Twenty-seven years after Pakistan’s nuclear tests, a pressing doctrinal dilemma has come into focus: while the nuclear ars­enal has succeeded in deterring full-scale war, a troubling pattern has emerged — India’s growing reliance on calculated and limited conventional strikes. This evolving challenge requires a clear and adaptive strategy to effectively counter it.

These operations, which Delhi has designed to stay below the nuclear threshold, have manifested the shrinking space in which our deterrence operates in the highly volatile South Asian environment. The time has come to rethink and update our understanding of deterrence — one that reflects the realities of today, where conflict no longer arrives with armies massing at borders, but with drones in the sky and missiles that strike and disappear before the world has time to respond.

On May 7, India launched “Operation Sindoor” — a coordinated assault involving air strikes, drone swarms, and missile attacks deep inside Pakistani territory. The strikes hit a disturbing range of targets from religious institutions like mosques to strategic military installations. Pakistani armed forces that follow a “quid pro quo plus” policy with regards to India, responded robustly and swiftly, downing multiple Indian aircraft — including Rafale, Mirage 2000, MiG-29, and Su-30 jets in a short span of less than an hour — employing stand-off weapons and air defence systems to signal its resolve.

But instead of de-escalating, India escalated further.

Pakistan’s quid pro quo plus aims at preventing all-out conflicts, but India’s reckless behaviour to expand geographic scope of its strikes risks miscalculation resulting in a nuclear catastrophe

By the next morning, a wave of drones swarmed Pakistani skies, followed a day later by fresh missile attacks on airbases. It was a moment of real danger. The international community scrambled to contain what was quickly becoming a runaway crisis. Deterrence, while not broken, was undeniably shaken.

India’s willingness to act and expand geographic scope of its strikes, echoing Uri in 2016 and Pulwama-Balakot in 2019, points to a gap in Pakistan’s ability to deter reckless Indian behaviour due to emergence of newer technologies. To put it simply, Pakistan’s shield is holding, though it may be fraying at the edges.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme, born from the trauma of 1971, was built on a simple promise: to make any future........

© Dawn