Islamabad’s long-running claim that Pakistan “won” the 1965 India–Pakistan war rests less on verifiable record than on domestic narrative management. A closer look at how the conflict ended—and why the Tashkent Agreement of January 1966 became necessary—points to a simpler explanation. Tashkent was not the fruit of leverage or victory. It was a war-termination arrangement shaped by military stalemate and strategic misjudgment along with sustained international pressure to halt escalation.

To understand Tashkent, it must be read through the strategic logic of the war and not be treated as a detached diplomatic afterthought.

The 1965 war did not begin as a straightforward clash between two regular armies. Pakistan initiated hostilities with the use of a strategy anchored in covert infiltration coupled with political misreading. Islamabad assumed limited military action would stay localised, trigger internal unrest in Jammu and Kashmir and then push India toward political compromise.

That premise collapsed quickly. The conflict expanded, and once fighting crossed the international boundary, the war’s character changed. What had been conceived as a controlled operation became a wider confrontation that Pakistan’s leadership neither anticipated nor could decisively manage.

India’s response also reshaped the equation. The Indian Army signalled that escalation would be met directly with force and not merely absorbed. The conflict no longer........

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