On 22 April, the pristine calm of Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam was ruptured by violence of the most brutal kind. In what is now being called the deadliest civilian-targeted terrorist attack in India since 2008, twenty-six tourists, including a child and a Nepalese national, were murdered in cold blood by militants claiming allegiance to The Resistance Front (TRF), a known proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba of Pakistan. This was not just an act of horrendous terror. For India, it was a catastrophic intelligence failure, a security breach of the highest order, and a national tragedy with profound strategic consequences.

India, a nuclear-armed state with one of the world’s largest standing militaries and a formidable intelligence network, failed to foresee an attack in one of the most heavily patrolled and sensitive regions of the country. This is India’s “zero-day” event ~ a term borrowed from cybersecurity, referring to a previously unknown vulnerability exploited by attackers before a patch can be issued. Kashmir’s picturesque façade had, perhaps, lulled policymakers into a misplaced sense of normalcy. But beneath it, as this attack showed, lay dormant terror networks waiting for their opportunity. The question India must now ask ~ calmly, seriously, and strategically ~ is this: how can India predict and prevent the next zero-day attack?

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The answer lies not just in more boots on the ground, but in more intelligence, more integration, and more technology. India must now make a decisive shift toward AI-enhanced national security ~ learning from global counterparts like Israel and the United States, who have integrated artificial intelligence deeply into their counterterrorism frameworks. India’s counterterrorism strategy remains a mix of centralized intelligence agencies ~ RAW, IB, NIA ~ and military deployment in volatile areas like Jammu and Kashmir. But this system is often reactive, bureaucratic, and siloed. It is good at response but poor at prediction.

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It can investigate what happened, but it struggles to see what is about........

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