DNA Edit: Factual Error

Imagine the gravity of the embarrassment in which the Pakistani diplomatic establishment is stewing right now.

One of its senior-most diplomats flashed the photo of an injured girl citing it as the kind of atrocity that the Indian Army inflicts on the people of J&K. In an egg-on-your-face moment that couldn’t have been scripted any better by a novelist or a script-writer, it turns out that the photograph was of a 17-year-old Palestinian girl who evidently suffered multiple facial bruises during an Israeli air strike.

Obviously, the military and bureaucratic elite in Pakistan are seeing red for it is no less than Pakistan’s permanent representative to the United Nations Maleeha Lodhi who has committed such a gaffe. Lodhi made the faux pas in her response to the scathing attack that India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj so compellingly unleashed against Pakistan.

The Pakistani diplomat was looking to get even by raising the bogey of human rights violations by the Army in J&K. This gaffe has come at a time when pressure from the US has hit Islamabad hard, leaving it with no choice but to ban Jamaat-ud-Dawa and put Hafiz Saeed under house arrest. With President Trump now showcasing renewed faith in resolving the seemingly interminable war in Afghanistan, the spotlight has shifted to Pakistan.

The disputatious country will now be forced to show some results for the billions of dollars in aid that, otherwise, were being cheekily swindled by the military top brass of Pakistan. That won’t cut ice with the US anymore.