On the morning of April 4, 2024, a British newspaper did something that no Pakistani official, no Western intelligence service, and no investigative outlet had managed in three years of accumulating dead bodies across Lahore, Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Sialkot. The Guardian printed a sentence with India in the subject position and an order to kill in the predicate. The headline read that the Indian government had ordered assassinations on Pakistani soil, and beneath it sat the work of three reporters, a sheaf of documents the paper said it had reviewed, and a roster of anonymous intelligence officers from both countries who agreed, for once, on something. What had been a pattern recognized only by analysts and a grievance voiced only by Islamabad became, in a single news cycle, a claim carried on front pages from Delhi to Washington. The covert campaign had a witness with a masthead.

This is the moment the secret war stopped being secret in the way that mattered. Secrecy in a campaign of this kind was never about whether journalists could guess what was happening. By early 2024 any competent observer of South Asian security could recite the pattern, and several had. Secrecy was about whether the guessing carried institutional weight, whether a finance ministry in a Western capital or a parliamentary committee or a wire service would treat the pattern as established fact rather than as a Pakistani talking point. The London paper supplied that weight. It converted suspicion into citation. Every subsequent article about the eliminations, every diplomatic démarche, every academic footnote could now point to a named publication rather than to a hunch. The reporting did not reveal the campaign. It legitimized the discussion of the campaign, and those are different things with very different consequences. The argument that runs through this account is uncomfortable for anyone who believes that sunlight reliably disinfects. Exposure of this campaign did not slow it. The tempo of eliminations in the two years after publication exceeded the tempo of the two years before it. Whether the investigation caused that acceleration or merely failed to prevent it is a question worth holding open, and this piece will hold it open. What is not in dispute is that the most consequential journalism ever produced about the shadow war was followed not by restraint but by a surge.

The Preceding Link

To understand why April 2024 mattered, the year that preceded it has to be set down with precision, because the investigation did not arrive into a quiet field. It arrived into a year that had already made the pattern impossible to ignore. The pre-investigation acceleration of 2023 is the link in the chain that made the London report both possible and, in a sense, inevitable.

Through 2023, the bodies accumulated at a cadence that no theory of coincidence could absorb. In February, two men wanted in India were shot within days of each other in different cities, one in Rawalpindi and one in Karachi. In May, a Sikh militant leader long designated by New Delhi was gunned down in Lahore. Through the autumn, the strikes clustered, with a Lashkar-e-Taiba figure killed in one city and a Jaish-e-Mohammed organizer killed in another, the November weeks producing a sequence of deaths so tightly spaced that Pakistani investigators began speaking, on background, of a single hand. By the close of the year, Pakistani security officials had privately tallied at least six killings they attributed to a hostile foreign service, with two more from the year before that fit the same template. The method repeated with a consistency that read as signature rather than as accident. Two men on a motorcycle. Close-range fire. A target caught in a predictable location, often a mosque, often at prayer. An escape through congested streets where pursuit was hopeless. The repetition is what turned a list of murders into evidence of a doctrine, and that doctrine is mapped in detail in the unknown gunmen pattern that defined the campaign’s operational grammar.

January 2024 supplied the second precondition. Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary, Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi, stood before reporters in Islamabad and said the words that a government does not say lightly. He claimed credible evidence of Indian involvement in killings inside Pakistan, described the operations as contract killings run through a sophisticated network spread across multiple jurisdictions, and named cases. He pointed to the murder of Muhammad Riaz in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in September and to the killing of Shahid Latif in Sialkot a month later. He hinted at others under investigation. This was the formal accusation, the state of Pakistan placing its credibility behind the charge. For the architecture of the campaign it changed something real. As long as the only accuser was Islamabad, the accusation could be filed under a familiar heading. Pakistan blamed India for many things. The whole apparatus of Pakistani grievance was a known quantity in Western chancelleries, easy to discount precisely because it was so reflexive. The shifting Pakistani counter-narrative had cycled through denial, attribution to internal feuds, and formal complaint without ever forcing a Western reckoning.

