{"id":3078,"date":"2026-09-04T21:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T21:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bittertruth.uk\/en\/?p=3078"},"modified":"2026-09-04T21:00:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T21:00:20","slug":"pakistan-the-unfinished-covenant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bittertruth.uk\/en\/pakistan-the-unfinished-covenant\/","title":{"rendered":"Pakistan: The Unfinished Covenant<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are dates which merely occupy a square upon the calendar, and there are dates which pass beyond chronology and enter the moral memory of a people.<\/p>\n

6 September 1965 belongs to the latter order.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was not merely a day of artillery, armoured columns, contested skies and embattled frontiers. It was one of those grave hours in which a nation discovers whether its existence rests upon geography alone, or upon something deeper: a shared memory, a common fidelity, and the willingness of ordinary men and women to place a cause larger than themselves above comfort, fear and even life.<\/p>\n

On that day, Pakistan\u2019s defence was not confined to the battlefield.<\/p>\n

There was a front around Lahore.
\nThere was another across the plains of Sialkot.
\nThere was a front in the air.<\/p>\n

But there was also a front in every Pakistani home.<\/p>\n

Somewhere, a mother straightened the uniform of a son whom she had once carried in her arms and accompanied him to the threshold.<\/p>\n

Somewhere, an ageing father placed his hand upon his son\u2019s shoulder, gave him a blessing, and forced back tears lest paternal grief weaken a soldier\u2019s resolve.<\/p>\n

Somewhere, a wife bade farewell to a husband with a smile summoned from the deepest reserves of courage.<\/p>\n

Children gathered around wireless sets, scarcely understanding the vocabulary of war yet instinctively aware that history had entered their homes.<\/p>\n

Young men queued to donate blood. Doctors and nurses prepared for the wounded. Workers, teachers, traders, students and labourers discovered that citizenship could suddenly become a form of service.<\/p>\n

It was a strange and solemn hour.<\/p>\n

There was fear, certainly; but something stood above fear.<\/p>\n

There was danger; but something proved greater than danger.<\/p>\n

There were prayers in homes, supplications in mosques, service in hospitals, resolve in the streets and soldiers upon the frontier who knew that behind them stood not merely a government, but a people.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the truest foundation of national defence:<\/p>\n

The moment at which the soldier in the trench knows that every citizen behind him regards the struggle as his own.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of What Substance Were Those Mothers Made?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the events of September 1965 are recalled, memory naturally turns towards aircraft, tanks, guns, trenches and the celebrated names of military history.<\/p>\n

Yet history is impoverished when it records only the visible instruments of battle.<\/p>\n

Let us, for a moment, turn from the battlefield to the doorway of the ordinary Pakistani home.
\nConsider the mother.<\/strong><\/p>\n

She had watched over a child through fevered nights. She had heard his first words, witnessed his first uncertain steps, worried over his smallest wound and built in silence a thousand hopes for his future.<\/p>\n

Then came a day when the country called for that son.<\/p>\n

What passes through the heart of a mother when the child who constitutes an entire world to her must walk away towards danger?<\/p>\n

Perhaps she placed her hand upon his head and said, in words or in spirit:
\nGo, my son. Pakistan has need of you.<\/p>\n

Such a sentence is easily written. It is not easily lived.<\/p>\n

To surrender to the defence of one\u2019s country the person around whom one\u2019s private universe has been built is more than an act of sacrifice. It belongs to that realm of human devotion which language can approach but never fully possess.<\/p>\n

And what of the fathers?
\nMen who had waited to see their sons grow strong perhaps discovered, in one terrible instant, that those very shoulders must now bear a share of the nation\u2019s burden.<\/p>\n

What of the wives who saw the lamps of their households depart towards the frontier?<\/p>\n

What of the children who could not comprehend war but understood that their fathers had gone away because something precious had to be protected?<\/p>\n

These are the quiet figures seldom marked upon military maps.<\/p>\n

Yet without them, no history of war is complete.
\nThus, 6 September is not solely a day upon which soldiers are remembered. It is also an inheritance of maternal fortitude, paternal restraint, the endurance of women, the innocent prayers of children, the ardour of youth and the collective dignity of a people who discovered that sacrifice has many uniforms, most of which are never seen upon parade.<\/p>\n

