Pakistan’s Gaza deception: How Gen Munir remarked yes, meant no, and fooled Trump – Firstpost
Pakistan has mastered the art of camouflaging a dark and dubious reality with flowery, moralistic pretensions. Even Gen Zia-ul-Haq, remembered as a brutal dictator who Islamised Pakistan, brooked no dissent, and curtailed music and the fine arts, could often deploy a wily personal charm to striking effect.
As veteran diplomat Satinder Kumar Lambah records in his book, In Pursuit of Peace: India-Pakistan Relations under Six Prime Ministers, how seamlessly Gen Zia would wrap ruthlessness in theatrical humility. The Pakistani dictator personally walked visitors to their cars, slipped expensive carpets into their hands, and spoke softly and deferentially. The performance worked more often than not.
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The most damning anecdote involved George Fernandes, who travelled to Pakistan vowing to confront Gen Zia over the imprisonment of Benazir Bhutto. Instead, Fernandes returned admiring the very man he had gone to denounce. Gen Zia’s weapon was not argument but sycophancy: “Sir, I want to learn labour issues from you,” he reportedly told Fernandes.
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That episode — emblematic of Pakistan’s long-practised diplomatic sleight of hand — appears to have found a modern echo, this time on a far larger global stage.
In 2018, Donald Trump, in his first term as US President, was openly contemptuous of Pakistan. His New Year’s Day tweet accusing Islamabad of swallowing over $33 billion in US aid while delivering only “lies & deceit” was unusually blunt even by Trumpian standards. He accused Pakistan of sheltering terrorists responsible for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. For once, the diagnosis was spot on.
And yet, seven years later, Trump — returning to the White House after a non-consecutive second victory — has brazenly rehabilitated Pakistan as a frontline American ally. Even more astonishingly, Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir is now spoken of admiringly by the US President as his “favourite Field Marshal”.
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This is not diplomatic realism by any stretch of the imagination. It is strategic amnesia, whose explanation lies not just in geopolitics, but also in business entanglements and bruised egos. In April 2026, Pakistan’s newly formed Pakistan Crypto Council signed a “landmark” agreement with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm majority-owned by Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner. Islamabad did not merely buy goodwill; it invested in it quite literally.
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Simultaneously, the US was jolted by India’s emphatic success in Operation Sindoor, a demonstration of military, technological, and doctrinal maturity that shattered long-held American assumptions about India being a cautious, reactive power. Faced with a more confident Delhi and an Islamabad offering transactional loyalty, Washington upended its two-decade-long India policy. The Trump-era pivot back towards Pakistan represents a sharp — and risky — volte-face.
But then the shift in Washington’s Islamabad policy, quite predictably, results in typical Pakistani perfidy. This has become glaringly apparent after the unveiling of the so-called Gaza Plan by Donald Trump. Following the near destruction of Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war, the US floated the idea of an International Stabilisation Force to manage post-war reconstruction. Pakistan was invited to contribute troops.
For Gen Munir, this was a dangerous scenario. Deploying Pakistani soldiers in Gaza alongside Israel would provoke Islamist outrage at home and fracture the Army’s carefully cultivated image as the “vanguard of Islam”. Refusing outright risked Trump’s ire. Gen Munir’s response was vintage Rawalpindi: ensure rejection while claiming willingness.
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Pakistan promptly invited senior Hamas commander Naji Zaheer to the country. Zaheer was paraded as chief guest at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Gujranwala, at an event organised by the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League, the political face of Lashkar-e-Taiba. He also met Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives. Chants of jihad rang out. The message was unambiguous.
Given the Pakistani Army’s iron grip over the state, especially under Gen Munir, none of this could have occurred without express approval from Rawalpindi.
The Israeli reaction was swift. Tel Aviv rejected Islamabad’s participation in any Gaza stabilisation force. Israel’s ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, publicly expressed concerns over links between Hamas and Pakistan-based terror groups, noting that peacekeeping requires trust and credible diplomatic relationships — conditions that, he reported, “are not the situation right now”.
For Gen Munir, this was the perfect escape plan. Islamabad could tell Washington it had been willing to guide, while Israeli rejection conveniently absolved it of responsibility. Pakistan placated domestic fundamentalists, retained American goodwill and escaped the Gaza trap — all while Washington pretended not to notice it was being played.
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That Pakistan has once more outmanoeuvred the United States should surprise no one. What is astonishing is how often Washington allows itself to be outplayed. The pattern is depressingly familiar: tactical cooperation, selective blindness to duplicity, and inevitable strategic blowback.
India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar writes in his 2020 book, The India Way: “Albert Einstein is supreme known for his theory of relativity. Had he opted for a career in political science, he could have been equally famous for a theory of insanity. His definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Jaishankar was pointing at the Indian geostrategic state of mind before 2014. But looking at the American handling of Pakistan, this applies equally — if not far more aptly — to American thinking.
Former ISI chief Hamid Gul captured this paradox with brutal candour in 2014: “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the support of America… Then there will be another sentence: the ISI, with the guide of America, defeated America.”
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More than a decade later, the script remains unchanged. The faces are different, the slogans updated, and the deals more sophisticated. But the contest remains the same. America is, once again, a victim of Pakistani deception. Sadly, given the sorry state of the American mind presently, it will not be the last time either.
(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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