The first instinct of a discredited regime is not to answer dissent but to classify it. Name the dissenter. Isolate the constituency. Shrink the grievance. In Pakistan, that machinery is again being deployed with familiar malice: mass outrage at imperial war is being recoded as sectarian agitation, and a security state aligned with Washington and the House of Saud is presenting itself as the custodian of national order.

The reported message to Shia clerics was blunt: if you love Iran so much, go to Iran. It was not the language of strength. It was the language of a frightened and servile ruling bloc that cannot politically answer opposition to the US-Israeli war on Iran and therefore seeks to criminalise, intimidate, and stigmatize it.

Only an intellectually exhausted establishment hears political outrage and responds with a loyalty test. Only a regime hollowed out by dependency imagines citizenship belongs exclusively to the obedient.

Only an intellectually exhausted establishment hears political outrage and responds with a loyalty test. Only a regime hollowed out by dependency imagines citizenship belongs exclusively to the obedient.

What is at issue is not theology. It is power. Who rules Pakistan, in whose interests, and under whose shadow? The ruling elite understands perfectly well that it is not facing a narrowly sectarian reaction. It is facing something far more dangerous to its survival: the possibility that Pakistanis across sectarian lines recognize the same structure of subordination, the same external alignments, and the same internal cowardice masquerading as prudence.

That is why the incident outside the US consulate in Karachi matters so profoundly. When anti-war protestors are gunned down by American marines on Pakistani soil, euphemism collapses. The fiction that this is merely a distant regional conflict becomes impossible to sustain. Foreign violence and domestic repression converge. The imperial center acts; the local security apparatus manages the consequences. That is the arrangement. The task of the Pakistani state is not to resist power abroad, but to suppress public anger at home.

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And that suppression requires ideological laundering. Outrage, by itself, can be contained. Politics cannot. Politics identifies structures, patrons, clients, and interests. Politics asks why a state that invokes sovereignty in speeches becomes timid before Washington and ferocious before its own citizens. Politics reveals that the men who posture as guardians of the nation are, in practice, wardens of dependency.

This is why sectarianisation remains such a prized weapon of Muslim ruling elites. Since 1979, the central objective has been to prevent the Iranian Revolution from being understood as what it was: not a Shia event, but a political one.

This is why sectarianisation remains such a prized weapon of Muslim ruling elites. Since 1979, the central objective has been to prevent the Iranian Revolution from being understood as what it was: not a Shia event, but a political one.

It terrified monarchies and military clients not because it advanced a sect, but because it overthrew a ruler sustained by foreign power. It demonstrated that sovereignty could become a mass demand. That was the threat. Sectarian framing was the countermeasure.

So, a revolution against monarchy was recast as a sectarian contagion. Anti-imperial politics was re-labelled as theological deviance. Regime preservation was sold as communal stability. The fraud was crude, but it worked, because it was repeated relentlessly by states, clerical establishments, security agencies, and Gulf-financed propaganda networks. Over time, political fear was disguised as doctrinal concern.

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Trump’s favourite Field Marshal is now drawing directly from that discredited playbook. General Asim Munir’s reported effort to force Pakistani Shias into an absurd binary — submit silently as “good Pakistanis” or leave for Iran — is not statesmanship. It is sectarian intimidation in the service of geopolitical obedience. It is the language of a military ruler who knows that public opposition to the US-Israeli assault on Iran is not confined to Shias and must therefore be falsely sectarianized before it becomes politically unmanageable. The Pakistani security state wants this to be read as a Shia-Sunni problem because it cannot afford for it to be recognized as what it is: a political confrontation between an illegitimate, collaborationist ruling order and a population that increasingly sees through it.

The issue is not sectarian loyalty. It is popular opposition to Zionist war, Western hegemony, Gulf-sponsored reaction, and the local generals and functionaries who enforce this order at home.

The issue is not sectarian loyalty. It is popular opposition to Zionist war, Western hegemony, Gulf-sponsored reaction, and the local generals and functionaries who enforce this order at home.

Pakistan’s rulers are not defending national cohesion. They are defending their patrons, their privileges, and their impunity. They are trying to convert a political indictment into a sectarian disturbance because sectarian disturbances can be policed, fragmented, and quarantined. Political clarity cannot.

That is the fear beneath the rhetoric. Not Iran. Not sect. Not protest as such. The real fear is that Pakistanis — Shia and Sunni alike — may come to see that the war abroad and repression at home are not separate crises, but two expressions of the same structure of rule.

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