India’s approach to covert action against cross-border terrorism has undergone three distinct transformations since the Research and Analysis Wing was established in September 1968, each triggered by a catastrophic failure of the preceding framework, and each expanding the boundaries of what New Delhi considered permissible in its confrontation with Pakistan-sponsored violence.

The trajectory is legible only in retrospect. For four decades after R.N. Kao built the Research and Analysis Wing from 250 handpicked operatives in a Cabinet Secretariat annex, India’s external intelligence apparatus treated Pakistan as a target for information collection, not kinetic action. The agency that midwifed Bangladesh in 1971, engineered Sikkim’s merger in 1975, and ran assets across South Asia and beyond did not apply its covert-action capability to the one adversary that mattered most. When the Gujral Doctrine dismantled even the intelligence-collection infrastructure inside Pakistan in 1997, the defensive posture hardened into institutional paralysis. The consequences arrived two years later at Kandahar, where India surrendered three designated terrorists in exchange for hostages, and then again in November 2008, when ten Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives from Pakistan turned Mumbai into a three-day battlefield that killed 166 people while India’s intelligence agencies watched the carnage unfold with no operational response capability in place.

The second phase, reactive counter-terrorism, emerged from the rubble of 26/11. India rebuilt its intelligence architecture, created the National Investigation Agency, established the Multi-Agency Centre for real-time intelligence sharing, and invested billions in border security technology. For eleven years between 2008 and 2019, New Delhi pursued diplomatic engagement, information-sharing agreements, and international pressure as its primary tools against Pakistan’s proxy war. The Pathankot attack of January 2016, where India invited a Pakistani Joint Investigation Team onto the airbase to inspect the damage, represented the high-water mark of this cooperative approach. The JIT produced nothing. Pakistan prosecuted nobody. The seven Indian soldiers who died at Pathankot joined the lengthening casualty list of a strategy that assumed good faith from an adversary that had none.

Background and Triggers

The story of India’s covert doctrine is inseparable from the story of its intelligence failures. Every phase transition was forced by an event that exposed the previous doctrine as inadequate, and every transition was resisted by institutional inertia until the political cost of inaction exceeded the political risk of escalation. Understanding the three phases requires understanding what broke at each transition point, who broke it, and what replaced the broken framework.

The founding of the Research and Analysis Wing on September 21, 1968, was itself a response to failure. India’s Intelligence Bureau, which had handled both domestic and foreign intelligence since independence, failed catastrophically before the 1962 war with China. B.N. Mullick, then director of the Intelligence Bureau, assured Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that China would not attack. China attacked. India lost 38,000 square kilometers of territory in Aksai Chin. The Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat Report, commissioned to investigate the debacle, identified intelligence failure as a primary cause, but the report itself was classified and never officially released. Three years later, during the 1965 war with Pakistan over Kashmir, the Intelligence Bureau again failed to detect Pakistan’s military preparations for Operation Gibraltar, the infiltration of armed fighters across the ceasefire line. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who took office in January 1966, concluded that India’s foreign intelligence function needed institutional separation from domestic security.

Kao was the natural choice. A deputy director at the Intelligence Bureau who had served as Nehru’s personal security chief, trained Ghana’s intelligence service in 1957, and built the Aviation Research Centre for aerial reconnaissance, Kao combined operational experience with administrative discipline. He began with those 250 officers and a classified budget of approximately four hundred thousand dollars. Within three years, the organization he built would help create a new nation by training and equipping the Mukti Bahini guerrillas who fought West Pakistan’s army in East Bengal during the 1971 war, an effort that resulted in Bangladesh’s independence and India’s most decisive military victory.

The analytical point is not that Kao built a formidable agency. Every institutional history makes that claim. The point is what he did not build. Kao’s Research and Analysis Wing was designed to gather intelligence, conduct analysis, run covert influence operations, and support conventional military campaigns. It was not designed to conduct targeted killings of terrorists on foreign soil. The distinction matters because it defined the agency’s operational culture for decades. When Pakistan began sponsoring terrorism against India in the 1980s through the Khalistani insurgency in Punjab, India’s response was domestic counterinsurgency, not cross-border retaliation. When the Kashmir insurgency erupted in 1989 with direct Pakistani support, India fought it as a law-and-order problem within its own borders, not as a covert war against the sponsors across the Line of Control. The defensive orientation was not accidental. It was doctrinal.

Phase One: The Defensive Era (1968-2008)

Kao’s vision for the Research and Analysis Wing rested on a premise that intelligence gathering and strategic analysis would provide India’s political leadership with the information necessary to make sound decisions through diplomatic and military channels. Covert action was a tool to be used in support of conventional objectives, as in 1971 when the Mukti Bahini operation enabled the Indian Army’s intervention in East Pakistan, or in 1975 when intelligence support for Sikkim’s merger referendum provided the democratic cover for what was effectively an annexation. Covert action was not conceived as an independent tool for prosecuting India’s security interests outside the framework of conventional military operations or diplomatic negotiations.

This defensive orientation produced genuine achievements during its first decade. The Research and Analysis Wing’s intelligence on Pakistani military dispositions contributed to India’s successful prosecution of the 1971 war. Its monitoring of Chinese activities along the northern border provided early warning against a repeat of the 1962 surprise. Its network across South Asia and Southeast Asia gave India strategic depth that a country with limited economic power in the 1970s could not have achieved through conventional diplomacy alone. Count Alexandre de Marenches, the head of France’s SDECE intelligence service, named Kao as one of the five greatest intelligence chiefs of the 1970s, a recognition that reflected the Research and Analysis Wing’s accomplishments under its founding chief.

The defensive doctrine’s first serious test came not from Pakistan but from India’s own political class. When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975, the Research and Analysis Wing’s domestic political reporting raised questions about the boundary between foreign intelligence and internal surveillance. When the Janata Party government took power in 1977 after Gandhi’s electoral defeat, Kao retired and his successors faced political scrutiny that constrained the agency’s operational freedom. Morarji Desai, the new Prime Minister, was reported to have revealed India’s intelligence sources inside Pakistan to the Pakistani leadership as a goodwill gesture, though this claim has been disputed by Desai’s defenders. Whether or not the specific allegation is accurate, the political transition demonstrated that the Research and Analysis Wing’s operational capability depended on political patronage, and political patronage could be withdrawn.

The Khalistani insurgency of the 1980s provided the next test. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, under the directorship of Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, established training camps for Sikh militants in Pakistan’s Punjab Province and the North-West Frontier Province, using funds and weapons originally supplied by the CIA and Saudi Arabia for the Afghan mujahideen. The Research and Analysis Wing detected and monitored these camps but did not conduct direct action against them. India’s response to ISI’s proxy war in Punjab was fought entirely within Indian territory: the storming of the Golden Temple in Operation Blue Star (June 1984), the subsequent counterinsurgency campaign led by K.P.S. Gill as Director General of Police in Punjab, and the intelligence-driven dismantlement of the militant network over the following decade. The Punjab counterinsurgency was successful in eventually suppressing the Khalistani movement, but it was won through domestic police and paramilitary operations, not through cross-border covert action.

The Kashmir insurgency that erupted in 1989 deepened the defensive pattern. When armed insurgency swept through the Kashmir Valley with direct ISI support, including weapons, training, money, and infiltration routes across the Line of Control, India responded with military deployment and counterinsurgency operations inside its own territory. The Research and Analysis Wing provided intelligence on infiltration routes, training camps across the border, and the command structures of groups like Hizbul Mujahideen and later Lashkar-e-Taiba, but the intelligence product was used for border security and domestic operations, not for offensive action inside Pakistan or Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.

Simultaneously, the Research and Analysis Wing’s involvement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka produced what remains the agency’s most controversial chapter and its most lasting institutional lesson. During the 1980s, the agency had trained LTTE fighters as a proxy force against the Sri Lankan government, a classic covert-action operation intended to project Indian influence in the island nation and counter perceived pro-Western tilt in Colombo. When India subsequently deployed the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka in 1987, the LTTE turned its Indian-supplied weapons and Indian-provided training against Indian soldiers. Over 1,200 Indian troops were killed in the three-year IPKF deployment. The LTTE eventually assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, using a suicide bomber trained in techniques that India’s own intelligence agency had helped develop. The LTTE experience burned into the Research and Analysis Wing’s institutional consciousness a profound wariness about covert action that produces uncontrollable consequences, what intelligence professionals call blowback. For two decades after the LTTE disaster, proposals for offensive covert operations in Pakistan faced institutional resistance grounded in the memory of what happened when India’s last major proxy operation spiraled beyond control.

The Research and Analysis Wing also maintained intelligence liaison relationships during the defensive era that would prove consequential for later doctrinal evolution. The agency’s cooperation with Mossad, which began in the 1960s and deepened after India and Israel established full diplomatic relations in 1992, provided India with exposure to Israeli intelligence doctrine including the philosophy of targeted prevention that would eventually inform the offensive phase. Israeli trainers reportedly assisted Indian operatives in developing surveillance, sabotage, and advanced counterinsurgency techniques. The agency’s relationship with the CIA, which oscillated between cooperation and suspicion depending on America’s relationship with Pakistan, provided technical intelligence capabilities including satellite imagery and signals intelligence that India could not produce independently during the defensive era. These relationships seeded technical and doctrinal knowledge that lay dormant during the defensive and reactive phases but became operationally relevant when the offensive doctrine required implementation.

The critical moment in the defensive era’s hardening into institutional paralysis came in 1997 when Prime Minister I.K. Gujral ordered the shutdown of the Research and Analysis Wing’s Pakistan special operations desk. Gujral, who had formulated his eponymous doctrine of unilateral concessions to India’s neighbors as Foreign Minister under H.D. Deve Gowda, extended the logic of accommodation to intelligence operations. He directed that the Research and Analysis Wing cease covert activities inside Pakistan as a gesture of goodwill intended to reduce bilateral tensions. Reports indicate that Gujral may have shared details of Indian intelligence assets in Pakistan with the Pakistani leadership, though this allegation remains disputed. What is not disputed is the operational consequence: the Research and Analysis Wing’s human intelligence network inside Pakistan, built over decades, was dismantled on political orders.

