For four decades, the contest between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and India’s Research and Analysis Wing was asymmetric in Pakistan’s favor. The directorate in Rawalpindi ran proxy wars across the Line of Control, infiltrated trained fighters into Indian territory, coordinated attacks on Indian soil from the 2001 Parliament siege to the 2008 Mumbai massacre, and managed a network of militant organizations whose collective body count runs into the tens of thousands. India’s external agency, by contrast, gathered information, filed assessments, and watched as Pakistani-sponsored attacks killed Indian citizens with near-impunity. Islamabad’s spy service shaped events; New Delhi’s spy service documented them. That asymmetry defined the relationship between the two agencies for most of their shared history, and it is the asymmetry that the shadow war has upended.

The reversal has not been universally acknowledged. Pakistani analysts, military commentators, and retired directorate officers tend to dismiss the shadow war as either Indian propaganda or the work of internal Pakistani rivalries, Baloch separatists, or Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan factions settling scores. Indian analysts, by contrast, tend to interpret the shadow war as vindication of a long-overdue shift toward offensive capability, though New Delhi has never officially confirmed any role. The divergence in interpretation matters because it shapes how each side understands its own position in the rivalry. If Pakistan’s directorate genuinely believes the shadow war is not an Indian operation, its institutional response will be calibrated to the wrong threat. If India’s agency is not responsible, the analytical framework presented here would require revision on its most consequential dimension.

The question this article answers is not merely which agency is stronger. Ranking two secret organizations against each other invites oversimplification, as any comparison between agencies operating in different environments, with different mandates, and under different political constraints will necessarily be approximate. Carlotta Gall, whose reporting in “The Wrong Enemy” exposed the depths of the relationship between Pakistan’s military establishment and the Taliban, has argued that the comparison itself is misleading because the agencies are structured for fundamentally different purposes. Aqil Shah, whose work in “The Army and Democracy” traces how Pakistan’s military has colonized its civilian institutions, has countered that the comparison is not only valid but necessary, precisely because the agencies’ diverging trajectories reveal the strategic health of the states they serve. The analytical question here is sharper than a generic power ranking. It is this: has the intelligence balance between India and Pakistan shifted, and if so, when did the shift begin, what does it look like across multiple dimensions of capability, and what does the shift mean for the broader India-Pakistan strategic equation?

The answer requires examining both agencies across six dimensions of operational capability: intelligence gathering, covert action, counter-intelligence, alliance management, institutional resources, and current operational tempo. Across these six dimensions, a pattern emerges that neither agency’s partisans want to acknowledge in full. Pakistan’s directorate retains significant structural advantages in some dimensions, particularly its institutional authority within the Pakistani state and its deep human-intelligence networks cultivated over decades of proxy warfare. India’s external agency has developed decisive advantages in others, most notably in the current operational tempo that has produced a sustained campaign of targeted eliminations on Pakistani soil that the directorate appears unable to prevent, detect, or punish. The balance is shifting, but it is not shifting uniformly, and the dimensions where each agency leads reveal as much about their parent states as about the agencies themselves.

The Cases

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was formally established on January 1, 1948, less than six months after Pakistan’s independence, to address failures of intelligence coordination during the First Kashmir War. Major General Walter Cawthorn, a British Indian Army officer retained in Pakistan’s service, laid its organizational foundations. The early agency was small, poorly resourced, and focused narrowly on military intelligence coordination. Its transformation into the dominant institution of the Pakistani state began under Field Marshal Ayub Khan in the late 1950s, accelerated during the 1965 war when intelligence failures exposed its political preoccupations, and reached its peak during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s. During that decade, the CIA channeled billions of dollars through the directorate to arm Afghan mujahideen, and the agency trained approximately 83,000 fighters between 1983 and 1997 according to Pakistani military estimates. The Afghan jihad turned a modest inter-services coordination body into what analysts describe as a state within a state, with its own foreign policy, its own proxy armies, and its own vision of Pakistan’s strategic destiny. Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the director-general from 1987 to 1989 who became known as the father of the Taliban, embodied the agency’s self-image: Pakistan’s first line of defense was not its army but its ability to wage war through others.

The agency’s post-Afghan evolution followed two parallel tracks. On the external track, it redirected the mujahideen infrastructure toward Kashmir in the early 1990s, founding or sponsoring Hizbul Mujahideen, supporting Lashkar-e-Taiba’s cross-border infiltration apparatus, and creating Jaish-e-Mohammed through the release of Masood Azhar in the 1999 IC-814 hijacking deal. The ISI-terror nexus was not an accident or a rogue operation but the central pillar of Pakistan’s India policy. On the domestic track, the directorate deepened its grip on Pakistani politics, manipulating elections in 1990 and 2002, running the Mehran Bank scandal to fund favored politicians, and maintaining surveillance over civilian leaders who might pursue rapprochement with India. By the early 2000s, the agency was simultaneously running proxy wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan, managing Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation networks, sheltering Taliban leaders from American drone strikes, and engineering political outcomes in Islamabad. Steve Coll documented in “Ghost Wars” and “Directorate S” how the directorate’s ambitions had expanded far beyond its original mandate, noting that by the time of the September 11 attacks, the agency was arguably the most consequential intelligence organization in the world for the simple reason that the networks it had built were about to reshape global security.

India’s Research and Analysis Wing was born two decades after its rival. Established in 1968 by Rameshwar Nath Kao following India’s humiliating intelligence failures in the 1962 Sino-Indian War, the agency was modeled partly on the CIA, with assistance from Langley in its early years. Kao, a quiet, patrician officer whom colleagues described as the antithesis of the swaggering spy, built an organization designed for one purpose: to gather information that India’s leaders needed but were not receiving. The agency’s founding triumph came within three years. In 1971, it played a decisive role in the liberation of Bangladesh, training and supporting the Mukti Bahini guerrillas in what remains one of the most successful covert operations in South Asian history. The success of 1971 proved that India could conduct sophisticated covert operations abroad when the political leadership provided the mandate and the strategic circumstances aligned. The agency then engineered the annexation of Sikkim in 1975, another textbook operation that expanded Indian territory without a shot fired in anger. B. Raman, a former RAW officer who documented the agency’s early years in “The Kaoboys of R&AW,” described Kao’s legacy as building an institution that valued discretion over display and assessment over action.

The decades that followed were less kind. The agency’s institutional history is marked by the Sri Lanka debacle of the 1980s, when India trained the LTTE only to watch the organization assassinate Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. That catastrophe produced a decade-long institutional retrenchment during which the agency retreated from covert action almost entirely. The Parliament attack of December 2001 and the 26/11 Mumbai massacre of November 2008 exposed the costs of that retreat: India’s external agency had become an organization that could describe threats with great precision but could do almost nothing to prevent them. Former RAW chief Vikram Sood, in public remarks that were unusually candid for a retired intelligence leader, described the fundamental asymmetry with disarming clarity. The directorate in Rawalpindi decides policy, he said, while the Research and Analysis Wing is a service provider to the policy makers. When asked whether the agency played a larger role in India’s neighborhood, Sood chose his words carefully: “Covert is my business, but it will not be at variance with the overt policy of the government. We are essentially a service provider, with a covert option.” The distinction was telling. One agency made policy. The other served it. One agency initiated. The other responded.

The contrast between the two agencies’ founding circumstances is instructive. Pakistan’s directorate was born from military failure, specifically the First Kashmir War’s exposure of coordination gaps among the new nation’s armed services. It was created as a military instrument, staffed by military officers, and embedded within the military’s command structure from inception. India’s agency was also born from military failure, the 1962 Sino-Indian War’s revelation that India lacked an external collection capability independent of the police-oriented Intelligence Bureau, but it was created as a civilian instrument reporting to the prime minister rather than the military. Kao deliberately modeled his organization on the principle that external collection should serve elected leadership, not substitute for it. These founding choices shaped every subsequent divergence. The directorate evolved into a policy-making institution because it was born within a policy-making institution, the military. India’s agency evolved into a service-providing organization because it was born to serve a democratic government that retained decision-making authority.

The two agencies’ relationship with their respective domestic populations also diverged. The directorate’s domestic surveillance function, which expanded under every military government from Ayub Khan through Musharraf, gave it a presence in Pakistani civilian life that India’s agency never developed. The directorate monitored politicians, journalists, judges, and civil society leaders as a matter of routine. India’s agency, restricted to external operations by its mandate, relied on the Intelligence Bureau for domestic surveillance. This distinction matters for the bilateral rivalry because the directorate’s domestic role consumed resources and attention that might otherwise have been dedicated to external operations, even as it gave the agency a comprehensive understanding of Pakistan’s internal political landscape that informed its management of proxy groups and its manipulation of jihadist ideology for strategic purposes.

The doctrinal framework that governed India’s external agency for most of its existence was fundamentally defensive. It gathered intelligence, ran counter-intelligence operations, and conducted limited covert actions in the immediate neighborhood, but it did not wage the kind of sustained offensive campaigns that Pakistan’s directorate conducted in Kashmir for decades. The shadow war, if the allegations of Indian involvement in the targeted eliminations of wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil are true, represents a fundamental departure from that defensive posture, a shift so profound that understanding when and how it occurred is essential to understanding the current balance between the two agencies.

Dimension One: Intelligence Gathering

Information collection is the foundational capability on which everything else depends. An agency that cannot collect accurate, timely information about its adversary cannot conduct effective covert action, cannot protect its own operations from penetration, and cannot provide its government with the assessments needed to make sound strategic decisions. Across the three pillars of intelligence collection, signals intercept, human-source collection, and satellite and technical surveillance, the balance between the two agencies has shifted dramatically over the past two decades, with India pulling ahead in technical collection and Pakistan retaining structural advantages in certain human-intelligence environments.

