Pakistani officials on Wednesday ordered the closure of all seminaries within the side of Kashmir under Islamabad’s control, officially citing a heat wave as the cause but a possible imminent war with India the real reason, a top minister tells Reuters as the tensions continue to escalate.
“Right now, we are facing two kinds of heat – one from the weather and the other from (Indian dictator) Modi,” Hafiz Nazir Ahmad, the director of Pakistani Kashmir’s Department of Religious Affairs, told Reuters, adding that the cover story was to avoid panic. Why the hell the guy just says this to western media without worrying it’ll get back to people in his jurisdiction was unclear, but the fear that Indian troops would target such schools as they consider them to be terrorist training centers probably makes it the right call. “We held a meeting yesterday in which it was unanimously decided not to put innocent children at risk,” Ahmad added about the “precautionary” closures.
Once again, the potentially catastrophic situation was supposed to be the kind of thing that only happened when Joe Biden was president because India and Pakistan and all the other countries prone to violent confrontations with their neighbors were afraid of how tough President Trump is, and yet here we are one fuckup away from war between two nuclear-armed belligerents.