India, Feb. 13 -- In a rare moment of candour, Pakistan's defence minister Khawaja Asif admitted in parliament that the rise of terrorism in his country was the outcome of its involvement in the two wars in Afghanistan, the first in the 1980s against the USSR-backed regime in Kabul, and then as part of the war against terror in the 2000s. "We deny our history and did not accept our mistakes. Terrorism is a blowback of the mistakes committed by dictators in the past," the minister said. Pakistan's evolution and trajectory are rooted in a denial of history and a refusal to recognise its mistakes and correct course. Its leaders broke with the composite nationalism of the Freedom Movement to privilege a faith-centric idea of nation-State and sought to define itself as the Other of a secular, democratic India. The disastrous preoccupation with religious nationalism was the cover that allowed even military dictators to willingly turn Pakistan into an instrument to wage war in Afghanistan and nurture terrorism in India. Asif also said the two former military dictators (Zia-ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf) joined the war in Afghanistan, not for the sake of Islam, but to appease the US. In return, Pakistan got millions of dollars worth of armaments and aid. The West provided a cover of legitimacy to the dictatorships, and, most importantly, forgave Pakistan for running a terror factory that coveted Kashmir and sought the destabilisation of India. The Islamic jihad that Pakistan sponsored with ideology and western arms ended the modernising trajectory of Afghanistan, legitimised a regressive form of Islam, which wreaked violence on liberals within Islam, non-conforming sects, women, and religious minorities. The same politics has now come to haunt Pakistan. The Tehreek-e-Taliban, accused of numerous attacks within Pakistan, is a child of the terror ecosystem nurtured by Rawalpindi. It is nothing but an ideological sibling of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammed, now called out by a UN counter-terror monitoring team for staging the November Delhi Red Fort attack, that Pakistan's ISI uses as instruments to launch terror strikes in India. Islamabad's obsession with religious nationalism blinded it to the concerns of nationalities such as the Baloch and Pashtun, who now challenge the Pakistani State. The truth is Pakistan has no redemption unless it pulls down the shutter on its terror factories and recalibrates its foreign policy, especially towards India. If it prefers to hunt with big powers in the hope of gaining the upper hand against India, it will only further a culture of dependency, wherein the big powers will continue to treat Pakistan like "toilet paper", as Asif so evocatively described....