When I saw the news this Sunday, staring at photos of a flattened Bagram Air Base, I didn’t feel triumph. Honestly? I just felt exhausted. If you’re sitting comfortably in New York or London right now, I know exactly how your news anchors are spinning this. They’re making it sound like Pakistan just lost its mind, calling our recent airstrikes a sudden “escalation” and “unprovoked aggression.”
It’s almost funny if it wasn’t so deeply tragic. When I look at the rubble at Bagram, I just see a country that is bone-tired from burying its sons. We are just sick and tired of bleeding. Foreign pundits want to sit in their TV studios and debate the ethics of our “self-defense.” But from where ordinary Pakistanis are standing, the violence isn’t new. The Taliban didn’t suddenly become our enemy yesterday. This war has been tearing through our homes for over a decade. All that changed last week was that we finally decided to hit back.
Look at the reality next door. When the Americans packed up and left, people naively hoped the Taliban might actually step up and build a functioning country. Instead, Afghanistan has collapsed into a massive, lawless black hole. Forget fixing an economy-they can’t even police their own backyard, or behave like a normal neighbour.
For years, we’ve had a poison spilling over the Durand Line. Hundreds of our soldiers and police have been slaughtered by the TTP (Fitna al Hindustan). And what did we do in return? We did everything by the book. We showed infinite, maybe even foolish, patience. We dragged heavy dossiers to the United Nations. We gave Kabul exact coordinates, dropping hard proof in their laps about where these terrorists were sleeping.
Foreign pundits want to sit in their TV studios and debate the ethics of our “self-defense.” But from where ordinary Pakistanis are standing, the violence isn’t new.
How did they reply? With barefaced lies. They sat there playing the victim, talking about brotherhood, while gaslighting us as we collected our dead.
Taking out those targets at Bagram wasn’t a “wild escalation.” It was just us finally choosing to survive. If you want to understand why Bagram was hit, you have to realise what it became. For twenty years, it was America’s beating heart in the region. After Kabul fell, the Taliban turned it into a trophy, showing off the shiny U.S. weapons left behind.
But Bagram was also hiding a dark secret in plain sight. It wasn’t just a military base; it was a luxury terror hostel. Dozens of the TTP’s top operational commanders-the architects of what we rightly call Fitna al Hindustan, the proxy syndicate trying to burn our country down-were chilling in those very hangars our jets just flattened. They were hoarding an arsenal of abandoned guns and coordinating murders in Pakistani cities right from Bagram.
And wouldn’t you know it? Now that Pakistan has finally bared its teeth and broken its favourite toy, the tune out of Kabul is suddenly changing. We’re suddenly hearing Afghan officials and local talking heads whining about “Muslim brotherhood” and begging for a ceasefire.
Please. My stance-and the red line Islamabad needs to hold-is this: we absolutely cannot buy into this ceasefire trap.
If we stop now, we sign a death warrant for more Pakistanis. Kabul doesn’t want peace; they want a timeout. They just need a few quiet weeks to scrape the surviving Fitna al Hindustan commanders off the pavement and move them to deeper, safer caves. We cannot let up until every single objective is met. We can’t just let our borders get trampled the second we turn our backs again. The roadmap from here is incredibly simple, and it cannot yield.
First, the airstrikes and covert ops don’t stop. If the leaders of that fitna managed to outrun the missiles at Bagram, we track them to whatever rat hole they’re hiding in next. Second, as General Hayat pointed out recently, it’s all about their supply. We systematically erase every hidden weapon dump, every supply cache, and every safe house on the other side of that border. We burn out the rot so thoroughly that the TTP is permanently paralysed. We need to broadcast a message to Kabul and the world in a language they can’t misinterpret: another country’s sovereignty ends exactly where our slaughter begins. We played the diplomatic game. We showed them the dossiers. They refused to listen. Now, we’re securing our own survival, and until the threat is totally dismantled, our jets shouldn’t even think about parking.
And if anyone thinks the strike on Bagram was just a one-off warning, they aren’t paying attention to what happened just last night. The latest updates from March 4th regarding Operation Ghazab Lil Haq prove that our military has finally, mercifully, taken the gloves off. Through the dark of night between March 3rd and 4th, our forces unleashed heavy artillery on 50 different militant launchpads across the border. We pounded their staging grounds right across the Chaman, Qila Saifullah, Sambaza, Ghadwana, Jani, and Ghaznali sectors-the exact geographic arteries they’ve been using to pump cross-border terrorism into our homes. Security sources are confirming massive enemy casualties and decimated infrastructure for the Afghan Taliban enablers, the Fitna al Khawarij, and their Fitna al Hindustan syndicate. This is what real defence looks like. Our armed forces are finally drawing a hard line to protect our citizens from Afghan aggression, and the mandate is crystal clear: Operation Ghazab Lil Haq won’t stop, and won’t be paused by any fake ceasefire, until every single predetermined target is crushed and our sovereignty is permanently secured.
The writer is a freelance columnist.