India’s approach to cross-border terrorism has undergone a transformation so complete that the country’s own strategic establishment struggles to define what it has become. Four distinct responses to four distinct provocations have produced something unprecedented in the annals of counter-terrorism: a permanent repertoire of escalation options ranging from covert assassination to conventional missile strikes, all available simultaneously, all proven in operational use, and all now embedded in institutional memory. The question confronting New Delhi, Islamabad, and every capital with a stake in South Asian stability is not what India will do after the next attack. The question is which combination of instruments India will deploy, because the current posture assumes that every tool in the kit is always on the table.

This analysis projects India’s counter-terror trajectory forward through three structured scenarios, each grounded in the doctrinal evolution that produced the current posture. Predicting future policy is inherently speculative, and unforeseen events ranging from leadership changes to economic crises to third-party interventions could invalidate any projection. What follows, therefore, is not prophecy but scenario analysis: a disciplined examination of where the logic of each doctrinal instrument leads if current trends continue, accelerate, or reverse. The argument is that India has built a multi-track counter-terror architecture that has no defined endpoint, no exit criteria, and no institutional mechanism for scaling back. Whether that architecture achieves its stated goals or produces permanent low-grade conflict depends on choices that neither New Delhi nor Islamabad has yet made, and on variables that neither side fully controls.

C. Raja Mohan, one of India’s most influential strategic commentators, has described the emerging posture as a permanent-confrontation framework in which New Delhi has abandoned the cyclical pattern of crisis followed by engagement followed by crisis. Anit Mukherjee, whose research on civil-military relations in the Indian context has shaped academic understanding of how New Delhi makes security decisions, raises a different question entirely: whether the country’s institutional structure, built for defensive postures and cautious bureaucratic consensus, can sustain a multi-track offensive strategy that demands coordination across intelligence agencies, armed forces, diplomatic channels, and political leadership simultaneously. Both perspectives inform the analysis that follows, because the future of Indian counter-terror policy depends as much on institutional capacity as on political will.

Background and Triggers: How Four Responses Built One Doctrine

The doctrinal architecture that defines India’s current counter-terror posture did not emerge from a single strategic review or white paper. It was built incrementally, response by response, across a decade of escalating provocations and increasingly assertive reactions. Each response established a new precedent. Each precedent was absorbed into institutional memory. The cumulative effect is a layered strategy in which covert and conventional instruments operate in parallel, each reinforcing the other’s credibility. Understanding the future requires understanding how each layer was added and what it contributed to the whole.

The first layer was the September 2016 surgical strikes across the Line of Control, launched in retaliation for the Jaish-e-Mohammed attack on the Indian Army’s brigade headquarters at Uri that killed nineteen soldiers. The operation was significant less for its military impact, which remains debated, than for the political precedent it established. For the first time since 1971, an Indian government publicly acknowledged conducting a military operation inside Pakistani-controlled territory. The strikes demonstrated that the Indian political leadership was willing to authorize cross-border force, accept the escalation risk, and claim credit publicly. This political willingness, more than any specific military capability, was the foundation on which everything that followed was built.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government understood that the surgical strikes’ value lay not in the physical damage they inflicted but in the psychological and political threshold they crossed. India had spent decades absorbing terrorist provocations and responding with diplomatic protests, dossier submissions to international bodies, complaints at the United Nations, and appeals to international opinion that generated sympathy but never concrete action against Pakistan. The Uri response signaled that this era was ending. The strikes were modest in scope, limited to launch pads along the immediate vicinity of the Line of Control, and their military significance was questioned by independent analysts. However, their strategic significance was enormous. They proved that cross-border military force was politically viable in democratic India, that the electorate would reward rather than punish a government that chose action over restraint, and that Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent did not prevent India from conducting limited conventional operations. Every subsequent escalation built on these three proof points.

The second layer arrived in February 2019 with the Balakot airstrike, launched after the Jaish-e-Mohammed suicide bombing at Pulwama that killed forty Central Reserve Police Force personnel. Balakot was qualitatively different from the surgical strikes in one critical dimension: geography. While the 2016 operation struck targets along the Line of Control, well within the contested space that both sides had treated as a de facto conflict zone for decades, Balakot penetrated deep into Pakistan proper. Indian Air Force Mirage 2000 fighters crossed the international border and struck what New Delhi described as a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, far from Kashmir. The geographic escalation established a second precedent: India was willing to use air power inside Pakistan’s sovereign territory, not merely in the disputed border zone.

Balakot also introduced a complication that would shape subsequent debates about the doctrine’s effectiveness: the difficulty of verifying operational outcomes. India claimed that the Balakot strikes destroyed a major training facility and killed a significant number of Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives. Pakistan denied that the strikes hit anything of military significance, presenting images of standing structures and undamaged terrain. International media and satellite imagery analysts produced assessments that fell somewhere between the two claims, neither confirming India’s success claims nor supporting Pakistan’s denial entirely. The damage-assessment controversy highlighted a fundamental challenge of the emerging doctrine: operations conducted deep inside hostile territory, without ground access for post-strike assessment, produce contested narratives that both sides exploit for domestic political purposes. This verification gap would become even more pronounced after Sindoor, where India claimed over one hundred militants killed while Pakistan reported civilian casualties.

The Balakot aftermath also revealed the escalation risks inherent in air operations against a nuclear-armed adversary. Pakistan retaliated the following day, sending fighter aircraft across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Kashmir. The resulting aerial engagement produced the first air-to-air combat between India and Pakistan since 1971 and led to the capture of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman after his MiG-21 was shot down by a Pakistani F-16. India’s response to the Pakistani retaliation was restrained: rather than escalating further, New Delhi accepted Pakistan’s gesture of returning Abhinandan as a de-escalation signal. The episode demonstrated both the potential and the limits of air-strike diplomacy: India could conduct strikes deep inside Pakistan, but Pakistan could and would retaliate, creating escalation dynamics that required careful management. The lesson learned was not that air strikes were too risky but that future operations needed to be conducted with sufficient force to deter or neutralize Pakistani retaliation, a lesson that directly shaped the planning for Sindoor.

A third layer operated in parallel with the first two but in a fundamentally different register. Beginning around 2021 or 2022, a pattern of targeted killings of the nation’s most-wanted terrorists inside Pakistan began to emerge. Motorcycle-borne gunmen appeared in Karachi, Lahore, Sialkot, Nawabshah, and other Pakistani cities, shooting specific individuals linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and other UN-designated organizations. Pakistani officials, Western intelligence agencies, and investigative journalists including those at The Washington Post and The Guardian attributed these killings to India’s Research and Analysis Wing, operating through local intermediaries, Afghan hired guns, and hawala financing networks routed through Dubai. India neither confirmed nor denied involvement, maintaining the plausible deniability that is essential to covert operations but allowing the cumulative pattern to speak for itself.

India’s [shadow war(https://insightcrunch.com/2012/09/17/india-covert-operations-doctrine/) contributed something that neither the surgical strikes nor Balakot could provide: persistence. Military strikes are discrete events. They require political authorization, military preparation, and diplomatic management. They happen once and are followed by de-escalation. Covert operations, by contrast, can be sustained indefinitely. They require no public authorization, generate no immediate diplomatic crisis, and impose continuous pressure on the adversary rather than periodic shocks. The shadow war demonstrated that India could maintain a sustained campaign of attrition against Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure without triggering the kind of international crisis that military operations inevitably produce. This persistence was the operational expression of a strategic shift from punishment to degradation, from responding to attacks to systematically dismantling the networks that produce them.

The Fourth Response: Operation Sindoor and the Convergence of All Instruments

The fourth and most consequential layer was Operation Sindoor, launched on the night of May 6-7, 2025, in retaliation for the Pahalgam massacre that killed twenty-six civilians, predominantly Hindu tourists, in Kashmir’s Baisaran Valley. Sindoor was not merely an escalation in degree; it was a transformation in kind. Indian armed forces fired twenty-four precision missiles at nine targets across Pakistani-administered Kashmir and Pakistan’s Punjab province in a campaign that lasted approximately twenty-three minutes. The targets included the Markaz Taiba camp at Muridke near Lahore, the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Taiba from which Hafiz Saeed had directed the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and numerous other operations against Indian civilians and security forces, and the Markaz Subhan camp at Bahawalpur, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed. Indian forces used SCALP cruise missiles launched from Rafale fighters, BrahMos supersonic missiles, SPICE precision-guided munitions, and a combination of air and naval platforms to conduct the simultaneous multi-target operation.

Sindoor established several precedents that fundamentally altered the strategic landscape. It was the first sustained exchange of missile fire between two nuclear-armed states in the jet age. It demonstrated that the country could conduct precision strikes deep inside Pakistan using advanced weapons systems, some of which were being used in combat for the first time. It proved that India’s air defense systems, particularly the S-400 batteries acquired from Russia, could neutralize Pakistani retaliatory strikes including drone swarms and cruise missiles. Perhaps most critically, it showed that India was willing to accept a four-day military confrontation with a nuclear-armed adversary, including Pakistani retaliation against Indian military bases and civilian areas, rather than absorb a major terrorist attack without a decisive military response.

