New Delhi, Sept. 24 -- For decades, Islamabad maintained a carefully calibrated fiction on the world stage. Whenever violence spilled across its borders, the official refrain remained fixed: Pakistan was merely a victim of rogue, non-state actors operating beyond the reach of its authorities. This diplomatic shield served to deflect accountability while its military intelligence complex quietly nurtured militant proxies as instruments of asymmetric warfare.

That charade is now crumbling from within. The institutional deception was recently exposed when Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif delivered a stark warning at the United Nations General Assembly, cautioning that without his country's containment measures these militants would be roaming ...