The consequences arrived swiftly. In May 1999, India discovered that Pakistani soldiers and militants had occupied positions at Kargil along the Line of Control in heights that had been vacated by Indian forces during winter. The Kargil intrusion caught India’s intelligence community by surprise. The Research and Analysis Wing, stripped of its Pakistan desk two years earlier, lacked the human intelligence assets that might have provided early warning of the operation. The Kargil Review Committee, headed by K. Subrahmanyam, identified intelligence failure as a primary factor and recommended sweeping reforms including the creation of a Defence Intelligence Agency and better coordination between civilian and military intelligence. The committee’s report was the first official acknowledgment that the defensive doctrine had produced a structural vulnerability in India’s national security architecture.

The IC-814 hijacking crisis in December 1999 compounded the damage. When five terrorists hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814 and diverted it to Kandahar, Afghanistan, India’s negotiating position was constrained by the absence of operational alternatives. The Research and Analysis Wing could not mount a rescue operation in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The Indian military lacked the special forces capability for a hostage rescue at that distance without allied basing support. India capitulated, releasing three imprisoned terrorists including Masood Azhar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar in exchange for the hostages. Azhar, freed from an Indian prison, traveled to Pakistan and within months founded Jaish-e-Mohammed, the organization that would go on to attack the Indian Parliament in December 2001, the Pathankot airbase in January 2016, and a CRPF convoy at Pulwama in February 2019.

The defensive doctrine survived the IC-814 humiliation. It survived the Parliament attack in December 2001, when India mobilized a million troops to the border in Operation Parakram but ultimately stood down without military action after months of coercive diplomacy. It survived the series of terror attacks that struck Indian cities throughout the 2000s: the Akshardham temple in Gujarat (September 2002, 33 killed), the Mumbai train bombings (July 2006, 209 killed), the Hyderabad twin blasts (August 2007, 42 killed), the Jaipur serial blasts (May 2008, 63 killed), the Delhi serial blasts (September 2008, 30 killed), and the Ahmedabad serial bombings (July 2008, 56 killed). Each attack was followed by domestic security reviews, intelligence reforms, and diplomatic protests to Pakistan. None was followed by cross-border offensive action.

The defensive era ended at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the Oberoi Trident, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Nariman House, and the Leopold Cafe in Mumbai between November 26 and 29, 2008. Ten Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives launched from Karachi, traveled by sea, and conducted a coordinated assault across multiple locations that killed 166 people, including 28 foreign nationals, over sixty hours. The attack was planned by the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s leadership in Pakistan with operational support from ISI officers, as confirmed by David Coleman Headley’s testimony and subsequent US intelligence assessments. India’s intelligence agencies had received multiple warnings about a sea-borne attack on Mumbai but failed to prevent it. More significantly, India had no capability to respond offensively against the perpetrators in Pakistan. National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan explicitly rejected proposals for covert retaliation after 26/11, telling intelligence officials that India was a democracy and would not engage in such acts.

The 26/11 attack killed the defensive doctrine. It did not die immediately, and its replacement took years to materialize, but the conceptual foundation was destroyed in those sixty hours. India’s political establishment, intelligence community, and strategic analysts recognized that a doctrine premised on absorbing attacks, filing diplomatic protests, and waiting for Pakistan to reform its behavior had produced an escalating cycle of increasingly devastating terrorism with zero accountability for the perpetrators. The question after 26/11 was not whether the doctrine would change but how fast and how far.

Phase Two: The Reactive Era (2008-2019)

The period between the 26/11 attacks and the emergence of the shadow war represented an interregnum during which India rebuilt its intelligence infrastructure, experimented with limited military responses, and exhausted every alternative to offensive covert action before arriving at the conclusion that alternatives did not work.

The institutional reforms came first. The National Investigation Agency, established in December 2008 as a federal counter-terrorism investigative body modeled partly on the FBI, gave India for the first time a dedicated national agency with jurisdiction to investigate terror attacks across state boundaries. The Multi-Agency Centre, reconstituted and strengthened after 26/11, became the nodal point for real-time intelligence sharing among India’s numerous intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The National Intelligence Grid, designed to connect databases across agencies, began its slow and contentious implementation. The National Security Guard, which had taken ten hours to reach Mumbai from Delhi during the 26/11 attacks, was given regional hubs in Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai to reduce response time for future incidents. The Research and Analysis Wing itself received expanded budgets, modernized technical surveillance capabilities, and a renewed mandate to rebuild its human intelligence networks that the Gujral Doctrine had destroyed.

The Manmohan Singh government, which was in power during 26/11 and remained so until May 2014, pursued a primarily diplomatic response. India demanded that Pakistan dismantle the Lashkar-e-Taiba infrastructure, arrest and prosecute those responsible for 26/11, and shut down the training camps. Pakistan arrested some suspects, staged trials that made no progress over years, and continued to allow Hafiz Saeed to operate openly in Lahore and Muridke. India suspended the composite dialogue process with Pakistan and rallied international support for designating Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders under UN sanctions. The diplomatic pressure produced designations but no operational results on the ground. Hafiz Saeed remained free. The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s Muridke compound continued to operate its two-hundred-acre campus with its seminary, hospital, and reportedly weapons storage facilities untouched.

The reactive era’s defining characteristic was the gap between India’s stated determination to punish cross-border terrorism and its actual capacity to do so. India invested heavily in border security, internal intelligence, and counter-terrorism capability, but these investments were defensive in nature. The country was building stronger walls, not developing the ability to strike at the builders. Even after 26/11 had demonstrated that defensive measures alone could not prevent determined attackers from reaching their targets, the Indian government remained reluctant to authorize offensive operations across the border.

Part of this reluctance stemmed from the nuclear dimension that has constrained Indian decision-making since both countries tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Pakistani strategic doctrine explicitly linked nuclear escalation to Indian conventional military action, articulating a threshold below which India could operate but above which Pakistan reserved the right to use nuclear weapons. This doctrine, sometimes described as “full-spectrum deterrence,” was designed to neutralize India’s conventional military superiority by raising the stakes of any military response to unacceptable levels. Indian policy-makers were acutely aware that conventional military responses to terrorism, however justified, risked triggering an escalation ladder that could reach nuclear levels. The search for a response mechanism that was effective against terrorism but remained below Pakistan’s nuclear threshold became the central strategic problem of the reactive era, a problem that the conventional military options of surgical strikes and airstrikes addressed imperfectly because they remained visible acts of state-on-state military aggression.

The institutional dynamics within India’s security establishment also shaped the reactive era’s character. The military establishment favored visible, dramatic responses that demonstrated resolve and deterrence, producing the surgical strikes and airstrikes that defined the era’s most prominent actions. The intelligence community, rebuilding after the devastation of the Gujral Doctrine, argued for patient reconstruction of human networks inside Pakistan that would eventually provide the capability for more precise, sustained, and deniable operations. The diplomatic establishment resisted both military and intelligence options, preferring international engagement that would pressure Pakistan through multilateral mechanisms. The tension between these institutional perspectives produced a reactive doctrine that combined elements of all three approaches without fully committing to any single one, a compromise that was inherently unstable because it satisfied none of the institutional stakeholders and produced results that fell short of each constituency’s minimum requirements.

The first departure from pure defense came in September 2016, after four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists attacked an Indian Army brigade headquarters at Uri in Kashmir, killing nineteen soldiers. The Indian Army conducted what it described as surgical strikes on launch pads across the Line of Control on the night of September 28-29, 2016, a limited cross-border ground operation targeting staging areas where militants prepared to infiltrate into India. The Uri surgical strikes were India’s first publicly acknowledged cross-border military operation against terrorism since independence. Their significance was more political than operational: the strikes established the precedent that India could and would cross the Line of Control in response to terrorism. Pakistan denied the strikes had occurred, which suited both countries, as Pakistan avoided the pressure to escalate and India claimed the credit for having acted.

The Balakot airstrikes of February 2019 represented a more dramatic escalation. After a Jaish-e-Mohammed suicide bomber killed forty CRPF personnel at Pulwama in Kashmir on February 14, 2019, India launched twelve Mirage 2000 fighter jets across the Line of Control and into Pakistani airspace for the first time since the 1971 war. The jets struck what India described as a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility at Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, deep inside Pakistan. The operational results of Balakot were contested: India claimed it had killed a large number of militants; Pakistan denied meaningful damage and showed journalists the standing structures at the site. The following day, Pakistan launched its own air strikes across the Line of Control, leading to a dogfight in which an Indian MiG-21 was shot down and its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, was captured. His return after diplomatic intervention provided a face-saving denouement, but the episode demonstrated both India’s willingness to escalate and the limits of conventional military strikes as a counter-terrorism tool.

Balakot’s contested results exposed the fundamental problem with conventional military responses to terrorism. Air strikes against fixed targets are visible, verifiable, and deniable by the other side. They provide dramatic television footage but uncertain operational results. They trigger conventional military escalation that risks nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan. And they do not address the underlying problem: the ISI-managed infrastructure that trains, equips, finances, and deploys terrorists against India operates through human networks, not fixed installations. Destroying a building does not destroy the network that operated from it.

