military presence, for financial conditionality, for the permanent management of a nuclear-armed state that has demonstrated it cannot manage itself.

The Karachi consulate siege has already produced the first frame. Pakistani protesters storming an American diplomatic facility, bodies on the road outside, Marine guards firing into a crowd. The image circulates globally as evidence that Pakistan is ungovernable, its population radicalized, its state incapable of protecting Western interests. This framing serves the argument for deeper external intervention in Pakistani affairs. Every Pakistani killed outside the consulate gates is, in the Western media architecture, further proof that Pakistan is the problem. The actual cause, an American war of aggression against a neighboring Muslim country conducted without UN Security Council authorization while diplomacy was still active, is treated as the natural and unquestionable background.

Those in Islamabad counseling alignment with the US owe Pakistan one specific operational answer to one specific operational question: what happens in Gilgit-Baltistan the day after Pakistan formally sides with Operation Epic Fury?

Gilgit-Baltistan is not a strategic afterthought. It is the northern axis of CPEC, the territory through which the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s road and energy infrastructure runs into Xinjiang. It is a territory where the Shia community is the demographic majority, where Khamenei’s killing has already produced protests, deaths, a three-day curfew, and Pakistan Army troops in the streets. At least twelve protesters were killed in Gilgit, Skardu, and Shigar in the first forty-eight hours after the strikes. Buildings burned. A school was damaged. The curfew has been imposed. This is what neutrality looks like. Imagine what alignment looks like.

Parachinar, the Shia-majority administrative center of the Kurram district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, sits 35 kilometers from the Afghan border and has been under effective siege conditions, intermittently, for years as Sunni tribal groups and Taliban-affiliated fighters have blockaded its roads. The residents of Parachinar have buried hundreds in sectarian attacks over the past decade, without large-scale state protection and without international attention, while watching the military’s primary counter-terrorism focus remain directed at groups threatening the state’s own installations, not at Shia communities that want to move supplies along a road without being shot.

In Karachi, the Shia community constitutes a substantial portion of the city’s twelve million residents, concentrated in Ancholi, Rizvia, and across the older commercial districts where Shia business families established their positions across the twentieth century. Karachi is already the most complex urban security environment in South Asia, a city where the Rangers have operated in de facto martial law conditions for decades, where the MQM’s decline has left a political vacuum that multiple armed groups are contesting. Asking Karachi to absorb the political shock of Pakistan aligning against Iran, while the US Consulate is already a site of mass casualties, is asking the city to detonate from the inside.

The Hazara community in Quetta has buried more of its dead, proportional to its size, than any other community in Pakistan. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi systematically targeted Hazara Shia across the 2010s, killing hundreds in coordinated bombings and targeted shootings, while the Balochistan government and federal security services produced ritual condemnations followed by the same absence of prosecutions. The Hazara cannot conceal their identity. They are ethnically distinct. They cannot move through Sunni neighborhoods without being identified. Any escalation of sectarian conflict following a Pakistan-Iran war alignment would place the Hazara community in Quetta in immediate physical danger with no route to state protection.

These are not hypothetical risks. They are the predictable consequences of a decision that the Pakistani state, at its most thoughtful, has always stopped short of making. The Zia-era intelligence community understood this. Their successors understand it too.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Senator Ishaq Dar stood at the UN Security Council and said what needed to be said: that the strikes against Iran were unwarranted, that diplomacy had been derailed, that Pakistan demands de-escalation, restraint, and a return to talks. Pakistan condemned the strikes. Pakistan expressed sorrow at Iranian missile strikes that killed Pakistani nationals in the UAE. Pakistan’s position threads the only needle available to a state in its structural position: no endorsement of the US-Israeli operation, solidarity with the legal principle of sovereignty violated, and acknowledgment that Gulf partner states hosting millions of Pakistani workers are simultaneously absorbing Iranian missiles.

This position will come under pressure. The pressure will be framed as a choice between principle and pragmatism. It is the opposite. Pakistan’s neutrality is not idealism. It is the only pragmatic position available. The IMF is not going anywhere. Pakistan’s relationship with Washington, however damaged by the spectacle of a consulate under siege, is not terminated by a refusal to enter an illegal war that carries no UN Security Council authorization and that the overwhelming majority of the Global South has condemned. Washington needs Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal managed, its border with Afghanistan monitored, and its intelligence services cooperative. These requirements do not disappear because Islamabad refused to denounce Iran.

