Staff Reporter
Karachi
Pakistan’s former spy chief Lt Gen (retd) Asad Durrani has said that “India is no longer a big threat to Pakistan,” as it has entangled itself in a mess by illegally annexing Kashmir.
The hardline Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the special status of Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) in August 2019 – and the region remains under siege since then.
“After what India did to Kashmir [IIOJK], there is no threat to us on the eastern border. We should not lower our guard against a Balakot-like misadventure though, but they [Indian] are so caught up in their own mess that they have little time to care about Pakistan,” Durrani told BBC Urdu in an interview released on Wednesday.
Indian warplanes carried out a botched airstrike in the Balokot area of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) in the dead of night in February 2019.
The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) retaliated in broad daylight by carrying out precision strikes deep inside IIOJK and then shot down two Indian jets that chased them into Azad Kashmir.
“India has not always been the biggest threat to us,” added Durrani, who had ruffled some feathers in 2018 by co-authoring a book, Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace with Indian RAW’s former chief AS Dulat which stirred up a controversy that haunts him till this day.
Of late, his second book, Honour among Spies, brought him back into the spotlight by resurrecting the controversy set off by his first book.
Elaborating on the internal challenges facing the country, Durrani said, “The country is facing three types of challenges: economy, political instability, and social cohesion.”