On signals intercept capability, India holds a significant and growing advantage. India’s technical surveillance capabilities expanded substantially after the 2008 Mumbai attacks exposed critical gaps in electronic collection. The National Technical Research Organisation, which coordinates signals intelligence for India’s intelligence community, has invested heavily in communications intercept infrastructure since 2009. India’s RISAT series of synthetic aperture radar satellites, the EMISAT electronic intelligence satellite launched in 2019, and its growing constellation of commercial and military observation satellites provide a technical collection capability that Pakistan cannot match. During the Kargil War of 1999, the agency demonstrated its signals intelligence capability when it intercepted the telephone conversation between Pakistan’s Army Chief Pervez Musharraf in Beijing and his chief of staff in Rawalpindi, a conversation that provided proof of Pakistani military involvement in what Islamabad was publicly calling a purely local Kashmiri uprising. That intercept shaped India’s diplomatic strategy during the crisis and demonstrated what technical collection could achieve when properly deployed.

Pakistan’s signals-intercept capability is more modest but not negligible. The directorate operates its own communications intercept infrastructure, supplemented by access to Chinese-supplied surveillance technology that has expanded since the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor deepened the bilateral relationship after 2015. The directorate intercepted Indian military communications during multiple crises, and its technical section benefited from CIA training during the 1980s when approximately 200 officers received instruction in American intercept methods. Pakistan’s cyber capabilities have also developed, with the directorate establishing dedicated units for electronic warfare and information operations. Yet the scale comparison is unfavorable. India’s space program, its indigenous satellite manufacturing capability, and its growing partnership with Western technology providers give New Delhi access to technical collection platforms that Islamabad simply cannot replicate. When the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict erupted following the Pahalgam attack, India’s technical surveillance advantage proved decisive for targeting: the Operation Sindoor strike package relied on meticulous preparation that combined satellite imagery, signals intercepts, and human sources to identify nine targets across Pakistan in a twenty-three-minute window.

On human-source collection, the comparison is more nuanced. Pakistan’s directorate built the most extensive militant-management human-source network in South Asia over four decades of proxy warfare. Its case officers maintained direct relationships with leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, and the Afghan Taliban, relationships that provided both operational control over the groups and granular information about conditions in Indian-administered Kashmir and Afghanistan. The directorate’s S Wing, its covert action division, reportedly managed thousands of assets across the region, including agents inside Indian government institutions and military establishments. The FBI acknowledged in a 2011 US court filing that the agency sponsored and oversaw the insurgency in Kashmir by arming separatist militant groups, a statement that confirmed what Indian analysts had asserted for decades. David Headley, who pleaded guilty to scouting locations for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, testified that Lashkar-e-Taiba coordinated directly with the directorate’s officers, providing a rare courtroom confirmation of the operational relationship.

India’s human-source collection capability operated under very different constraints. The agency never built a comparable network of proxy forces because India’s democratic political culture and post-LTTE institutional caution made large-scale proxy management politically unacceptable. What India’s agency developed instead was a more targeted agent-recruitment approach focused on penetration of specific organizations and governments. The agency’s extended operational history includes documented successes in infiltrating Pakistani-sponsored militant groups during Operation Chanakya in the mid-1990s, when operatives penetrated various groups operating in Jammu and Kashmir, collected tactical data, and provided evidence of state sponsorship that India used diplomatically. The creation of pro-Indian counter-insurgent groups like the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen demonstrated the agency’s ability to conduct sophisticated human-source operations in contested territory. More recently, the shadow war itself provides circumstantial evidence of a mature human-source capability inside Pakistan. The operational pattern documented across the complete campaign, with motorcycle-borne assassins locating specific individuals in crowded Pakistani cities, conducting close-range operations, and escaping without being identified, implies a level of local asset recruitment and surveillance proficiency that represents a qualitative leap from anything India’s agency had previously demonstrated.

The two agencies’ approaches to open-source collection and analytical tradecraft also diverge in revealing ways. India’s agency benefits from a vast English-language analytical workforce, connections to India’s world-class universities, and a growing ecosystem of think tanks and research institutions that produce open-source analysis on Pakistan-related security topics. The South Asia Terrorism Portal, maintained by the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, provides a publicly accessible database of terrorism-related incidents that doubles as an analytical infrastructure for government agencies. Pakistan’s analytical institutions are smaller, less well-funded, and more heavily influenced by the military’s preferred narratives about India. The directorate’s own analytical products, according to retired Pakistani officers, tend to reflect institutional biases rather than objective assessment, particularly on the question of India’s capabilities and intentions. This analytical asymmetry compounds the technical collection gap: India not only collects more raw data but processes it through a more rigorous analytical framework.

On satellite and technical collection beyond signals intercept, India’s advantage is overwhelming. India operates more than a dozen Earth observation and surveillance satellites, including the Cartosat series providing sub-meter resolution imagery and the RISAT series providing all-weather radar imaging capability. Pakistan operates no indigenous surveillance satellite constellation. Islamabad relies on commercial satellite imagery purchases and Chinese-supplied data, but the access is neither real-time nor comprehensive. This gap means that India can conduct independent damage assessments after strikes, monitor Pakistani military deployments, and track infrastructure changes at known terrorist facilities without relying on any external partner. Pakistan must rely on allied data sharing, primarily from China, for comparable capability.

Dimension Two: Covert Action

Covert action is where the asymmetry between the two agencies has been most dramatic historically and where the reversal has been most consequential. The term itself carries different connotations on each side of the border. For Pakistan’s directorate, covert action has been the primary instrument of state policy toward India for decades, a sustained, institutionalized practice embedded in the agency’s organizational culture. For India’s agency, covert action was for most of its history an exceptional tool deployed in extraordinary circumstances, not a routine capability. Understanding this cultural difference is essential to grasping how the current reversal represents a deeper transformation than operational metrics alone suggest. For four decades, Pakistan’s directorate was the undisputed master of covert action in South Asia. Today, if the evidence is interpreted at face value, India’s agency is conducting a sustained covert campaign inside Pakistan that the directorate cannot stop. Understanding how this reversal occurred requires examining what covert action means for each agency and how their approaches diverged.

Pakistan’s directorate built its covert-action capability on proxy management. The model was forged in the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, when the agency served as the primary conduit for CIA and Saudi funding to the Afghan mujahideen. The directorate did not merely pass money and weapons to fighters. It selected which groups received support, trained fighters in camps it controlled along the Afghan-Pakistani border, planned operations against Soviet forces, and managed the political relationships among competing mujahideen factions. The scale was extraordinary. An estimated three billion dollars in covert funding flowed through the directorate during the decade, making it the most lavishly funded intelligence covert-action program since the CIA’s operations during the early Cold War. When the Soviet Union withdrew in February 1989, the directorate emerged with an institutional expertise in proxy-force management that no other intelligence agency in the developing world could match.

The agency applied that expertise to Kashmir beginning in 1989. The timing was not coincidental. As the Afghan pipeline wound down, the directorate redirected its infrastructure toward the insurgency that was erupting in Indian-administered Kashmir. The directorate’s Kashmir operations followed the Afghan template: recruit fighters, train them in camps along the border, arm them with weapons drawn from Afghan-war stockpiles, infiltrate them across the Line of Control, and provide intelligence guidance for attacks inside Indian territory. The FBI’s 2011 acknowledgment that the directorate sponsored the Kashmir insurgency confirmed what India’s intelligence community had documented for two decades. The difference between the Afghan and Kashmir operations was political cover. In Afghanistan, the directorate had acted with American blessing and Saudi funding. In Kashmir, it acted unilaterally, using the ideology of jihad and the rhetoric of Kashmiri self-determination to obscure what was, at its core, a state-directed covert-action campaign.

The directorate’s covert-action portfolio extended beyond proxy management. Its officers were involved in Pakistan’s nuclear procurement network, which A.Q. Khan used to sell centrifuge technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. The directorate’s links to the Taliban persisted after September 11, 2001, with the Haqqani network described by Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a veritable arm of the agency. The directorate’s political wing, officially dissolved in 2008 after its discovery, had manipulated Pakistani elections throughout the 1990s. The breadth of covert-action activity was remarkable: the directorate simultaneously ran proxy wars in two countries, managed a nuclear proliferation network, conducted domestic political operations, and maintained relationships with international jihadist movements. No other intelligence agency in a developing country attempted so many covert-action campaigns simultaneously.

India’s covert-action history, by contrast, was episodic rather than sustained. The Bangladesh operation of 1971 demonstrated maximum capability: the agency trained, funded, and directed the Mukti Bahini in a campaign that dismembered Pakistan and created a new nation. The Sikkim annexation of 1975 showed the agency could engineer regime change without violence. But the Sri Lanka catastrophe of the 1980s, when India’s support for the LTTE produced an organization that turned against India and assassinated its prime minister, created institutional trauma that suppressed covert-action ambition for nearly two decades. During the period from 1991 to roughly 2014, India’s agency was primarily an intelligence-gathering organization. It conducted limited covert actions in the immediate neighborhood, including reported operations in Bangladesh and Myanmar against insurgent groups operating in India’s northeast, but nothing approaching the scale or sustained tempo of the directorate’s proxy-warfare campaigns.