The escalation that followed the initial strikes was itself instructive. Pakistan launched Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos in retaliation, targeting Indian military installations including airbases at Udhampur, Pathankot, and Adampur. India responded by striking eleven Pakistani airbases, reaching as far as Bholari, 270 kilometers inside Pakistani territory. The four-day conflict involved more than 114 aircraft in what defense analysts described as the largest beyond-visual-range air engagement in recent military history. Both sides deployed weapons systems that had never been used in combat between them before, including armed drones, cruise missiles, and advanced electronic warfare capabilities. The ceasefire, negotiated through DGMO hotline communications on May 10, 2025, came after United States Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged extensively with both Indian and Pakistani officials.

What made Sindoor doctrinally transformative was not any single aspect of the operation but the convergence it represented. For the first time, India deployed covert and conventional instruments simultaneously rather than sequentially. The shadow war’s sustained pressure on Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure had been running for years when Sindoor added open military force on top of it. The surgical strikes had established willingness to cross borders. Balakot had established willingness to use air power inside Pakistan. The shadow war had established willingness to conduct sustained covert operations. Sindoor brought all three together, adding missile strikes, naval deployment, and air defense operations to the mix. Each previous response had been a separate tool. Sindoor demonstrated that New Delhi could use all tools at once.

The Modi Doctrine: Three Markers for the Future

On May 12, 2025, two days after the ceasefire, Prime Minister Modi delivered a nationally televised address that effectively codified the doctrinal shift into three explicit markers. These markers were not new strategic concepts invented for the occasion. They were the logical conclusions of the trajectory that had been building since 2016, now stated openly for the first time by an Indian head of government.

Modi’s first marker declared that any future terrorist attack on India would be met with a decisive response on the republic’s own terms, at a time and place of India’s choosing. This formulation explicitly rejected the constraint that had governed Indian responses throughout the defensive era: the idea that proportionality, international opinion, and diplomatic consequences should moderate the scale and timing of retaliation. Modi was signaling that New Delhi would no longer calibrate its response to match the provocation. The response would be calibrated to achieve Indian objectives, whatever those objectives required.

The second marker addressed the nuclear dimension directly. Modi stated that India would not tolerate nuclear blackmail, and that Indian forces would strike terrorist hideouts operating under the cover of nuclear threats. This was the most consequential of the three markers because it explicitly rejected the foundational logic of Pakistani strategic doctrine. Pakistan’s entire strategy of supporting terrorist proxy groups while maintaining a nuclear deterrent rested on the assumption that the country would never risk conventional escalation because of the nuclear overhang. Modi’s second marker declared this assumption void. India had already demonstrated during Sindoor that it was willing to conduct sustained military operations against a nuclear-armed adversary. The second marker stated that this willingness was now permanent policy, not a one-time exception.

A third and final marker eliminated the distinction between terrorist organizations and the states that sponsor them. Modi stated that New Delhi would no longer differentiate between the masterminds of terrorism and the governments that shelter them. This marker had immediate implications for Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, which had maintained the fiction that terrorist organizations operating from Pakistani soil were independent actors beyond state control. By collapsing the distinction between principal and agent, Modi was declaring that Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership bore direct responsibility for the actions of the organizations they protected, trained, financed, and directed. During Sindoor itself, Indian officials had pointed to Pakistani military officers paying respects at the funerals of killed militants as evidence of the state-terror nexus.

These three markers, taken together, constituted not merely a policy statement but a doctrinal framework. They defined the conditions under which India would use force (any terrorist attack), the scope of that force (unconstrained by nuclear considerations), and the target set (state sponsors as well as non-state actors). The PRAHAAR framework, India’s first officially articulated National Counter-Terrorism Policy and Strategy unveiled by the Ministry of Home Affairs in February 2026, subsequently formalized many of these principles into institutional policy, establishing a seven-pillar architecture encompassing prevention, response, aggregation of capacities, human rights compliance, attenuation of radicalization, alignment with international efforts, and recovery. PRAHAAR represented the bureaucratic consolidation of what Modi’s three markers had declared politically.

The Permanent Repertoire: Why No Instrument Gets Retired

The most significant feature of India’s current counter-terror posture is not any single capability but the fact that every capability, once demonstrated, has been retained as a permanently available option. The surgical strikes did not replace diplomatic protests; they added military force to the menu. Balakot did not replace surgical strikes; it added air power. The shadow war did not replace either; it added persistent covert pressure. Sindoor did not replace any previous instrument; it added precision missile strikes, naval deployment, and multi-domain warfare. Each response expanded the repertoire without discarding any previous element.

This accumulative logic has profound implications for the future. Historically, states that develop counter-terror doctrines tend to settle on a preferred instrument and use it repeatedly. The United States relied heavily on drone strikes during the Global War on Terror, to the point where the drone program became the default instrument for counter-terrorism operations across multiple theaters. Israel’s targeted-killing program similarly became the primary tool of Israeli counter-terror operations, supplemented by military operations but fundamentally anchored in intelligence-driven assassination. New Delhi’s trajectory is different because it has not converged on a single preferred instrument. Instead, it has built a portfolio of options spanning the entire spectrum from deniable covert killing to open conventional warfare.

This portfolio approach creates a strategic ambiguity that complicates Pakistan’s defensive planning enormously. If India relied exclusively on surgical strikes, Pakistan could optimize its defenses for that specific threat. If India relied exclusively on covert operations, Pakistan could concentrate its counter-intelligence resources on detecting and disrupting those networks. Instead, Pakistan must defend simultaneously against covert assassination campaigns in its cities, cross-border special forces operations along the Line of Control, air strikes by advanced fighter aircraft, precision missile attacks launched from hundreds of kilometers away, and naval operations in the Arabian Sea. No single defensive posture can address all of these threats simultaneously. The diversity of India’s offensive portfolio is itself a strategic weapon, forcing Pakistan into defensive overstretch.

The intelligence architecture that supports this multi-track doctrine has evolved in parallel with the operational capabilities. The Research and Analysis Wing’s transformation from a primarily defensive intelligence-gathering organization into one allegedly capable of conducting sustained offensive operations inside Pakistani territory represents an institutional shift as significant as the military modernization that produced Sindoor. The coordination between intelligence agencies, armed forces, and political leadership that Sindoor required, launching simultaneous strikes against nine targets across two regions using multiple weapons platforms while maintaining air defense against Pakistani retaliation, represented a level of institutional integration that India’s traditionally compartmentalized security bureaucracy had never previously demonstrated.

Scenario A: Continued Shadow War at Current Tempo With No Major Provocation

The first scenario projects a future in which no new Pahalgam-scale terrorist attack occurs, bilateral relations remain frozen at their current sub-zero level, and India maintains the shadow war at its current operational tempo. This is, in some respects, the baseline scenario: a continuation of current trends without a major shock in either direction.

Under this scenario, the covert elimination campaign continues to operate across Pakistani cities, targeting mid-level and senior operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, and associated organizations. The pace of operations, which accelerated markedly through 2025 and into 2026, stabilizes at a rate that represents a persistent but manageable level of pressure on Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure. New targets are identified and added to the operational list as intelligence develops. Some targets are eliminated. Others go deeper underground, restricting their movements, communications, and operational activities to the point where they become functionally neutralized even without being physically eliminated.

The strategic logic of Scenario A rests on the premise that sustained attrition can degrade Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure to the point of functional irrelevance. Hawks in the Indian strategic establishment, whose thinking informs much of the current posture, argue that continuous pressure will eventually force Pakistan to choose between its militants and its economy. This argument draws on Pakistan’s ongoing economic fragility, its dependence on International Monetary Fund support and foreign investment, and the economic costs of maintaining a security apparatus dedicated to protecting designated terrorists from elimination. If the cost of sheltering terrorists exceeds the cost of abandoning them, the logic goes, rational self-interest will eventually compel Pakistan to dismantle the infrastructure.

The problem with this logic is that it assumes Pakistani decision-making on terrorism is primarily economic, when the evidence suggests it is primarily ideological and institutional. Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment has maintained the terrorist proxy infrastructure not because it generates economic returns but because it serves strategic objectives that the military considers existential: maintaining leverage over Kashmir, providing strategic depth against India, and preserving the military’s domestic political relevance as the guardian of national security against an existential external threat. These objectives do not respond to economic pressure in the straightforward way that commercial enterprises do. The military can absorb significant economic costs if it believes the strategic objectives are worth preserving.

Furthermore, Scenario A assumes that the shadow war can continue indefinitely without producing a major unintended consequence. Covert operations inherently carry the risk of exposure, escalation, or blowback. The revelation of Indian covert activities by The Washington Post, The Guardian, and through US and Canadian legal proceedings related to the Pannun and Nijjar cases has already imposed diplomatic costs on New Delhi. A botched operation that kills civilians, targets the wrong individual, or is traced conclusively to Indian government agents could trigger a diplomatic crisis disproportionate to the operational value of any single elimination. The sustainability of Scenario A depends on maintaining operational discipline across an expanding campaign with multiple independent operational cells, which becomes progressively more difficult as the campaign scales.

The probability assessment for Scenario A is moderate to high in the near term, perhaps two to five years, declining thereafter. The shadow war can sustain its current tempo as long as operational security holds, international diplomatic consequences remain manageable, and no major provocation from either side disrupts the equilibrium. However, the longer the campaign runs, the greater the cumulative risk of the kind of operational failure or diplomatic exposure that could force a strategic reassessment. Scenario A is sustainable but not indefinitely stable. It is a holding pattern that serves India’s interests as long as the broader strategic environment remains roughly static, but it does not resolve the underlying conflict and it does not create the conditions for its own termination.