The reactive era also encompassed India’s diplomatic engagement with Pakistan that included the Pathankot precedent. On January 2, 2016, four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists attacked the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot in Punjab. Seven Indian security personnel and all four attackers were killed. In an extraordinary gesture intended to build trust with Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, India invited a Pakistani Joint Investigation Team to visit the Pathankot airbase, inspect the evidence, and contribute to the investigation. The JIT visited in March 2016. Pakistan subsequently claimed that the evidence provided by India was insufficient. No prosecution followed. The Pathankot JIT was the reactive doctrine’s most revealing failure. India had, at considerable political risk, shared classified security information with an adversary state in the hope that transparency would compel accountability. The adversary pocketed the intelligence and offered nothing in return.

Between 2016 and 2019, India thus conducted two conventional military operations (Uri and Balakot) and one major diplomatic initiative (Pathankot JIT), and none produced the desired result of deterring Pakistan-sponsored terrorism or dismantling the terror infrastructure that sustained it. The ground-based surgical strikes were too limited in scope. The airstrikes were too contestable in results. The diplomatic engagement was too naive in assumptions. The shadow war was the option that remained after every other option had been tried and had failed.

Phase Three: The Offensive Era (2019-Present)

The transition from reactive counter-terrorism to offensive targeted elimination did not occur on a single date. It emerged through a series of operational indicators that, viewed collectively, constitute a doctrinal transformation. Beginning approximately in 2022, individuals on India’s most-wanted lists in Pakistan began dying under remarkably similar circumstances: motorcycle-borne gunmen approaching the target in public spaces, firing at close range with small arms, and escaping before Pakistani law enforcement could respond. The pattern repeated across multiple Pakistani cities, targeting members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, and Khalistan-affiliated organizations.

The operational characteristics of these killings distinguished them from Pakistan’s endemic sectarian violence, criminal gang warfare, and internal factional settling of scores. Every verified target had been designated as a terrorist by India or listed on Indian most-wanted databases. None of the killings was claimed by any Pakistani group. The modus operandi was consistent across cities and organizational affiliations: motorcycle approach, pistol-range engagement, rapid withdrawal, no forensic evidence left behind. The targets spanned multiple organizations and geographic locations but shared a single characteristic: they were all individuals India had identified as threats to its national security.

The Guardian newspaper published what remains the most significant Western investigation into the killings in April 2024. The newspaper’s report cited unnamed Indian and Pakistani intelligence operatives who attributed the killings to India’s intelligence agencies. India’s government did not confirm or deny the allegations, maintaining what has become the defining posture of the offensive doctrine: neither claiming credit nor issuing denials that could be contradicted. Pakistan attributed the killings to India’s Research and Analysis Wing and demanded international investigation, but its allegations were undermined by the fact that the targets were individuals Pakistan had sheltered despite their designation as terrorists by multiple international bodies.

The shadow war, as the campaign has come to be called, represents a fundamental departure from both the defensive and reactive doctrines that preceded it. The defensive doctrine collected intelligence but did not act on it offensively. The reactive doctrine responded to attacks with conventional military force. The offensive doctrine allegedly identifies, locates, and eliminates specific individuals inside Pakistan’s territory using covert capabilities that minimize escalation risk, avoid conventional military confrontation, and maintain plausible deniability.

The doctrinal shift can be analyzed through five operational dimensions that distinguish Phase Three from its predecessors.

The first dimension is target selection. Phase One and Phase Two treated terrorism as a collective phenomenon to be addressed through institutional responses: better border security, stronger intelligence agencies, diplomatic pressure for organizational sanctions. Phase Three allegedly treats terrorism as a personnel problem to be addressed through the removal of specific individuals from the operational chain. This shift mirrors the approach that Israel’s Mossad pioneered in the decades following the Munich Olympics massacre, what Ronen Bergman documented as the “rise and kill first” doctrine in his definitive history of Israeli targeted killings.

The second dimension is geographic reach. Phase One operated primarily within India’s own borders, with foreign intelligence collection as a supporting function. Phase Two added limited cross-border military operations (Uri surgical strikes, Balakot airstrikes) but these were one-time responses to specific provocations, not sustained campaigns. Phase Three allegedly involves a continuous operational presence inside Pakistan’s territory, including in major cities such as Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, and smaller cities across Punjab, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The geographic scope of the campaign implies a level of human intelligence infrastructure and local support that far exceeds anything the Research and Analysis Wing is publicly known to possess.

The third dimension is operational tempo. Phase Two’s military responses were episodic: one surgical strike after Uri, one airstrike after Balakot. Phase Three’s alleged operations occur continuously, with the frequency of reported eliminations increasing rather than decreasing over time. The acceleration from the initial killings in 2022 through the surge in 2025 and the unprecedented pace of reported eliminations in 2026 indicates either growing operational capability, degraded Pakistani security, or both.

The fourth dimension is deniability architecture. Phase Two’s military operations were publicly acknowledged and politically celebrated. Phase Three’s alleged operations are neither confirmed nor denied by India’s government, creating a deniability architecture that serves multiple purposes simultaneously. Deniability limits escalation pressure by making it harder for Pakistan to justify a military response against attacks that India officially does not acknowledge. Deniability protects intelligence sources and methods by ensuring that Pakistan’s counter-intelligence cannot work backward from official acknowledgments to identify the operational infrastructure. And deniability provides diplomatic insulation by allowing India to maintain that it is not conducting extrajudicial killings on foreign soil while the operational results speak for themselves.

The fifth dimension is integration with conventional military capability. The 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, triggered by the Pahalgam attack and culminating in Operation Sindoor, demonstrated that the covert and conventional tracks of India’s counter-terrorism policy are not alternatives but complements. India launched precision missile strikes against Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba infrastructure in Pakistan while the covert campaign continued. The ceasefire that ended the conventional military confrontation did not end the shadow war. The covert track and the conventional track operated simultaneously during the crisis and independently afterward, suggesting that India now maintains what analysts have called a full-spectrum counter-terrorism capability that ranges from intelligence collection through covert elimination to conventional military strikes.

Key Figures in the Doctrinal Evolution

R.N. Kao and the Founding Vision

Rameshwar Nath Kao, born in Varanasi in 1918 to a Kashmiri Pandit family, joined the Indian Police in 1940 and was deputed to the Intelligence Bureau on the eve of independence. His early career included serving as Jawaharlal Nehru’s personal security chief, a posting that gave him direct access to the highest levels of Indian governance, and a year-long assignment in Ghana in 1957 where he helped establish that country’s foreign intelligence service. When Indira Gandhi tasked him with creating the Research and Analysis Wing in 1968, Kao brought three decades of intelligence experience and a network of international contacts that included senior figures in the CIA, MI6, SDECE, and Mossad.

Kao’s organizational philosophy reflected his temperament: methodical, professional, and risk-averse. He recruited carefully, selecting 250 officers from the Intelligence Bureau, the military, and the civil services who became known as the “Kaoboys.” He built analytical capabilities before operational ones, established liaison relationships with friendly foreign services before attempting independent operations, and maintained strict compartmentalization that limited the damage from any single compromise. His approach to covert action was instrumental rather than ideological: it served specific policy objectives (Bangladesh liberation, Sikkim merger) rather than constituting a permanent operational posture.

Kao’s tenure as chief lasted until 1977, and his influence over the organization continued through his protégés for years afterward. He served as security advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and is credited with establishing the National Security Guard in 1984. His death in January 2002 deprived India of its most experienced intelligence strategist at precisely the moment when the failure of the defensive doctrine he had built was becoming apparent. The agency Kao built was excellent at gathering information and supporting conventional military operations. It was not built for the kind of sustained offensive covert action that the shadow war would eventually require, and the institutional culture Kao instilled, professionally cautious and politically deferential, made the transition to offensive operations more difficult when it finally came.

I.K. Gujral and the Doctrine of Dismantlement

Inder Kumar Gujral served as India’s twelfth Prime Minister from April 1997 to March 1998, a tenure of less than a year that left a disproportionate impact on India’s intelligence capabilities. As Foreign Minister under H.D. Deve Gowda before becoming Prime Minister, Gujral had articulated a five-principle framework for India’s relations with its neighbors that emphasized unilateral accommodation, non-reciprocity, and trust-building. The Gujral Doctrine was intellectually coherent and politically appealing: India, as the region’s largest power, could afford to make concessions that smaller neighbors could not, and those concessions would generate goodwill that served India’s long-term interests.

The doctrine’s application to intelligence operations was catastrophic. Gujral directed the closure of the Research and Analysis Wing’s Pakistan special operations desk, the unit responsible for conducting and managing covert activities inside India’s primary adversary state. The decision was intended as a confidence-building measure that would demonstrate India’s commitment to peaceful relations. In practice, it eliminated human intelligence networks that had taken decades to construct, networks that could not be rebuilt overnight because they depended on recruited agents, established covers, and trust relationships that require years of cultivation.

The cost became apparent at Kargil in 1999, when Indian intelligence failed to detect Pakistani military incursions into positions along the Line of Control. Post-mortems identified the dismantlement of the Pakistan desk as one of the factors contributing to the intelligence failure. India Today magazine later reported that the capability Gujral destroyed would take more than a year to rebuild, a prediction that proved optimistic. The full consequences of the dismantlement became visible in 2008, when India lacked the operational infrastructure inside Pakistan to respond to the Mumbai attacks with anything other than diplomatic protest.

Gujral’s legacy in the context of the doctrinal evolution is paradoxical. His dismantlement of intelligence capabilities was intended to prevent covert operations from poisoning bilateral relations. Instead, it created the intelligence vacuum that ensured bilateral relations would be poisoned by terrorism that India could neither prevent nor punish. The Gujral Doctrine is the missing chapter that connects the defensive era’s inherent limitations to the catastrophic failures that ultimately produced the offensive doctrine.

