Kaja Kallas’s Pakistan visit and the EU’s dangerous capitulation

There are moments in diplomacy when neutrality is not balance but evasion. Kaja Kallas’s handling of Pakistan is one of those moments.

After the Pahalgam terror attack, the European Union began correctly. It condemned terrorism and acknowledged that no cause can justify the killing of civilians. But almost immediately, the statement slipped into the familiar fog of European crisis management, urging “both parties” to exercise restraint, “both sides” to de-escalate, and India and Pakistan to return to dialogue. The language sounded responsible. In reality, it was a capitulation to Pakistan’s preferred narrative. It took a terror attack and converted it into a symmetrical dispute.

That is precisely the diplomatic trap Islamabad has perfected over decades. First comes the attack. Then comes denial. Then comes the appeal to internationalize the crisis. Finally, the victim’s response is placed on the same moral plane as the violence that provoked it. When Brussels uses this vocabulary, it may believe it is lowering tensions. In practice, it rewards the very ambiguity that allows Pakistan to escape accountability. Brussels has done this with the PLO and with Iran, with only disastrous consequences.

Kallas’s visit to Islamabad on 1 June 2026 makes this problem even more serious. The EU has presented the trip as a bilateral visit and as part of the 8th EU-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, with meetings scheduled with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Forces, Field Marshal Asim Munir. The dialogue is framed as an opportunity to deepen cooperation under the EU-Pakistan Strategic Engagement Plan signed in 2019.

But diplomacy is not only about agenda papers. It is also about timing, optics and political meaning. Coming after the EU’s weak equivalence on India and Pakistan, Kallas’s visit risks looking less like strategic engagement and more like diplomatic rehabilitation. Pakistan is being received not as a state that must answer difficult questions about terrorism, radical infrastructure and regional destabilisation, but as a partner to be courted across trade, security, migration, climate and connectivity. Dawn reported that during the visit, Shehbaz Sharif reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment to expanding cooperation with the EU and highlighted GSP+ as central to stronger trade ties.

Europe wants India as a strategic partner, but still treats Pakistan as a crisis-management habit it cannot abandon. It speaks of security cooperation with New Delhi, then rushes to Islamabad with the same old language of balance, engagement and restraint. By equating Jammu and Kashmir with Ukraine in the press statement, it forgives Pakistan its support of cross border terrorism and for cheap optics sacrifices its moral high ground on terror.

Earlier this year, Kallas said the EU would proceed with a security and defence partnership with India, a significant step in Europe’s Indo-Pacific posture.  Yet on the subcontinent’s most sensitive security question, the EU continues to behave as though India’s counterterror concerns are merely one side of a bilateral quarrel.

That is not strategic autonomy. It is strategic confusion. Europe is back again pacifying dictators like it once did. While verbally it tries to proclaim strategic autonomy it panders to Asif Munir just because it must seem to have a seat at the Iran table.

The issue is not that Kallas visited Pakistan.  Serious powers engage adversaries, rivals and difficult partners. The issue is that the visit came without any visible insistence on accountability. A serious European message would have been clear: Pakistan cannot claim partnership with Europe while the infrastructure of extremism, denial and proxy violence remains a recurring feature of South Asian instability. Instead, the public choreography gave Pakistan what it most craves: legitimacy without cost.

This is particularly jarring from Kallas, whose political identity has been built on moral clarity toward aggression, coercion and sovereignty. On Ukraine, Europe and Kallas understand the importance of naming the aggressor. It does not ask Kyiv and Moscow to show equal restraint when Russian missiles hit Ukrainian civilians. It does not turn invasion into a misunderstanding. It does not confuse de-escalation with absolution. Europe knows, in its own theatre, that peace without accountability is merely surrender with better stationery.

Why, then, does South Asia receive a different vocabulary?

S. Jaishankar once put his finger on Europe’s central conceit when he said that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” Kallas’s Pakistan visit is almost a case study in that mindset. Europe demands that the world treat Ukraine as a test of the international order, and rightly so. But when India faces cross-border terrorism, Europe suddenly discovers nuance, restraint, dialogue and balance. The moral clarity it demands for itself becomes a procedural fog when the victim is not European. Similar double standards that the EU and its leaders use for Israel.

India is not asking Europe to abandon diplomacy. It is asking Europe to understand chronology. Pahalgam came first. Terror came first. The murder of civilians came first. A state’s lawful response to cross-border terrorism is not the same as a state ecosystem that has, for decades, allowed jihadist networks to operate as instruments of pressure. Pretending otherwise may sound sophisticated in Brussels, but in South Asia it reads as strategic illiteracy.

Even Washington, while urging de-escalation during the 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, reportedly paired its call for restraint with a message to Pakistan to end support for terrorist groups. That distinction matters. De-escalation cannot mean silence on the infrastructure of terror.

Kallas’s Islamabad visit therefore risks confirming a damaging perception in New Delhi: that Europe wants India’s market, India’s geopolitical weight and India’s role in balancing China, but hesitates when India asks for clarity on terrorism. It wants India as a partner, wants an EU-India Free Trade Agreement to balance its potential losses in DC, but still reaches instinctively for the old Pakistan file whenever the subcontinent becomes uncomfortable.

Pakistan’s great diplomatic skill has been to internationalize the consequences of its conduct while denying responsibility for the causes. The EU’s mistake is to keep falling for it. By moving from soft equivalence after Pahalgam to high-level engagement in Islamabad, Kallas has given Pakistan the benefit of ambiguity at precisely the wrong moment.

A serious European policy would sequence its message differently: condemn terrorism, demand accountability, call on Pakistan to dismantle terror networks, affirm India’s right to protect its citizens within international law, and then urge de-escalation. Without that order, restraint becomes a burden placed mainly on the victim.

Kaja Kallas should know better. Europe after Ukraine should know better. And India has every reason to expect better.