Operationally, the shadow war’s patterns under Scenario A would likely evolve in response to both Indian and Pakistani adaptation. On the Indian side, the targeting methodology would become progressively more sophisticated as intelligence networks mature and operational cells develop deeper local knowledge. The geographic scope of operations would likely expand beyond the current concentrations in Punjab and Sindh to include Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and potentially Islamabad itself, as the country’s intelligence presence deepens. The operational tempo might shift from targeting mid-level operatives, who are relatively accessible but whose elimination produces limited strategic impact, toward higher-value targets whose removal carries greater organizational consequences but also greater operational risk and diplomatic exposure.

Financial architecture supporting the shadow war would also face increasing pressure under Scenario A. The hawala networks and Dubai-based intermediaries that allegedly facilitate payments to local operatives are inherently vulnerable to disruption by financial intelligence agencies, whether Pakistani, American, or international. The Financial Action Task Force’s continued monitoring of both Pakistani and regional financial flows creates additional exposure. Every operational payment leaves a financial trail, however indirect, and the accumulation of these trails over years of sustained operations increases the probability that a comprehensive financial investigation could expose the network’s structure. India’s intelligence agencies would need to continuously evolve their financial tradecraft, creating new channels as old ones are compromised or shut down.

Under this scenario, Pakistan adapts by investing heavily in counter-intelligence, relocating high-value targets, improving surveillance around sensitive facilities, and using the shadow war as evidence in international forums that New Delhi is conducting extrajudicial killings in violation of sovereignty and international law. The ISI’s intelligence contest with RAW intensifies, with both agencies devoting increasing resources to penetrating each other’s operational networks. The diplomatic environment becomes progressively more uncomfortable for New Delhi as the campaign’s existence becomes an open secret rather than a genuine mystery. India manages this diplomatic pressure by pointing to Pakistan’s refusal to extradite or prosecute designated terrorists despite international warrants and UN designations, and by noting that the United States conducted thousands of drone strikes against terrorist targets on the sovereign territory of countries that had not authorized those strikes.

Scenario B: Another Pahalgam-Scale Attack Triggers a Sindoor-Plus Response

The second scenario projects a future in which a major terrorist attack on Indian soil, comparable in scale and provocation to Pahalgam, triggers a military response that exceeds Operation Sindoor in scope, intensity, or duration. This is the escalation scenario: the one that defense planners in both countries and at the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council in Washington are most actively preparing for.

The probability of another major attack is not zero, and several factors suggest it may increase rather than decrease over time. Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure, though degraded by the shadow war, remains operationally capable. Lashkar-e-Taiba’s organizational structure, built over three decades with state support and institutional redundancy, has proven resilient to leadership losses. Jaish-e-Mohammed, though severely damaged by the elimination of key operatives and the destruction of its Bahawalpur headquarters during Sindoor, retains the capability to plan and execute attacks using operatives already infiltrated into Indian-administered Kashmir. The Resistance Front, the Kashmir-based proxy that initially claimed and then denied the Pahalgam attack, represents a new operational model in which nominally independent local cells execute attacks with logistical support from Pakistan-based organizations while maintaining enough separation to complicate attribution.

If a Pahalgam-scale attack occurs, the Modi doctrine’s three markers would require a response that meets or exceeds the Sindoor benchmark. The political logic that drove the Sindoor response, domestic expectations of decisive action, the precedent set by previous operations, and the personal political investment of the prime minister in projecting strength, would make restraint politically impossible. No Indian government that had established Sindoor as the baseline response to a major terrorist provocation could respond to a subsequent attack of comparable severity with anything less without facing devastating domestic political consequences.

A Sindoor-plus response could take several forms, and the specific shape would depend on the nature and attribution of the triggering attack. One possibility is a wider target set: strikes against not only terrorist infrastructure but also military installations that India determines are directly supporting terrorist operations. Modi’s third marker, collapsing the distinction between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors, provides the doctrinal justification for expanding the target set to include elements of Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus. During Sindoor itself, India eventually struck eleven Pakistani airbases, demonstrating both the capability and the willingness to target military infrastructure. A Sindoor-plus response could begin where Sindoor ended, targeting military command nodes, intelligence facilities, and the communication infrastructure that links the Pakistani state to its proxy organizations.

Another possibility is extended duration. Sindoor lasted four days, constrained by US diplomatic intervention and the mutual recognition that continued escalation carried nuclear risks that neither side was prepared to accept. A Sindoor-plus response might involve a longer campaign, sustained over weeks rather than days, designed to inflict cumulative damage that a four-day operation cannot achieve. This would require India to maintain military operations while managing diplomatic pressure and nuclear escalation risk, a significantly more demanding strategic task than Sindoor’s relatively compressed timeline.

The escalation dynamics under Scenario B are considerably more dangerous than those that governed Sindoor. Both sides have now conducted a full-scale military confrontation, drawn operational lessons from it, and invested heavily in addressing the vulnerabilities that the confrontation exposed. Pakistan’s post-Sindoor procurement rush, which included Chinese attack helicopters, establishment of an emergency rocket force, construction of new artillery ammunition factories, and constitutional amendments restructuring military command, suggests that Islamabad is preparing for a future confrontation in which it performs more effectively than it did during Sindoor. India, for its part, is reported to be preparing test launches of the Agni-6 intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads, a capability demonstration aimed at reinforcing nuclear deterrence while conventional options expand.

The concern among analysts such as Vipin Narang at MIT, whose work on nuclear escalation in South Asia is among the most rigorous in the field, is that both sides may be developing increased confidence in their ability to manage escalation, a confidence that the historical record does not support. The 2025 conflict, while ultimately contained, came closer to nuclear escalation than any previous India-Pakistan crisis. Both sides fired missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in their conventional configurations. Both sides targeted each other’s air bases, which in a nuclear conflict would be priority targets for preemptive strikes. Both sides conducted operations that the other could have interpreted as preparations for nuclear use. The fact that restraint prevailed in 2025 does not guarantee that restraint will prevail in a more intense future confrontation, particularly if both sides have invested in capabilities designed to perform better in exactly the kind of conflict that restraint is supposed to prevent.

Scenario B also raises the question of whether external powers would intervene more aggressively than they did during the 2025 crisis. During Sindoor, the United States mediated a ceasefire after four days of fighting, but Washington’s influence was limited by the speed of escalation and by India’s insistence that no external mediation was involved. In a future crisis, the compressed timelines that analysts at The Diplomat have identified would give external powers even less room to intervene. If India launches a Sindoor-plus operation that achieves its initial objectives within hours, as the original Sindoor’s twenty-three-minute missile campaign demonstrated was possible, the escalation dynamics may outrun diplomatic intervention entirely. By the time Washington, Beijing, or the United Nations Security Council can mobilize a response, the military situation on the ground may have already escalated beyond the point where diplomatic intervention can prevent further fighting.

The information warfare dimension of Scenario B would also differ significantly from the 2025 experience. During the Sindoor crisis, social media became a major battleground, with both sides deploying disinformation, inflated claims of success, and doctored evidence to shape the narrative. India ordered the removal of over eight thousand social media accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation, while Pakistan lifted its ban on the platform X to amplify its counter-narrative. In a future confrontation, both sides would have refined their information warfare capabilities based on the 2025 experience, deploying AI-generated content, deepfake videos, and coordinated bot networks to shape domestic and international opinion. The risk is that information warfare creates false perceptions of what is actually happening on the battlefield, leading decision-makers on both sides to make choices based on distorted assessments of the military situation. Misperception in a nuclear-armed confrontation is not merely a diplomatic inconvenience; it is a potential pathway to catastrophe.

Christopher Clary, whose academic work on India-Pakistan crises provides one of the most detailed analyses of how these confrontations are managed and terminated, has noted that the resolution of each successive crisis becomes harder, not easier, because the accumulated history of unresolved grievances raises the stakes and reduces the diplomatic space available for compromise. The 2025 ceasefire was achieved through a combination of military exhaustion, American pressure, and mutual recognition that further escalation carried unacceptable nuclear risk. If a future crisis begins at a higher level of military intensity than 2025, the threshold for what constitutes “unacceptable risk” may have shifted, and the off-ramps that worked in 2025 may not be available or acceptable to either side.

Scenario C: Pakistan Genuinely Cracks Down and the Shadow War’s Justification Erodes

The third scenario is the one that India’s doctrinal framework has no mechanism to address: a future in which Pakistan takes genuine, verifiable, and sustained action against the terrorist organizations operating from its soil, thereby eroding the justification for the nation’s covert and conventional campaign. This scenario is the least probable of the three, but it is analytically important because it exposes the doctrinal gap at the heart of India’s current posture, the absence of defined exit criteria.

For decades, Western governments, international organizations, and Indian officials themselves have demanded that Pakistan dismantle its terrorist infrastructure. The Financial Action Task Force’s grey-listing of Pakistan, the UN Security Council’s designation of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed as terrorist organizations, and the repeated failure of Pakistan’s promises to crack down on these groups have all reinforced the narrative that Pakistan is unwilling or unable to address the problem. India’s entire counter-terror doctrine, from the shadow war to Sindoor, rests on the premise that Pakistan will not police its own territory, and that the country must therefore do it unilaterally.

If Pakistan were to genuinely crack down, the doctrinal implications for New Delhi would be profound and uncomfortable. The shadow war’s operational justification, that India must eliminate terrorists because Pakistan refuses to, would lose its force. The Modi doctrine’s three markers, which assume a permanently hostile Pakistan sheltering permanently active terrorist organizations, would need revision. The military capabilities built for Sindoor-type operations, including precision strike platforms, air defense systems, and intelligence networks, would not disappear, but their continued use against a Pakistan that was actively cooperating on counter-terrorism would be difficult to justify internationally and possibly domestically.

