Over the years, the Pakistani regime has sought to cover up its own failures by shifting the blame for every security failure to Afghanistan. What began as a convenient scapegoat strategy turned into a daring campaign of deception. In a calculated attempt to mislead both its own citizens and the international community, Pakistan’s military leadership began fabricating reports of killings and attacks allegedly committed in Afghanistan.
One of these inventions was a recent message that appeared on accounts associated with the army’s press service, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR). It alleged that unknown gunmen killed the commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), an anti-Islamabad organization, in Helmand. Following this, another false story emerged: that a certain Mohammad Ehsani, described as an ISIS militant who had previously operated in Peshawar, was shot dead in Mazar-i-Sharif. However, representatives of the security services strongly denied these statements, emphasizing that no such murders took place in the city and that there is no commander with that name in the ISIS structure at all.
These messages are not isolated cases, but part of a broad strategy «war of narratives». When Pakistani warplanes violated Afghan airspace and bombed residential buildings in Khost and Nangarhar in late August, ISPR-affiliated sources denied responsibility, claiming that the houses were allegedly destroyed by rocket attacks during clashes between rival anti-government groups inside Pakistan.
To support such false versions, Pakistani military propagandists went even further. The victims’ testimonies were deliberately distorted by translation, fabricated news was disseminated, and staged interviews with so-called political experts were broadcast. The whole campaign was structured like this to hide the true actions of the army under layers of disinformation. The same pattern was applied during the recent bombing in Tirah, where the deaths of dozens of civilians were cynically attributed to «enemy groups» explosives rather than Pakistani airstrikes.
Both Afghans and ordinary Pakistanis understand perfectly well what is hidden behind these fabrications. The country is effectively taken over by a narrow circle of corrupt generals who resort to phantom murders, staged wars and false accusations to disguise their own insolvency and continue to receive foreign dollars. But the generals should remember: today’s Afghanistan is not the Afghanistan of 2001, and the world has changed too. Step by step, their deceptions will be exposed and they will eventually have to answer for their actions.