The shadow war represents a categorical change. Since 2022, a pattern of targeted eliminations has killed dozens of individuals on Pakistan’s most-wanted lists across multiple Pakistani cities, from Karachi to Lahore to Rawalpindi to areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and even Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. The operational pattern, motorcycle-borne gunmen conducting close-range shootings and escaping unidentified, repeats with sufficient consistency to suggest a coordinated campaign rather than isolated incidents. Pakistan has formally alleged Indian involvement. The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, citing unnamed intelligence operatives, reported that Indian agents were responsible for at least some of the killings. India has denied all allegations. The analytical question is not whether India is responsible, as definitive attribution remains impossible with available evidence, but what the operational pattern reveals about capability. If even a fraction of the alleged eliminations are the work of India’s agency, they represent a covert-action capability that is qualitatively different from anything the agency previously demonstrated: sustained, lethal, geographically dispersed across an adversary’s territory, and operationally resilient enough to continue for years without a single operative being publicly identified and captured.

The directorate’s covert-action portfolio, meanwhile, has contracted. The Kashmir infiltration infrastructure was degraded by India’s border fencing program, improved surveillance technology, and the security crackdown following the 2019 Pulwama attack. The Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in August 2021 complicated the directorate’s position rather than simplifying it, as the Afghan Taliban’s leadership has pursued an independent foreign policy that does not always align with Rawalpindi’s preferences. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan’s accelerating campaign of attacks inside Pakistan, killing thousands of Pakistani security forces since 2021, has forced the directorate to redirect resources from external proxy management to internal counter-terrorism. Pakistan’s post-Sindoor security environment further strained the directorate’s capacity: with the military managing ceasefire arrangements, rebuilding damaged infrastructure, and processing the political consequences of the 2025 conflict, the resources available for offensive covert action against India have diminished.

The methodological contrast between the two agencies’ covert-action approaches merits close examination. The directorate’s proxy-management model required maintaining permanent relationships with non-state armed groups. These relationships were resource-intensive: they demanded continuous funding streams, weapons supply chains, training infrastructure, and political management of groups whose leaders had their own agendas and ambitions. The model produced impressive force-multiplication effects during its peak years, allowing Pakistan to project power against a much larger adversary through relatively low-cost irregular forces. But the model also created dependencies. The directorate could not easily abandon groups it had created without risking blowback from fighters who knew its methods, its officers, and its facilities. The directorate’s proxy forces became, over time, institutional liabilities as well as assets, organizations that the agency could neither fully control nor safely discard.

The shadow war, if it is an Indian operation, employs a fundamentally different methodology. Rather than building and managing permanent proxy organizations, the alleged campaign appears to rely on a network of directly managed agents or locally recruited assets who conduct specific operations without the overhead of maintaining standing armed groups. This agent-based model is leaner, more deniable, and more difficult to detect because it does not require the permanent infrastructure of training camps, weapons depots, or organizational command structures that the directorate’s proxy model demands. The trade-off is scale: agent-based operations can eliminate individual targets but cannot project the sustained force that proxy armies can generate. For the strategic objective of degrading Pakistan’s safe-haven guarantee to wanted terrorists, however, the agent-based model appears more effective than the proxy model. Every elimination demonstrates that the safe haven is penetrated, and the cumulative effect of dozens of operations over multiple years undermines the credibility of Pakistan’s protection guarantee more effectively than any single large-scale proxy campaign could.

The differing methodologies also produce different counter-intelligence challenges for the adversary. Proxy forces are large, visible, and traceable: they have leaders, members, training schedules, and communication patterns that can be monitored. Agent networks are small, compartmented, and designed to minimize the signature that counter-espionage services can detect. The directorate’s counter-espionage challenge against the shadow war is harder than India’s counter-terrorism challenge against proxy infiltration precisely because the shadow war’s methodology produces a smaller, less detectable footprint.

The covert-action balance has inverted. Where Pakistan’s directorate once conducted sustained campaigns inside Indian territory while India’s agency watched, the alleged shadow war suggests the reverse dynamic: India conducting sustained operations inside Pakistan while the directorate struggles to respond. Carlotta Gall’s analysis of the directorate’s operational methods and vulnerabilities provides a framework for understanding why. The directorate’s covert-action capability was built on institutional relationships with militant groups. Those relationships required stability, predictability, and a functioning safe-haven infrastructure. The shadow war, by targeting the individuals who comprise those relationships, attacks the directorate’s covert-action capability at its most fundamental level. Every eliminated militant commander is a relationship the directorate must rebuild, a network connection that is severed, and a signal that the safe-haven guarantee the directorate provided to its proxy forces is no longer reliable.

Dimension Three: Counter-Intelligence

Counter-espionage, the discipline of protecting one’s own operations from adversary penetration and detecting adversary agents within one’s own territory, is where both agencies display their most significant vulnerabilities. Neither agency has a strong public track record in this dimension, though their failures manifest in different ways.

Pakistan’s counter-espionage record is marked by catastrophic lapses that have shaped both the bilateral rivalry and Pakistan’s broader international relationships. The scale of these failures, from operational penetration to strategic blindness, suggests not isolated incidents but systemic vulnerabilities rooted in the directorate’s institutional culture and organizational priorities. An agency that invests the bulk of its attention in managing proxy forces and conducting external operations inevitably underinvests in the internal security disciplines that protect those operations from adversary penetration. The directorate’s history contains multiple examples of this trade-off producing damaging outcomes. The May 2, 2011, US Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, barely a kilometer from Pakistan’s premier military academy, represented the most humiliating security failure in the directorate’s history. Former Pakistani General Ziauddin Butt later revealed that, according to his knowledge, the then-director general of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, Brigadier Ijaz Shah, had kept bin Laden in an IB safe house in Abbottabad, a claim that, if true, implicates the intelligence establishment in actively hiding the world’s most wanted man from its American ally. Whether the directorate knew bin Laden’s location or genuinely failed to detect a high-value target living in its own backyard, the outcome was equally damaging: either the agency was complicit in harboring him or it was incompetent in detecting him. Neither explanation inspires confidence in its counter-intelligence capability.

The shadow war itself represents an ongoing counter-intelligence failure for the directorate. If external agents are operating inside Pakistan with sufficient freedom to locate, surveil, and eliminate specific individuals in multiple cities over a period spanning years, the directorate’s internal security apparatus has been penetrated or circumvented in ways that should alarm Rawalpindi. The pattern documented across the campaign shows that operatives, whether Indian agents or locally recruited assets, have developed the ability to move through Pakistani urban environments, identify targets, conduct operations in broad daylight, and escape without leaving identifiable traces. Each successful operation is a security failure for the directorate. Each failure to identify, arrest, or publicly expose the network behind the killings compounds the damage. Pakistan’s Counter Terrorism Department announced in mid-2025 that it had exposed a network allegedly run by an external handler named Sanjay, arresting six suspects in Karachi. But the arrests, even if the allegations are accurate, represent a tactical response to what appears to be a systemic penetration.

India’s counter-espionage record is also imperfect, though the failures have been of a different character. The agency has suffered documented penetrations by Pakistan’s directorate over the decades, including agents recruited within India’s defense and intelligence establishments. The arrest of Indian Navy officials in Qatar in 2023 on espionage charges, reportedly working on behalf of Indian agencies to gather information on Qatar’s submarine program at Israel’s behest, exposed India’s intelligence personnel to foreign prosecution and public embarrassment. The Kulbhushan Jadhav case, in which a former Indian Navy officer was arrested in Pakistan in 2016 on charges of espionage and sentenced to death before the International Court of Justice ordered Pakistan to review the conviction, demonstrated that Indian operatives working in or near Pakistan face significant counter-intelligence risks. Whether Jadhav was an active intelligence operative or a retired officer engaged in private business, as India claimed, the case revealed that Pakistan’s counter-intelligence services could identify and apprehend individuals with connections to Indian intelligence.

Beyond these specific cases, the counter-espionage dimension reveals a structural vulnerability in the directorate’s security architecture. The agency’s reliance on military personnel who rotate through on assignment creates a paradox: the rotation system ensures a constant supply of disciplined officers but also means that personnel leave the directorate with detailed knowledge of its methods, facilities, and operational patterns. Retired officers have written memoirs, given interviews, and in some cases provided testimony to foreign governments that have exposed aspects of the directorate’s internal workings. The memoirs of General Pervez Musharraf, Lieutenant General Assad Durrani, and other former directors and senior officers have placed information in the public domain that a more rigorous counter-espionage culture would have prevented. Durrani’s co-authored book with former CIA officer A.S. Dulat, “The Spy Chronicles,” was extraordinary: a retired Pakistani spymaster and a retired Indian spymaster jointly discussing their agencies’ operations in a published volume. The Pakistani military establishment placed restrictions on Durrani after the book’s publication, but the information had already been disclosed.

India’s counter-espionage vulnerabilities have manifested differently. The agency’s recruitment from the Indian Police Service means that its officers bring law-enforcement backgrounds that may not include the specialized counter-espionage training that dedicated agencies provide. The Rabinder Singh defection case of 2004, in which a senior officer reportedly spied for the CIA before fleeing to the United States, exposed penetration of the agency by a close ally, a reminder that adversary services are not the only counter-espionage threat. The case prompted internal reforms, but the details remain classified, and the extent to which the defection compromised ongoing operations has never been publicly disclosed.