What Islamabad lacked was a non-Pakistani voice. A foreign secretary’s press conference is an interested party speaking for itself. The structural function of the London newspaper, three months later, was to be the disinterested party, or at least the party that could be read as disinterested. A British broadsheet with no obvious stake in the India-Pakistan quarrel, reporting the same conclusion that Islamabad had reached, transformed the epistemics of the entire question. The accusation was no longer Pakistan’s word against India’s denial. It was now a documented inquiry, sourced on both sides, that happened to corroborate Pakistan’s word. Qazi’s January press conference was the prosecution opening its case. The April report was the appearance of a witness the jury had no reason to dismiss.

The two cases Qazi named in January deserve a closer look, because they show why the Pakistani charge had become specific enough to be reportable. Shahid Latif was not an obscure figure. He had been named by Indian investigators as a planner of the 2016 assault on the Pathankot air base, an attack that killed Indian security personnel and that had poisoned a brief thaw in relations. When Latif was shot dead inside a mosque in Sialkot in October 2023, the killing was not a random act of urban violence. It was the death of a man on India’s most-wanted lists, in a manner consistent with every other strike in the sequence, and it gave Pakistani investigators a case they could describe with names, dates, and a documented Indian grievance behind it. Muhammad Riaz, killed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir the month before, fit the same logic. A foreign secretary citing two such cases was not gesturing at a vague fear. He was pointing at deaths with paperwork.

The Pakistani recognition process across 2023 is itself a piece of the story that the later report would tell. Pakistani investigators did not begin the year convinced that a foreign service was running a campaign. They began it treating the deaths as discrete crimes, the kind of score-settling and sectarian bloodshed that Pakistani cities produce without foreign help. What changed their assessment was repetition. By the autumn, officers comparing case files across jurisdictions were noticing the same elements recurring, the motorcycle, the recruited local shooter, the cash trail, the targeting of men who shared one specific trait, namely a place on an Indian wanted list. Pattern recognition inside a security service is slow, because a security service is institutionally reluctant to admit that it has been penetrated to the degree the pattern implied. The fact that Pakistani investigators reached the conclusion anyway, and reached it before any newspaper did, carries weight. It means the report that arrived in April 2024 was not manufacturing a narrative. It was relaying a conclusion that Pakistani professionals had already, reluctantly, arrived at on the evidence.

There is a further dimension to the preceding year that the chain requires, and it concerns the Western cases that landed in its final months. The Canadian accusation in September 2023 and the United States indictment in November 2023 were not, on their face, about Pakistan at all. They concerned Sikh separatists on Western soil. But their effect on the Pakistan question was structural and large. They established, in the minds of Western officials and Western editors, that the proposition was thinkable. Before September 2023, an editor weighing whether to commission an inquiry into Indian killings in Pakistan had to overcome a strong prior, the prior that democratic India did not run foreign assassination programs and that the charge was therefore probably Pakistani propaganda. After the Canadian statement and the American indictment, that prior was gone. India had been publicly accused of exactly this category of conduct by two Western governments. The investigative path into the Pakistan theater had been cleared, not by anything that happened in Pakistan, but by what had happened in Surrey and in New York. The 2023 surge supplied the pattern, the January accusation supplied the formal charge, and the Western cases supplied the permission.

The 2023 acceleration and the January accusation together created a situation with only one missing element, and journalism is in the business of supplying missing elements. The pattern existed. The Pakistani charge existed. The intelligence operatives on both sides who knew the truth existed and, for reasons examined later in this account, had reached the point of being willing to talk. The reporting that followed was less a bolt from the blue than the closing of a circuit that 2023 had wired. Anyone reading the campaign overview by the start of 2024 could see the shape of what was coming. The only open question was which outlet would publish first, and how India would respond when one did.

What Happened

The report appeared under the bylines of Hannah Ellis-Petersen, the paper’s South Asia correspondent, Aakash Hassan, and Shah Meer Baloch, a Pakistani journalist, and it was built on a sourcing structure worth dissecting because the structure is the story. The newspaper did not claim to have a confession. It claimed something more carefully constructed. It said it had spoken to intelligence operatives in both India and Pakistan, that it had reviewed documentation relating to a set of assassinations, and that the accounts it gathered converged on a single conclusion, namely that the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence service, had carried out targeted killings on Pakistani territory as a matter of policy.