The conditions under which Pakistan might genuinely crack down are narrow but not inconceivable. A severe enough economic crisis, combined with international conditions that explicitly link financial support to counter-terrorism progress, could shift the cost-benefit calculation for Pakistan’s military leadership. A change in military leadership that brings to power officers with different strategic priorities could redefine the institutional relationship with proxy organizations. Chinese pressure, motivated by concerns about the stability of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or about Uighur militants finding safe haven in Pakistan, could add external leverage that the United States and Western allies have failed to generate on their own. A domestic political transformation that reduces the military’s dominance over national security policy could create space for civilian leaders to pursue engagement with New Delhi.

However, even a genuine Pakistani crackdown would not necessarily produce Indian de-escalation. The depth of distrust between the two countries, built over decades of broken promises, covert operations, and open warfare, would make any Pakistani commitment suspect. India would need to verify that Pakistan’s actions were genuine rather than cosmetic, and the verification mechanisms available, international monitoring, intelligence assessment, and observation of operational outcomes, are imperfect at best. Pakistan has previously announced crackdowns that amounted to little more than temporary detention of leaders who were released as soon as international attention shifted. The history of Pakistani commitments to counter-terrorism, from the post-26/11 promises to the FATF action plan compliance, provides abundant reason for skepticism.

The probability assessment for Scenario C is low in the near to medium term. Pakistan’s military establishment shows no sign of abandoning its strategic investment in proxy warfare, and the post-Sindoor period has, if anything, reinforced the military’s domestic political position as the guardian of national security against Indian aggression. The economic pressures that might force a strategic recalculation exist but have not yet reached the threshold that would override ideological and institutional commitments. Scenario C remains theoretically possible but practically unlikely within the current strategic environment. Its primary analytical value lies in exposing the fact that India’s doctrine lacks a mechanism for de-escalation even if the conditions that justify escalation were to change.

The deeper structural obstacle to Scenario C is that Pakistan’s military defines its institutional identity partly through opposition to India and partly through management of the proxy warfare infrastructure. The Pakistani military controls a vast economic empire, extensive real estate holdings, and significant political influence, all of which are justified domestically by the argument that Pakistan faces an existential threat from India that only the military can manage. Dismantling the terrorist proxy infrastructure would remove one of the primary justifications for the military’s outsized role in Pakistani governance, economics, and foreign policy. The institutional self-interest of Pakistan’s military establishment is therefore aligned against genuine counter-terrorism reform, regardless of the economic pressures that external actors might apply.

Furthermore, the ideological infrastructure that sustains cross-border terrorism has developed a momentum independent of state sponsorship. Pakistan’s madrassa network, estimated at tens of thousands of institutions educating millions of students, produces a continuous flow of young men socialized into militant ideology. Many of these madrassas operate with minimal state oversight, funded by private donations and zakat contributions that are difficult to trace or regulate. Even if Pakistan’s military leadership made a genuine decision to crack down on terrorist organizations, the ideological reproduction mechanism would continue to produce potential recruits faster than any crackdown could absorb them. The organizations that New Delhi targets are not merely command structures that can be dismantled by arresting leaders; they are social movements embedded in communities, educational institutions, and religious networks that would survive organizational disruption.

The international dimension of Scenario C is equally challenging. China’s relationship with Pakistan provides a structural obstacle to the kind of external pressure that might force a genuine crackdown. Beijing has consistently blocked UN Security Council efforts to designate Pakistani-based individuals and organizations as terrorists, and China’s own concerns about separatism in Xinjiang make it reluctant to support precedents that could be turned against Chinese interests. Without Chinese cooperation, international pressure on Pakistan operates with one hand tied behind its back, as any sanctions regime or diplomatic initiative can be circumvented through Chinese economic and political support.

Can the Current Doctrine Achieve Its Stated Goal?

the republic’s stated counter-terror goal, insofar as it has been articulated through official statements, policy documents, and the PRAHAAR framework, is the complete elimination of cross-border terrorism originating from Pakistani soil. This goal encompasses both the destruction of terrorist infrastructure, including training camps, command centers, financing networks, and recruitment pipelines, and the deterrence of future attacks through the demonstrated willingness to impose unacceptable costs on terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Achieving this goal would require not merely degrading existing capabilities but permanently preventing their reconstitution, a standard that no counter-terror campaign in history has met against a state-sponsored adversary. Whether the multi-track approach that New Delhi has built, combining covert operations, military strikes, diplomatic pressure, and economic measures, is capable of achieving this unprecedented objective, or whether it will produce a permanent state of low-intensity conflict without resolution, remains genuinely uncertain.

Hawks build their case for optimism on several observable trends. The shadow war has demonstrably degraded the operational capabilities of Pakistan’s major terrorist organizations. Lashkar-e-Taiba has lost multiple mid-level and senior operatives. Jaish-e-Mohammed’s leadership structure has been disrupted. The cumulative effect of targeted killings has forced surviving leaders into patterns of behavior, restricted movement, limited communication, delegated command, and constant security consciousness, that reduce their operational effectiveness even when they remain alive. Operation Sindoor inflicted physical damage on terrorist infrastructure that will take years to rebuild, and the psychological impact of India’s demonstrated willingness to strike deep inside Pakistan has imposed costs on the sense of impunity that previously characterized Pakistani support for terrorism.

Furthermore, the hawks argue, the combination of covert and conventional pressure creates a dilemma for Pakistan that cannot be resolved without addressing the root cause. Pakistan cannot effectively defend against the shadow war’s covert operations without redirecting intelligence and security resources away from other priorities. It cannot effectively defend against Sindoor-type military operations without massive military modernization that its economy cannot afford. And it cannot address either threat through nuclear escalation without crossing a threshold that would invite catastrophic consequences. The multi-track approach, in this view, has created a strategic vise that will eventually force Pakistan to choose between its militant proxies and its own survival as a functioning state.

Doves offer an equally compelling counter-argument. India’s counter-terror doctrine treats the symptoms of cross-border terrorism without addressing its causes. The organizations that India targets are not autonomous actors but products of institutional structures, ideological commitments, and strategic calculations embedded deep within Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment. Eliminating individual operatives, even destroying training facilities, does not dismantle the institutional apparatus that produces replacements. Pakistan’s madrassa network, which provides the recruitment pipeline for terrorist organizations, remains vast, largely unregulated, and ideologically committed to the kind of militancy that produces cross-border attacks. As long as this pipeline exists, the supply of potential operatives is effectively unlimited.

The historical evidence provides support for both positions, which is what makes the debate genuinely unresolved rather than rhetorically balanced. On one hand, sustained counter-terror pressure has demonstrably reduced the frequency and severity of major terrorist attacks on Indian soil, a trend that predates Sindoor and has continued after it. On the other hand, the Pahalgam attack demonstrated that even degraded organizations retain the capability to plan and execute devastating operations when they choose to. The campaign kills operatives but does not kill the ideology, institutional support, or strategic logic that produces them. Whether attrition can outpace regeneration is an empirical question that the evidence does not yet conclusively answer.

Additional complexity emerges when organizational behavior is examined. Terrorist organizations facing sustained leadership attrition typically respond in one of three ways: they decentralize command authority to make the organization more resilient to leadership targeting; they reduce operational tempo to preserve remaining leadership; or they escalate operations dramatically to demonstrate continued relevance before further attrition reduces their capability to do so. The shadow war has produced evidence of all three responses across different organizations. Lashkar-e-Taiba appears to have decentralized, with the Resistance Front operating as a semi-autonomous franchise in Kashmir that provides organizational deniability. Jaish-e-Mohammed has reduced its visible operational footprint, with Masood Azhar reportedly in hiding or under Chinese protection. Smaller organizations and individual operatives may be incentivized toward spectacular attacks precisely because organizational degradation creates a use-it-or-lose-it dynamic that favors high-risk, high-impact operations.

Implications of these organizational responses for the doctrine’s effectiveness are contradictory. Decentralization makes the organization harder to disrupt through leadership targeting but also makes it harder for the organization to conduct sophisticated, coordinated attacks that require centralized planning. Reduced operational tempo is exactly what the doctrine seeks to achieve, but it can be reversed rapidly if organizational pressure eases. Escalation toward spectacular attacks is the most dangerous response because it creates precisely the kind of provocation that triggers Scenario B, potentially producing a more devastating India-Pakistan confrontation than either side intends.

The legal dimension adds another layer of complexity. India has conducted its counter-terror campaign without any public legal framework authorizing targeted killings on foreign soil. Unlike the United States, which developed an elaborate legal architecture for drone strikes based on the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and Article 51 of the UN Charter, or Israel, which secured Supreme Court authorization for targeted killings under specific conditions, India operates in a complete legal vacuum. The shadow war exists in a space where official denial prevents legal scrutiny, and Sindoor was justified under the general rubric of self-defense without reference to specific legal authorities. This legal gap does not prevent operations, but it creates vulnerability to international legal challenges and limits the ability to build international legitimacy for what India describes as defensive counter-terrorism.

