Pakistani establishment glorified jihad for decades between 1980 and the 2000s. The target of this propaganda were primarily Pashtuns and Punjabis. Now people innocently ask why some Pashtuns and Punjabis have sympathy for jehadis ?? Lol as if the common Pakistani created this problem.
Pakistani establishment absolutely did the heavy lifting here, no doubt. They weaponized jihad, turned it into state policy, fed it through textbooks, pulpits, media, foreign policy, and “strategic depth” fantasies for decades. They deserve the bulk of the blame.
You can take the horse to the water but you cannot make it drink it - Pakistanis love drinking that water.
Pretending this was only the establishment is also dishonest.
At some point propaganda stops being just propaganda and becomes social common sense. That’s the real issue. The rot spread far beyond GHQ or the agencies. Politicians used it, mullahs sold it, TV amplified it, drawing room uncles romanticized it, and society at large absorbed it. You can’t run an ideological project for 30 to 40 years and then act surprised when parts of the population come out thinking the jihadi is some kind of noble defender of the qaum.
This is where Pakistanis love doing intellectual fraud to justify their own cults unfortunately. They want to isolate all guilt in one building in Rawalpindi as if the rest of society was chained in a basement with no agency at all- khusray ho na saaray??!.
Imran Khan is part of that story too, by the way. People now want to act like he descended from the heavens as some pure anti establishment democrat, but for years he openly peddled soft apologism for militants, framed complex security issues in moral shortcuts, and helped sanitize dangerous ideas for the urban middle class. He did not create the problem, but he absolutely repackaged parts of it in cleaner language for people who wanted to
feel principled while staying intellectually lazy.
So yes, the establishment deserves the most ire, undoubtedly. But if you only blame them, you miss how deeply this mythology was socialized. From pre partition Muslim political insecurities to Zai ul haq era Islamization to post 2000 selective denial, this country kept feeding itself the same poison and then called it ideology, patriotism, and iman(the morning after they attended the mehfil e fahash)
Now people ask with fake innocence, “why do some Pashtuns and Punjabis have sympathy for jihadis?” Because for decades they were told these people were heroes, assets, martyrs, and defenders of Islam. You do not mass produce a narrative for generations and then act shocked when it produces believers.
That is the real Pakistani farce because everyone wants to identify the arsonist in each other, but nobody wants to admit how many people kept passing him the fuel.