The headline itself was an act of editorial precision worth pausing on, because headlines on stories of this kind are negotiated word by word. The paper did not write that India was suspected of killings, or that Pakistan accused India of killings. It wrote that the Indian government had ordered killings, with intelligence officials as the attributing clause. The verb ordered placed authorship at the level of the state rather than of a rogue cell, and the attribution to intelligence officials told the reader that the claim rested on insider testimony rather than on inference. Every word of that construction would be fought over in the days that followed. India’s defenders read the headline as a verdict the body text did not earn. The paper’s editors would have said the headline summarized what their sources asserted, and that summarizing a sourced assertion is what headlines do. The argument over the headline was, in miniature, the argument over the whole report, a dispute about the distance between what sources say and what a newspaper may print as established.

The specifics the report laid out were granular enough to be checkable in principle and unverifiable in practice, which is the characteristic texture of intelligence journalism. Pakistani investigators, the paper reported, believed the operations were run by Indian sleeper cells based largely in the United Arab Emirates. Those cells, the account went, did not use Indian nationals as triggermen. They paid intermediaries. Money moved to local Pakistani criminals or to poor men recruited for cash, and in several instances the actual shooters were jihadists persuaded that the targets were infidels deserving of death. The sums described were substantial by local standards, millions of rupees per operation. The newspaper reported that Pakistani officials suspected Indian involvement in as many as twenty killings since 2020, and that the paper itself had seen documents relating to roughly seven of them, while stating plainly that it could not independently verify those documents.

That last clause matters more than the headline. A responsible reading of the article has to hold two facts together. The newspaper printed a strong claim, and the newspaper conceded the limits of its own verification. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is the gap the entire campaign was designed to live inside. The A-series investigation analysis takes apart the sourcing methodology in forensic detail, weighing what each category of source could credibly know and why operatives on both sides might want the account public. The compressed version is this. A Pakistani intelligence officer can credibly attest that a man was shot, that the shooter was a recruited local, that money moved. A Pakistani intelligence officer cannot credibly attest, from direct knowledge, that the order originated in New Delhi, because that officer was not in the room where any such order was given. The Indian operatives quoted in the report supplied the other half, the half about intent and authorization, and they spoke anonymously, which means their motives cannot be tested. The reporting was a genuine achievement of sourcing. It was also, structurally, a chain of inference rather than a chain of custody, and honest analysis says so.

The Indian operatives quoted in the report supplied the most arresting material, because they did not merely confirm the killings. They explained them. One unnamed Indian intelligence official told the paper that the shift in approach followed the Pulwama attack of 2019, when a suicide bomber killed forty Indian paramilitary personnel in Kashmir. After Pulwama, this official said, the logic changed. The state would no longer wait for attacks to be launched from sanctuaries it could not reach. It would reach into the sanctuaries. The official framed it as a problem of source elimination. The attacks could not be stopped on Indian soil because the planning and shelter sat across the border, so the planners and the shelterers had to be addressed where they lived. The same official indicated that operations of this category required sign-off at the highest level of government, a phrase that did a great deal of work and that India’s denials would later have to contend with.

The report also located India’s alleged doctrine within a lineage. The Indian official cited Israel’s Mossad and the Soviet KGB as models, services associated with extraterritorial killing, and the story noted that the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 had been referenced inside the Indian agency. The placement of India in that company was a deliberate act of framing, and it was framing that would prove double-edged. To the report’s authors, the comparison underscored a drift toward lawlessness. To a substantial slice of the Indian public, the comparison underscored that India had finally joined the ranks of serious states willing to act on their security interests, a reading the India and Israel comparison examines as its own analytical problem.

One sentence in the report deserves separate attention because it complicates the simple story and because the rest of this account depends on taking it seriously. According to one Indian intelligence official quoted by the paper, New Delhi had recently ordered the suspension of targeted killings in Pakistan after Canada and the United States went public with their own allegations, and the official said no suspicious killings had taken place in the early months of 2024. This is a remarkable thing to find inside a report whose headline announced an active assassination program. The newspaper was simultaneously reporting that India ran the campaign and that India had paused the campaign. The pause claim is not a footnote. It is central to the question of fallout, because it means the operational tempo at the exact moment of publication was, by the report’s own sourcing, near zero. Anything that happened afterward, any resumption, any surge, has to be measured against a baseline the report itself established as a deliberate halt. The chronological record of the campaign confirms the early-2024 lull and the later resumption, and the shape of that curve is the evidentiary heart of this analysis.