Absence of a legal framework also means there is no institutional mechanism for determining when a target is legitimate and when they are not, no process for approving or reviewing targeting decisions, and no legal accountability for operations that produce unintended casualties. In the United States, the targeted-killing program operated under presidential authorization with reporting to congressional intelligence committees, however imperfect that oversight proved in practice. In Israel, the Supreme Court established criteria for proportionality, necessity, and civilian harm mitigation that intelligence agencies were required to address before operations. India’s program, if it exists as alleged, operates without any comparable institutional constraints, which provides maximum operational flexibility but also creates maximum legal and moral exposure.

Sustainability and Risk Assessment: What Could Go Wrong

The sustainability of New Delhi’s multi-track counter-terror doctrine depends on the continued alignment of several factors: political will, institutional capacity, economic resources, diplomatic management, and the absence of catastrophic operational failure. Each factor carries specific risks that could undermine the doctrine’s viability.

Political will is currently robust. The Modi government has invested enormous political capital in the image of strength and decisive action against terrorism, and the electoral returns on that investment have been substantial. However, political will in democracies is not permanent. A change of government, a shift in public priorities from security to economic concerns, or a catastrophic military failure that exposes the costs rather than the benefits of the confrontational posture could reduce the political appetite for continued operations. India’s opposition parties have generally supported the counter-terror posture in broad terms, but a future government with different foreign policy priorities, different strategic advisers, and different electoral calculations might choose a different approach.

Institutional capacity represents both a strength and a vulnerability. The coordination that Sindoor required, across intelligence agencies, air force, navy, army, and political leadership, was unprecedented in India’s history and suggested that institutional capacity has improved dramatically. However, sustaining multi-track operations indefinitely places continuous demands on institutional bandwidth. Intelligence agencies must simultaneously manage the shadow war’s covert operations, support military planning for potential future Sindoor-type operations, monitor Pakistan’s military preparations, coordinate with international partners, and manage the diplomatic fallout from exposed operations. Bureaucratic overstretch is a real risk, particularly if a future crisis demands rapid mobilization while ongoing operations are consuming institutional bandwidth.

Economic resources are a less binding constraint for New Delhi than for Pakistan, but they are not unlimited. India’s defense budget has grown significantly, and the government has invested heavily in indigenous weapons development, advanced fighter aircraft, missile systems, and air defense capabilities. However, the economic costs of permanent military readiness against a nuclear-armed adversary are substantial and growing. Every Rafale fighter, every BrahMos missile, every S-400 battery represents an opportunity cost in terms of infrastructure, education, healthcare, or other development priorities. The Indian economy is large enough to absorb these costs in the near term, but a sustained economic slowdown or competing budgetary demands could constrain the military modernization that the current doctrine requires.

Diplomatic management is perhaps the greatest ongoing risk. the country’s counter-terror operations have already generated significant diplomatic complications. The Pannun case in the United States and the Nijjar case in Canada exposed Indian intelligence operations targeting Sikh separatists, creating bilateral friction with two countries that are otherwise natural strategic partners for India. The Washington Post and Guardian investigations into the shadow war in Pakistan have created a public record of alleged Indian extrajudicial killings that provides ammunition for Pakistan’s diplomatic counter-offensive. As the campaign continues and accumulates more operational history, the risk of diplomatic exposure increases rather than decreases. A single high-profile failure, a killed civilian, a captured operative, a bungled operation that produces incontrovertible evidence of Indian government involvement, could transform manageable diplomatic friction into a strategic crisis.

Diplomatic risk is compounded by the increasingly polarized international environment in which India operates. The post-Sindoor period saw a notable divergence in how different international actors assessed India’s actions. While France, Russia, and several Gulf states broadly supported India’s right to self-defense, China and Turkey aligned with Pakistan, and the broader Muslim-majority world expressed varying degrees of sympathy with Islamabad’s position. The United States occupied an ambiguous middle ground, supporting India’s counter-terrorism objectives while expressing concern about escalation dynamics and the implications for regional stability. the nation’s ability to maintain international support for its counter-terror operations depends on sustaining the narrative that its actions are defensive responses to genuine terrorist threats rather than aggressive unilateral operations against a sovereign state. Every exposed covert operation, every civilian casualty from military strikes, and every piece of evidence that Indian operations are targeting individuals beyond the immediate counter-terrorism target set weakens this narrative and provides ammunition for the counter-narrative that the country, under Modi, has become a destabilizing force in South Asia.

Technology adds another dimension to sustainability. India’s counter-terror doctrine relies on advanced weapons systems, many of which were supplied by foreign partners, particularly France (Rafale fighters, SCALP missiles), Russia (S-400 air defense, Su-30MKI fighters, BrahMos missiles), and Israel (precision-guided munitions, surveillance systems). The continued availability of these systems and their consumables, particularly precision-guided munitions that are expended in each operation and must be replenished, depends on the willingness of supplier nations to continue supporting India’s military operations. During the 2025 crisis, there were no reports of supplier nations restricting India’s use of their weapons systems, but a future conflict that produces significant civilian casualties or that is perceived internationally as disproportionate could trigger restrictions, particularly from France and Israel, both of which are sensitive to the humanitarian implications of their weapons exports.

Nuclear risk remains the most consequential potential failure mode. The 2025 conflict demonstrated that India and Pakistan can conduct sustained conventional military operations without crossing the nuclear threshold, but it did not demonstrate that this restraint is indefinitely reliable. Each future confrontation will take place in a context shaped by the lessons both sides drew from the previous one, and the risk is that those lessons include increased confidence in the manageability of escalation. If both sides conclude that conventional warfare can be conducted safely below the nuclear threshold, the inhibitions against initiating future confrontations will weaken, and the probability of a miscalculation, a misinterpreted signal, or an accident that triggers nuclear escalation will increase correspondingly. the republic’s reported preparation for testing the Agni-6 intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of carrying multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), adds a new layer to the nuclear equation by enhancing India’s second-strike capability but also potentially destabilizing the strategic balance by raising Pakistani fears of a first-strike posture.

What Would Force a Doctrinal Reset

A doctrinal reset, defined as a fundamental reconsideration of the multi-track approach rather than incremental adjustments within it, could be triggered by several categories of events. Understanding what would force a reset is as important as understanding the current trajectory, because it defines the boundary conditions within which the doctrine operates.

The first category is catastrophic operational failure. If India conducted a military operation comparable to Sindoor that resulted in heavy Indian casualties, lost aircraft, captured pilots, or failed to achieve its stated objectives, the political viability of the confrontational posture would be severely damaged. The 2025 conflict, while India claims strategic success, was not without costs: Pakistani counter-strikes damaged Indian military installations, and independent assessments from outlets including Le Monde suggested that the Indian Air Force revealed vulnerabilities that a more capable adversary could exploit. A future operation that went significantly worse than Sindoor would undermine the foundational premise that India can conduct military operations against Pakistan at acceptable cost.

Nuclear escalation constitutes the second category. If a future India-Pakistan military confrontation crossed the nuclear threshold, even with the use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield rather than strategic strikes against cities, it would transform the strategic environment so completely that no pre-existing doctrine would remain relevant. The current doctrine implicitly assumes that nuclear weapons constrain but do not prevent conventional operations. If that assumption were disproven by actual nuclear use, the entire framework would require reconstruction from first principles. The psychological impact of nuclear detonation, even a limited tactical use, would shatter public confidence in the manageability of the confrontational posture and create overwhelming domestic and international pressure for a fundamentally different approach. The post-nuclear strategic environment would be characterized by such extreme caution on both sides that the kind of offensive operations the current doctrine contemplates would become politically and institutionally unthinkable for a generation.

International isolation represents a third category. If India’s counter-terror operations generated sufficient international opposition to produce concrete consequences, economic sanctions, diplomatic downgrades, loss of access to advanced weapons technology, or Security Council resolutions condemning Indian actions, the cost-benefit calculation underlying the doctrine would shift. New Delhi has thus far managed international reaction to the shadow war and Sindoor by leveraging the international community’s own frustration with Pakistan’s support for terrorism, by maintaining relationships with major powers including the United States, France, and Russia, and by positioning its actions as legitimate self-defense. However, this diplomatic management depends on the continued goodwill of partners whose own strategic calculations could change. A shift in American strategic priorities, a change of government in France that produces a more restrictive arms-export policy, or a Russian reassessment of its relationship with India in the context of its broader confrontation with the West could all affect the international environment in which India operates. The current doctrine assumes a permissive international environment, and a shift to a restrictive one would force fundamental recalculation.

Domestic political transformation forms a fourth category. If Indian voters or political parties decided that the confrontational posture was producing costs without commensurate benefits, a future government could choose de-escalation. This is less likely in the current political environment, where public sentiment strongly supports decisive action against terrorism, but democratic politics are inherently unpredictable, and economic pressures, war fatigue, or a reframing of national priorities could shift the domestic political landscape. The BJP’s dominance of Indian politics is not guaranteed indefinitely, and a coalition government led by different political forces might prioritize economic development, social spending, or diplomatic normalization over military confrontation. The 2025 crisis produced significant economic disruption, including the closure of Pakistani airspace to Indian carriers that continues to affect commercial aviation routes and increase operating costs for Indian airlines, and a future government might calculate that the economic costs of permanent confrontation outweigh the security benefits.

