The fall-out from India’s retaliation against Pakistan for the horrific Pahalgam terrorist attack has been bilateral, regional and international.

At the bilateral level, a powerful signal has gone to Pakistan that henceforth India will not tolerate terror attacks engineered against India. Talk of zero tolerance of terrorism has moved from rhetoric to a robust military response, despite escalatory risks.

That Pakistan has nuclear weapons is no longer considered a deterrent to appropriate levels of Indian retaliation. India, in any case, has no reason to pose an existential threat to Pakistan. Just as India has to control the escalatory ladder, Pakistan too has to do, as India also possesses nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s belief that under the nuclear overhang it can pursue the low-cost option of conducting terror attacks against India has now been severely challenged. As in the case of the proxy war in Ukraine between NATO and Russia, both having formidable nuclear arsenals, the scope of conventional warfare has been shown to be considerable. This would not be lost on both Pakistan and India.

It is difficult at this stage to determine whether Pakistan has learnt a hard lesson and will avoid the risk of staging terror attacks against India in the future. It may yet be tempted to organise small-scale terror attacks on Indian soil and test India’s willingness to retaliate on a large scale. Pakistan has shown over the years that it can take the risk of playing the terrorist card even against its benefactors like the US, calculating that the latter would place self-limits on its response by weighing costs and benefits of a strong response. India too would have to consider whether a limited Pakistan-backed terrorist incident in the future would require a major military response.

What adds to the doubt whether Pakistan will eschew terror in the future is the narrative that has been cultivated with the connivance of the Western media that Pakistan either got the edge over India in the recent conflict or that it was a draw. For the Western media and defence correspondents, the only metric for judging the outcome of the conflict is whether Pakistan’s Chinese planes and missiles succeeded in downing a French made Indian Rafale, even though no evidence has been produced by either Western or Pakistani sources to back any such claim. That the major terror hubs of Pakistan were targeted by India with precision strikes, its most important air bases were successfully attacked, and that Pakistani air defences failed to intercept the Indian missiles,........

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