What Was the Most Formidable Weapon of 1965?
\nWas it the tank?
\nThe artillery piece?
\nThe fighter aircraft?
\nThe rifle?
\nAll were indispensable.<\/p>\n

But the most formidable weapon may have been something for which no armoury could issue a serial number:<\/p>\n

national cohesion.<\/p>\n

In moments of existential danger, the secondary identities by which societies so often divide themselves may suddenly lose their tyranny.<\/p>\n

The question ceases to be: Which province are you from?<\/p>\n

What language do you speak?<\/p>\n

To which sect, party, class or community do you belong?
\nA greater question takes command:
\nDoes Pakistan require something of us?<\/p>\n

And the answer, in that hour, was simple:
\nYes.<\/p>\n

That was enough.<\/p>\n

Private disagreement yielded to public duty.<\/p>\n

Pakistan moved to the foreground; lesser quarrels receded.<\/p>\n

History repeatedly demonstrates that when a people become capable of placing a common purpose above faction, doors which had appeared permanently barred may begin to open.<\/p>\n

This, perhaps, is among the most enduring lessons of 6 September.<\/p>\n

For national defence is not only the defence of a line upon a map.<\/p>\n

A country must also defend its moral purpose.
\nIts institutions.
\nIts educational inheritance.
\nIts economy.
\nIts social cohesion.
\nIts commitment to truth.
\nIts justice.
\nAnd, above all, the covenant from which it derives its understanding of itself.<\/p>\n

Pakistan \u2014 More Than a Piece of Territory
\nIn Pakistan\u2019s collective memory, the birth of the state has long possessed a spiritual resonance extending beyond ordinary political chronology.<\/p>\n

The association of independence with the closing days of Ramadan, and in popular consciousness with the blessed atmosphere of that sacred month, has nourished across generations the conviction that Pakistan was not conceived merely as another territorial rearrangement upon the map of a departing empire.<\/p>\n

There was a larger aspiration.
\nThere was the idea of a homeland in which Muslims might live with dignity according to their faith, civilisation and collective moral principles; a society in which man would not become the slave of another man, power would submit to law, the weak would not be abandoned before the strong, knowledge would be regarded as a form of worship, public office as a trust, and the ethical teachings of the Qur\u2019an and Sunnah as a discipline of national conscience rather than ornaments of rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Our political and spiritual vocabulary has often expressed that aspiration in the language of supplication:
\nO Lord, grant us a land in which men may be delivered from servitude to men, so that they may live in freedom under obedience to You alone.<\/p>\n

Whether uttered from a pulpit, remembered within a family, or transmitted through national memory, the true worth of such an aspiration cannot lie in the grandeur of the slogan.<\/p>\n

It must lie in the quality of the society built beneath it.<\/p>\n

Pakistan was never meant to signify merely the waving of a green flag.<\/p>\n

Its deeper promise was that justice might become so visible that even outsiders would be compelled to acknowledge it.<\/p>\n

That rulers should regard themselves not as master\u2019s but as trustees.<\/p>\n

That the public treasury should never become private property.<\/p>\n

That the rights of the orphan and the powerless should be protected by the same moral principle that governs the conduct of the state.<\/p>\n

That learning and inquiry should occupy the place naturally implied by the very first Qur\u2019anic command:
\nIqra \u2014 Read.<\/p>\n

That honesty should enter commerce.
\nJustice should inhabit the courtroom.
\nEthics should restrain politics.
\nSelf-reliance should inform economic policy.
\nResearch should dignify education.
\nAnd power should be accompanied by mercy.
\nThat was, and remains, the nobler meaning of the national project.<\/p>\n