The forensic question that any serious reader has to ask of the report is what, precisely, each of its claims rests on, and the document rewards that scrutiny better than its critics allowed. Take the sleeper-cell architecture, the assertion that operations were run from the United Arab Emirates. This was attributed to Pakistani investigators, and a Pakistani investigator is well placed to know certain things about it. If a shooter was arrested or identified, that shooter’s phone, that shooter’s payment history, that shooter’s contacts could plausibly point toward handlers operating from Gulf numbers. A Pakistani investigator can credibly say that the money and the tasking appeared to route through the Emirates. What a Pakistani investigator cannot say, from the same evidence, is that the men on the Gulf end were Indian intelligence officers rather than freelance fixers or criminal middlemen. The Emirates detail is therefore strong as a description of the logistical geography and weak as proof of state direction, and the coverage, read carefully, does not actually claim more than the evidence supports. It says Pakistani investigators believed the cells were Indian. Belief, attributed and sourced, is what the document offers, and it offers it honestly.

The recruited-jihadist detail is the most striking single claim in the report and also the one that most rewards skepticism, in both directions. The account held that in some operations the actual shooters were jihadists deceived into believing their targets were infidels, men who thought they were committing a religious killing when they were in fact executing an Indian intelligence tasking. If true, it is a detail of considerable operational elegance, because it solves a real problem. A shooter who believes he is killing for God does not need to be told who is paying, does not connect his act to a foreign state, and cannot, if captured, reveal a chain he never knew existed. The deception would be a near-perfect insulation. But the same elegance is a reason for caution. A detail that perfectly serves a narrative is a detail that a source with a narrative would be tempted to supply. The claim came from the Pakistani side, and the Pakistani side had an obvious interest in a story in which India not only kills on Pakistani soil but corrupts and weaponizes Pakistan’s own militants to do it. The detail might be accurate. It might also be the kind of embellishment that an interested source adds to a true core. The report presented it as a claim by investigators, which is the correct way to present a detail of uncertain weight, and the A-series investigation analysis examines exactly this kind of layered reliability question case by case.

The documents are the third pillar and the murkiest. The newspaper said it had reviewed documentation relating to roughly seven of the killings and stated that it could not independently verify that documentation. This is the most important sentence in the entire report for anyone assessing its evidentiary weight, and it is the sentence that India’s defenders quoted most and that the report’s amplifiers quoted least. Unverified documents are not worthless. A reporter of Ellis-Petersen’s experience does not describe documents in print without forming a professional judgment about their plausibility, and the decision to reference them at all is itself a signal that the paper found them credible enough to mention. But unverified is unverified. The reader is being asked to trust the newspaper’s judgment about the documents rather than the documents themselves, and a reader is entitled to weigh that trust according to the reader’s own assessment of the newspaper. The report’s structure, in the end, asks for two distinct acts of trust, trust in the anonymous sources and trust in the editorial judgment that vetted them, and a fair reading neither dismisses those acts of trust as worthless nor mistakes them for the certainty that only on-the-record evidence provides.

The Zahoor Mistry case, mentioned in the report, illustrates the texture of the whole. Mistry was one of the hijackers of Indian Airlines Flight 814 in 1999, a man whose name carried a quarter-century of Indian grievance, and he was shot dead in Karachi in early 2022. The dispatch relayed the Pakistani account that his killing was arranged by Indian sleeper cells that had paid Afghan nationals to carry it out. For an Indian audience, the Mistry killing was not an atrocity to be hidden. It was a closing of accounts, the death of a hijacker who should, in the Indian telling, have faced justice two decades earlier. The report’s inclusion of the Mistry case therefore did something its authors may not have fully intended. It reminded Indian readers that the campaign being exposed had reached a man whose continued life had been a standing insult. The roster of victims was, from one angle, a charge sheet against India. From another angle, widely held inside India, it was a list of accounts settled.

The report’s language choices became their own controversy. Critics in India seized on the description of the men killed, noting that the paper had at points referred to militants as individuals and to Khalistani figures as activists, framing that Indian commentators read as a soft-pedaling of the victims’ records. The report did, later in its text, acknowledge that the majority of those allegedly killed were associated with groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and that several had convictions or proven links to terrorist incidents that had killed hundreds. But the early framing gave India’s defenders an opening, and they used it to argue that the report was less an act of journalism than an act of advocacy. The dispute over a few nouns was not trivial. It was a preview of the larger interpretive war the report would trigger, a war fought less over whether the killings happened than over what the killings meant.

