Unnamed Source, No Evidence As Pakistan Rejects NYT Jet Claim

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Ministry of Information on Thursday dismissed as “fake and fabricated” a New York Times report that Pakistan Air Force jets are being used against Yemen’s Houthis, a story that rests on an unnamed official and sits at odds with everything Islamabad has said on the record.

The rebuttal came through the ministry’s fact-check account on X, which posted a screenshot of the October 7 report. International media houses, it said, were “again” asked to avoid speculative reporting on how Pakistan’s forces are employed under the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement. Details of any employment, if necessary, would come from the authorities concerned.

The official position is not hidden. The military’s spokesman told CNN a day earlier that Pakistani troops have served in the kingdom for decades, and withheld only operational detail. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif has said Pakistani and Turkish forces are present in a supporting role while Saudi troops alone do the fighting. Türkiye’s foreign minister has ruled out sending soldiers into Yemen.

Against all that, one anonymous voice is asked to carry a claim with heavy consequences. A Pakistani jet bombing Houthi positions would turn a defender of Saudi cities into a combatant in Yemen’s civil war. It would also give hardliners in Tehran a reason to doubt the one capital that still carries messages between Iran and Washington.

The report’s own named expert pulls the other way. The claim takes up a single paragraph in a wider story about explosions in Riyadh. Directly beneath it, Col David O. Smith, a former US Army attaché in Pakistan, puts the Pakistani presence at about 8,000 troops, says they would likely help secure oil infrastructure, and adds that they are unlikely to engage in direct combat with the Houthis because Islamabad is protecting its relationship with Iran.

This is the ministry’s third correction in under three weeks. On September 19 it debunked a claim, pushed by India-linked social media accounts, that Houthi missiles had damaged three JF-17s at King Abdulaziz Air Base. On Tuesday it described a Reuters report putting 30,000 to 40,000 Pakistani troops in the kingdom as speculative. The Times story followed a day later.

The New York Times has been here before, and has said so itself. In May 2004 its editors published a note conceding that coverage of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, much of it built on unnamed officials and defectors, “was not as rigorous as it should have been”. In 2020 it withdrew the central claims of its Caliphate podcast and returned a Peabody award after its star source was exposed as a fabricator.

Britain’s Daily Mail supplies the second cautionary tale. Its Sunday edition alleged in 2019 that Shehbaz Sharif had siphoned off British aid meant for earthquake victims. Three years later, facing a libel suit, the paper apologised to him and took the article down. By then he was prime minister.

India’s television news needs less introduction. During the May 2025 conflict, channels announced the destruction of Karachi port and a strike on a Pakistani nuclear site, neither of which happened, and the Times itself documented how those falsehoods were amplified. In 2020 the Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab exposed a 15-year network of more than 750 fake outlets in over 100 countries, built to discredit Pakistan. That narrative war has not paused.

Why does the pressure rise now? Because the old script no longer fits. For two decades the Pakistan of foreign desks was a failing state, a hired gun or a problem to be managed. In 2026 it brokered a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, was handed the secretariat of a three-nation alliance and heard Iran’s own consul general thank it for mediating.

What the three have in common is the Pakistan they would prefer. For New Delhi’s studios it is an isolated neighbour. For a London tabloid it was a corruption fable. For anonymous briefers in a great American newspaper it is a mercenary air force fighting someone else’s war. Whether by design or by habit, each version tries to push Islamabad off the middle ground it has earned.

Each has failed, and this one will too. Pakistan’s position has been stated in public by its ministers and its generals that defend the kingdom and the holy places, stay out of Yemen’s internal war, keep the door to Tehran open. A state that answers to no patron cannot be written into a role it has refused.

None of this is an argument against scrutiny. It is an argument for names, evidence and proportion. A newspaper that once apologised for trusting unnamed officials on Iraq should know the cost of repeating the habit on Yemen.

The real war, meanwhile, goes on. The Houthis said on Thursday they had fired a ballistic missile at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, days after a drone strike on a grid station in Madinah. If Pakistan’s role changes, the ministry says, Pakistan will be the one to announce it. Its post ended with four words includes truth prevails over falsehood.