It is a quiet time in May, when the snow has melted and the tourist buses have yet to begin their morning trips up and down the hills. Until that day came on Thursday last when two men on a motorcycle pulled up outside a private college in Gojra neighbourhood and waited for the principal to come out of the building, Muzaffarabad was a quiet day. He did, clean-shaven and with satchel in hand, the image of provincial respectability. After 3 blows to the head, the man the locals knew as the head of the institution was lying on his own driveway, bled out. When he was brought to a hospital in Muzaffarabad and placed on a ventilator, the copies of the wire were already doing rounds in Indian newsrooms. In fact, the principal was Arjumand Gulzar Dar of Ratnipora, Pulwama, alias Hamza Burhan, code name Doctor, who was suspected to be involved in wire laying for the bomb that ripped apart a CRPF convoy on the Jammu-Srinagar highway on a February afternoon seven years ago.

He had been living right under our noses for nearly 10 years. A boy who, in 2017, had walked out of the Valley, saying he was going to study and who slip across the LOC and into the welcoming arms of Al-Badr rose to the rank of commander, was once his face became too familiar in the Indian dossiers, put into the most ordinary cover Pakistan could provide a chalk board, a list of teenage students and a letter of salary slip from a college in PoK. It is not a coincidence that the longer history of cross-border terror is what it is. It is doctrine. Once their faces are on the wanted lists, the men who plan the killings on Indian soil are not left to deal with it by themselves. They are soaked into, re-routed by, reclaimed under a new name, and lodged in the soft muscle of Pakistani institutions madrassas, charities, government colleges, sometimes military adjacent medical centres. Burhan's administrative seat at a Muzaffarabad institute is a perfect fit for that.

The killing on Thursday is not just another paragraph in a wire service report, it's a pattern that fits. The figure of ‘so many’ terrorists shot dead by so-called ‘unknown gunmen’ on Pakistani soil has now been upped to well over 30 since 2022, according to compilations now circulating in Indian security circles and on social media, which serves as an index of Indian grief. Abu Qatal, the Lashkar man from Rajouri, who was gunned down in Jhelum in March last year. In May 2025, Saifullah Khalid, who was accused of being one of the masterminds behind the IISc Bengaluru shooting 20 years ago, was killed in Sindh. Imtiyaz Alam, otherwise known as Bashir Ahmad Peer, landed in Rawalpindi. Zahoor Mistry of the IC-814 hijack, finished off in Karachi. Eliminated Khalistan Commando Force member Paramjit Singh Panjwar, who was killed in Lahore in 2023. This geography covers the whole country including Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh and now again the so called Azad Kashmir. The technique is lamentably predictable: the shooters are on a bicycle, they shoot three or four rounds at close range, they go quietly away, they make no claim and never arrest the shooter and no public statement is made from Rawalpindi.

For the first time in this sequence, however, somebody else has put up a hand. A post on social media, purportedly by one of the members of the Lawrence Bishnoi syndicate, named Tyson Bishnoi, credited the hit to Burhan and offered it, in chest-thumping Hindi, to the families of the forty CRPF men shot dead at Lethpora. This statement should be held in long, double tongs. It is hard to imagine that there is a reach of organised crime which extends to targeted assassinations by Indian gangsters on an international border in a garrison town within a militarised zone of a hostile state. It does usefully, however, muddy the waters a denial-friendly second story for those who must tell that this wasn't the work of a foreign intelligence service. The cottage conspiracy industry, which has been around since the dawn of computer-generated imagery, is the sort of confusion that a state engaged in the cover-up of a fictional undercover agent thriller likes.

None would change the basic fact. The men who are dying like this aren't just anyone, they are nobodies. They are the workhorses of the South Asian jihad economy the planners, the recruiters, the logistics handlers who help to transport Chinese-made pistols and grenade rounds to courier networks in South Kashmir, as well as tranches of hawala money. According to the accounts of Indian agency staff, Burhan was a digital-radicalisation specialist, who managed to seduce Valley teenagers into the gun by using encrypted apps. He was in Muzaffarabad and was operating a virtual madrassa for impressionable boys in their home countries. That's the kind of cog that, removed, will take longer to put in place than it should, as the recruitment funnel itself has been pressure-washed over the past five years in Kashmir. Of, the ranks of the locally recruited fighters in J&K have reduced from triple digits in 2018 to single digits in the post-Pahalgam years and the district of Pulwama, which, in the past, was the springboard for locally recruited militancy, has seen no recruits for several quarters now to any outfit proscribed by the Indian state.

But the deeper implication and one that has been repeatedly pointed out by anyone following the politics of this war in recent years is that Pakistan's terror network is not a creation of rogue clerics in a back-alley seminary. It's a controlled resource. The same security establishment is the one that stores these men, provides them with new identity cards, enrolls them in its colleges and clinics, and welfare trusts, and demands their contribution on Kashmir. This arrangement was effective in the absence of cost. Now you can see the price and it is double. One is in blood steady attrition of the operational cadre. The other ledger is in dollars.

The amount is the one on which the world's financial system is unconsciously calculating. The four-year stay on the FATF's grey list (2018-2022) cost Pakistan about thirty-eight billion dollars in lost economic activities, which included foreign direct investments that failed to materialise, lines of credit that were withdrawn, letters of credit that banks would not accept and sovereign borrowing costs that spiralled out of control, according to an Islamabad-based think tank. The exit from the grey list came close to four years back, but the FATF president herself Elisa de Anda Madrazo cautioned about the exit not being a bulletproof vest in a press conference earlier this year in Paris, saying that fresh reports of Jaish-e-Mohammed's camps being funded through digital wallets would bring them back on the radar. The country can't afford another listing on that score given its teetering sovereign rating, historic low rate of the rupee, and quarter-on-quarter behavioural compliance with the IMF programme. Yet, it is the institutional memory that churns out just the optics that ensure a listing, and the latest is a wanted Indian terrorist running a college a hundred and thirty-five kilometres from the federal capital.

There's also a worldwide element to highlight. The attitude of Western capitals towards Pakistan, which for two decades had considered Pakistan as a complicated but necessary partner, has become noticeably colder. From indulgence to transactionalism to indifference, the successive Washington governments' Pakistan policies have taken a turn for the worse; and today the European chancery echos comparisons with the Pakistan's sanctions-evasion economy, which is a useful analytical cousin to the Russian economy's standards for tolerating criminal sub-economies as the price of strategic leverage. Gulf money, which used to be the safety valve, is now also conditional and more and more watered down. Even Beijing's all-weather friend is said to be worried about safety of CPEC personnel in Pakistan, and is angered by the presence of its own engineers in body bags in incidents, which Pakistani institutions are incapable of or refuse to stop.

In that context, the killing of Hamza Burhan is not a news item, but rather a thermometer. It has said that the cost that Pakistan is paying to host such men like him is no longer rhetorical. Whether it was fired by an Indian asset, by a freelance criminal syndicate with an unlikely conscience, or by someone who is a score-settler within the college, this message arrives in Rawalpindi: The gun outside that Muzaffarabad college was fired by someone who was not a member of the group. The sanctuary is no longer a sanctuary. The chalkboard cover is no longer an actual cover. Each new body on a hospital trolley in the city of Muzaffarabad, each new restive province, and each new Kashmiris who have begun to learn how to bury their dead and move on has narrowed Pakistan's distance from the international financial system, and from its own restive provinces.

Forty CRPF jawans came home in coffins from Lethpora in February 2019. On Thursday, one of the men accused of putting them in those coffins came home, too, in his own.