BāBā-Tāl whispers: “Bacha! Your most precious shield may be in danger.”
The Pakistani nation may therefore need to ask a frightening question:
Is someone quietly eyeing the bundle that contains our most precious strategic asset—the nuclear deterrent that has served as our ultimate shield?
And if so, are we awake enough to recognise the hand reaching for it before it is too late?
“Bacha!”
BāBā-Tāl leaned towards me and whispered.
“Feel it. Smell it in the air. Something dangerous is moving against the nation’s most precious asset.”
He fell silent.
He took a breath.
Then he lifted his steaming mug of tea, took a slow sip and looked straight into my eyes.
“Beware, Bacha! The danger may not come only from the enemy on the international horizon. Look within, too. There may be facilities, networks—and yes, even traitors—working from inside.”
I froze.
I looked deeper into his eyes. There was something frightening in them—a cruel, almost merciless shadow—that shook me from somewhere deep inside.
For a moment, I felt a horrible fear.
Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state. Its nuclear deterrent has long been regarded as the ultimate shield against existential military threats.
And suddenly I remembered what I had written only last week:
Pakistan should never hand anyone an excuse to transform a regional crisis into an international campaign focused on its nuclear status.
Perhaps that is the real “honey trap” we must guard against—not an imagined secret conspiracy, but the very real possibility of being drawn into a conflict whose consequences eventually fall most heavily on the country that entered it.
Pakistan has learned enough history to know that great-power friendships are not permanent insurance policies.
Three countries have now been placed inside one defence packet: Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich kingdom; Türkiye, a NATO member with a formidable military; and Pakistan, the Muslim world’s nuclear-armed state.
The packet carries a simple warning label: an armed attack on one shall be regarded as an attack on all three.
But what if this “defensive” pact is tested by an escalating Yemen war?
Saudi Arabia is attacked by the Houthis.
The pact is tested.
Pakistan and Türkiye could then face pressure to stand beside Saudi Arabia.
Yemen becomes the battlefield.
And once the conflict widens, Iran—whose relationship with the Houthis is central to the regional equation—would become part of an increasingly dangerous strategic calculation.
Pakistan could then find itself facing a strategic nightmare: an obligation pulling it toward one side, while geography, history and its own national interests warn it against confrontation with Iran.
Pakistan is not merely Iran’s neighbour on a map.
Millions of Pakistani citizens belong to Shia communities, spread across the country—from Karachi and the Makran coast to the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan, with communities also present in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Kashmir. There is no reliable current official sect-wise census from which an exact figure can responsibly be produced; credible estimates nevertheless place Pakistan’s Shia population in the tens of millions.
The significance is not merely demographic.
It is human.
It is religious.
It is familial.
It is cultural.
And, in moments of crisis, it can become political and street-level.
Pakistan saw a frightening demonstration of that reality in March 2026. Following the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader in U.S.-Israeli strikes, large protests erupted across Pakistan. Karachi witnessed deadly clashes around the U.S. Consulate, while Gilgit-Baltistan also saw serious unrest.
That does not mean Pakistani Shias are an Iranian fifth column.
It does not mean that every Shia citizen supports Tehran.
And it certainly does not mean that Pakistan’s Shia citizens are anything other than Pakistani citizens whose loyalty and citizenship belong to Pakistan.
It means something more sober:
When Iran enters a major regional confrontation, Islamabad cannot treat the crisis as something happening only across an international border.
The shockwaves can travel inward.
From Karachi to Gwadar, from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir, Iran is therefore not simply a foreign-policy file lying on a government desk.
It has a human geography inside Pakistan.
And that is precisely why any defence arrangement that could place Pakistan in a wider confrontation involving Iran demands extraordinary strategic caution.
Because a war may begin on a map.
But its consequences do not remain there.
Could Pakistan be manoeuvred into a regional war from which it cannot easily walk away?
And here comes the old warning:
“تیری گٹھڑی کو لاگا چور…” [
The old cry is simple.
The thief does not always announce himself.
Sometimes the danger begins by making the owner leave the room.
BāBā-Tāl might whisper:
“Bacha! Look carefully at the bundle. A thief does not always come to steal the bundle in one stroke. Sometimes he first creates a quarrel around the bundle, makes the owner leave his house, and waits for the moment when the bundle is left unattended.”
And what is Pakistan’s most precious strategic bundle?
Not its oil.
Not its palaces.
Not even its foreign-exchange reserves.
It is the nuclear deterrent—the ultimate shield.
The Qur’an gives the matter of trust a frightening moral gravity:
“O you who have believed, do not betray Allah and the Messenger or betray your trusts while you know.”
— Surah Al-Anfal 8:27
A national strategic asset is not merely a weapon.
It is a trust.
And a trust demands guardianship.
The Holy Prophet Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him] said:
“Everyone of you is a guardian and is responsible for his charges.”
— Sahih al-Bukhari 7138
So the question becomes larger than weapons.
Who is guarding the trust?