Perhaps most paradoxically, success itself constitutes a fifth category. If the counter-terror campaign achieved its stated objectives, if Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure were genuinely dismantled, if cross-border attacks ceased, if the organizations that New Delhi targets were rendered operationally irrelevant, then the doctrine’s continued application would lack justification. Success, in other words, would require doctrinal adaptation just as surely as failure would, and India’s current framework has no institutional mechanism for declaring mission accomplished and transitioning to a different posture. The military capabilities built for the confrontational posture would not disappear; they would need to be redirected, repurposed, or maintained in reserve, creating institutional constituencies with interests in sustaining the posture even after its justification has evaporated. This is a well-documented dynamic in the study of military bureaucracies: organizations built for specific missions resist the termination of those missions because termination threatens institutional budgets, personnel, and relevance.

The Institutional Question: Can New Delhi’s Bureaucracy Sustain This?

Anit Mukherjee’s research on Indian civil-military relations identifies a structural tension at the heart of India’s defense establishment that has direct implications for the sustainability of the current counter-terror doctrine. India’s security bureaucracy was built for a different era and a different strategic posture: one characterized by defensive orientation, risk aversion, bureaucratic consensus, and clear separation between military, intelligence, and diplomatic functions. The multi-track doctrine requires exactly the opposite: offensive orientation, risk acceptance, rapid decision-making, and seamless integration across institutional boundaries.

The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) position, created in 2019 and currently held by General Anil Chauhan, was designed to address precisely this integration gap. The CDS provides a single point of military advice to the political leadership and coordinates operations across the three services. During Sindoor, this coordination function was essential: the operation required simultaneous air, naval, and missile operations managed within a unified command structure. However, the CDS position does not resolve the deeper institutional tensions between the military, the intelligence agencies, and the diplomatic establishment, each of which operates within its own institutional culture, bureaucratic incentives, and organizational logic.

RAW’s alleged transformation from a defensive intelligence organization into an offensive covert action agency represents an institutional shift that India’s bureaucratic framework was not designed to accommodate. RAW operates under the Cabinet Secretariat, outside the normal oversight mechanisms that govern military operations. Its activities, including the alleged shadow war campaign, lack the kind of legal authorization, legislative oversight, and institutional accountability that comparable programs in the United States (covert action programs under Title 50) or the United Kingdom (MI6 operations under the Intelligence Services Act) are subject to. This institutional gap provides operational flexibility but creates vulnerability: there is no mechanism for independent review of whether covert operations are achieving their stated objectives, no institutional process for terminating programs that have outlived their usefulness, and no legal framework for holding officials accountable if operations go wrong.

PRAHAAR, launched in February 2026, represents an attempt to create the institutional architecture that the multi-track doctrine requires. By establishing a unified counter-terrorism policy encompassing prevention, response, capacity aggregation, human rights compliance, de-radicalization, international cooperation, and recovery, PRAHAAR provides a bureaucratic structure for coordinating the diverse instruments that the doctrine deploys. However, policy documents are not self-executing. Whether PRAHAAR transforms the country’s counter-terror bureaucracy from a collection of compartmentalized agencies into an integrated national security apparatus depends on implementation, resourcing, and sustained political attention, none of which is guaranteed.

The Regional Context: How Other Powers Shape the Doctrine’s Future

India’s counter-terror doctrine does not operate in a bilateral vacuum. The choices available to both New Delhi and Islamabad are shaped by the actions and interests of external powers, particularly the United States, China, and the broader international community. Understanding the doctrine’s future requires understanding how these external actors constrain or enable India’s options.

The United States occupies a paradoxical position. Washington broadly supports India’s counter-terror objectives, shares the nation’s assessment that Pakistan-based organizations pose a genuine security threat, and has provided India with advanced weapons systems including the technologies that made Sindoor possible. At the same time, the United States has its own interests in preventing India-Pakistan escalation, maintaining a working relationship with Pakistan’s military for counter-terrorism cooperation in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and upholding the international legal norms that India’s shadow war arguably violates. The US role during the 2025 crisis, in which Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio actively mediated the ceasefire, demonstrated both American influence and American limits: Washington could help end the fighting but could not prevent it from starting.

China’s role is more straightforwardly aligned with Pakistan. Beijing is Pakistan’s primary weapons supplier, economic partner, and diplomatic protector. Every major Pakistani weapons platform deployed during the 2025 conflict, the JF-17 fighter, the HQ-9 air defense system, the CM-400AKG cruise missile, was Chinese-designed or Chinese-supplied. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a flagship Belt and Road Initiative project, gives China a direct economic stake in Pakistani stability. Beijing has consistently shielded Pakistan from international pressure on terrorism, blocking UN Security Council sanctions designations and providing diplomatic cover in multilateral forums. India’s doctrine must account for the reality that escalation against Pakistan risks indirect confrontation with China, particularly if future operations damage Chinese-supplied military infrastructure or threaten Chinese economic interests in Pakistan.

The 2025 conflict provided the most significant real-world test of Chinese weapons systems since the Korean War, a fact with strategic implications that extend well beyond the India-Pakistan bilateral relationship. Chinese military analysts studied the performance of JF-17 fighters against Indian Rafales, HQ-9 air defense batteries against Indian precision strikes, and CM-400AKG cruise missiles in operational conditions with intense professional interest. The outcomes, which independent analysts assessed as mixed at best for Chinese-supplied systems, have implications for Chinese arms sales globally and for Beijing’s assessment of its own military capabilities relative to Western systems. India’s future doctrinal planning must account for the possibility that China will respond to the 2025 performance data by upgrading the systems it supplies to Pakistan, providing more advanced platforms, or increasing Chinese military technical assistance in ways that alter the operational balance.

Gulf states occupy an increasingly important position in the strategic landscape surrounding the republic’s counter-terror doctrine. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, historically closer to Pakistan through Islamic solidarity and security partnerships, have developed substantial economic and diplomatic relationships with India under Modi. The UAE’s role as a financial hub through which hawala networks allegedly funnel payments for covert operations creates a specific vulnerability: Emirati financial authorities could, if pressured, crack down on the networks that facilitate India’s operations, or alternatively, could choose to look the other way as a strategic accommodation to New Delhi. Saudi Arabia’s evolving relationship with both India and Pakistan, shaped by Vision 2030’s economic diversification strategy and Riyadh’s own counter-terrorism concerns, adds another variable. The Gulf states are not neutral observers of the India-Pakistan dynamic; they are active participants whose choices about financial regulation, intelligence sharing, diplomatic engagement, and weapons sales influence both sides’ options.

Beyond these major players, the broader international community plays a primarily reactive role. Most countries respond to India-Pakistan crises by calling for restraint, offering mediation, and expressing concern about nuclear escalation. The United Nations Security Council, constrained by Chinese vetoes, has been unable to take meaningful action on either Pakistan-sponsored terrorism or Indian military responses. European governments, which have significant economic relationships with India, have generally avoided taking sides. The international community provides neither effective restraint on Indian operations nor effective pressure on Pakistan to address the root causes. The result is a strategic environment in which India has significant freedom of action, constrained primarily by its own assessment of risk rather than by external enforcement of international norms.

The Endgame Problem: A Doctrine Without Exit Criteria

At its deepest level, the most fundamental challenge facing India’s counter-terror doctrine is not operational, diplomatic, or institutional. It is conceptual. The doctrine has no defined endpoint, no exit criteria, and no institutional mechanism for declaring success and transitioning to a different posture. This is not an oversight but a structural feature of a doctrine built incrementally through responses to specific provocations rather than designed from the top down with strategic objectives defined in advance.

As explored in depth in the forward-looking analysis of the campaign’s trajectory, has no natural termination point. Covert operations can continue as long as targets exist, and the madrassa pipeline that produces potential operatives ensures that the target set is continuously replenished even as specific individuals are eliminated. Sindoor-type military operations are triggered by specific provocations, but the triggers, terrorist attacks on Indian soil, are themselves products of the same institutional infrastructure that the doctrine seeks to dismantle. The doctrine is, in effect, a response to the conditions that perpetuate the need for the doctrine: a circular logic that produces permanent confrontation rather than resolution.

Audrey Kurth Cronin, whose research on how terrorism ends is among the most comprehensive in the academic literature, identifies several mechanisms through which states’ counter-terrorism campaigns terminate: the targeted organization is decapitated, the organization is defeated militarily, the organization transitions to political participation, the organization’s objectives are achieved, the broader political context changes, or the campaign loses domestic support. None of these termination mechanisms applies straightforwardly to India’s campaign against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Decapitation is ineffective against state-sponsored organizations with institutional redundancy. Military defeat of Pakistan itself is constrained by nuclear weapons. Political transition of organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba is incompatible with their ideological commitments. The organizations’ objectives, which include the accession of Kashmir to Pakistan and the broader Islamization agenda, are non-negotiable. The political context would need to change fundamentally to remove the structural incentives for Pakistani sponsorship of terrorism, and New Delhi’s domestic support for the campaign shows no sign of weakening.

George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment, whose work on nuclear policy and strategic competition in South Asia has shaped the scholarly debate, raises the question of whether permanent attrition is a viable strategic posture between nuclear-armed states. His analysis suggests that the answer is conditional: permanent attrition is sustainable as long as both sides maintain shared understandings about escalation limits, as long as external powers remain engaged in managing crises, and as long as domestic political dynamics on both sides do not produce leaders who believe that escalation is preferable to the status quo. All three conditions are currently met, but none is guaranteed indefinitely.