What does disappear, permanently and irrecoverably, if Pakistan makes the wrong choice, is the fragile internal compact that holds the country together. Pakistan is not a nation-state in the Western European sense, built around ethnic and linguistic homogeneity cemented over centuries. It is a political construction assembled from communities with distinct histories, distinct grievances, and distinct relationships to the central state, held together by the promise, frequently violated but never formally abandoned, that the state is not structurally hostile to any of them. The moment Pakistan is perceived by its Shia community as having aligned with a military campaign against the center of their religious world, that promise is broken in a way that no subsequent diplomatic statement can repair.

The generation that grew up watching Hazara bodies stacked in Quetta, that mourned Shia doctors shot at their clinic doors in Karachi, that buried Imambargah bombing victims across the Muharram seasons of the 2010s, is the generation currently in the streets outside the US Consulate. They are not asking Islamabad to go to war with America. They are asking Islamabad to refuse complicity in the killing of their co-religionists. That is a minimum ask. It is the ask that Pakistan’s neutrality position is attempting to honor.

In September 1974, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto signed into law the Second Amendment to Pakistan’s constitution, formally declaring the Ahmadiyya community non-Muslim. Bhutto was not a religious man. He was a secular socialist who had come to power on the back of a workers’ and peasants’ movement, who drank whisky in private and spoke the language of Third World liberation in public. He declared the Ahmadis non-Muslim because the opposition Islamist parties had manufactured a street crisis around the issue, because he calculated that capitulation would buy him political peace, and because the Ahmadis were a small, commercially successful, internationally connected minority with no armed capacity to resist their own exclusion.

It was the most consequential and the most self-destructive decision of his political career. The capitulation did not buy peace. It taught the religious right that the state would yield to sufficient pressure on questions of religious identity. It established the precedent that constitutional protection could be stripped from a minority by sufficiently organized agitation. And it handed Zia ul Haq the ideological architecture of an Islamic state whose definition of who belonged would always remain available for further contraction.

The lesson is precise: when the Pakistani state allows its identity architecture to be weaponized against an internal community for external political purposes, the cost is always higher than the payment. Bhutto paid for the Ahmadiyya amendment with his own government, his own judicial murder, and eleven years of military dictatorship.

The question before Pakistan’s current leadership is whether they have studied that lesson. Entering or facilitating a war against Iran for the benefit of Washington and Riyadh, in a country where the Shia community numbers in the tens of millions and has already demonstrated it will absorb lethal force from its own security services before it accepts complicity in its theological destruction, is not Bhutto’s Ahmadiyya amendment scaled up. It is the Ahmadiyya amendment with a body count attached from the first day.

Pakistan must maintain and deepen its call for de-escalation. Not as a diplomatic formula. As a red line. The red line is simple: Pakistan will not participate in, facilitate, or provide operational cover for a campaign whose stated objective is the destruction of the Iranian state. This is not neutrality in the liberal peacenik sense. It is a declaration of national survival interest, backed by the same strategic logic that the Pakistan Army applies when it refuses to subordinate its nuclear program to American preference. The logic that preserves Pakistan’s deterrent from foreign control is the same logic that requires Pakistan to stay out of a war that would break the country from the inside.

Pakistan must address the conditions that produced the Karachi consulate siege. Not by further militarizing the consulate perimeter. By acknowledging that the Shia community in Pakistan carries a legitimate political grievance about the killing of Khamenei, about the US-Israeli war on Iran, and about the Pakistani state’s vulnerability to being perceived as complicit in that war by its own population. Acknowledgment is not agreement with every demand of every protester. It is the minimum political act of naming the reality the state’s Shia citizens are living inside.

Gilgit-Baltistan must not become a theater of internal repression in the name of stabilization. Curfews and troop deployments are containment, not resolution. The communities of Gilgit, Skardu, and Shigar are watching their state’s response to a killing that their spiritual world experienced as a civilizational wound. They are owed a political response from a government that treats them as citizens rather than a security problem.

Pakistan’s foreign policy establishment must stop accepting the framing, circulated from Washington and amplified by Gulf-aligned commentators inside Pakistan, that staying out of this war signals weakness, irresolution, or dangerous proximity to Tehran. Pakistan shares a 909-kilometer border with Iran. Pakistan is the world’s second-largest Shia country by population. Pakistan has been at war with itself over sectarian violence for forty years. The demand that Pakistan enter an anti-Iran military coalition is not a demand to demonstrate strength. It is a demand that Pakistan demonstrate its willingness to dissolve itself on command.

No government with any claim to national interest can meet that demand.

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The fault lines were mapped before they were manufactured. The ISI knew in the 1980s that what could not be done by constitutional exclusion could not be done by any other means without producing the same result. That knowledge does not expire. What the state was wise enough to refuse at the height of its own sectarian engineering project, it must be wise enough to refuse now, when the pressure is external, the stakes are existential, and the bodies are already on the pavement outside the consulate on Mai Kolachi Road.