The expose, then, was not a single claim but a layered document. It asserted a policy of killing. It described a method involving sleeper cells, intermediaries, and recruited shooters. It supplied a motive rooted in Pulwama. It placed India in a lineage of states that kill abroad. And it recorded, almost in passing, that the policy was at that moment suspended. Every piece of fallout that followed can be traced to how different actors chose to read this layered document, which parts they amplified, and which parts they ignored.

Why It Happened

A pattern of killings had existed since 2021 without producing a report of this magnitude. The question of why the exposure crystallized in April 2024 specifically, and why it took the form of a British newspaper investigation rather than anything else, has three answers, and the three together explain more than any one of them alone.

The first answer is that intelligence operatives on both sides had reached the point of wanting the story out, and that convergence is the rarest and most telling feature of the whole episode. Intelligence officers do not speak to journalists about live operations without a reason, and the reasons differ by side. For the Pakistani officers, the motive is comparatively legible. Their service had been humiliated. A foreign agency was, on their own assessment, killing men inside Pakistani cities with something close to impunity, and the Pakistani security establishment could neither prevent the operations nor produce the kind of proof that would force an international response. Talking to a credible foreign newspaper was a way to internationalize a grievance that domestic channels had failed to monetize. It converted an operational failure into a diplomatic instrument. If Pakistan could not stop the killings, Pakistan could at least ensure the world was told who was doing them, and a British masthead carried further than an Islamabad press conference.

The Indian motive is harder and more interesting, and it is where the analysis of Rana Banerji, a former special secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing, becomes indispensable. Banerji’s value as an interpreter is that he understands the institutional psychology of the agency from the inside, and his reading of episodes like this one resists the assumption that a leak is always a failure of discipline. Sometimes a controlled disclosure serves the institution. An intelligence service that has built a capability it cannot publicly claim faces a peculiar frustration. Deterrence requires that the adversary believe in the capability, and belief is hard to cultivate when the official position is total denial. A campaign that the Indian state can never acknowledge is a campaign whose deterrent value is permanently capped, because deterrence is a message and a message has to be received. An anonymous quote in a foreign newspaper threads that needle. It allows the capability to be communicated to Pakistan, to Pakistan’s militant proxies, and to the wider region, while the government retains the deniability that a formal admission would surrender. Read this way, the Indian operatives who spoke to the paper were not betraying the campaign. They were extending it by other means, using a British broadsheet as a delivery vehicle for a message the government could not send itself. This interpretation cannot be proven, and Banerji himself would frame it as one possibility among several rather than as a certainty. But it explains a fact that the betrayal theory cannot, namely why two Indian officials would risk speaking at all about operations whose exposure could only embarrass their government, unless the exposure served a purpose the government quietly valued.

The second answer concerns the Western allegations that had landed in the preceding months and that had changed the global information environment in a way that made the London report viable. In September 2023, Canada’s Prime Minister stood in Parliament and accused agents of the Indian government of involvement in the killing of a Sikh activist on Canadian soil. In November 2023, United States federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment describing a foiled plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist in New York, a plot they alleged had been directed by an Indian government employee. These were not Pakistani accusations. These were accusations from India’s closest democratic partners, made through a parliament and a federal court, two of the most credible institutions in the Western world. They did something for the Pakistani charge that the Pakistani charge could never do for itself. They made it plausible. A reader inclined to dismiss the idea that India ran assassination operations abroad now had to reconcile that dismissal with a Canadian parliamentary statement and a sealed American indictment. Once Ottawa and Washington had publicly entertained the proposition, a British newspaper investigating the same proposition in a different theater was no longer swimming against the current. It was reporting a story the West had already half-told. The Western allegations that followed the London report would deepen this dynamic, but the Canada and United States cases also preceded it, and their preceding role is what gave the April investigation its running start.