Ajit Doval and the Offensive Turn

Ajit Kumar Doval was appointed as India’s fifth National Security Advisor on May 30, 2014, when the Narendra Modi government took office. His appointment was itself a doctrinal signal. Unlike his predecessors in the role, who had been career diplomats or civil servants, Doval was a career intelligence officer who had spent decades in field operations. He had served undercover inside Pakistan for seven years, reportedly operating in Lahore and Islamabad under assumed identities. He had been deployed to the Golden Temple in Amritsar during the Sikh insurgency, where he reportedly spent time inside the temple complex disguised as a Pakistani ISI agent to gather intelligence on militant leaders. He had negotiated the surrender of hijacked aircraft and participated in hostage rescue operations. In a February 2014 lecture at SASTRA University, months before his appointment as NSA, Doval laid out the intellectual framework that would guide his tenure.

Doval’s lecture identified three strategic options for India in responding to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism: defense, defensive offense, and offense. He dismissed pure defense as ineffective because attackers would always find ways to breach defensive perimeters. He dismissed pure offense as reckless because it risked nuclear escalation between two nuclear-armed states. He advocated defensive offense, a posture in which India would exploit Pakistan’s own vulnerabilities to impose costs on terrorism sponsorship while maintaining deniability and avoiding nuclear escalation thresholds. Doval specifically cited Pakistan’s internal fault lines, including the Balochistan insurgency, sectarian tensions, and the TTP insurgency, as pressure points that India could exploit.

The Uri surgical strikes of September 2016 were the first public manifestation of the Doval doctrine in action. The Balakot airstrikes of February 2019 were its most dramatic expression through conventional military channels. The shadow war, if it is indeed directed by India’s intelligence establishment as Pakistan and The Guardian’s investigation have alleged, represents the doctrine’s covert dimension: sustained, deniable, targeted, and designed to impose costs on Pakistan’s proxy war infrastructure without triggering the conventional military escalation that could lead to nuclear confrontation.

Doval’s influence on India’s security posture extends beyond specific operations to the institutional architecture of decision-making. He has centralized intelligence coordination through the National Security Council Secretariat, personally overseen the integration of intelligence inputs from the Research and Analysis Wing, the Intelligence Bureau, military intelligence, and the National Technical Research Organisation, and maintained direct communication channels with intelligence counterparts in Israel, the United States, and other allied countries. Under his tenure, the NSA role has evolved from advisory to operational, with Doval reportedly participating directly in operational planning for both the conventional strikes (Uri, Balakot, Sindoor) and the broader strategic framework within which the shadow war allegedly operates.

What Triggered Each Transition

The three doctrinal transitions were not gradual evolutions driven by strategic thinking in peacetime. They were forced adaptations driven by specific operational failures that made the status quo politically untenable.

The transition from no foreign intelligence capability to the defensive doctrine (1962-1968) was driven by the Chinese invasion of 1962 and the Pakistan war of 1965. Both conflicts exposed India’s inability to collect and analyze foreign intelligence through a single agency that also handled domestic security. The failure was institutional: the Intelligence Bureau was organizationally incapable of performing both functions adequately. The solution was structural: create a separate agency dedicated to foreign intelligence. The transition took six years from the triggering failure to the establishment of the new institution, a timeline that reflects the bureaucratic friction and political maneuvering inherent in creating new intelligence organizations.

The transition from the defensive to the reactive doctrine (2008) was driven by a single event: the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. The failure was categorical: India’s intelligence system detected warning signals but could not synthesize them into actionable prevention, and India’s national security apparatus had no capability to respond offensively to an attack that had been planned and launched from Pakistani soil. The solution was multidimensional: new institutions (NIA, strengthened MAC, NSG regional hubs), new technology (NATGRID, enhanced surveillance), new diplomatic approaches (composite dialogue suspension, international sanctions campaigns), and eventually new military options (surgical strikes, airstrikes). The transition took approximately eight years to produce the first cross-border military response (Uri, 2016) and eleven years to produce the first airstrike inside Pakistani airspace (Balakot, 2019).

The transition from the reactive to the offensive doctrine (approximately 2019-2022) was driven by the accumulated failure of every reactive instrument India had deployed. Diplomatic engagement produced no Pakistani accountability for 26/11 or any subsequent attack. The Pathankot JIT demonstrated that investigative cooperation was exploited rather than reciprocated. The Uri surgical strikes, while politically significant, did not deter Jaish-e-Mohammed from launching the Pulwama attack three years later. The Balakot airstrikes, while militarily unprecedented, produced contested results and triggered Pakistani retaliation that included the downing of an Indian fighter jet. Each response was more dramatic than the last, and each failed to alter Pakistan’s fundamental calculus that sponsoring terrorism against India was a low-cost, high-benefit strategy.

The offensive doctrine emerged from the recognition that neither diplomatic engagement nor episodic military responses could solve the structural problem: Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment considered terrorism a strategic asset, not a liability, and would continue to employ it unless the cost of doing so exceeded the benefit. Changing Pakistan’s calculus required a method that was sustained (not episodic), targeted (not indiscriminate), deniable (to avoid nuclear escalation), and directed at the human infrastructure of terrorism (not at buildings that could be rebuilt). The shadow war, as alleged by Pakistan and international reporting, meets all four criteria.

The Three-Phase Doctrine Evolution: An Analytical Framework

The three-phase evolution can be analyzed through a framework that examines six operational dimensions across each phase, creating a systematic comparison of how India’s approach to covert action transformed over five decades.

The first dimension is the objective function. In Phase One, the objective was information advantage: knowing what adversaries planned, what capabilities they possessed, and what vulnerabilities could be exploited through conventional channels. The Research and Analysis Wing existed to inform decisions, not to execute them. In Phase Two, the objective expanded to include response capability: India needed not only to know about threats but to demonstrate the ability to punish those who carried them out. The Uri and Balakot operations were demonstrations of response capability rather than sustained campaigns. In Phase Three, the objective allegedly shifted to attrition: systematically degrading the human capital of Pakistan-based terror organizations through the removal of operationally significant individuals. The objective is not to respond to specific attacks but to impose a permanent cost on Pakistan’s proxy war infrastructure.

The second dimension is the relationship between intelligence and action. In Phase One, intelligence and action were institutionally separated: the Research and Analysis Wing gathered intelligence, and the military or diplomatic establishment acted on it. In Phase Two, the separation narrowed: the Research and Analysis Wing provided targeting intelligence for military strikes, and the military executed the strikes based on that intelligence. In Phase Three, the separation allegedly collapses: intelligence collection, target identification, surveillance, and execution are reportedly integrated within the same operational chain, a model that resembles the Israeli approach where intelligence agencies conduct targeted killings rather than handing targets to the military for conventional strikes.

The third dimension is political authorization. In Phase One, covert operations required explicit political approval for each specific action, a model that reflected the democratic principle of civilian control over intelligence activities but also created bureaucratic delays and political risk aversion. Phase Two maintained the authorization requirement but expanded the scope of what politicians were willing to authorize: surgical strikes and airstrikes received prime ministerial approval on compressed timelines that reflected wartime urgency rather than peacetime deliberation. Phase Three’s authorization model is unknown, but the operational tempo and geographic scope of the alleged campaign suggest either standing authorization for a defined category of targets or a delegated approval process that does not require specific prime ministerial authorization for each individual operation.

The fourth dimension concerns escalation management. Phase One managed escalation by not escalating: India absorbed terrorist attacks and responded through diplomatic channels. Phase Two managed escalation through calibrated military responses: surgical strikes at the Line of Control were less escalatory than airstrikes deep inside Pakistan, which were less escalatory than full-scale military operations. Phase Three allegedly manages escalation through deniability: by conducting operations that cannot be officially attributed, India avoids the escalatory pressure that acknowledged military strikes would create. Pakistan cannot retaliate against attacks that India does not acknowledge, and international mediators cannot intervene in a conflict that officially does not exist.

The fifth dimension is the metric of success. Phase One measured success by the quality of intelligence produced: did the Research and Analysis Wing provide accurate and timely information to decision-makers? Phase Two measured success by the dramatic impact of specific responses: did the Uri strikes or Balakot airstrikes demonstrate resolve and deter future attacks? Phase Three allegedly measures success by cumulative organizational damage: how many operationally significant individuals have been removed from the target organizations, and has the removal degraded those organizations’ capability to plan and execute attacks against India?

The sixth dimension is sustainability. Phase One was indefinitely sustainable: intelligence collection is a permanent activity that does not create escalation dynamics. Phase Two was inherently unsustainable: each conventional military response triggered a crisis cycle (attack, mobilization, strike, retaliation, de-escalation) that consumed enormous political and military resources and could not be maintained as a permanent posture. Phase Three is allegedly designed for indefinite sustainment: the low-profile, deniable nature of the operations allows them to continue without consuming the political and military resources that conventional responses require, and without creating the escalation dynamics that conventional strikes produce.

The Institutional Infrastructure Behind the Shift

Understanding the doctrinal evolution requires understanding the institutional changes that enabled it. The shadow war, if it exists as Pakistan and international reporting allege, required not only a political decision to authorize offensive operations but also an operational infrastructure capable of executing them. Building that infrastructure took years of investment across multiple domains.

The technological dimension involved the acquisition and deployment of signals intelligence capabilities that could monitor communications inside Pakistan, satellite surveillance that could track target movements, and cyber capabilities that could penetrate Pakistani communications networks. India’s purchase of advanced surveillance technology from Israel, including satellite imagery capabilities and electronic intelligence systems, provided technical tools that had not been available during the defensive era. The establishment of the National Technical Research Organisation as India’s signals intelligence agency created an institutional home for technical collection that had previously been fragmented across multiple agencies.

The human intelligence dimension required rebuilding the networks that the Gujral Doctrine had destroyed. If the shadow war involves operatives or recruited agents inside Pakistani cities, as the operational details of the reported killings suggest, then the Research and Analysis Wing must have spent years cultivating human sources in Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, and other locations where targets have been identified and engaged. Human intelligence networks of this sophistication require local support infrastructure: safe houses, communication systems, escape routes, and in some cases, local recruits who can provide surveillance, logistics, or direct operational support. Building such infrastructure in a hostile counter-intelligence environment like Pakistan, where the ISI maintains extensive domestic surveillance, would represent a major intelligence achievement.