The comparison with other prolonged counter-terror campaigns is instructive but imperfect. Britain’s campaign against the Provisional Irish Republican Army lasted three decades before producing the Good Friday Agreement, but that campaign operated within a fundamentally different strategic framework: neither side possessed nuclear weapons, the conflict was primarily domestic rather than interstate, and the eventual resolution was possible because both sides accepted the legitimacy of political compromise. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which shares some structural similarities with the India-Pakistan dynamic in its mixture of state and non-state actors, territorial disputes, and religious dimensions, has produced a permanent confrontation posture remarkably similar to what India is building, but without any of the nuclear complications. The US Global War on Terror, which is the closest operational analogue to India’s multi-track approach, has been running for over two decades without achieving its stated objective of eliminating the threat of transnational terrorism, and the organizations it targeted have proven resilient, adaptive, and capable of regeneration even after suffering devastating leadership attrition.

These comparisons suggest that campaigns without exit criteria tend to become permanent features of the security landscape rather than time-limited responses to specific threats. They generate their own institutional constituencies, produce their own strategic cultures, and develop momentum that resists termination even when the original justification weakens. India’s counter-terror doctrine may be entering this self-sustaining phase, in which the doctrine persists not because it is achieving its stated objectives but because the institutions, budgets, careers, political narratives, and strategic assumptions built around it create resistance to change.

The twenty-six-year arc from IC-814 to Pahalgam traced as a single narrative chain illustrates both the remarkable consistency of the structural dynamics that produce India-Pakistan crises and the equally remarkable inability of either side to resolve them. Every crisis in the chain was both a consequence of the previous crisis and a cause of the next one. The release of Masood Azhar in 1999 led to the founding of Jaish-e-Mohammed, which led to the Parliament attack, which led to Parakram, which led to Mumbai 2008, which led to the decade of restraint, which led to the surgical strikes, which led to Balakot, which led to the shadow war, which led to Pahalgam, which led to Sindoor. Each link in the chain was shaped by the same structural factors: Pakistan’s support for terrorist proxies, India’s escalating willingness to respond, and the nuclear constraint that prevents either side from achieving a decisive resolution. The future of the doctrine depends on whether this chain continues to produce the same cyclical pattern or whether some intervening factor breaks the cycle.

What distinguishes the current moment from previous phases of this cycle is the comprehensiveness of the country’s response architecture. In previous decades, India responded to provocations with a single instrument: diplomatic protest after the 1993 Mumbai bombings, military mobilization without action after the 2001 Parliament attack, restraint after 26/11. Each response was self-contained and followed by a return to baseline. The current posture is different because it does not return to baseline. The shadow war continues between military operations. PRAHAAR institutionalizes the confrontational framework. The military capabilities built for Sindoor are maintained at readiness. The intelligence networks that support covert operations are sustained and expanded. For the first time in the twenty-six-year chain, India’s response to a crisis has produced not a temporary escalation followed by de-escalation but a permanent upward shift in the baseline level of confrontation.

The Counter-Terror Doctrine Future Scenario Matrix

Pulling the three scenarios together into a unified assessment reveals a pattern: India’s counter-terror doctrine is more likely to intensify than to moderate, and more likely to produce continued confrontation than resolution. Scenario A, continued shadow war at current tempo, is the most probable near-term trajectory but carries accumulating risks of operational failure and diplomatic exposure. Scenario B, escalation following a new provocation, is the most dangerous trajectory and becomes more probable the longer Scenario A continues, because the degradation of Pakistan’s terrorist capabilities creates incentives for Pakistan-based organizations to conduct spectacular attacks that restore their relevance and credibility. Scenario C, Pakistani crackdown eroding the doctrine’s justification, is the most desirable trajectory but the least probable, given the structural incentives that sustain Pakistan’s support for terrorism.

The interaction between scenarios is as important as each scenario individually. Scenario A creates the conditions for Scenario B by degrading but not destroying the organizations that could trigger another crisis. Scenario B, if it occurs and India escalates beyond Sindoor, could paradoxically increase the probability of Scenario C by demonstrating to Pakistan that the costs of supporting terrorism now include not merely targeted killings of mid-level operatives but large-scale military destruction of national infrastructure. Conversely, Scenario B could also foreclose Scenario C entirely by hardening Pakistani attitudes and reinforcing the military’s argument that the country is an existential threat that justifies any and all counter-measures, including terrorist proxies.

Timing adds further complexity. The longer Scenario A persists without resolution, the higher the accumulated pressure on Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure, but also the higher the accumulated diplomatic, operational, and institutional risks for New Delhi. A transition from Scenario A to Scenario B could occur at any point, triggered by a single terrorist attack whose timing and nature are fundamentally unpredictable. The transition from either Scenario A or B to Scenario C would require structural changes in Pakistan that operate on timescales of years or decades, not months. The doctrine’s planners must therefore optimize for a temporal mismatch: managing daily operational risks under Scenario A while preparing for the sudden onset of Scenario B and acknowledging that Scenario C remains distant.

One year after Operation Sindoor in May 2026 provides a natural point of assessment. The ceasefire has held, but the conditions that produced the conflict remain unchanged. India’s economy has absorbed the costs of military readiness without significant strain. Pakistan’s post-Sindoor procurement and restructuring are underway but far from complete. The shadow war continues with minimal international attention. The diplomatic relationship between the two countries remains frozen, with no high-level contact, no trade normalization, and no diplomatic engagement beyond the minimum required to maintain the ceasefire. This equilibrium is stable in the short term but inherently fragile, because it depends on the absence of a triggering event rather than on the resolution of the underlying conditions that produce triggering events.

In the final analysis, the doctrine’s future is not determined by India alone. It is a product of the interaction between Indian capabilities and Pakistani choices, between regional dynamics and global power competition, between institutional structures that persist and individual decisions that can change suddenly. What New Delhi has built, however, is clear: a multi-track counter-terror architecture of unprecedented scope and capability, operating without exit criteria, without legal framework, and without a defined endpoint, sustained by political will, institutional evolution, and the conviction that four decades of restraint produced nothing but more attacks while four years of offensive action produced the first significant degradation of Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure in living memory.

Whether that conviction is correct, and whether the doctrine it sustains will ultimately achieve its objectives or produce the kind of permanent confrontation that nuclear-armed states cannot safely sustain, is the central strategic question of the next decade in South Asian security. The doctrinal evolution that produced the current posture has been remarkably rapid, transforming India from a country that absorbed terrorist attacks with diplomatic protests into one that conducts precision missile strikes and sustained covert operations against the perpetrators. The question is not whether India has changed. The question is whether that change produces the security that India seeks, or whether it creates new risks that prove equally difficult to manage. The answer will be written not in policy documents or academic analyses but in the choices that both governments make when the next crisis arrives, as history and structural logic strongly suggest it will.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the future of the nation’s counter-terrorism policy?

India’s counter-terrorism policy is likely to continue along the multi-track trajectory established between 2016 and 2025. The combination of covert operations, military strikes, diplomatic pressure, and economic measures that defines the current approach has been absorbed into institutional practice and political culture. The PRAHAAR framework, launched in February 2026, formalizes this approach into a seven-pillar national strategy encompassing prevention, response, capacity building, human rights compliance, de-radicalization, international cooperation, and recovery. The trajectory points toward intensification rather than moderation, with India treating any future terrorist provocation as justification for a response calibrated to Indian objectives rather than proportional to the specific attack.

Q: Will India continue the shadow war against terrorists in Pakistan?

The covert elimination campaign is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The operational infrastructure that supports targeted killings, including intelligence networks, intermediary systems, and financing channels, has been built over several years and represents a significant institutional investment. Sustaining the campaign requires ongoing intelligence development, operational security, and political authorization, all of which appear to be in place under the current government. The campaign may face increasing challenges from Pakistani counter-intelligence adaptation, international diplomatic pressure, and the inherent risks of scaling covert operations, but none of these challenges appears sufficient to force termination in the near term.

Q: What happens if there is another major terror attack on India?

A major terror attack comparable to Pahalgam would almost certainly trigger a military response that meets or exceeds the Operation Sindoor benchmark. The three doctrinal markers established by Prime Minister Modi in May 2025, decisive response on India’s terms, rejection of nuclear blackmail, and no distinction between terrorists and their state sponsors, create a framework that makes restraint politically impossible after a major provocation. The specific form of the response would depend on the nature, scale, and attribution of the attack, but the direction of the response is predetermined by the doctrinal commitments that the current government has publicly articulated.

Q: Can India’s current doctrine end Pakistan-sponsored terrorism?

This is the central unresolved question of the republic’s counter-terror strategy. Hawks argue that sustained pressure will eventually force Pakistan to choose between its militants and its economic survival. Doves argue that the doctrine treats symptoms without addressing the institutional, ideological, and strategic structures that produce cross-border terrorism. The evidence supports elements of both arguments: the shadow war has demonstrably degraded terrorist capabilities, but Pakistan’s madrassa pipeline and military-intelligence patronage system continue to produce replacements. Whether attrition can outpace regeneration remains an empirical question that has not been conclusively answered.

Q: Will India and Pakistan have another military confrontation?

The structural factors that produced the 2025 conflict, Pakistan’s support for terrorist proxies, India’s willingness to respond militarily, and the absence of any diplomatic mechanism for resolving the underlying dispute, remain in place. Both sides have drawn operational lessons from the 2025 conflict and are investing in capabilities designed to perform better in a future confrontation. Analysts at The Diplomat and elsewhere have noted that compressed timelines, greater domestic pressure, weaker external constraints, and the perception that escalation can be controlled all increase the probability of another military confrontation. The ceasefire has held for a year, but the conditions that produced the conflict have not been addressed.

Q: Is India’s permanent-confrontation posture sustainable?