The third answer is the simplest and is about the calendar. The report appeared at the beginning of April 2024, weeks before the start of India’s general election. No serious analysis can treat that timing as neutral, and Indian critics of the report seized on it immediately, arguing that a foreign newspaper had deliberately timed a damaging story to influence a democratic vote. The timing cuts more than one way, though, and the cleanest analysis of that comes from Shekhar Gupta, the veteran Indian editor whose reading of how the domestic press metabolized the report is examined at length later in this account. Gupta’s general framework is useful here too. A story published during an Indian election does not land in a vacuum. It lands in an electorate, and an electorate is not a passive recipient. A foreign paper alleging that the Indian government ordered the killing of terrorists in Pakistan was, to one segment of Indian voters, an accusation. To another and probably larger segment, it was a campaign advertisement the government did not have to pay for. The report’s authors may have intended an exposé of state lawlessness. A great many Indian readers received a confirmation of state strength. The election timing therefore did not simply create a motive for the report’s critics. It created a structural reason the piece could not function as the report’s authors might have hoped, because the audience that mattered most had already decided that the conduct being exposed was conduct it approved of.

The willingness of the operatives to talk repays one more pass, because the convergence is genuinely strange and the strangeness is informative. Intelligence services across the world treat unauthorized contact with the press as among the gravest of professional sins, and yet here were officers from two mutually hostile services, on opposite sides of one of the most dangerous rivalries on earth, all choosing to speak to the same reporters about the same operations within the same reporting window. That is not the random behavior of indiscreet individuals. It is the signature of two institutions that had each, independently, calculated that disclosure served them. The Pakistani calculation has been described. The Indian calculation, in Banerji’s institutional reading, turns on a problem that besets every deniable program, the problem that deniability and deterrence pull against each other. A killing that the world cannot attribute to you punishes the dead man but warns no one, because deterrence is a message and an unattributed killing carries no return address. A service that has invested years and considerable risk in building a strike capability does not want that capability to warn nobody. The anonymous quote is the resolution. It lets the message be sent while the formal denial is preserved. The Indian operatives quoted in the report, on this reading, were not rogue. They were performing a function, the function of converting a deniable capability into a deterrent one, and they did it through a foreign newspaper because a foreign newspaper supplied exactly the right combination of reach and deniability.

There is a related question, easy to skip past, of why a British outlet specifically. The answer is partly accident and partly structure. The Guardian had the South Asia reporting infrastructure, the appetite for long-form intelligence journalism, and the editorial willingness to publish a story that two governments would attack. But the structural point is that a British masthead occupied an almost ideal position in the credibility geography. It was Western, which gave it standing that no Pakistani outlet could have. It was not American, which meant it could not be dismissed as an instrument of Washington’s own complicated agenda in South Asia. It was a legacy broadsheet with a global readership and a reputation that it had every incentive to protect, which meant its editorial vetting could be presented as a guarantee of seriousness. A claim of this magnitude needed a carrier with exactly that profile to travel as far as it did, and the carrier’s nationality and pedigree were part of why the report became, almost overnight, the citable account rather than one allegation among many.

The credibility transfer from the Western cases deserves its own mechanical account, because it is the part of the causal story that is easiest to state and hardest to overstate. Credibility in international accusation is not a property of the accusation. It is a property of the accuser. The identical sentence, India runs a foreign assassination program, carries different weight depending on who utters it, and the weight is assigned by the audience’s prior assessment of the speaker. From Islamabad, the sentence carried almost no weight, because Islamabad’s credibility on Indian wrongdoing had been spent over decades of reflexive blame. From a Canadian Prime Minister addressing Parliament, the same sentence carried enormous weight, because a Canadian Prime Minister had no history of reflexive anti-Indian accusation and a great deal to lose by making one falsely. The British newspaper sat between these poles and closer to the Canadian one. It had no national stake in the India-Pakistan quarrel, it had a global reputation to protect, and it had just watched two Western governments lend the underlying proposition their own credibility. The report could borrow that credibility. It could relay the Pakistani charge while standing on the platform that Ottawa and Washington had built, and that borrowed standing is much of what made the investigation land as fact rather than as allegation.