The analytical dimension involved developing the targeting methodology that determines which individuals are selected for alleged elimination and in what order. The pattern of the shadow war suggests a systematic targeting hierarchy that escalates from lower-ranking operatives to senior leadership, from peripheral locations to major cities, and from less-protected individuals to heavily guarded targets. This progression implies a targeting process that evaluates each potential target against criteria including operational significance, intelligence value (targets whose elimination yields intelligence about remaining network members), accessibility (the feasibility of reaching the target), and escalation risk (the political and diplomatic consequences of the target’s elimination).

The organizational dimension involved integrating multiple agencies and capabilities into a unified operational chain. The Research and Analysis Wing, the Intelligence Bureau, the National Technical Research Organisation, military intelligence, and potentially special forces units from the military or paramilitary services would need to coordinate their activities for a sustained campaign of the alleged scope. This integration would require command structures, communication protocols, and deconfliction mechanisms that did not exist during the defensive or reactive eras. The National Security Council Secretariat under Doval’s leadership has been reported to serve as the nodal coordination point for such integration.

The Comparative Context: Where India’s Doctrine Fits Globally

India’s doctrinal evolution did not occur in an intellectual vacuum. The shift from defensive intelligence gathering to offensive targeted elimination followed a trajectory that parallels, and in some cases was informed by, the covert doctrines of other states that have confronted terrorism originating from foreign soil. Understanding these parallels clarifies what India adopted, what it adapted, and what it developed independently.

Israel’s experience provides the most frequently cited parallel. After eleven Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics in September 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized Operation Wrath of God, a sustained campaign to eliminate the Palestinian operatives responsible for the massacre. Mossad teams operated across Europe and the Middle East over the following years, tracking and killing individuals identified as planners or supporters of the Munich attack. The operation established several principles that the Indian doctrine allegedly mirrors: the campaign was sustained rather than episodic, targeted specific individuals rather than organizations or infrastructure, used small teams with conventional weapons rather than military assets, and relied on deniability to manage diplomatic consequences. Mossad’s experience also produced cautionary lessons that India’s doctrine reportedly incorporates. The Lillehammer affair of 1973, in which Mossad operatives mistakenly killed an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they misidentified as a Palestinian target, demonstrated the risks of operating in environments where positive identification is difficult and the consequences of error are irreversible.

The American experience offers a different template. The United States’ drone campaign in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which began under President George W. Bush and expanded dramatically under President Barack Obama, demonstrated both the operational possibilities and strategic limitations of sustained targeted killing. Between 2004 and 2018, American drones struck hundreds of targets in Pakistan, killing senior al-Qaeda and TTP operatives alongside an uncertain number of civilians. The campaign degraded al-Qaeda’s operational capability in the region but did not eliminate the organization, did not prevent the rise of ISIS, and generated significant political backlash both in Pakistan and internationally. India’s alleged doctrine differs from the American model in several important respects: it uses human operatives rather than drones, operates in urban environments rather than tribal areas, targets individuals affiliated with specific anti-India organizations rather than the broader jihadist ecosystem, and maintains complete deniability rather than the acknowledged-but-officially-classified status of the American program.

Russia’s extraterritorial operations provide the negative template: what India’s doctrine allegedly avoids. The poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, in March 2018 with the Novichok nerve agent demonstrated the catastrophic diplomatic consequences of operations that leave forensic evidence traceable to a state laboratory. Russia’s targeted killings in Europe and the Middle East have relied on exotic methods, including radioactive polonium-210 (the Litvinenko assassination), military-grade nerve agents (Salisbury), and possibly aircraft sabotage (the suspected assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin). Each method left forensic signatures that enabled attribution, which in turn triggered diplomatic expulsions, sanctions, and international criminal investigations. India’s alleged use of conventional weapons, specifically commercially available pistols fired from motorcycles in crowded Pakistani cities, produces forensic environments that make attribution operationally impossible. The choice of method is not coincidental; it reflects a doctrinal preference for deniability over dramatic impact.

Turkey’s cross-border operations against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in northern Iraq and Syria represent a fourth model: overt military action justified by the failure of the host state to prevent cross-border terrorism. Since the 1990s, Turkey has conducted repeated incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan to strike PKK positions, arguing that Iraq is unable or unwilling to prevent PKK attacks against Turkish territory. India’s conventional military responses (Uri, Balakot, Sindoor) follow the Turkish model, but India’s alleged covert campaign goes beyond it by maintaining operations that Turkey has never attempted: sustained clandestine operations inside the adversary’s territory using intelligence operatives rather than military forces. The distinction matters because covert operations avoid the diplomatic and military consequences of overt cross-border strikes while achieving a more granular targeting effect.

The comparative analysis reveals that India’s alleged doctrine represents a synthesis of elements drawn from multiple traditions: Israel’s sustained human-operated targeting methodology, America’s willingness to operate inside a sovereign state that harbors terrorists, Turkey’s legal justification based on the host state’s inability or unwillingness to act, and Russia’s experience as a cautionary tale of what happens when forensic attribution is possible. The synthesis is original because no previous doctrine has combined these elements in the specific context of two nuclear-armed states with a contested border, an active territorial dispute in Kashmir, and a bilateral relationship characterized by seven decades of hostility punctuated by four wars.

The Operational Environment Inside Pakistan

The alleged shadow war operates within an environment that is simultaneously permissive and hostile, a paradox that shapes both the opportunities and constraints of the offensive doctrine. Understanding how this environment enables and limits covert operations is essential to assessing the doctrine’s viability and sustainability.

Pakistan’s urban landscape provides operational cover that would be unavailable in more orderly security environments. Cities like Karachi, with a population exceeding fifteen million, offer the anonymity of scale: millions of motorcycles traverse the streets daily, making two men on a motorcycle invisible in a way they would not be in a smaller or more controlled environment. Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Peshawar, and the cities of Sindh and Balochistan each present different operational characteristics, from Karachi’s chaotic density to Rawalpindi’s proximity to military installations and the ISI headquarters. The variety of operational environments suggests that the alleged campaign possesses the intelligence preparation and local knowledge necessary to operate across significantly different urban terrain types.

Pakistan’s internal security challenges contribute to an environment where unexplained killings are not immediately attributed to foreign actors. The country experiences high levels of sectarian violence, criminal gang warfare, factional disputes within militant organizations, and TTP-directed attacks against military and civilian targets. When a designated terrorist is killed in Karachi, the initial assumption in Pakistani media is often that the killing resulted from internal rivalries or sectarian conflict rather than Indian covert action. This background noise provides a layer of attribution ambiguity that a country with lower levels of internal violence would not provide. The alleged campaign reportedly exploits this ambiguity, conducting operations that are initially absorbed into the background of Pakistan’s endemic violence before the pattern becomes visible.

The ISI’s counter-intelligence capability represents the primary hostile factor in the operational environment. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence maintains extensive domestic surveillance networks, informant relationships in every major city, and the authority to detain and interrogate suspected foreign agents. Any intelligence operatives working inside Pakistan, whether Indian agents, locally recruited assets, or third-country nationals operating on India’s behalf, face continuous counter-intelligence pressure from an organization that considers India its primary adversary. The ISI’s surveillance is supplemented by the Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan, the Military Intelligence directorate, and provincial police intelligence units, creating a layered counter-intelligence environment that would challenge any foreign intelligence service.

The fact that the alleged campaign has apparently been sustained over multiple years despite this counter-intelligence environment suggests one of several possibilities. Either the operational methodology is sufficiently compartmentalized and low-profile to evade detection, the locally recruited assets are sufficiently insulated from the command structure to prevent roll-up of the network, or the Pakistani security apparatus has structural gaps that India’s intelligence agencies have identified and exploited. A fourth possibility, which some Pakistani analysts have raised, is that elements within Pakistan’s own security establishment have facilitated the operations, either because they serve internal political objectives or because the targets have become liabilities that powerful figures within the Pakistani military are willing to sacrifice. This last possibility is speculative but cannot be excluded given the complex internal politics of Pakistan’s security establishment.

The geographic expansion of the alleged campaign from initial operations concentrated in Karachi to subsequent operations across multiple cities and provinces indicates either growing operational confidence or the maturation of intelligence networks that were seeded years earlier and have only recently become productive. Intelligence networks in hostile environments typically require three to five years from initial agent recruitment to reliable operational output, a timeline that is consistent with the hypothesis that the Research and Analysis Wing began rebuilding its Pakistani networks after 2014, when the Doval-led national security apparatus prioritized offensive capability, and those networks began producing operational results around 2022.

Consequences and Impact

The offensive doctrine, if it is indeed operational as alleged, has produced consequences across multiple domains that extend far beyond the immediate operational results of individual eliminations.

Within Pakistan, the reported campaign has allegedly transformed the security environment for designated terrorists. Individuals who once lived openly in Pakistani cities, attended mosques, conducted business, and received protection from the ISI and Pakistani law enforcement have reportedly altered their behavior significantly. Reports from Pakistani media describe senior militant leaders changing residences frequently, avoiding predictable routines, reducing their public presence, and in some cases relocating from major cities to smaller towns or tribal areas where they believe detection is less likely. The behavioral change itself imposes an operational cost on terror organizations: leaders who spend their energy on personal security have less capacity to plan and direct attacks against India. Even if the shadow war does not eliminate every target on India’s list, the security dilemma it creates consumes resources that would otherwise be directed toward anti-India operations.