Sustainability depends on the continued alignment of political will, institutional capacity, economic resources, and diplomatic management. India’s growing economy, expanding military capabilities, and strong domestic support for the counter-terror posture suggest that the current approach is sustainable in the near to medium term. However, several factors could erode sustainability over time: economic slowdown, diplomatic isolation, operational failure, leadership change, or the accumulation of strategic risks that the doctrine generates. The nuclear dimension adds a fundamental limit to sustainability: permanent confrontation between nuclear-armed states carries risks that grow with each successive crisis.

Q: What would make India change its current doctrine?

Five categories of events could force a doctrinal reset: catastrophic operational failure that exposes the costs of confrontation; nuclear escalation that transforms the strategic environment; international isolation that produces concrete economic or diplomatic consequences; domestic political change that reprioritizes national objectives; or paradoxically, success, the genuine dismantlement of Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure that removes the justification for continued operations. Of these, catastrophic operational failure and international isolation are the most plausible near-term risks, while nuclear escalation represents the most consequential possibility.

Q: How does New Delhi’s doctrine compare to global counter-terror approaches?

India’s multi-track approach is unique among global counter-terror doctrines. The United States relied primarily on drone strikes during the Global War on Terror, supplemented by special forces operations and intelligence activities. Israel developed a targeted-killing program supported by periodic military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. Russia used overwhelming military force in Chechnya and Syria. New Delhi has combined elements of all three approaches, adding covert assassination, precision air strikes, conventional military operations, and sustained intelligence pressure into a single integrated framework. No other country maintains a comparable portfolio of counter-terror options against a single adversary.

Q: What is PRAHAAR and how does it shape future policy?

PRAHAAR stands for Prevention, Response, Aggregation, Human-rights, Attenuation of radicalization, Alignment with global efforts, and Recovery. It is India’s first officially articulated National Counter-Terrorism Policy and Strategy, launched by the Ministry of Home Affairs in February 2026. PRAHAAR consolidates India’s counter-terror approach into a unified bureaucratic framework, establishing institutional mechanisms for intelligence coordination through the Multi Agency Centre, legal prosecution through the National Investigation Agency, and capability standardization across state and central security forces. It represents the institutional codification of the doctrinal shift that the Modi government implemented through operational actions between 2016 and 2025.

Q: Does India have a legal framework for targeted killings abroad?

India does not have any publicly acknowledged legal framework authorizing targeted killings on foreign soil. Unlike the United States, which developed legal justifications based on the Authorization for Use of Military Force and Article 51 of the UN Charter, or Israel, which secured Supreme Court authorization under specific conditions, the country’s covert operations exist in a complete legal vacuum. Official deniability prevents legal scrutiny, and the PRAHAAR framework does not address the legal basis for offensive covert operations abroad. This legal gap provides operational flexibility but creates vulnerability to international legal challenges and limits India’s ability to build international legitimacy for its counter-terror operations.

Q: How does the nuclear dimension affect India’s counter-terror choices?

Nuclear weapons constrain but do not prevent India’s conventional counter-terror operations. The 2025 conflict demonstrated that India is willing to conduct sustained military operations against a nuclear-armed adversary, and Modi’s second doctrinal marker explicitly rejects the proposition that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal should deter Indian responses to terrorism. However, nuclear weapons impose an upper limit on escalation that both sides have respected thus far. The risk is that increased confidence in managing escalation, derived from the 2025 experience, leads to progressively bolder operations that reduce the margin of safety between conventional warfare and nuclear use.

Q: What role does the United States play in the nation’s counter-terror doctrine?

The United States plays a dual role: enabling partner and restraining influence. Washington has supplied India with advanced weapons systems including technologies used during Sindoor, shares intelligence on terrorist threats, and broadly supports India’s right to self-defense. Simultaneously, the United States has mediated India-Pakistan crises, pressured both sides toward restraint, and pursued its own relationship with Pakistan’s military for regional counter-terrorism cooperation. The US role during the 2025 ceasefire, brokered through intensive engagement by Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, demonstrated both American influence and its limits.

Q: How has Pakistan adapted to India’s evolving doctrine?

Pakistan has adapted across multiple dimensions. Militarily, post-Sindoor procurement includes Chinese attack helicopters, establishment of an emergency rocket force, new ammunition manufacturing capacity, and constitutional amendments restructuring military command, all indicative of emergency remediation after the 2025 conflict exposed significant vulnerabilities. On the intelligence front, Pakistani counter-intelligence has increased efforts to detect and disrupt Indian covert networks. Diplomatically, Pakistan has leveraged India’s extrajudicial operations to build international sympathy and has maintained airspace restrictions against Indian carriers as both a punitive measure and a symbol of continued confrontation. Strategically, Pakistan continues to rely on its nuclear deterrent as the ultimate constraint on Indian escalation.

Q: What are the risks of the republic’s current approach?

The primary risks include: escalation to nuclear confrontation through miscalculation during a future military operation; diplomatic isolation if covert operations produce incontrovertible evidence of extrajudicial killings; operational failure that damages India’s military credibility; economic strain from sustained military readiness against a nuclear adversary; and the perpetuation of a conflict cycle that neither side can resolve. Each risk is individually manageable in the near term but accumulates over time, creating compounding strategic exposure.

Q: How does the China factor influence India’s doctrine against Pakistan?

China’s role as Pakistan’s primary weapons supplier, economic partner, and diplomatic protector creates a strategic complication for India’s counter-terror doctrine. Indian military operations against Pakistan inevitably involve Chinese-supplied weapons systems, and escalation risks indirect confrontation with Beijing. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor gives China a direct economic stake in Pakistani stability, and Chinese diplomatic protection in the UN Security Council shields Pakistan from international pressure. India must calibrate its operations to avoid triggering Chinese counter-responses while maintaining sufficient pressure on Pakistan to achieve counter-terror objectives.

Q: Is New Delhi’s counter-terror success permanent or temporary?

The gains achieved through the shadow war and Sindoor are real but potentially reversible. Terrorist infrastructure can be rebuilt. Leadership losses can be replaced through promotion from lower ranks. Training camps can relocate to new sites. The degradation of capabilities that New Delhi has achieved represents a snapshot of a dynamic competition, not a permanent strategic condition. Sustaining the gains requires sustained pressure, which in turn requires sustained resources, political commitment, and operational discipline. If India reduces pressure, even temporarily, the organizations it targets have demonstrated the resilience to regenerate.

Q: What lessons from Operation Sindoor shape future doctrine?

Sindoor provided several doctrinal lessons that shape future planning: precision strikes can achieve significant damage against terrorist infrastructure without triggering nuclear escalation; India’s air defense systems can neutralize Pakistani retaliatory strikes; multi-domain operations requiring air, naval, missile, and electronic warfare coordination are within India’s institutional capacity; the international community will accept Indian military action when framed as counter-terrorism self-defense; and Pakistan’s military response, though vigorous, did not prevent India from achieving its primary operational objectives. These lessons increase confidence in the repeatability of Sindoor-type operations, which both strengthens deterrence and increases risk appetite.

Q: Could diplomatic engagement replace India’s confrontational posture?

Diplomatic engagement has been effectively foreclosed by the Modi doctrine’s three markers and by the institutional momentum of the confrontational posture. the country’s official position, articulated through the zero-tolerance policy, is that talks with Pakistan will resume only when Pakistan completely and verifiably dismantles its terrorist infrastructure. Since Pakistan has shown no inclination to meet this condition, diplomacy is in indefinite suspension. A future Indian government could, in theory, modify this condition, but doing so would carry significant political costs and would require a credible Pakistani gesture that no current Pakistani leader appears willing to make.

Q: How does the Pahalgam attack influence the doctrine’s trajectory?

The Pahalgam massacre serves as both trigger and template. As a trigger, it produced the most intense Indian military response since 1971 and established the benchmarks that future responses will be measured against. As a template, it demonstrated the vulnerability that India’s counter-terror doctrine is designed to address: despite years of shadow war operations and the degradation of Pakistan-based organizations, a relatively small terrorist cell was still able to plan and execute a devastating attack on Indian soil. Pahalgam reinforced the argument that India’s current approach, however effective at degrading capabilities, has not yet achieved the objective of preventing attacks, and therefore that the doctrine must continue and potentially intensify.

Q: What does India’s counter-terror doctrine mean for global security?

India’s multi-track approach establishes a template that other democracies facing cross-border terrorism may seek to emulate, adapt, or challenge. The doctrine’s most significant global implication is its demonstration that a democratic government can conduct sustained covert operations and precision military strikes against a nuclear-armed adversary while maintaining domestic political support and international partnerships. Whether this template is regarded as a model for effective counter-terrorism or as a dangerous precedent for extrajudicial state violence depends on perspective, but its existence reshapes the global debate about the limits of legitimate self-defense and the obligations of states that harbor terrorist organizations.

Q: What is the most likely trajectory for the next five years?

The most likely trajectory combines elements of Scenario A and Scenario B: continued shadow war operations at or near current tempo, punctuated by the possibility of another major confrontation if a significant terrorist attack occurs. The structural factors that produced the 2025 crisis remain in place, and both sides are investing in capabilities designed for the next round. The ceasefire holds in the absence of a new provocation, but neither side has invested in the diplomatic infrastructure that would be needed to prevent a new provocation from producing the same escalation cycle. The probability of at least one more major India-Pakistan military confrontation within the next decade is assessed as moderate to high by most analysts who study the region.