The election timing requires a final and slightly uncomfortable observation. The report’s critics treated the calendar as proof of malice, evidence that a foreign paper had deliberately set out to wound the Indian government before a vote. The charge is unprovable and probably overstated, because investigative reporting of this complexity is published when the sourcing matures, not when a political calendar dictates, and the sourcing here had been maturing across the months since the Western cases broke. But the critics were right about one thing, even if they drew the wrong conclusion from it. The timing did shape the report’s effect, profoundly. A report alleging that a government kills terrorists abroad, dropped into the final weeks of that government’s reelection campaign, was always going to be metabolized by the campaign rather than by the conscience. Whatever the authors intended, the calendar guaranteed that the report’s largest audience would encounter it as electoral content. The reasons the report was published when it was, in other words, are tangled up with the reasons it could not function as a check. A different publication date would not have changed the report’s facts. It might have changed the report’s fate.

These forces, the convergent willingness of operatives to talk, the credibility transfer from the Canada and United States cases, and the pre-election calendar, are why the exposure took the shape it did and arrived when it did. None of them, it should be noted, is a force that points toward restraint. Operatives leaking to extend deterrence, Western accusations that normalize the underlying claim, and an electorate that rewards the conduct, are conditions under which a campaign continues. The reasons the report happened are, on inspection, the same reasons the report failed to stop anything.

The Immediate Consequences

The response to the article divided cleanly along national lines within hours, and the speed and predictability of that division is itself a piece of evidence about how little the report changed.

New Delhi’s reaction was immediate, categorical, and rehearsed. The Ministry of External Affairs dismissed the report as false and malicious anti-India propaganda, a phrase that had the worn smoothness of language used before. The denial leaned on a prior statement by the External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, to the effect that targeted killing abroad was not the policy of the government of India. The Indian rebuttal had a structure, and the structure is worth naming because it would be reused without variation for the next two years. It did not engage the specifics. It did not address the documents, the named cases, the sleeper-cell description, or the Pulwama account. It attacked the source. It impugned the motive. It restated a general policy denial. This is the rhetorical architecture of plausible deniability operating exactly as designed. A government that engages specifics gets drawn into a factual contest it might lose. A government that refuses the specifics and attacks the venue keeps the contest on terrain it controls, and it signals to a domestic audience that the whole thing is a foreign smear rather than a matter requiring an answer.

Islamabad’s reaction was the mirror image and was equally choreographed. Pakistani officials treated the report as vindication. For three years Pakistan had been making a charge that the world discounted because Pakistan was making it. Now a respected foreign newspaper had reached the same conclusion, and Pakistan’s posture shifted from accuser to corroborated accuser. The shift carried an awkwardness that Pakistani officials largely declined to acknowledge, because the report’s vindication came at a price. To accept the story was to accept its central factual texture, and that texture included the detail that most of the men killed were associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, that several had convictions or proven links to terrorist incidents that had killed hundreds of people, and that others functioned as handlers coordinating attacks. Pakistan could not fully embrace the report as proof of Indian wrongdoing without also publicizing that the victims were precisely the militant figures Islamabad had spent decades insisting it did not shelter. The report that vindicated Pakistan’s accusation simultaneously documented Pakistan’s harboring problem. Pakistani officials handled this by emphasizing the violation of sovereignty and the principle of extraterritorial killing while saying as little as possible about who, specifically, had been killed.

The most consequential immediate fact, though, was not either government’s statement. It was the operational lull. The report’s own sourcing, as noted, included an Indian official’s claim that killings had been suspended after the Canada and United States allegations and that no suspicious deaths had occurred in early 2024. In the weeks after publication, that lull held. There was no demonstrative strike to answer the report, no body dropped to show defiance. To a casual observer this looked like the coverage working, like exposure inducing caution. The causal reading is shakier than it appears. The pause predated the report. By the Indian official’s own account it had begun months earlier, in response to Ottawa and Washington rather than to London. The report did not create the lull. The report was published into a lull that already existed, and it then received credit, in some early commentary, for a restraint it had not produced. This distinction is not pedantic. It is the entire methodological key to the long-term analysis, because if an observer mistakes a pre-existing pause for a report-induced one, that observer will then misread the eventual resumption as a betrayal of the report’s promise rather than as the expiration of a pause that had nothing to do with the dispatch.

