By Muhammad Mohsin Iqbal
There is a peculiar kind of cruelty that distinguishes the false flag from other forms of deceit. The liar who steals your purse or the charlatan who sells you a remedy that does not work, these operate in the realm of personal gain, venal and shabby but limited in their reach. However, the false flag seeks something far more sinister. It seeks to bend history itself, to manufacture outrage so potent that nations lurch toward war, to paint innocence as guilt and guilt as innocence with such skill that even the victims may doubt what their own eyes have seen. This is not lying for profit but lying for power, and it carries with it a moral stain that ordinary mendacity can never approach.
The term comes to us from the age of sail, when warships would hoist the colors of a friendly or neutral nation to draw close to an enemy vessel unremarked. Only at the last moment would they run up their true flag, often exchanging a deadly broadside before the deception was discovered. A clever ruse of war, one might say, and not without a certain grim artistry. But the civilian application of the tactic, the turning of this naval sleight of hand against one’s own people or against unsuspecting innocents, transforms cleverness into something altogether more monstrous. Consider the Gleiwitz incident of August 1939, if one can bear to look upon such things.
A handful of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms, a staged attack on a radio station, a dead body dressed in Polish military clothing and left as evidence. The world was told that Poland had struck first, that German honour demanded a response, and within days Europe was consumed by fire. The architects of that deception confessed at Nuremberg, but that confession came too late for the millions who perished. A lie that fits inside a single paragraph here, a dozen paragraphs in the history books, but measured in human life it stretches across continents and generations. The same pattern, the same dreadful symmetry, appears again and again across the decades.
Japanese officers in Manchuria blowing up a few feet of railway track and blaming Chinese nationalists. Israeli operatives planting bombs in Egyptian cinemas and hoping to blame the Muslim Brotherhood. Each time the calculation is identical. A small violence, carefully staged, will produce a larger violence that serves some strategic purpose. The attackers accept that some will die, perhaps many, but they console themselves with the arithmetic of realpolitik. This sacrifice, they tell themselves, will prevent a greater catastrophe later. Or perhaps they do not bother with such consolations. Perhaps by the time a government has descended to false flag operations, it has already abandoned the pretence of morality altogether.
The difficulty, for those of us who must watch these events unfold from a distance, is that determining what is real and what is staged has become extraordinarily difficult. The Samjhauta Express bombings of 2007, the Mumbai attacks of 2008, the endless litany of explosions and gunfights that scar the subcontinent, each presents itself as a puzzle. Who truly struck the blow? Who ordered it? Who benefits? These questions are not idle speculation. They are the difference between justice and revenge, between peace and endless retaliation which brings us to Pahalgam. The attack in April 2025 on tourists in the meadows near that serene hill town was brutal by any measure.
Twenty six civilians dead, among them a local horse handler who tried to fight back with whatever came to hand. Families shattered, a place of beauty transformed into a killing ground. India was swift to point toward Pakistan-based militants, swift to promise consequences. And Pakistan, with equal speed, declared the entire affair a false flag, a provocation designed to legitimize something darker still. One hesitates to pronounce final judgment on events still so raw, still shrouded in the fog of accusation and counter-accusation. However, the pattern is familiar enough to give pause. A violent act that serves one party’s strategic interests. A rapid attribution to the usual enemy. A public mood that demands action before evidence can be properly gathered.
What is to be done? The honest answer is unsatisfying. We must demand transparency from our own governments even when transparency is inconvenient. We must resist the urge to believe the first story we are told, especially when that story flatters our prejudices. We must accept that some mysteries may never be solved, that some attacks may be claimed by those who did not commit them and denied by those who did. And we must remember, always, that the dead do not care which flag flew over the ship that fired the shot. They are dead. The living have a duty not to let their deaths become mere props in someone else’s drama.
(The writer is a parliamentary expert with decades of experience in legislative research and media affairs, leading policy support initiatives for lawmakers on complex national and international issues, and can be reached at editorial@metro-Morning.com)