Yet How Faithful Have We Been to Our Covenant?
\nThe question is uncomfortable.
\nBut nations do not endure by listening only to hymns in their own praise.
\nA mature nation must possess the courage to look into the mirror even when the reflection is unflattering.
\nWe must therefore ask ourselves:
\nHave we fashioned this country in accordance with the highest purpose to which we so often appeal?
\nHas public trust always taken precedence over private interest?
\nHas justice been equally available to the powerful and the powerless?
\nHave knowledge, science, research and technological competence truly been treated as national priorities?
\nHave we consistently placed Pakistan above faction, sect, language, patronage and personal advantage?
\nHave we honoured the Qur\u2019anic injunction of awfu bil-\u2018ahd \u2014 fulfil the covenant?
\nOr have we too often broken faith with our own declared principles?
\nThese questions cannot be answered merely by pointing towards rulers.
\nA state is not shaped by rulers alone.
\nA society builds the state which eventually governs it.
\nThe man who accepts a bribe bears responsibility, but so does the man who offers one.
\nThe merchant who deceives.
\nThe student who cheats.
\nThe official who subverts merit.
\nThe citizen who believes law should bind everyone except himself.
\nThe demagogue who turns disagreement into hatred.
\nThe person who circulates falsehood without inquiry.
\nAnd, most gravely, the holder of public office who converts an entrusted authority into private advantage.<\/p>\n

All participate, in different degrees, in the making or unmaking of public morality.<\/p>\n

If Pakistan is a covenant, then we are all parties to it.
\nThis is perhaps the harder patriotism: not to praise one\u2019s country when drums are sounding, but to discipline oneself when no one is watching.<\/p>\n

And Yet, O Lord, Your Mercy Has Not Deserted Us
\nHere the story of Pakistan assumes another, remarkable dimension.
\nWe have made grave mistakes.
\nWe have stumbled through political crises.
\nWe have endured economic frailty.
\nWe have weakened one another through division.
\nWe have squandered opportunities which history rarely offers twice.
\nYet the country endures.
\nAnd it has not merely endured.
\nIt has crossed thresholds which, at earlier moments, would have appeared scarcely attainable.
\nA state born amidst shortage and upheaval gradually produced scientists, engineers and institutions of strategic research.
\nIt developed indigenous defence capabilities.
\nIt acquired expertise in missile technology, aviation, radar, naval systems and a range of advanced military sciences.
\nMost consequentially, Pakistan became a nuclear-armed state.
\nIn May 1998, the country publicly demonstrated its nuclear capability and altered the strategic balance of South Asia.
\nBut this achievement should never be understood as a celebration of war.
\nIts responsible meaning is altogether more serious.<\/p>\n

The highest purpose of strategic deterrence is not to glorify the destruction of an adversary.
\nIt is to make aggression so dangerous, so irrational and so prohibitively costly that war itself is prevented.
\nThe finest victory of deterrence is the battle that never has to be fought.
\nModern warfare has compressed time with terrifying efficiency.
\nMissiles, drones, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, satellite surveillance and increasingly sophisticated command systems have narrowed the interval between warning and consequence.
\nIn such a world, national power cannot safely be measured by the number of weapons in an arsenal.
\nA secure Pakistan requires more than weapons.
\nIt requires:
\nminds prepared for the future;
\nan economy capable of sustaining sovereignty;
\nindustries that can stand upon their own feet;
\nscience at the frontier of knowledge;
\na people sufficiently united to resist manipulation;
\nleadership governed by moral restraint;
\nand a defence doctrine strong enough to deter war, yet responsible enough not to worship it.
\nThe purpose of strength must be peace with dignity.
\nOtherwise, strength itself becomes another form of weakness.<\/p>\n

To the Young Pakistani of Today: The Soldier of 1965 Is Still Calling You
\nA young person may reasonably ask:
\nWhat has a war fought more than six decades ago to do with me?
\nThe answer is: a very great deal.
\nThe battlefield has changed.
\nThe duty has not.
\nIn 1965, a young Pakistani stood in a trench.
\nToday, you may have to stand at the frontier of knowledge.
\nHe defended a physical border.
\nYou must help defend Pakistan\u2019s future.
\nHe faced gunfire.
\nYou must confront ignorance, corruption, dishonesty, intellectual dependence, extremism, despair and the seductions of mediocrity.
\nHe carried a rifle.
\nYour weapons may be a book, a computer, a laboratory, a workshop, a business, a profession, an invention, a research paper or a disciplined character.
\nPakistan today requires millions of young men and women prepared to make a quieter but no less consequential declaration:
\nI shall not cheat.
\nI shall not advance by fraud.
\nI shall not mistake shortcuts for achievement.
\nI shall learn from the world without becoming intellectually dependent upon it.
\nI shall master technology and, where possible, create it rather than merely consume it.
\nI shall build enterprises.
\nI shall pursue research.
\nI shall turn skill into national value.
\nI shall disagree without hatred.
\nI shall love my language, province and inheritance without despising those of another Pakistani.
\nI shall allow faith to become character, not merely slogan.
\nI shall try to leave my country stronger than I found it.
\nIf a generation were to make such commitments seriously, that would constitute a Defence Day for the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n