The asymmetry in counter-espionage vulnerability runs in India’s favor in the current environment. India’s domestic security apparatus, while far from impervious, has not experienced anything comparable to the sustained operational penetration that the shadow war represents on Pakistani soil. Pakistan’s directorate has not demonstrated the ability to conduct a sustained campaign of targeted operations inside India since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and the post-26/11 security reforms, including the creation of the National Investigation Agency, the strengthening of coastal surveillance, and the expansion of the Multi-Agency Centre for intelligence sharing, have raised the barriers to entry for Pakistani-sponsored operations on Indian territory. The directorate’s primary covert-action tool against India, cross-border infiltration, has been progressively degraded by physical barriers, surveillance technology, and the elimination of senior militant commanders who once managed the infiltration pipeline.

The counter-intelligence dimension reveals an uncomfortable truth for both agencies. Neither has demonstrated the ability to fully protect its operations from adversary penetration. But the consequences of their respective failures are asymmetric. India’s counter-intelligence vulnerabilities have produced embarrassing incidents and diplomatic complications. Pakistan’s counter-intelligence vulnerabilities, if the shadow war allegations are accurate, have produced dead bodies.

Dimension Four: Alliance Management

Intelligence agencies do not operate in isolation. Their effectiveness depends partly on the alliances they cultivate with peer agencies in other countries, alliances that provide access to intelligence sources, technical capabilities, and diplomatic cover that no single agency can generate independently. The alliance portfolios of the two rival organizations have undergone dramatic shifts over the past two decades, with India gaining access to partnerships that were once unimaginable and Pakistan losing relationships it once took for granted.

Pakistan’s directorate built its most consequential international relationships during the Cold War and the Afghan jihad. The CIA-directorate partnership of the 1980s was among the most productive espionage collaborations of the twentieth century, channeling billions of dollars in weapons and funding to Afghan mujahideen and producing one of the century’s pivotal strategic outcomes, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The relationship gave the directorate access to American satellite intelligence, communications intercept equipment, and training for hundreds of officers. Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Presidency provided parallel funding and ideological support. China’s Ministry of State Security developed a deepening relationship based on shared strategic concerns about India, eventually providing Pakistan with surveillance technology, cyber capabilities, and satellite data that partially compensated for Pakistan’s indigenous technical limitations.

The erosion of the directorate’s alliance portfolio began after September 11, 2001, and accelerated through the 2010s and 2020s. The American relationship deteriorated through a series of crises: the discovery of bin Laden in Abbottabad, the Raymond Davis affair in 2011, Admiral Mullen’s public accusation that the Haqqani network was the directorate’s proxy, and the progressive reduction in US military aid that accompanied the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The relationship has not severed entirely. American intelligence still shares some counter-terrorism information with Rawalpindi, and the directorate retains liaison channels with the CIA. But the trust deficit is deep, the information sharing is far more restricted than during the 1980s, and the United States no longer provides the financial support that once enabled the directorate’s most ambitious covert-action programs. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising the intelligence agencies of the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, shares information with India far more readily than with Pakistan, a shift that reflects both India’s democratic alignment with the Five Eyes nations and Pakistan’s damaged credibility following the bin Laden discovery.

China has partially filled the gap, but the partnership operates under constraints. Beijing provides the directorate with surveillance technology, cyber capabilities, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations Security Council, where China has repeatedly blocked India’s efforts to designate Pakistani-based militant leaders under UN sanctions. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has deepened economic integration and created new intelligence-sharing channels. However, China’s intelligence cooperation with Pakistan is transactional rather than open-ended. Beijing has its own concerns about the directorate’s relationships with Uyghur militant groups, and China’s willingness to support Pakistan’s Kashmir policy has limits that become visible when Beijing’s own interests, particularly its relationship with India, are at stake.

India’s alliance portfolio has expanded dramatically. The transformation began in the late 1990s with the end of Cold War-era constraints on Indian partnerships. India’s decades-long alignment with the Soviet Union had limited its relationships with Western agencies; the USSR’s collapse removed that barrier. India’s nuclear tests of 1998 initially strained the American relationship but ultimately opened the door to a strategic partnership that has deepened through three successive US administrations regardless of party. The 2005 US-India civil nuclear agreement was as much a strategic signal as a commercial deal: it announced that Washington viewed New Delhi as a partner rather than a rival, and the cascade of subsequent cooperation agreements in defense, technology, and counter-terrorism followed naturally.

The Middle Eastern dimension of the alliance portfolio deserves specific mention. India’s growing energy dependence on Gulf states, combined with the large Indian diaspora across the Arabian Peninsula, has created new channels for cooperation with intelligence services in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. These relationships provide India with access to regional information environments that were once primarily accessible through Pakistan’s directorate, which had built deep relationships with Gulf monarchies through decades of military cooperation and labor migration. India’s success in cultivating its own Gulf partnerships has progressively narrowed the directorate’s informational advantage in a region where Pakistani militant organizations maintain fundraising and recruitment networks. The US-India intelligence relationship has undergone a transformation since the 2008 nuclear deal, with cooperation deepening across counter-terrorism, signals intelligence, and maritime domain awareness. The founding of the Quad, the strategic dialogue among the United States, India, Japan, and Australia, created new channels for intelligence sharing on Chinese military activities in the Indo-Pacific. India’s intelligence relationship with Israel’s Mossad has matured from covert contacts in the 1960s to a comprehensive partnership spanning surveillance technology, counter-terrorism methodology, drone technology, and reported operational coordination. India has purchased billions of dollars in Israeli defense technology, including sophisticated surveillance systems, and the intelligence dimensions of the partnership, though largely classified, are understood to be substantial. India’s partnerships with France’s DGSE, Britain’s MI6, and intelligence agencies across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia have similarly expanded, reflecting India’s growing strategic weight and the alignment of Indian interests with Western security concerns about jihadist terrorism.

The technology-transfer dimension of these alliances deserves specific attention. India’s defense relationship with Israel has produced billions of dollars in surveillance equipment sales, including sophisticated drone technology, missile-defense components, and reportedly advanced electronic monitoring systems deployed along the Line of Control. India’s relationship with France has yielded the Rafale fighter jet deal and associated technology transfers that extend to sensor systems and electronic warfare packages. Japan’s partnership has opened channels for maritime surveillance technology relevant to monitoring Pakistan’s naval capabilities. Each of these partnerships provides India’s agency with indirect access to technological capabilities that augment its own indigenous development programs. Pakistan’s technology-transfer relationship with China is substantial, particularly in missile technology, nuclear-capable delivery systems, and the JF-17 Thunder fighter jet program. But the breadth of China’s technology partnership with Pakistan does not match the combined breadth of India’s partnerships with the United States, Israel, France, Japan, and Australia, and the diversification of India’s technology sources reduces India’s vulnerability to any single partnership souring.

The alliance-management dimension illustrates a structural shift in the intelligence balance. Pakistan’s directorate peaked in alliance value during the 1980s, when it was America’s indispensable partner in fighting the Cold War’s last great proxy battle. Today, its alliance portfolio is narrower, its primary partner is China rather than the United States, and its international credibility has been damaged by decades of documented support for designated terrorist organizations. India’s agency entered the post-Cold War era with limited international partnerships. Today, it operates within a web of intelligence relationships that provide access to some of the world’s most capable technical intelligence platforms. The alliance shift does not automatically translate into operational advantage. Alliances provide information and technology, but they do not substitute for the institutional capability to use them. Yet the direction of the shift is unmistakable, and it shapes the operating environment in which both agencies compete.

Dimension Five: Institutional Resources

Comparing the institutional resources of two organizations whose budgets are classified and whose personnel numbers are state secrets requires relying on estimates, informed speculation, and the limited data that has entered the public domain through parliamentary disclosures, journalistic investigations, and the accounts of retired officials. The comparison is necessarily approximate, but the broad contours are revealing.

Pakistan’s directorate is estimated to employ more than 10,000 personnel directly, with a network of tens of thousands of informants and assets both inside Pakistan and abroad, according to analyses cited by Al Jazeera and multiple defense publications. The agency’s budget has never been publicly disclosed by the Pakistani government, but independent analysts estimate it expanded from minimal pre-war levels to hundreds of millions of dollars annually during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, when CIA and Saudi funding supplemented Pakistani government allocations. In the post-Afghan era, the budget has reportedly contracted relative to its 1980s peak but remains substantial by regional standards. The directorate’s institutional power, however, extends far beyond its formal budget. As the intelligence arm of the Pakistani military, the most powerful institution in Pakistan’s political system, the directorate draws on the resources of the broader military establishment. Military officers rotate through the directorate on assignment, and the director-general, always a serving three-star lieutenant general, is appointed by the prime minister on the recommendation of the army chief. As of September 2024, Lieutenant General Asim Malik serves as director-general. The institutional embedding within the military gives the directorate access to military logistics, communications infrastructure, and operational support that no separate civilian intelligence agency could command independently.

The directorate’s institutional authority within the Pakistani state is unmatched. Vikram Sood’s observation that the directorate decides policy while India’s agency provides services captures the fundamental difference. The directorate does not merely advise the Pakistani government on national security matters. It shapes the contours of Pakistan’s foreign policy toward India and Afghanistan, it manages the proxy forces that implement that policy, and it exercises effective veto power over civilian-government initiatives that might compromise its operational equities. No Pakistani prime minister has successfully brought the directorate under civilian control. Yousaf Raza Gilani attempted in 2008 to place the agency under the interior ministry. The order was reversed within days. The directorate’s authority comes not from its formal mandate but from its position within Pakistan’s civil-military power structure, where the army chief, not the prime minister, is the ultimate decision-maker on security policy.