Within India, the offensive doctrine has produced a political environment in which cross-border military and covert action against terrorism enjoys broad public support. The Uri surgical strikes, the Balakot airstrikes, and Operation Sindoor were celebrated across the political spectrum, with even opposition parties providing initial support for military action despite subsequent criticism of specific operational claims. The shadow war, to the extent that the Indian public is aware of it, has generated similar support, reinforced by the cultural resonance of the Bollywood film Dhurandhar, which depicted a fictional version of India’s targeted killing campaign and became a commercial and cultural phenomenon. The domestic political consensus around offensive counter-terrorism has created conditions in which any future government would face enormous political costs for reverting to the defensive or reactive postures of earlier decades.

Internationally, the offensive doctrine has created a complex diplomatic landscape. India’s Western partners, particularly the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel, have largely refrained from criticizing India’s alleged covert operations, reflecting both strategic alignment with India against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and an implicit acknowledgment that India’s grievances against Pakistan’s proxy war are legitimate. The United States itself conducted a decade-long drone campaign against terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas, including the May 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, a precedent that limits Washington’s moral standing to object to India’s alleged operations. Israel, which has conducted targeted killings across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe for decades, is even less positioned to object and reportedly provides intelligence cooperation that supports India’s capabilities.

Pakistan’s response to the alleged campaign has been complicated by its own position. Islamabad’s claim that India is conducting extrajudicial killings on Pakistani soil is undermined by the fact that the individuals being killed are designated terrorists whom Pakistan was obligated by international law and UN Security Council resolutions to arrest, prosecute, or expel. Pakistan’s demands for international investigation are weakened by its decades of sheltering these individuals despite international sanctions and designation. The ISI’s relationship with the organizations whose members are being killed creates a moral hazard that limits Pakistan’s ability to rally international sympathy.

The impact on the India-Pakistan relationship has been to accelerate a trend toward comprehensive disengagement that predated the offensive doctrine but has been intensified by it. India has suspended diplomatic engagement, restricted trade and travel, downgraded diplomatic representation, and signaled that the bilateral relationship will not be normalized until Pakistan verifiably dismantles its terror infrastructure. The offensive doctrine reinforces this disengagement by providing India with an alternative to engagement: rather than negotiating with Pakistan for the arrest of designated terrorists, India allegedly removes them from the operational chain directly.

Analytical Debate

The offensive doctrine has generated a significant analytical debate among strategic thinkers, international lawyers, and intelligence scholars. The debate centers on three questions: effectiveness, legality, and sustainability.

On effectiveness, the debate divides between those who argue that targeted killings degrade terror organizations and those who argue they merely replace leaders without addressing structural causes. The effectiveness argument holds that the removal of operationally experienced individuals from terror organizations creates capability gaps that cannot be easily filled. Senior operatives possess institutional knowledge, contact networks, operational tradecraft, and leadership credibility that new recruits cannot replicate. Each elimination forces the organization to promote less experienced replacements, disrupts ongoing operational planning, and creates institutional fear that degrades recruitment and morale. Christine Fair, the Georgetown professor who has studied Pakistani militant organizations extensively, has argued that sustained attrition of leadership cadres can fundamentally degrade organizational capacity over time.

The counter-argument, advanced by analysts who study Israeli targeted killing operations and the U.S. drone campaign, holds that leadership decapitation produces temporary disruption but does not eliminate the structural conditions that generate terrorism: state sponsorship, ideological motivation, availability of recruits, and access to weapons and funding. Daniel Byman of Brookings has noted that organizations subjected to leadership targeting often adapt by decentralizing their command structures, reducing their dependence on individual leaders, and drawing on deep recruitment pools to replace eliminated operatives. The U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan’s tribal areas killed thousands of suspected militants, including senior al-Qaeda and TTP leaders, but did not eliminate the organizations or the conditions that sustained them.

On legality, the debate is genuinely unresolved. India has not officially acknowledged the shadow war and therefore has not offered a legal justification for it. If the operations are occurring as alleged, potential legal frameworks include the inherent right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter (Pakistan’s territory is being used to plan and launch attacks against India, and Pakistan has demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to prevent such attacks), the doctrine of necessity (India’s defensive and reactive measures have proven insufficient to protect its citizens from terrorism originating in Pakistan), or the argument that designated terrorists are unlawful combatants who forfeit legal protections by engaging in hostilities against India outside the framework of recognized armed conflict. Each framework has legal proponents and critics, and the absence of a formal Indian legal position makes adjudication impossible. The broader legal debate on targeted killings remains one of the most contentious areas of international law.

On sustainability, the debate divides between those who argue that the offensive doctrine can be maintained indefinitely because its deniability prevents escalation, and those who argue that Pakistan will eventually develop counter-capabilities that make the operations too costly. The sustainability argument holds that the operational model is inherently low-cost and low-risk compared to conventional military alternatives: it does not require military mobilization, does not trigger nuclear escalation dynamics, and does not consume the diplomatic capital that conventional strikes require. The counter-argument holds that Pakistan’s counter-intelligence capabilities will improve, that the operational infrastructure inside Pakistan will eventually be compromised, and that the accumulation of alleged assassinations will eventually generate international pressure that constrains India’s freedom of action.

Historical precedent offers mixed evidence on sustainability. Israel’s targeted killing program has been sustained for over five decades, suggesting that a determined state with capable intelligence services can maintain such operations indefinitely if the political will persists and the operational methodology adapts to changing counter-intelligence environments. Conversely, the U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan wound down after roughly a decade as political conditions changed, suggesting that even programs with strong institutional support can be terminated when the strategic context shifts. The French Service Action, the covert operations wing of the DGSE, has maintained a capacity for extraterritorial operations spanning decades but has experienced periods of reduced activity following diplomatic fallout from specific operations, most notably the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985. India’s doctrine will face similar tests: a single compromised operation, a misidentified target, or collateral damage affecting civilians could generate the kind of international pressure that forces operational pause or doctrinal revision.

The question of moral hazard adds a dimension to the debate that purely strategic analysis often neglects. If the offensive doctrine succeeds in degrading Pakistan-based terror organizations, does that success reduce India’s incentive to address the underlying causes of the conflict, including the Kashmir dispute, that Pakistan exploits to justify its proxy war? Strategic analysts who favor diplomatic engagement argue that the shadow war is a symptom management tool that treats the effects of Pakistan’s grievances without addressing the grievances themselves. Proponents counter that Pakistan’s use of terrorism is not primarily about Kashmir but about strategic parity with a larger neighbor, and that no diplomatic concession on Kashmir would persuade Pakistan’s military establishment to abandon an instrument that has served its interests for decades. The debate is fundamentally about whether the problem is solvable through negotiation, and whether the offensive doctrine, by providing an alternative to negotiation, reduces the pressure for the kind of diplomatic creativity that long-term resolution would require.

The analytical position that best accounts for the available evidence is that the offensive doctrine is effective in the limited sense that it degrades the operational capability of specific organizations, legally ambiguous in ways that serve India’s interests precisely because the ambiguity prevents definitive condemnation, and sustainable for as long as Pakistan’s counter-intelligence remains unable to prevent the operations and international tolerance for India’s actions continues. Whether the doctrine is strategically wise in the long term, whether it reduces the total threat to India or merely transforms it, and whether it sets precedents that other states will exploit in ways India may not welcome, are questions that cannot be answered until the long-term consequences become visible.

Why It Still Matters

The covert doctrine evolution matters because it represents a template that other states are studying. India is not the first country to conduct targeted killings of terrorists on foreign soil, but it is the first to do so in the specific context of a nuclear-armed adversary that sponsors terrorism as state policy. Israel’s targeted killings are conducted against non-state actors in non-nuclear contexts. The U.S. drone campaign was conducted with the tacit (and sometimes explicit) consent of Pakistan’s government. India’s alleged operations are conducted without Pakistani consent, against individuals protected by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, in a nuclear-armed adversary state that has explicitly threatened escalation. The doctrine’s success or failure will inform how other states with similar asymmetric threat environments, including countries facing cross-border terrorism from nuclear or near-nuclear neighbors, evaluate their own options.

The doctrine also matters because it reflects a broader shift in India’s self-conception as a security actor. For seven decades after independence, India’s strategic culture emphasized restraint, non-alignment, and preference for diplomatic resolution of conflicts. The offensive doctrine represents a departure from this tradition toward a more assertive, operationally oriented security posture that prioritizes effectiveness over restraint and results over process. This shift is not confined to counter-terrorism: it is visible in India’s changed approach to border disputes with China (the Doklam standoff of 2017, the Galwan Valley clash of 2020), its more assertive maritime posture in the Indian Ocean, and its willingness to use economic coercion against adversaries through measures like the Indus Waters Treaty suspension.

The doctrinal evolution also carries implications for the architecture of accountability in democratic states. India’s offensive doctrine operates in a zone of deliberate opacity: the government neither confirms nor denies operations that international reporting and the adversary state attribute to Indian intelligence. This opacity prevents democratic accountability for specific operational decisions because there is no official record of authorization, execution, or review. The contrast with Israel is instructive: Israel’s High Court of Justice has adjudicated cases involving targeted killings, establishing legal parameters for when and against whom such operations are permissible. India’s judiciary has not been called upon to consider similar questions because the government does not acknowledge that the operations occur. Whether this accountability deficit represents a necessary condition for operational effectiveness or a democratic deficiency that will eventually produce abuse is among the most consequential questions the doctrine raises.

The future trajectory of India’s covert doctrine will be shaped by four variables: the operational results of the shadow war (whether it actually reduces the threat to India), Pakistan’s adaptive response (whether it develops counter-capabilities or modifies its terrorism-sponsorship behavior), international reaction (whether other states tolerate, criticize, or emulate India’s approach), and technological evolution (whether advances in surveillance, drone technology, and cyber operations expand or constrain the operational toolkit available for covert action).