To the Daughters of Pakistan: This Country Is Yours No Less
\nThe moral history of 1965 cannot be told honestly if courage is narrated only in masculine terms.
\nPakistani women have borne the burden of every national trial.
\nThey have given sons to the country.
\nSustained husbands through adversity.
\nCared for the wounded.
\nHeld families together.
\nPreserved education.
\nMaintained dignity in deprivation.
\nAnd, perhaps most importantly, shaped the minds of the generations that followed.
\nToday, the frontier at which a Pakistani woman serves her country may be a university.
\nA hospital.
\nA research laboratory.
\nA classroom.
\nA courtroom.
\nA business.
\nA technology firm.
\nA public institution.
\nOr the home in which the moral grammar of the next generation is first taught.
\nNations are not fashioned upon borders alone.
\nThey are also fashioned in the lap of a mother.
\nA mother who teaches a child that service to Pakistan consists not merely in patriotic vocabulary but in honesty, knowledge, competence, discipline and compassion may be shaping the destiny of a country more profoundly than she will ever know.<\/p>\n

To the Elderly Pakistani: You Are Our Living Archive
\nThose who witnessed the early decades of Pakistan possess something which no archive can wholly preserve.
\nSome remember the upheaval of Partition.
\nSome heard the air-raid sirens of 1965.
\nSome remember families gathered around radio sets.
\nSome recall a social atmosphere in which material resources were fewer, yet neighbourliness could sometimes appear richer.
\nTo the younger generation, such people are not merely relics of another age.
\nThey are repositories of national memory.
\nTell the young what freedom cost.
\nTell them that states do not emerge from maps alone.
\nA homeland is made of remembered graves, migrations, sacrifices, prayers, languages, cultures, affections and responsibilities inherited by people who did not personally pay the original price.
\nTell them, too, that reverence for the past must never become an excuse for failing the future.
\nMemory is valuable only when it becomes instruction.<\/p>\n

The Most Dangerous War May Not Be Fought at the Frontier
\nPakistan today faces dangers that do not resemble the conventional battlefields of the twentieth century.
\nThere is a war against hope.
\nA war against intellectual independence.
\nA war of false information.
\nA war of economic dependency.
\nA war against educational excellence.
\nA crisis of institutional confidence.
\nA corrosion of character.
\nThese wars seldom announce themselves with artillery.
\nThere may be no air-raid siren.
\nNo column of smoke.
\nNo soldier visible in a trench.
\nYet a society can be hollowed from within long before an enemy crosses its frontier.
\nWhen young people cease to believe that honest effort can alter their condition, something of the nation has already been defeated.
\nWhen merit becomes irrelevant, something has been defeated.
\nWhen the brightest student comes to regard departure from the country as the sole conceivable definition of success, something has been defeated.
\nWhen we make every national failure the responsibility of some mysterious \u201cother\u201d while refusing to examine ourselves, something has been defeated.
\nThe defence required in such an age is therefore broader than military readiness.
\nPakistan needs another kind of soldier.
\nIf you are a teacher, teach with integrity.
\nIf you are a doctor, regard the patient as a trust.
\nIf you are a trader, keep your measure honest.
\nIf you are a civil servant, remember that the citizen\u2019s time is not your personal property.
\nIf you are a politician, regard authority as service rather than possession.
\nIf you are a journalist, treat truth as an entrusted responsibility.
\nIf you are a religious scholar, heal divisions rather than inflame them.
\nIf you are young, equip yourself with knowledge and skill.
\nNot everyone will stand in a trench.
\nBut everyone occupies a post.<\/p>\n