India’s agency operates under fundamentally different institutional constraints. Created by executive order rather than legislation, it reports to the prime minister through the cabinet secretary and operates without a codified charter, drawing its norms of conduct from the Intelligence Organisations (Restriction of Rights) Act of 1985. Its core leadership is generally drawn from the Indian Police Service, with the Secretary (Research) serving as its head. As of July 2025, Parag Jain holds the position. The agency does not have the institutional authority to shape Indian foreign policy unilaterally. It provides assessments and options; the political leadership decides. This structural subordination to civilian authority is sometimes characterized as a weakness relative to the directorate’s policy-shaping role. But it can also be understood as a feature rather than a bug: India’s agency operates within a democratic accountability framework that constrains its autonomy but also protects it from the institutional overreach that has damaged the directorate’s international credibility.

The physical infrastructure comparison reinforces the resource asymmetry. The directorate’s headquarters complex in the Aabpara sector of Islamabad, expanded multiple times since the agency’s founding, serves as its primary operational and administrative hub. The agency operates training facilities in various locations, including sites associated with the Afghan-jihad-era infrastructure. India’s agency headquarters in the CGO Complex area of New Delhi has similarly expanded, and the agency operates a training facility, analytical centers, and station offices in Indian embassies and consulates worldwide. The worldwide station network provides India’s agency with a broader geographic footprint than the directorate’s more regionally concentrated presence. India maintains diplomatic missions in substantially more countries than Pakistan, and each mission provides a potential platform for the agency’s overseas operations.

The digital infrastructure gap is widening. India’s investment in data analytics, machine learning for pattern recognition, and automated signals processing has accelerated since the mid-2010s, drawing on partnerships with Indian technology firms and academic institutions. The national security community’s ability to process large volumes of communications data, satellite imagery, and open-source information has expanded dramatically. Pakistan’s investment in comparable analytical infrastructure is constrained by a smaller technology sector and tighter budget allocations. The directorate has sought to compensate through partnerships with Chinese technology providers, but the scale of India’s indigenous capability investment exceeds what bilateral technology transfer from Beijing can match.

India’s annual allocation for defense and security, while classified in its specifics, is generally believed to be significantly larger than Pakistan’s when considered as a proportion of a much larger GDP. India’s total defense budget exceeded $75 billion in fiscal year 2024-2025, and the intelligence components of that budget, while not separately itemized, fund a multi-agency national security community that includes the agency, the Bureau, the National Technical Research Organisation, military intelligence directorates, and the Defence Intelligence Agency. The scale advantage is reinforced by India’s indigenous technology base: India manufactures its own surveillance satellites, develops its own communications intercept systems, and produces increasingly sophisticated cyber capabilities through a technology sector that Pakistan cannot match. The resource comparison, in raw terms, favors India substantially. The personnel quality dimension introduces additional complexity. Pakistan’s directorate recruits its officers from the military, which provides operational discipline and a unified command culture but limits the diversity of professional backgrounds available. Officers rotate through the directorate on assignment rather than building career-long expertise in collection or analysis, which can produce breadth of experience at the cost of depth. India’s agency recruits from the Indian Police Service, the Indian Administrative Service, and increasingly from specialized technical backgrounds, providing a broader range of professional skills. The Research and Analysis Service, created to provide a dedicated career track for agency professionals, was designed to address the expertise-continuity gap that rotation-based staffing creates. Whether the dedicated-career model produces better outcomes than the military-rotation model is debated among analysts, but the dedicated model provides the institutional memory that sustained covert campaigns require.

The training infrastructure supporting each agency reflects the resource asymmetry. India’s premier training institution for external-affairs personnel draws on a broader educational ecosystem, with Indian universities producing graduates in languages, area studies, and technical fields that the agency can recruit from. Pakistan’s training infrastructure, while competent within its military framework, draws from a smaller educational base and a narrower range of professional disciplines. The directorate’s decades of CIA training during the Afghan jihad provided a significant one-time capability injection, but that training pipeline closed as the American relationship deteriorated, and Pakistan has not replaced it with an equivalent partnership. Whether India translates that considerable resource advantage into proportional operational advantage depends on institutional effectiveness, strategic focus, leadership quality, and the caliber of its personnel at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, factors that are significantly harder to measure and compare than budgets alone but are ultimately more determinative of operational outcomes.

Dimension Six: Current Operational Tempo

The most revealing dimension of the intelligence balance is the one that can be measured in real time: current operational tempo. Which agency is conducting more operations? Which is generating more intelligence? Which is producing observable effects on the adversary’s behavior? By every available indicator, India’s agency is currently operating at a higher tempo against Pakistan than the directorate is operating against India, and the gap appears to be widening.

The shadow war provides the most dramatic evidence. The pattern of targeted eliminations on Pakistani soil, documented across dozens of cases since 2022, represents a sustained operational campaign that shows no signs of diminishing. The campaign’s acceleration in 2026, with more than thirty individuals killed in a single year according to compiled open-source reporting, suggests that the operational infrastructure enabling the campaign has matured rather than degraded over time. The geographic expansion of the campaign, from initial operations concentrated in Karachi to subsequent eliminations in Lahore, Rawalpindi, areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, demonstrates an ability to project operational capability across Pakistan’s territory. The targeting has climbed organizational hierarchies, reaching from mid-level operatives to senior commanders, including the co-founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Every operational indicator, volume, geographic spread, target seniority, and operational resilience, points in the same direction: an agency that is accelerating rather than plateauing.

The directorate’s operational tempo against India has moved in the opposite direction. Cross-border infiltration into Indian-administered Kashmir has declined steadily since 2019, with India’s security forces reporting the lowest infiltration numbers in decades during 2023 and 2024. The Pahalgam attack of April 2025, which killed dozens of tourists and triggered Operation Sindoor, demonstrated that the directorate’s proxy infrastructure retained some capability for spectacular attacks. But a single catastrophic attack, however devastating, is not the same as sustained operational tempo. Sustained tempo requires continuous operations over time: infiltrations, agent communications, weapons supply, target surveillance, and attack execution on a regular basis. By these measures, the directorate’s operational tempo against India has declined from the heights of the 1990s and early 2000s, when cross-border infiltration ran into thousands annually and attacks on Indian soil occurred with grim regularity.

The post-Sindoor environment has further constrained the directorate. Pakistan’s military resources have been diverted to ceasefire management, infrastructure reconstruction, and internal security operations against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, whose campaign of attacks inside Pakistan has accelerated since 2021 with devastating effect. The internal security demands on the directorate deserve elaboration. Pakistan has lost thousands of soldiers and police officers to terrorism since the early 2000s, and the directorate’s domestic counter-terrorism mandate has consumed increasing portions of its institutional bandwidth. Operations Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan in 2014 and Radd-ul-Fasaad launched in 2017 were large-scale military campaigns that required extensive preparatory work from the directorate’s operational-planning and target-identification divisions. Every officer and analyst assigned to internal counter-terrorism is an officer and analyst not available for external operations against India. The TTP’s resilience, despite multiple military operations, means that this internal demand shows no sign of diminishing. The Army Public School massacre in Peshawar in December 2014, which killed 149 people including 132 schoolchildren, demonstrated the consequences of the directorate’s inability to suppress the organizations that grew from the same jihadist infrastructure it had once cultivated. The creation of monsters it cannot control is the directorate’s most enduring institutional tragedy.

The directorate faces a two-front challenge that did not exist during its peak years: it must simultaneously manage the deteriorating internal security situation and respond to the alleged shadow war on its own soil. The resources allocated to each mission compete with each other, and the internal security challenge, which directly threatens the Pakistani state’s physical control over its own territory, inevitably takes priority.

The chronological evidence is worth examining in detail. The first documented cases that matched the shadow war’s operational signature appeared in early 2022, when individuals on India’s wanted lists began dying in Pakistani cities under circumstances that deviated from the typical patterns of sectarian violence, criminal gang warfare, or TTP attacks. Saleem Rehmani, an India-designated wanted terrorist, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Pakistan in January 2022, one of the earliest confirmed cases. By late 2022, the pattern was established: motorcycle-borne assailants, close-range shootings, rapid escape, no claims of responsibility, and targets drawn consistently from India’s most-wanted lists. The tempo accelerated through 2023 and 2024, with the Shahid Latif killing inside a Sialkot mosque in October 2023 representing a particularly audacious operation. Latif had masterminded the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack and was shot by masked gunmen during Friday prayers, an operation that required precise timing, local knowledge, and operational nerve. The Amir Hamza killing in Lahore in early 2026, targeting Lashkar-e-Taiba’s co-founder, demonstrated that the campaign’s reach extended to the highest levels of Pakistan’s militant hierarchy.

Pakistan’s operational tempo against India, measured by the same indicators, tells the opposite story. The number of cross-border infiltration attempts into Indian-administered Kashmir declined from hundreds per year during the peak period of the late 1990s and early 2000s to dozens per year by 2020 and to historic lows by 2024. The physical barriers erected along the Line of Control, including smart fencing with sensors, cameras, and alarm systems, raised the cost of infiltration substantially. The Pahalgam attack of April 2025 broke this declining trend with devastating effect, killing dozens of tourists in a massacre that shocked the world and triggered India’s military response. But the attack’s very exceptionalism underscored the changed dynamic: it was notable precisely because large-scale terror attacks on Indian soil had become rare, a reversal from the era when such attacks occurred with numbing regularity.

