The photograph says everything that seventy-seven years of official statements have failed to say. A Taliban delegation, turbaned and bearded, stands on Indian soil, smiling, shaking hands, accepting flowers. The same men who were once called "Pakistan's proxy" now publicly declare that Islamabad gave them poison while Delhi gave them technology and respect.
This is not just a diplomatic embarrassment for Pakistan — it is a historic indictment of every policy that put ideology above geography, religion above kinship, and guns above bread.
One civilisational continuum pretending to be three hostile civilizions.
From the Indus to the Ganges, from the Hindu Kush to the Pamirs, you share the same blood, the same poetry, the same food, the same curses, the same jokes, the same grief. A Pashtun mother in Kandahar sings the same lullaby as a Punjabi mother in Lahore. A Sindhi peasant in Thatta and a Rajasthani farmer in Jaisalmer complain about the same heat in almost the same words. Even our hatred is intimate — only siblings fight with this much passion.
Yet you have spent eight decades turning this intimacy into orphanages and graveyards.
Every bullet fired across the Line of Control, every drone that crosses the Durand Line, every terrorist who slips through the mountains, takes the life of someone who could have been your cousin. We are killing our own extended family and calling it national interest.
Look at the numbers if your heart has grown numb.
India and Pakistan together spend more than $130 billion a year on defence — money that could have built a thousand new universities, laid high-speed rail from Karachi to Kolkata, given clean water to every village from Quetta to Dhaka. Afghanistan's reconstruction needs are $200–$300 billion over the next decade. Instead of pooling resources, we pool suspicions. The poor of Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Kashmir continue to live the same medieval lives while generals on all sides upgrade their toys.
The Taliban’s new warmth toward India is the clearest proof yet that yesterday’s “strategic assets” can become tomorrow’s strategic liabilities. Pakistan nurtured them for “depth” against India; today they bite the hand that once fed them and reach for the hand that once bombed them. This is not treachery — it is nature restoring itself. Rivers do not respect political borders; neither do people when they are tired of being used as pawns.
It is time to admit the obvious: Islamabad’s real twin city is Delhi, not Kabul, not Riyadh, not Beijing. You speak the same language (yes, Hindi and Urdu are the same language wearing different perfumes). You watch the same cricket matches with the same hysteria. Your weddings look identical, Your funerals sound identical, Your politicians lie in the same accent. Even your extremists quote the same medieval scholars and misunderstand them in exactly the same way.
So why do we keep choosing war over dinner?
Imagine this instead: a train from Lahore to Amritsar packed with families going home for Eid or Diwali. Imagine Afghan traders driving trucks loaded with pomegranates and dry fruit straight to Delhi markets without visas or bribes. Imagine Pakistani engineers helping rebuild Kabul’s power grid while Indian doctors train Afghan midwives in Herat. Imagine the money saved from just one year of not buying new F-16s or Rafales being used to give free education to every child in the region.
None of this is utopian. It is simply rational.
The alternative is what we already have: three nuclear-armed countries sleepwalking toward catastrophe because wounded pride is mistaken for strength. We have already lost three generations to this madness. Let us not lose the fourth.
The dinner table is waiting.
Let the leaders of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan sit down — not in five-star hotels with 500 journalists outside, but quietly, like family elders settling a feud. Let them eat nihari and biryani together, let them remember their grandmothers spoke the same proverbs, let them look each other in the eye and admit: we have been stupid long enough.
The people of this region have suffered every ideology that promised them paradise and delivered only graves. Religious chauvinism, hyper-nationalism, strategic depth, forward policy — all have failed spectacularly. The only thing that has never been seriously tried is the simplest and oldest truth of all:We are one people.
It is time to behave like it.
Let the flowers in that photograph not remain a gesture frozen in time. Let them become the new normal. Let the next handshake not be for cameras, but for children who deserve to grow up without air-raid sirens as their lullaby.
Peace is not weakness.
Peace is the ultimate victory.
And it is long, long overdue.
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