Who is protecting the nation from being dragged into a war that may place that trust under unprecedented pressure?
And who is making decisions today whose consequences may be carried by generations yet unborn?
The Qur’an gives another warning—this time about unity:
“And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided.”
— Surah Al ‘Imran 3:103
Because a divided house is easier to pressure than a united one.
And history has shown us something even more terrifying:
Sometimes the enemy outside the wall does not need to break the gate.
Someone inside may open it.
That brings me to the most uncomfortable part of this story.
The traitors within.
“Bacha!”
BāBā-Tāl stood beside the west-side window of the Eyrie, looking over the Margalla Hills.
“My eyes—these two eyes—have absorbed countless scenes and countless faces: men who betrayed their nations, their states, their leaders, their causes and, sometimes, even their faith.”
He stopped.
His gaze remained fixed on the distant hills.
Then, all of a sudden, he turned towards me.
His face was expressionless.
But his eyes…
His eyes seemed deeper than the history they had witnessed.
“Bacha! These eyes are not looking only into yesterday. They are looking into today—and perhaps into tomorrow.”
He paused.
“The glowing faces of those Takasirya Tabqah elites—the oligarchic celebrities drunk on wealth, power and influence. Men who may be tempted to sell the Muslim Ummah’s bundle to those who have always looked for a way to snatch it.”
His voice became lower.
“And what is inside that bundle, Bacha?”
He looked directly into my eyes.
“Your most precious strategic possession—the atomic deterrent that the Almighty has bestowed upon your nation as a shield.”
BāBā-Tāl seemed deeply disturbed.
For a moment, I thought he was about to point towards certain names.
His lips moved.
But no name came.
Instead, he suddenly turned, walked out through the gate of the Eyrie—and disappeared.
I remained silent.
On my desk lay his half-finished mug of hot tea, beside my cream-coloured papers covered in coffee-coloured ink.
The bells had stopped ringing.
But his warning had not.
I opened the pages of history.
And there they were—the names that generations remembered whenever betrayal from within had helped an enemy advance from outside.
ʿAbdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul—the figure remembered in Islamic tradition as a leading hypocrite of Madinah, whose followers withdrew from the Muslim force before the Battle of Uhud.
Mir Jafar—the commander whose defection at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 helped the East India Company defeat Siraj ud-Daulah and opened the door to British domination of Bengal.
Mir Sadiq—Tipu Sultan’s minister, traditionally remembered for betrayal during the siege of Seringapatam in 1799, when the British were closing in on the last great bastion of Mysorean resistance.
And then there was Ibn al-Alqami, the Abbasid minister whose name has for centuries been associated with the fall of Baghdad to Hulagu in 1258. But here history itself demands caution: his alleged betrayal remains contested among historians. The accusation became part of the historical tradition; the evidence and interpretation are not as simple as the legend.
Different centuries.
Different empires.
Different battles.
Different motives.
Yet one terrible lesson keeps returning:
Sometimes the enemy outside the wall does not need to break the gate.
Someone inside may open it.
And that is where my thoughts returned to Pakistan.
Who are the men—and women—of tomorrow who might be tempted by wealth, power, influence, foreign favour or personal survival to place the nation’s bundle in another man’s hands?
The question is not whether history has produced traitors.
History has.
The question is whether we have become wise enough to recognise the danger before the next gate is opened.
The Holy Prophet Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him] warned about the character of hypocrisy:
“If you trust him, he proves to be dishonest.”
— Sahih al-Bukhari 33
The words strike differently when read beside the bundle.
Trust.
Guardianship.
Betrayal.
Responsibility.
Four simple words.
Four enormous obligations.
And then, from the Western literary world, comes William Butler Yeats’s chilling warning:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
The line was written in another age and another crisis.
Yet it seems to whisper across the decades.
What happens when responsible people become silent—and reckless people become determined?
What happens when national vigilance falls asleep?
What happens when a nation begins fighting itself while others study its weaknesses?
The answer may be written not in tomorrow’s newspapers, but in tomorrow’s history books.
*Poetears*
Guard the trust through night and day,
Let no silent hand betray;
When gates are left to careless hands,
A nation’s shield may slip away.
[ — Coined by
S. T. Hejazi — Where poetry becomes tears, and tears become poetry.]
And this time, Bacha, the bundle is not a palace.
It is not a bank account.
It is not a throne.
It is Pakistan’s atomic deterrence.
So wake up, Pakistan.
Not tomorrow.
Now.
Guard the bundle.
Guard the unity.
Guard the decision-making.
Guard the national interest.
And above all, guard the trust.
Because the frightening question is not that someone has already stolen the bundle.
The frightening question is this:
Could Pakistan be manoeuvred into a regional war whose ultimate strategic consequence would be to place its nuclear deterrent under unprecedented pressure?
The thief may not be standing at your door.
He may be quietly rearranging the furniture inside your house—
until you are forced to leave the room where your most precious bundle is kept.
WAKE UP, PAKISTAN!
SOMEONE MAY BE EYEING THE BUNDLE.
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