The operational-tempo comparison does not prove that India’s agency has surpassed the directorate in absolute capability. Operational tempo is a function of both capability and strategic circumstance. India’s agency may be operating at a higher tempo partly because Pakistan’s security environment has degraded, creating opportunities that would not exist in a more stable Pakistani state. But the pattern predates the post-Sindoor degradation. The shadow war’s earliest documented cases date to 2022, three years before Operation Sindoor. The operational tempo was already building before Pakistan’s security situation deteriorated sharply in 2025. Aqil Shah’s framework for analyzing civil-military dynamics in Pakistan provides a useful lens: the directorate’s structural constraints are not temporary but reflect long-term institutional trends within the Pakistani state itself. The army’s dominance of Pakistani politics, which once gave the directorate unlimited operational freedom, now produces a country so consumed by internal political crisis that external intelligence operations become secondary priorities.

Where the Comparison Breaks Down

The six-dimension comparison provides a structured analytical framework, but it also obscures important realities that do not fit neatly into a capability matrix. Any comparison between two intelligence agencies must acknowledge the fundamental asymmetries in their operating environments, mandates, and political contexts that make certain dimensions incommensurable.

The directorate’s greatest institutional advantage, its authority to shape Pakistani state policy, is also its greatest vulnerability. An agency that controls foreign policy operates without the accountability checks that democratic oversight provides. When the directorate’s strategic bets succeed, as they did in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the agency receives credit for strategic vision. When those bets fail, as they have with the Kashmir proxy war that produced the shadow-war blowback, the agency has no mechanism for course correction because no institution within Pakistan has the power to overrule it. The directorate’s policy authority insulates it from the kind of critical scrutiny that might have prevented the escalation of proxy warfare to the point where it provoked a covert-action response. India’s agency, constrained by democratic accountability and political oversight, operates with less freedom but also with guardrails that prevent the kind of strategic overextension that has characterized the directorate’s trajectory.

The comparison also breaks down on the question of proxy forces. The directorate’s proxy-management capability is qualitatively different from anything India’s agency has attempted since the LTTE debacle. Proxy management requires maintaining long-term relationships with non-state armed groups, providing sustained funding and logistics, and exercising enough control to direct their operations without assuming responsibility for their excesses. The directorate performed this function for decades. India’s agency has not rebuilt a comparable proxy infrastructure, and the shadow war, if it is an Indian operation, relies not on proxy forces but on directly managed agents conducting specific operations. Comparing the two capabilities is like comparing a cattle ranch to a hunting expedition: they produce different outcomes through fundamentally different methods, and excellence in one does not translate into capability for the other.

The nuclear dimension introduces a factor that no capability comparison can fully capture. Both agencies operate in the shadow of nuclear weapons, and the nuclear overhang constrains what each can do. India’s agency, even if it is conducting the shadow war, operates under the constraint that its operations must remain deniable because open acknowledgment could trigger an escalatory spiral between two nuclear-armed states. The directorate operates under a similar constraint: its proxy operations against India must maintain enough plausible deniability to avoid provoking a conventional military response that could escalate to the nuclear level. Nuclear weapons do not eliminate intelligence competition, but they impose an upper bound on how aggressively either agency can operate, and that upper bound shapes the intelligence war in ways that no capability matrix can capture.

The human cost of the rivalry introduces an ethical dimension that capability comparisons sanitize. The directorate’s proxy-war campaigns produced tens of thousands of casualties among Indian civilians and security forces over three decades. The 26/11 Mumbai attack alone killed 166 people across multiple nationalities in a sixty-hour siege that was coordinated from Pakistan with the directorate’s knowledge, according to the testimony of David Headley and the intercepted communications between the attackers and their handlers. The shadow war, if it is an Indian campaign, has produced casualties among individuals on India’s wanted lists, people designated as terrorists by Indian authorities and in some cases by the United Nations. The ethical calculus differs depending on where one stands. Pakistan characterizes the shadow war as extrajudicial killing that violates sovereignty and due process. India characterizes the directorate’s proxy campaigns as state-sponsored terrorism that killed innocent civilians. Both characterizations contain elements of truth, and the ethical dimension does not lend itself to the kind of dimensional scoring that capability comparisons employ.

The technological trajectory also complicates static comparisons. The capabilities being compared today will look different in five years. Artificial-intelligence-driven target identification, autonomous micro-drone technology, advanced biometric surveillance, and cyber-enabled sabotage are all developing rapidly, and the country that integrates these technologies into its national-security apparatus first will gain advantages that the current comparison cannot anticipate. India’s larger technology sector, deeper pool of technical talent, and broader international partnerships position it favorably for this technological transition. Pakistan’s access to Chinese technology provides an alternative development path. The question is not merely which agency is stronger today but which is better positioned to adapt to the operational environment of 2030, and on that question, India’s structural advantages in technology and human capital are significant.

The analytical framework used here treats each dimension independently, but in practice, the dimensions interact. Alliance advantages translate into technical intelligence advantages. Technical intelligence advantages enable covert-action successes. Covert-action successes create counter-intelligence challenges for the adversary. The six dimensions are not separate competitions but interconnected facets of a single strategic rivalry, and the overall balance is more than the sum of the dimensional assessments.

What the Comparison Teaches

The ISI-RAW intelligence war teaches three lessons that extend beyond the bilateral rivalry and speak to broader questions about espionage competition in the twenty-first century.

The first lesson concerns the relationship between institutional authority and institutional effectiveness. The scholarly literature on civil-military relations, to which Aqil Shah has contributed substantially, suggests that organizations with unchecked authority tend to overinvest in strategies that produce visible tactical results even when those strategies carry unsustainable strategic costs. The directorate’s proxy-war model is a textbook case. Infiltration numbers, successful attacks on Indian soil, and the ideological mobilization of Kashmiri youth all represented tactical metrics that the directorate could point to as evidence of success. What the metrics did not capture was the cumulative reputational damage, the erosion of international alliances, the creation of groups that would eventually turn on the Pakistani state, and the provocation of an adversary that would eventually develop the capability and the political will to respond in kind. The metrics rewarded short-term results while concealing long-term costs, and the directorate’s institutional authority meant that no external institution could force a strategic reassessment until the costs had already become irreversible. The directorate’s unmatched authority within the Pakistani state, its ability to shape foreign policy, control proxy forces, and operate without meaningful civilian oversight, has produced impressive tactical capabilities but catastrophic strategic outcomes. The proxy-war infrastructure the directorate built in Kashmir and Afghanistan generated a decades-long blowback cycle that culminated in the Pahalgam attack, Operation Sindoor, and the shadow war. The directorate won tactical victories, infiltrations, attacks, and intelligence coups, while losing the strategic competition: Pakistan is more isolated internationally, more vulnerable to internal terrorism, and less capable of defending its proxies than at any point since the agency’s founding. India’s agency, operating with less institutional authority and greater political constraint, has produced more modest tactical achievements over most of its history but is now demonstrating a strategic effectiveness that the directorate, despite its greater institutional power, cannot match. The lesson is counterintuitive but consistent: unlimited institutional authority can produce unlimited institutional overreach, and the guardrails that democratic accountability imposes on intelligence agencies may be features rather than constraints.

The second lesson concerns the arc of intelligence competition itself. The ISI-RAW rivalry has passed through three distinct phases. The first phase, from the 1970s through the 1990s, was characterized by the directorate’s offensive dominance: it ran proxy wars while India’s agency gathered intelligence and filed reports. The second phase, from 2001 through roughly 2019, was a period of gradual convergence: the directorate’s capabilities were degraded by the post-9/11 fallout, the loss of American support, and internal Pakistani turmoil, while India’s agency modernized, built new international partnerships, and developed technical capabilities that narrowed the gap. The third phase, from 2022 to the present, represents the reversal: India’s agency is allegedly conducting sustained offensive operations inside Pakistan while the directorate struggles with internal security, degraded alliances, and an operational environment in which its own clients are being eliminated. The complete history of the directorate’s covert operations makes this arc visible in institutional detail: from the Afghan jihad’s peak empowerment through the Kashmir proxy war’s independent ambition to the post-9/11 double game and finally to the current defensive posture in which the directorate cannot protect its own clients from elimination on Pakistani soil.

The three-phase arc suggests that intelligence balances are not static. They shift in response to strategic circumstances, institutional investment, alliance changes, and the consequences of past decisions. The directorate’s current difficulties are not the result of a sudden decline but of cumulative choices made over decades, choices that generated short-term tactical advantages at the cost of long-term strategic vulnerability.

The second lesson has practical implications for other bilateral rivalries. The Israel-Hezbollah dynamic, the US-Iran relationship, and the China-Taiwan cross-strait tension all involve asymmetric contests between state actors and their adversaries, and each involves phases of offensive dominance followed by competitive convergence and potential reversal. The patterns visible in the India-Pakistan case, initial offensive advantage by one side, gradual capability development by the other, and eventual reversal when strategic circumstances shift, are not unique to South Asia. They reflect a general dynamic in which initial advantages, however dramatic, are eroded by the adversary’s adaptation, the passage of time, and the accumulated consequences of the strategies that produced the initial advantage. The directorate’s proxy-war model was devastatingly effective for two decades, but the infrastructure it built, the relationships it cultivated, and the ideological forces it mobilized eventually produced the conditions that made the shadow war possible. Success planted the seeds of vulnerability.

The third lesson is the most uncomfortable for both sides: the intelligence war is not zero-sum. The directorate’s decline does not automatically produce Indian intelligence dominance, and India’s operational successes in the shadow war do not guarantee strategic victory. Intelligence competition operates within a broader strategic context that includes nuclear deterrence, economic interdependence, international alliance structures, and domestic political dynamics. India’s agency can allegedly eliminate dozens of wanted terrorists on Pakistani soil without resolving the underlying drivers of the India-Pakistan conflict. The directorate can be degraded operationally without Pakistan’s strategic challenge to India being eliminated. The intelligence war is a subsystem within a larger strategic system, and the equilibrium of the subsystem, however it shifts, does not determine the outcome of the larger competition.