When Will Pakistan Be Truly Unassailable?
\nWill it be when we possess the most advanced missiles?
\nNo.
\nWhen we possess nuclear weapons?
\nNo.
\nWhen our armed forces are strong?
\nTheir strength is indispensable, but by itself it is not enough.
\nPakistan will approach genuine security when military strength is accompanied by economic strength.
\nWhen national defence is matched by national education.
\nWhen the frontier is secure and the courtroom commands confidence.
\nWhen the missile is sophisticated and the university is equally sophisticated.
\nWhen nuclear capability exists alongside self-reliance in energy, industry, agriculture and technology.
\nWhen the mosque is full and the marketplace is honest.
\nWhen the Qur\u2019an is recited beautifully and its ethics are visible in public dealings.
\nWhen we unite against external danger but are equally prepared to defend the rights of one another.
\nThat is the larger meaning of defence.
\nMilitary defence.
\nIntellectual defence.
\nEconomic defence.
\nMoral defence.
\nCivilisational defence.
\nA state protected in only one of these dimensions remains vulnerable in all the others.<\/p>\n

6 September Does Not Ask Every Generation for Blood; It Asks Every Generation for Character
\nThere is no virtue in desiring perpetual conflict.
\nThe greatness of a country is not measured by how often it goes to war.
\nIt is measured, in part, by whether it can become so capable, so coherent, so just and so formidable that war against it becomes an act of folly.
\nOur dead did not sacrifice themselves so that every generation after them should remain permanently upon a battlefield.
\nThey died so that those who followed might live free, secure and at peace.
\nFor that reason, the greatest tribute to a fallen soldier cannot consist solely of wreaths, ceremonies and speeches.
\nIt must lie in building the country for which he died.
\nA Pakistan in which the child of a fallen soldier is not denied justice.
\nWhere the gifted son of a poor family is not condemned by poverty.
\nWhere a daughter may live and work in safety.
\nWhere a farmer retains dignity.
\nWhere a teacher is honoured.
\nWhere the scientist is given the means to explore.
\nWhere the young are offered possibility rather than despair.
\nWhere law does not lower its eyes before wealth or rank.
\nOnly then may we approach the graves of those who died and hope that our words of gratitude are supported by evidence.<\/p>\n

O Lord, Make Us Again a People Worthy of the Trust
\nO Allah,
\nbefore You we acknowledge our failings.
\nYou granted us a homeland, and we have not always valued it as we should.
\nYou granted us resources, and we have not always used them wisely.
\nYou gave us talent, and too often we exhausted it in quarrel.
\nYou preserved us through moments of danger, yet we have not always prevailed over our own weaknesses.
\nO Lord,
\nrestore to us the heart that becomes one in adversity.
\nGive us the moral courage to recognise our own errors.
\nGrant us knowledge that frees us from dependency.
\nGrant us leadership that understands public office as a trust.
\nRaise among us a generation which contributes to the world rather than merely demands from it.
\nGive us science which serves humanity.
\nGive us strength under which the oppressed may find security.
\nGive us a defence so credible that war is restrained.
\nGive us an economy strong enough to protect the independence of our decisions.
\nAnd give us such character that before the world speaks of our power,
\nit speaks of our justice.<\/p>\n

The Covenant of the Present
\nOn 6 September, let us not say only:
\nWe are proud of our martyrs.
\nLet us also say:
\nWe are indebted to them.
\nLet us not merely declare:
\nPakistan shall endure.
\nLet us ask:
\nWhat am I doing today to make its endurance worthy?
\nDo not merely raise the flag.
\nWrite Pakistan upon your conduct.
\nDo not merely listen to the patriotic song.
\nMake your profession an act of national service.
\nDo not merely catalogue the weakness of adversaries.
\nHave the courage to confront your own.
\nDo not merely take pride in nuclear capability.
\nHelp build such intellectual, economic, technological and moral strength that Pakistan commands respect for the totality of its civilisation.
\nFor one day our generation, too, will become history.
\nThe children of today will grow older.
\nAnd they will ask us:
\nWhen Pakistan faced difficulty, what were you doing?
\nShall we tell them:
\nWe were fighting one another?
\nWe were manufacturing hatred?
\nWe had surrendered to despair?
\nOr shall we be able to say:
\nWe helped Pakistan stand again.
\nWe made education a form of power.
\nWe restored dignity to research.
\nWe gave young people reason to hope.
\nWe built industries.
\nWe created technologies.
\nWe learned to disagree without dismembering the national community.
\nWe remembered the covenant which we had so often invoked before God.
\nAnd we delivered to those who followed a Pakistan which was not merely large upon a map,
\nbut large in character.<\/p>\n