A fifth variable, rarely discussed but potentially decisive, is the question of institutional memory and doctrinal resilience across political transitions. India’s democratic system produces periodic changes in government, and each transition carries the risk that incoming leadership may modify or reverse the covert doctrine for political, ideological, or diplomatic reasons. The Gujral precedent haunts this question: a single Prime Minister, serving for less than a year, dismantled intelligence capabilities that had taken decades to build, with consequences that persisted for over a decade. The offensive doctrine’s durability depends on whether it becomes institutionalized within the security establishment, embedded in organizational culture and standard operating procedures rather than dependent on the personal commitment of any single political leader or national security advisor.

The question of technological disruption adds another layer of uncertainty. The current alleged methodology, human operatives on motorcycles using conventional weapons in Pakistani cities, is labor-intensive and dependent on the sustained availability of local intelligence assets. Advances in drone technology, artificial intelligence, cyber operations, and biometric surveillance could transform the operational toolkit available for targeted killing operations, potentially making human-operated methods obsolete or supplementing them with capabilities that are more precise, less risky to operatives, and harder for counter-intelligence to detect. Conversely, advances in counter-surveillance technology, facial recognition, and communications security could make the current methodology untenable by giving Pakistani counter-intelligence tools to identify and track suspected operatives.

The regional implications extend beyond the India-Pakistan relationship. China, which maintains a close strategic partnership with Pakistan and supplies it with major weapons systems including the JF-17 fighter aircraft and the HQ-9 air defense system, monitors India’s doctrinal evolution as an indicator of India’s willingness to use force against adversaries. Beijing’s calculation of the costs and risks of its own confrontational posture along the Line of Actual Control is influenced by India’s demonstrated willingness to conduct military and covert operations across borders. India’s doctrinal assertiveness against Pakistan signals to China that India’s strategic culture has shifted away from the restraint that characterized earlier decades and toward a posture of active cost-imposition that could, under different circumstances, be applied to other threat environments.

What is clear is that the defensive doctrine is permanently dead. No Indian government will return to the posture of absorbing terrorist attacks and responding with diplomatic notes. The reactive doctrine of episodic military responses may continue as one tool in the toolkit, but it will not constitute the primary framework. The offensive doctrine, whether it evolves, intensifies, or eventually produces blowback that forces recalibration, has established a new baseline from which India’s covert policy will develop. The question is no longer whether India will conduct offensive operations against terrorism. The question is how far, how fast, and at what cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is India’s covert operations doctrine?

India’s covert operations doctrine refers to the framework that governs how the country’s intelligence agencies, primarily the Research and Analysis Wing, conduct secret activities abroad in support of national security objectives. The doctrine has evolved through three distinct phases since 1968: a defensive phase focused on intelligence gathering, a reactive phase that added limited military responses to terrorist attacks, and an offensive phase that allegedly includes sustained targeted killings of designated terrorists on Pakistani soil. Each phase was triggered by the failure of its predecessor to prevent cross-border terrorism, and each expanded the boundaries of what India’s political leadership authorized its intelligence agencies to do. The current offensive phase, if it exists as alleged by Pakistan and international reporting, represents the most significant transformation in Indian intelligence policy since the Research and Analysis Wing was established.

Q: When was RAW founded and why?

The Research and Analysis Wing was established on September 21, 1968, by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who bifurcated the Intelligence Bureau to create a separate agency dedicated to foreign intelligence collection. The decision was driven by India’s intelligence failures during the 1962 war with China, when the Intelligence Bureau failed to detect the Chinese military buildup along the northern border, and the 1965 war with Pakistan, when intelligence gaps hampered India’s military response. R.N. Kao, a deputy director at the Intelligence Bureau who had previously served as Nehru’s security chief and helped establish Ghana’s intelligence service, was appointed as the founding chief. He began with 250 handpicked operatives and built the organization into a formidable intelligence service within three years, most notably supporting the Mukti Bahini guerrillas during the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war.

Q: What was the Gujral Doctrine and how did it affect RAW?

The Gujral Doctrine was a five-principle foreign policy framework articulated by I.K. Gujral, first as Foreign Minister (1996-1997) and then as Prime Minister (1997-1998), that emphasized unilateral concessions to India’s neighbors without expecting reciprocity. As applied to intelligence operations, Gujral directed the closure of the Research and Analysis Wing’s Pakistan special operations desk, the unit responsible for covert activities inside India’s primary adversary state. The decision dismantled human intelligence networks that had been built over decades. Analysts have identified this dismantlement as a contributing factor to the intelligence failure before the Kargil War in 1999, and India Today magazine later reported that the capability Gujral destroyed would take over a year to rebuild. The Gujral Doctrine’s impact on intelligence operations created a vulnerability that persisted through the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

Q: How did the 26/11 Mumbai attacks change India’s covert doctrine?

The November 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which ten Lashkar-e-Taiba operatives killed 166 people across multiple locations over sixty hours, destroyed the intellectual foundations of the defensive doctrine. The attacks demonstrated that even a sophisticated intelligence system could not prevent a determined attack launched from Pakistani soil, and that India lacked any capability to respond offensively against the perpetrators in Pakistan. National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan explicitly rejected proposals for covert retaliation after 26/11, reinforcing the defensive posture, but the political and institutional consensus had shifted. India responded by creating new counter-terrorism institutions (the NIA, strengthened MAC, regional NSG hubs), rebuilding intelligence capabilities, and eventually developing military options including the Uri surgical strikes (2016) and Balakot airstrikes (2019) that represented the reactive doctrine’s limited departures from pure defense.

Q: What is Ajit Doval’s offensive defense doctrine?

Ajit Doval’s offensive defense doctrine, articulated in a February 2014 lecture at SASTRA University and implemented through his tenure as National Security Advisor beginning in May 2014, advocates a shift from passive absorption of terrorist attacks to proactive cost-imposition on the sponsors of terrorism. Doval argued that India had three strategic options, defense, defensive offense, and offense, and advocated the middle path: exploiting Pakistan’s internal vulnerabilities while maintaining deniability and avoiding nuclear escalation. The doctrine has manifested through the Uri surgical strikes (2016), the Balakot airstrikes (2019), Operation Sindoor (2025), and the alleged shadow war of targeted killings inside Pakistan. Doval, a career intelligence officer who reportedly spent seven years undercover in Pakistan, brought operational experience to the NSA role that his diplomat and civil-servant predecessors had lacked.

Q: Is there evidence that India is conducting targeted killings in Pakistan?

The evidence is circumstantial but extensive. Multiple individuals on India’s most-wanted lists have been killed by unidentified gunmen in Pakistani cities since approximately 2022, all following a consistent modus operandi involving motorcycle-borne attackers using pistols at close range. The Guardian newspaper published a major investigation in April 2024 citing unnamed Indian and Pakistani intelligence operatives who attributed the killings to India’s intelligence agencies. Pakistan has formally accused India and the Research and Analysis Wing of conducting the operations. India has neither confirmed nor denied the allegations, maintaining what analysts describe as a deniability architecture. The pattern of targets (all India-designated terrorists), the consistency of methods, the absence of claims by any Pakistani group, and the geographic spread across multiple Pakistani cities are cited as circumstantial evidence of a coordinated campaign rather than random violence.

Q: How does India’s shadow war compare to Israel’s targeted killing program?

India’s alleged campaign shares structural similarities with Israel’s decades-long program of targeted killings but differs in significant ways. Both programs allegedly target specific individuals identified as security threats, employ covert methods designed to minimize collateral damage, and maintain deniability (Israel’s policy of ambiguity about specific operations is similar to India’s neither-confirm-nor-deny posture). The differences include the nuclear dimension (Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state; Israel’s targets have generally not been located in nuclear-armed countries), the method of execution (Israel has used car bombs, air strikes, and poisoning alongside gunmen; India’s alleged operations primarily use motorcycle-borne shooters), the scale (Israel’s program spans decades and continents; India’s alleged campaign is concentrated in a single country), and the legal framework (Israel has developed a domestic legal doctrine of targeted prevention; India has articulated no legal framework at all).

Q: What role did the Pathankot JIT play in the doctrine’s evolution?

The Pathankot Joint Investigation Team was a pivotal moment in the transition from reactive to offensive doctrine. After four Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists attacked the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot in January 2016, India invited a Pakistani investigation team to visit the site, inspect evidence, and contribute to the prosecution of those responsible. The decision represented the high-water mark of India’s cooperative approach to counter-terrorism with Pakistan. The JIT visited in March 2016, but Pakistan subsequently claimed the evidence was insufficient and pursued no prosecutions. The failure of the Pathankot JIT demonstrated to Indian policy-makers that transparency and cooperation with Pakistan could not produce accountability for terrorism. This conclusion contributed to the subsequent shift toward unilateral offensive action.

Q: Why did India’s reactive doctrine fail to deter Pakistan?

India’s reactive doctrine failed to alter Pakistan’s calculus because each response, however dramatic, was episodic rather than sustained, and the benefits Pakistan derived from sponsoring terrorism consistently exceeded the costs India imposed. The Uri surgical strikes were limited in scope and denied by Pakistan, minimizing their deterrent impact. The Balakot airstrikes produced contested results and triggered Pakistani retaliation that included the downing of an Indian fighter jet. Each Indian response was followed by a period of de-escalation that allowed Pakistan to resume its proxy war operations. The fundamental flaw of the reactive doctrine was that it treated each terrorist attack as a discrete event requiring a proportional response, rather than recognizing the continuous nature of Pakistan’s proxy war and developing a continuous response mechanism.

Q: What is the role of technology in India’s covert doctrine evolution?