The named disagreement this article must adjudicate is straightforward: has India’s agency actually surpassed the directorate operationally, or has the directorate simply been constrained by Pakistan’s post-Sindoor security degradation? The evidence favors the first interpretation, not because India’s agency has demonstrated superiority across all dimensions, but because the shadow war’s operational pattern predates the post-Sindoor degradation by three years. The first documented targeted eliminations occurred in 2022, long before Operation Sindoor degraded Pakistan’s security environment in May 2025. The operational tempo was already building when Pakistan’s internal situation was relatively stable. This chronological evidence suggests that the shift reflects genuine improvement in India’s operational capability rather than merely the exploitation of temporary Pakistani weakness. But the honest answer acknowledges that both factors contribute. India’s agency appears to have developed a genuine offensive covert-action capability that it did not previously possess, and Pakistan’s deteriorating security environment has created conditions that make the exercise of that capability easier. Separating the two factors with precision is impossible given the classified nature of both agencies’ operations.

This analysis must acknowledge a complication that runs through every dimension of the comparison: comparing two clandestine organizations requires relying on incomplete information. Retired officers’ accounts are colored by institutional loyalty, personal grudges, and the desire to shape their agencies’ legacies. Journalistic investigations provide snapshots rather than comprehensive pictures. Government statements are strategic communications, not transparent disclosures. The capability assessments offered here are necessarily approximate, built on publicly available evidence that represents a fraction of the operational reality. A career officer in Rawalpindi or New Delhi would likely identify errors, omissions, and misjudgments in this analysis that no outside observer can correct. The analysis is offered not as a definitive assessment but as the most rigorous framework available for understanding a competition that, by its nature, resists definitive assessment.

The complication this article acknowledges is that comparing two secretive organizations requires relying on incomplete, potentially self-serving information from retired officers, journalistic investigations, and external assessments. Every claim made in this analysis is provisional, subject to revision as new information enters the public domain. Retired officers’ accounts are colored by institutional loyalty and personal experience. Journalistic investigations provide snapshots of operations that may not represent the full picture. Government statements are crafted for strategic effect. The analysis is offered as the most rigorous publicly available framework for a competition that fundamentally resists definitive external assessment.

What is beyond doubt is that the balance between India and Pakistan has shifted. The direction of the shift favors India. The speed of the shift has accelerated since 2022. And the very real consequences of this transformation are visible in the most concrete form possible: the ongoing shadow war is being fought entirely on Pakistani soil, not on Indian soil, and the directorate has not demonstrated the ability to reverse that reality. The trajectory of the rivalry over the past four years suggests an accelerating divergence rather than a temporary fluctuation, and the structural factors driving the divergence, India’s growing technology base, expanding alliance network, maturing operational capabilities, and Pakistan’s internal security crisis, resource constraints, and eroding international partnerships, point toward continued movement in the same direction unless one or both states make fundamental strategic choices that alter the competitive dynamic at its foundation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is more powerful, the ISI or RAW?

The answer depends on which dimension of capability you measure. Pakistan’s directorate retains significant institutional authority within the Pakistani state, deep human-intelligence networks built over decades of proxy warfare, and a covert-action heritage rooted in the Afghan jihad. India’s agency has developed decisive advantages in technical intelligence collection through its indigenous satellite program and surveillance infrastructure, has built a broader and more valuable international alliance portfolio, and is currently operating at a higher operational tempo inside Pakistan than the directorate is operating inside India. No single metric captures which agency is more powerful because the two agencies are structured for different purposes within very different political systems. The six-dimension comparison offered in this article provides a more nuanced answer than any simple ranking.

Has the intelligence balance shifted between India and Pakistan?

The evidence strongly suggests that the intelligence balance has shifted in India’s favor, particularly since 2022. The shadow war, the expansion of India’s international espionage partnerships, and the degradation of Rawalpindi’s alliance portfolio all point in the same direction. The shift is not uniform across all dimensions: the directorate retains structural advantages in proxy-force management and institutional authority within the Pakistani state. But the overall direction of movement favors India, and the pace of the shift has accelerated.

What are the ISI’s strengths compared to RAW?

The directorate’s primary strengths include its institutional authority within the Pakistani state, which allows it to shape foreign and security policy rather than merely advising on it. Its human-intelligence networks, built through decades of proxy-war management in Afghanistan and Kashmir, provide granular access to militant organizations and regional intelligence environments that India’s agency has not replicated. Its deep relationship with the Chinese Ministry of State Security provides access to surveillance technology and diplomatic support at the UN Security Council. The directorate’s personnel, who rotate from the military establishment, bring operational discipline and a command structure that facilitates rapid decision-making.

What are RAW’s advantages over the ISI?

India’s agency holds advantages in technical intelligence collection through India’s indigenous satellite constellation, signals intelligence infrastructure, and growing cyber capabilities. Its international alliance portfolio, which now includes deep partnerships with the United States, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia, provides access to some of the world’s most capable espionage platforms. The agency’s democratic accountability framework, while constraining its operational autonomy, protects it from the strategic overreach that has damaged the directorate’s international credibility. Most significantly, the current operational tempo of the alleged shadow war demonstrates an offensive covert-action capability that the directorate has not been able to counter.

Is the shadow war evidence that RAW has surpassed the ISI?

The shadow war provides circumstantial evidence of a significant shift in operational capability. If India’s agency is conducting sustained targeted operations across multiple Pakistani cities over a period of years without having a single operative publicly identified and captured, it demonstrates a covert-action maturity that represents a qualitative leap from anything the agency previously displayed. However, the shadow war alone does not prove comprehensive superiority. The directorate retains capabilities in dimensions that the shadow war does not test. The shadow war demonstrates that India has developed a specific offensive capability that the directorate cannot currently counter, but it does not demonstrate that India has surpassed the directorate across all dimensions of intelligence capability.

How do the ISI and RAW compare in covert operations?

The comparison reveals a historical reversal. For four decades, the directorate was the undisputed leader in covert operations in South Asia, managing proxy forces in Afghanistan and Kashmir, running infiltration networks across the Line of Control, and coordinating attacks on Indian soil. India’s agency conducted episodic covert operations, notably the 1971 Bangladesh and 1975 Sikkim operations, but never sustained the kind of continuous covert-action campaign that the directorate managed for decades. The shadow war appears to have reversed this dynamic: India’s agency is now allegedly conducting the sustained covert campaign while the directorate’s proxy infrastructure has been degraded by border fencing, surveillance technology, and the elimination of key personnel.

Does the ISI know who is killing terrorists in Pakistan?

Pakistan has publicly alleged that India’s intelligence agency is responsible for the targeted killings, and Pakistan’s Counter Terrorism Department has announced arrests of individuals allegedly working for Indian handlers. The directorate presumably has its own assessments based on classified intelligence, signals intercepts, and interrogation of detained suspects. However, the directorate’s inability to prevent the campaign’s continuation, identify and publicly expose the operational network behind it, or disrupt the pattern with counter-operations suggests that its knowledge of the campaign’s infrastructure is either incomplete or insufficient to enable effective countermeasures. The distinction matters: knowing who is broadly responsible is different from understanding how the network operates at a level of granularity sufficient to dismantle it.

Can the ISI stop RAW’s alleged operations?

The evidence available through mid-2026 suggests the directorate has not been able to stop the alleged campaign. The operational tempo has increased rather than decreased over time, the geographic scope has expanded rather than contracted, and the targeting has climbed organizational hierarchies rather than being pushed down to lower-value targets. These indicators suggest that whatever countermeasures the directorate has implemented have been insufficient. Whether the directorate could stop the campaign with additional resources, different strategies, or improved counter-intelligence practices is an open question. The answer may depend partly on factors outside the directorate’s control, including Pakistan’s overall security environment, the competing demands of internal counter-terrorism operations against TTP, and the diplomatic consequences of the post-Sindoor security situation.

When was the ISI founded?

The Inter-Services Intelligence was formally established on January 1, 1948, less than six months after Pakistan’s independence from British India. Major General Walter Cawthorn, a British Indian Army officer retained in Pakistan’s service, and Brigadier Syed Shahid Hamid were the key figures in its creation. The agency was established to address the lack of coordinated intelligence among Pakistan’s newly formed army, navy, and air force branches following intelligence failures during the First Kashmir War.

When was RAW founded?

The Research and Analysis Wing was established in 1968 by Rameshwar Nath Kao, following India’s intelligence failures in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. The agency was created by executive order, separating external intelligence functions from the Intelligence Bureau, which had previously handled both internal and external intelligence. The CIA assisted in the agency’s early development, and Kao modeled aspects of the organization on the American intelligence community’s structure.

How does each agency’s relationship with its government differ?

The structural difference is fundamental. The directorate functions as a policy-making institution within the Pakistani state, effectively determining Pakistan’s approach to India and Afghanistan and exercising veto power over civilian-government initiatives that conflict with military interests. India’s agency functions as a service provider to elected policy-makers, offering intelligence assessments and covert options but not determining the policy direction. Former RAW chief Vikram Sood described this distinction explicitly: the directorate decides policy; India’s agency provides assessments. This structural difference shapes every aspect of the intelligence rivalry, from resource allocation to risk tolerance to strategic overreach.