Soldiers and martyrs of September 1965,
\nfrom the silence of your graves there still seems to arise a question:
\nIs Pakistan secure?
\nWe answer:
\nYes. Upon its frontiers your successors still stand watch.
\nYou ask:
\nIs Pakistan strong?
\nWe answer:
\nIt possesses defensive capabilities beyond much that could have been imagined in your own time.
\nThen perhaps comes the final and more difficult question:
\nBut is the nation for which we gave our lives equally strong?
\nAnd there\u2014
\nour eloquence falters.
\nFor that question cannot be answered by speeches.
\nOur schools will answer it.
\nOur courts will answer it.
\nOur universities will answer it.
\nOur markets will answer it.
\nOur institutions will answer it.
\nOur conduct will answer it.
\nOur young people will answer it.
\nHistory will answer it.<\/p>\n

So let 6 September cease to be merely an annual recollection of the past.
\nLet it become a covenant with the future.
\nLet us resolve that Pakistan shall never be made smaller than the interests of a person, a party, a sect, a province, a language or a generation.
\nLet us bind faith to character.
\nPatriotism to labour.
\nFreedom to self-reliance.
\nDefence to knowledge.
\nPower to justice.<\/p>\n

And Pakistan to the larger moral purpose for which earlier generations dreamed, migrated, suffered and sacrificed.
\nThen perhaps there may come a day when the world will look upon Pakistan and see not merely a nuclear state, nor merely a strategically situated country, nor merely a nation that survived difficult decades.
\nIt may say instead:
\nHere were a people who learned from their mistakes.
\nWho remembered their covenant.
\nWho created strength with their own hands.
\nWho overcame the tyranny of internal division.
\nWho possessed power without becoming intoxicated by it.
\nAnd who chose peace without surrendering dignity.
\nPerhaps then the prayer of a nation will acquire a new meaning.
\nPerhaps then our children, reading of 6 September, will not say merely:
\nOur forefathers were great.
\nThey will be able to add:
\nThey preserved the homeland\u2014
\nand we built the Pakistan of which they had dreamed.
\nPakistan is not merely our soil.
\nIt is an inheritance held in trust from those who died, a prayer transmitted by those who came before us, the sacrifice of mothers, the endurance of fathers, the future of children, and a collective responsibility before God.
\nHold fast to that trust.
\nDo not permit it to be consumed by the fire of faction.
\nDo not surrender it to despair.
\nDo not abandon it to ignorance.
\nDo not permit it to be chained by dependency, debt or intellectual servitude.
\nGive Pakistan your knowledge.
\nGive it your ability.
\nGive it your integrity.
\nGive it your labour.
\nGive it your prayer.
\nFor once, somewhere upon a frontier, a soldier surrendered his present so that we might possess a future.<\/p>\n

The duty now falls to us: to use our present to build Pakistan\u2019s tomorrow.<\/strong>
\nPakistan Paindabad.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are dates which merely occupy a square upon the calendar, and there are dates which pass beyond chronology and enter the moral memory of a people. 6 September 1965 belongs to the latter order. It was not merely a day of artillery, armoured columns, contested skies and embattled frontiers. It was one of those …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,33,24,28,26,27,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-columns","category-important-columns","category-international-columns","category-islam","category-pakistan-columns","category-today-columns","category-top-articles"],"yoast_head":"\nPakistan | The Unfinished Covenant<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When young people cease to believe that honest effort can alter their condition, something of the nation has already been defeated.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bittertruth.uk\/en\/pakistan-the-unfinished-covenant\/\" 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