Technology has been a critical enabler of each doctrinal transition. The founding of the Research and Analysis Wing coincided with the development of signals intelligence and satellite reconnaissance capabilities that expanded India’s ability to monitor adversary activities. The reactive era saw major investments in surveillance technology, border sensors, and communication intercepts, many acquired through partnerships with Israel and the United States. The offensive era allegedly depends on advanced technical capabilities including satellite tracking, communications interception, cyber operations, and potentially biometric identification systems that enable the location and surveillance of specific targets inside Pakistan. India’s acquisition of Israeli surveillance technology and its indigenous development of technical intelligence capabilities through the National Technical Research Organisation have reportedly provided tools that were unavailable during earlier phases.

Q: How does India maintain deniability for the alleged operations?

India’s deniability architecture operates on multiple levels. At the political level, no Indian official has confirmed or denied the shadow war; questions about specific killings are met with silence or generic statements about India’s commitment to fighting terrorism. At the operational level, the alleged operations use methods (motorcycle-borne gunmen with conventional weapons) that do not leave forensic evidence traceable to state agencies. At the diplomatic level, India frames the killings as Pakistan’s internal security problem rather than cross-border operations: if Pakistan cannot protect individuals on its own soil, that is Pakistan’s failure, not evidence of Indian operations. The deniability structure serves India’s interests by preventing Pakistan from building a case for military retaliation, insulating India from international legal accountability, and protecting the operational infrastructure that enables the alleged campaign.

Q: Could India’s covert doctrine be reversed by a future government?

While theoretically possible, a reversal of the offensive doctrine is politically unlikely. The domestic political consensus supporting assertive counter-terrorism has hardened over multiple elections, and any government that reverted to the defensive posture of absorbing attacks without response would face devastating political criticism. The institutional infrastructure supporting the offensive doctrine, including rebuilt intelligence networks, technical surveillance capabilities, and operational experience, would be difficult to dismantle even if a government chose to do so. The historical precedent of the Gujral Doctrine, which dismantled intelligence capabilities with disastrous consequences, serves as a cautionary example that Indian politicians across the political spectrum cite as a policy failure never to be repeated.

Q: What is the PRAHAAR doctrine and how does it relate to India’s covert evolution?

PRAHAAR is India’s comprehensive national counter-terrorism policy framework that institutionalizes the shift from reactive to proactive counter-terrorism. While details of PRAHAAR remain classified, publicly available descriptions indicate that it integrates intelligence-led prevention, advanced surveillance technology, financial intelligence to disrupt terror financing, and the capability for pre-emptive action against terror threats. PRAHAAR represents the institutionalization of what had previously been ad hoc responses: it creates a structured policy framework for the kind of proactive counter-terrorism that Doval’s defensive offense doctrine advocates. The relationship between PRAHAAR and the alleged shadow war is not publicly established, but the framework’s emphasis on anticipatory action and threat neutralization at the earliest stage is consistent with a doctrine that includes targeted elimination of terror operatives.

Q: How has Pakistan responded to the alleged targeted killings?

Pakistan’s response has evolved through several stages. Initially, Pakistani authorities attributed the killings to internal sectarian violence, criminal activity, or factional disputes within militant organizations. As the pattern became undeniable, Pakistan shifted to accusing India directly, with the ISI and ISPR issuing statements alleging Indian involvement. Pakistan has demanded international investigation, raised the issue at diplomatic forums, and enhanced security protocols around known militant leaders. Operationally, Pakistani intelligence has reportedly increased surveillance of suspected Indian agents and tightened security in areas where killings have occurred. However, Pakistan’s response has been complicated by the fundamental contradiction of demanding protection for individuals who are designated terrorists under international sanctions and whom Pakistan itself was obligated to arrest.

Q: What does the doctrine evolution mean for nuclear deterrence between India and Pakistan?

The offensive doctrine’s design specifically accounts for the nuclear dimension of the India-Pakistan relationship. Each phase transition has carefully managed the escalation spectrum: defensive operations carry no escalation risk; reactive military operations (surgical strikes, airstrikes) were calibrated below the nuclear threshold; and the alleged offensive operations are conducted at a level of plausible deniability that prevents Pakistan from invoking its nuclear deterrent. The doctrine’s success depends on maintaining operations below Pakistan’s escalation threshold, a threshold that Pakistan has deliberately kept ambiguous to maximize its deterrent effect. The covert nature of the alleged operations exploits this ambiguity: if Pakistan formally acknowledges that India is conducting targeted killings, it faces pressure to respond; if it does not acknowledge them, it cannot respond. This creates a deterrence paradox where Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, designed to prevent Indian conventional military action, are neutralized by operations that occur below the threshold at which nuclear deterrence applies.

Q: Who are the key analysts debating India’s covert doctrine?

The analytical debate features several prominent voices. Christine Fair of Georgetown University has argued that sustained pressure on Pakistani militant organizations can degrade their capabilities. Vipin Narang of MIT has analyzed the nuclear dimensions of India’s escalation options. Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment has examined how India’s strategic posture has evolved in response to Pakistan’s proxy war. Walter Ladwig III of King’s College London has studied India’s limited war options. Daniel Byman of Brookings has analyzed the effectiveness and limitations of targeted killing programs globally. Happymon Jacob of JNU has critiqued the escalatory potential of offensive operations. On the Pakistani side, Hussain Haqqani has examined the ISI-terror nexus from a reform perspective, while Pakistani military analysts have argued that India’s operations violate sovereignty and risk nuclear escalation. These analysts represent a spectrum from cautious endorsement to serious concern about the offensive doctrine’s long-term consequences.

Q: How does the covert doctrine relate to Operation Sindoor?

Operation Sindoor, India’s precision strike campaign against Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba infrastructure in Pakistan in May 2025, represented the convergence of India’s covert and conventional counter-terrorism tracks. While the shadow war had been operating covertly for approximately three years before Sindoor, the Pahalgam attack triggered a conventional military response that occurred simultaneously with the ongoing covert campaign. The significance is that the two tracks operated in parallel during the crisis and independently afterward: the ceasefire that ended Operation Sindoor’s conventional strikes did not interrupt the alleged shadow war. This parallel operation demonstrates that India’s current counter-terrorism posture integrates covert and conventional capabilities rather than treating them as alternatives, a combination that no previous Indian government had achieved or attempted.

Q: What is the significance of the motorcycle method used in the alleged killings?

The motorcycle method, in which assailants approach targets on motorcycles, engage with pistols at close range, and escape through traffic, is significant for several reasons. Motorcycles are ubiquitous in Pakistani cities, making them inconspicuous for approach and escape. Pistol-range engagement eliminates the need for specialized weapons that could be traced. The method requires minimal physical infrastructure, as shooters need no fixed base, no heavy equipment, and no extraction support beyond a motorcycle and knowledge of escape routes. The consistency of the method across different cities and targets suggests standardized operational training rather than ad hoc improvisation. The method also has a historical parallel in Mossad’s early targeted killings, where operatives in European cities used close-range pistol engagements and local transportation for approach and escape.

Q: Has the offensive doctrine reduced terrorism against India?

The causal relationship between the alleged shadow war and India’s domestic terrorism environment is difficult to establish definitively because multiple factors contribute to the reduction in major terrorist attacks on Indian soil. Border security enhancements, improved domestic intelligence, and the general decline of the Kashmir insurgency’s intensity all contribute independently to reduced attack frequency. However, analysts note that the period since the alleged shadow war began has coincided with a significant reduction in attempted infiltrations across the Line of Control and a decline in the operational capability of Pakistan-based organizations to plan complex attacks on Indian targets. Whether this correlation reflects the campaign’s direct impact or broader trends in the India-Pakistan security environment remains debated among intelligence scholars and strategic analysts.

Q: What precedents does India’s doctrine set for other countries?

India’s alleged offensive doctrine sets several important precedents. It demonstrates that a democratic state can conduct sustained covert operations against a nuclear-armed adversary while maintaining deniability and managing escalation. It establishes a model for addressing state-sponsored terrorism through targeted attrition rather than conventional military responses or diplomatic negotiations. It shows that international tolerance for targeted killings is higher when the targets are designated terrorists whom the host state has sheltered in violation of international obligations. These precedents are being studied by other countries that face similar asymmetric threats, including those confronting cross-border terrorism from hostile neighbors with nuclear or significant conventional military capabilities. The precedent’s ultimate value or danger will depend on whether the doctrine achieves its stated objectives without producing the unintended consequences that have plagued similar programs historically.

Q: What are the risks of the offensive doctrine?

The offensive doctrine carries several categories of risk. Operational risk includes the possibility that operations could be compromised, leading to the capture of agents and a diplomatic crisis comparable to or worse than the U.S. experience with Gary Powers in 1960. Escalation risk exists if Pakistan’s tolerance for alleged operations reaches a breaking point, potentially triggering military confrontation between nuclear-armed states. Blowback risk includes the possibility that Pakistan could develop or deploy its own targeted killing capability against Indian targets, citing India’s operations as precedent. Institutional risk involves the difficulty of maintaining democratic oversight over covert operations that are designed to be deniable, creating potential for abuse or mission creep. Normative risk includes the erosion of international norms against extraterritorial use of force that could be cited by other states to justify their own operations in ways that harm India’s interests. Each category of risk is manageable but not eliminable.

Q: How does the doctrine address international law concerns?

India has not articulated a formal legal defense of the alleged operations because doing so would require acknowledging them. However, potential legal frameworks include the inherent right of self-defense (Article 51 of the UN Charter), which permits states to use force in response to armed attacks and may extend to preemptive action against imminent threats; the unable-or-unwilling standard, which some legal scholars argue permits action on foreign territory when the territorial state is unable or unwilling to prevent threats emanating from its territory; and the argument that India’s operations constitute law enforcement against designated criminals rather than acts of war. International law on targeted killings remains unsettled, with the United States, Israel, and Russia all having conducted such operations under various legal theories. The absence of a definitive international legal framework works to India’s advantage: the ambiguity prevents condemnation while the operational results continue.