Has the ISI lost control of the groups it created?

The relationship between the directorate and its proxy organizations has become increasingly complicated. During the 1980s and 1990s, the directorate exercised substantial operational control over the groups it supported, selecting targets, providing intelligence guidance, and managing logistics. Over the past two decades, several groups have developed autonomous operational capabilities that exceed the directorate’s ability to control them. The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which emerged from the same Afghan-jihad infrastructure the directorate built, now conducts sustained attacks against the Pakistani state itself. Jaish-e-Mohammed’s autonomous action in conducting the Pulwama attack reportedly surprised elements within the Pakistani establishment. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s charitable and political infrastructure has grown to a scale that makes it difficult for any single state institution to dissolve. The relationship between handler and proxy has become bidirectional: the groups depend on the directorate for protection but are no longer fully controlled by it.

What role did the Afghan jihad play in shaping the ISI?

The Afghan jihad of the 1980s was the defining experience of the directorate’s institutional history. Before the jihad, the agency was a mid-sized military intelligence coordination body with limited international reach. The CIA’s decision to channel covert funding through the directorate, combined with Saudi Arabian parallel support, transformed it into one of the world’s most consequential intelligence agencies. An estimated three billion dollars in covert aid flowed through the directorate during the decade. Approximately 83,000 fighters were trained between 1983 and 1997. The agency developed institutional expertise in proxy-force management, arms distribution, and cross-border infiltration that it subsequently applied to Kashmir. The Afghan jihad also embedded within the directorate an ideological orientation toward jihadist movements that persisted long after the strategic circumstances that justified the original partnership had changed.

How do international partnerships affect the intelligence balance?

International partnerships shape the intelligence balance by providing access to finished assessments, technical capabilities, and diplomatic support that neither organization can generate independently. India’s growing partnerships with the United States, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia provide access to satellite reconnaissance, surveillance technology, counter-terrorism methodology, and a diplomatic environment that is broadly sympathetic to India’s security concerns. Pakistan’s primary espionage partnership is now with China, which provides surveillance technology, cyber capabilities, and UN Security Council diplomatic cover. The breadth and depth of India’s partnership portfolio exceeds Pakistan’s, reflecting both India’s larger economy and its democratic alignment with Western espionage communities. The partnership gap has practical consequences: India has access to technical intelligence platforms that Pakistan cannot replicate through its own resources or its Chinese partnership alone.

How has the Kulbhushan Jadhav case affected the rivalry?

The arrest of Kulbhushan Jadhav in Pakistan in March 2016 on charges of espionage became one of the most publicized episodes in the bilateral rivalry. Pakistan claimed Jadhav was a serving officer of India’s agency conducting subversive activities in Balochistan. India maintained he was a retired Navy officer engaged in private business in Iran who was abducted from Iranian territory. Pakistan’s military court sentenced Jadhav to death in April 2017. India took the case to the International Court of Justice, which ordered Pakistan in July 2019 to provide effective review and reconsideration of the conviction and sentence. The case remains unresolved. From a capability-analysis perspective, the Jadhav episode demonstrated two things: Pakistan’s counter-espionage services can identify and apprehend individuals with connections to Indian national security agencies, and India’s diplomatic leverage and legal infrastructure can prevent a death sentence from being carried out even when the individual is in Pakistani custody. The case also exposed the risks that agent-based operations carry for personnel, a factor that may influence how India’s agency designs operations to minimize the signature and exposure of its operatives.

What does the Abbottabad raid reveal about the ISI’s capabilities?

The May 2, 2011, US Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, approximately one kilometer from Pakistan’s premier military academy, remains the most debated episode in the directorate’s history. The raid demonstrates either that the directorate was complicit in harboring bin Laden, which would confirm allegations of ongoing relationships with al-Qaeda, or that the directorate’s counter-intelligence apparatus failed to detect the world’s most wanted man living in its own backyard for years. Either interpretation represents a significant institutional failure. The raid also exposed the limits of the directorate’s relationship with the CIA: the United States conducted the operation unilaterally, deliberately excluding the directorate from the planning and execution, because American officials assessed that informing the directorate would risk the operation being compromised. The trust deficit that decision reveals has shaped the American-Pakistani intelligence relationship ever since.

How does nuclear deterrence affect the intelligence war?

Nuclear deterrence imposes an upper bound on the intensity of the intelligence war. Both agencies operate under the constraint that their operations must remain below the escalation threshold that could trigger a nuclear crisis. For the directorate, this means that proxy operations against India must maintain enough deniability to avoid provoking a conventional military response that could escalate to nuclear confrontation. For India’s agency, if it is conducting the shadow war, the operations must remain deniable for the same reason. Operation Sindoor of May 2025, which saw the first exchange of missile fire between nuclear-armed states, demonstrated both the fragility of the nuclear threshold and the ability of both states to manage escalation. The intelligence war operates in the space below that threshold, a space that nuclear weapons define but do not eliminate.

Is the ISI a state within a state?

The characterization of the directorate as a state within a state is widely used by Pakistani and international analysts. It reflects the agency’s institutional authority, which extends far beyond intelligence collection to include foreign-policy formulation, proxy-force management, domestic political manipulation, and effective veto power over civilian-government decisions on security matters. The characterization captures an important reality: the directorate operates with a degree of autonomy from civilian oversight that is unusual among spy agencies in even partially democratic states. However, the characterization can also be misleading. The directorate does not operate independently of the Pakistani military. It is the intelligence arm of the army, and the army chief, not the director-general of the directorate, is the ultimate authority. The agency is a state within a state only insofar as the Pakistani military itself functions as a state within a state, which is the deeper structural reality that shapes the directorate’s role.

How has the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict affected the intelligence war?

Operation Sindoor of May 2025 has affected the intelligence war in three significant ways. First, it diverted Pakistani military resources from external intelligence operations to internal security management, ceasefire maintenance, and infrastructure reconstruction. Second, it degraded Pakistan’s overall security environment in ways that may have created operational opportunities for the shadow war’s acceleration. Third, it demonstrated the convergence of India’s conventional military capability with its alleged covert-action capability, suggesting that India now operates on two parallel tracks, one conventional and one covert, that can function independently of each other. The post-Sindoor acceleration of the shadow war, with more eliminations reported in early 2026 than in any previous year, suggests that the conflict’s aftermath has shifted the balance further in India’s favor. The ceasefire that ended the conventional military operations did not constrain the covert campaign; if anything, it appears to have liberated it. International attention focused on the fragility of the ceasefire and the diplomatic arrangements surrounding it, while the shadow war exploited the reduced scrutiny to accelerate its operational tempo. Pakistan’s military resources, redirected toward managing ceasefire arrangements, border stabilization, and the political consequences of the conflict, were less available for the internal security operations that might have detected and disrupted the shadow war’s network. The dual-track dynamic, conventional operations on one track and covert action on the other, suggests that India now possesses the capability to operate both tracks independently, suspending one without affecting the other, a level of strategic flexibility that the directorate has not demonstrated.

Who is winning the ISI versus RAW intelligence war?

The concept of winning in an espionage war is imprecise. Intelligence competition does not produce clear victories in the way that military battles do. Neither agency will defeat the other in any absolute sense. The spy war will continue as long as the India-Pakistan rivalry persists. What has changed is the direction of competitive advantage. For four decades, the directorate held the advantage: it conducted offensive operations against India while India’s agency played defense. Since 2022, the dynamic has reversed. India’s agency is allegedly conducting sustained offensive operations inside Pakistan while the directorate struggles to respond. By the operational metrics available, tempo, geographic reach, target seniority, and adversary counter-intelligence effectiveness, the advantage currently belongs to India’s agency. Whether this advantage proves durable or transient depends on factors that extend far beyond the intelligence balance, including the trajectory of Pakistan’s internal politics, the evolution of India’s international partnerships, and the strategic choices that both governments make in the years ahead.

What would it take for the ISI to reverse the current trajectory?

Reversing the current trajectory would require the directorate to address failures across multiple dimensions simultaneously. It would need to rebuild its counter-intelligence capability to detect and disrupt the shadow war’s operational network. It would need to restore its international alliance portfolio, particularly the American relationship, to regain access to technical intelligence platforms and diplomatic support. It would need to resolve the resource competition between external intelligence operations and internal counter-terrorism demands. And it would need to adapt its institutional model from proxy-force management, which built its historical reputation, to the more agile, agent-driven operational approach that the shadow war appears to represent. Each of these changes would require structural reforms that the directorate’s institutional culture and the broader Pakistani civil-military power structure resist. The trajectory is not irreversible, but reversing it would require a degree of institutional transformation that the directorate has not demonstrated the capacity or the willingness to undertake.

How do retired intelligence officers view the ISI-RAW rivalry?

Retired officers from both agencies have provided publicly divergent accounts that reflect their institutional loyalties and career experiences. Former RAW chief Vikram Sood has emphasized the structural difference between the two agencies, characterizing the directorate as a policy-making institution and his own organization as a service provider. B. Raman, a former RAW officer who authored “The Kaoboys of R&AW,” provided detailed accounts of India’s intelligence evolution that emphasized the agency’s professionalism and restraint. On the Pakistani side, retired officers have generally emphasized the directorate’s strategic vision and its role in defending Pakistan against a larger adversary, while acknowledging, usually obliquely, that the relationship with proxy groups created complications. The retired-officer accounts are valuable as primary sources but must be read critically, as each officer’s narrative serves institutional and personal interests that may not align with the operational realities.