The Indian denial deserves to be read as a designed artifact rather than as a mere reaction, because its design is the point. A government caught in a credible allegation has, broadly, three available postures. It can confirm, it can engage and contest the specifics, or it can refuse and attack the venue. Confirmation was never an option for a campaign whose entire value depended on deniability. Engagement was the trap, because to contest the specifics of the Mistry killing or the Latif killing or the sleeper-cell structure was to enter a factual argument in which every exchange would generate fresh headlines and in which New Delhi might, on any given point, be shown to be wrong. The third posture, refusal plus attack on the venue, was the only one consistent with the campaign’s logic, and so it was the one chosen. Calling the report anti-India propaganda accomplished several things at once. It told the domestic audience that the report was a foreign smear and therefore required no soul-searching. It signaled to the international system that India would not be drawn. And it kept every specific claim formally unaddressed, which meant every specific claim also remained formally undenied. The phrase not the government’s policy is a small masterpiece of this kind of construction, because it denies a policy without denying an act, and a campaign can be conducted through acts that are never elevated to the status of avowed policy.

Islamabad’s predicament after the report was real and largely unspoken. The reporting handed Pakistan the corroboration it had sought for three years, and Pakistan could not fully cash it. To brandish the document as proof of Indian assassination was to brandish a text that described, in its own supporting detail, a Pakistan whose cities sheltered Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed leadership, whose territory hosted the planners of attacks that had killed hundreds, and whose denials of that sheltering the expose quietly demolished. Every time a Pakistani official cited the piece to indict India, that official was also citing a text that indicted Pakistan. The result was a curiously muted Pakistani triumph. Officials spoke of sovereignty violations and of international law, the safest available ground, and they largely avoided the victims, because the victims were the part of the story that Pakistan could not discuss without conceding the harboring that the shifting Pakistani counter-narrative had spent years denying. The report was a gift to Islamabad that came wrapped in an indictment of Islamabad, and Pakistan’s officials handled it with the wariness that such a gift deserves.

The operational lull in the weeks after publication generated a small body of premature commentary that is worth correcting, because the error in that commentary is the error this whole account exists to prevent. Some observers, noting the absence of fresh killings in the spring of 2024, suggested that the report had induced caution, that India had pulled back under the glare of international scrutiny. The reading is wrong on the chronology. The lull was not a response to the report. It was, by the testimony embedded in the piece itself, a response to the earlier Western accusations, a halt ordered before the report existed. The piece was published into the lull and then, in some accounts, given credit for it. Untangling that confusion is essential, because an observer who believes the report caused the lull will necessarily read the later resumption as the report’s failure, as exposure wearing off. The truer account is that the report neither caused the lull nor failed when the lull ended. The pause had its own cause and its own clock, and when an attack at Pahalgam reset that clock, the resumption owed nothing to the report’s loss of force, because the investigation had never been the thing holding the campaign back.

There was a further immediate consequence that registered mostly in retrospect. The report established, permanently, a citable reference. Before April 2024, a journalist or analyst or official asserting that India ran a killing campaign in Pakistan was asserting it on their own authority or on Islamabad’s. After April 2024, they could cite the newspaper. The piece became infrastructure. It became the thing that footnotes pointed to, the prior reporting that every subsequent story could lean on, the established account that no longer had to be re-established. This is why the report’s significance is real even though its deterrent effect was nil. It did not change what India did. It changed what could be said about what India did, and it changed it for everyone, in every venue, from that day forward. The global reaction to the allegations against New Delhi, and the conspicuous gaps in that reaction, became possible to discuss in concrete terms only because the report had given the discussion a spine.

The Long-Term Chain

The honest test of any investigative report is not how loud the day of publication was. It is what the world looked like two years later. For this report the two-year test produces a finding that should trouble anyone committed to the faith that exposure constrains. The campaign the report exposed did not contract. It expanded. Setting the operational record before April 2024 against the operational record after it is the central analytical exercise of this section, and the comparison is built deliberately, because the shape of the curve is the argument.

Consider first the period the article itself covered, the stretch from the campaign’s initiation through the end of 2023. The initiation phase ran across 2021 and 2022 at a deliberate, almost cautious tempo. A car bomb near a militant leader’s Lahore residence in mid-2021 injured no one and functioned as a declaration. The killing of Saleem Rehmani in early 2022 functioned as a proof of concept. The killing of the IC-814 hijacker Zahoor Mistry in Karachi in early 2022 functioned as confirmation of method. Across those two years the confirmed eliminations could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and the slow pace reflected a campaign establishing itself, testing whether the model worked, learning whether Pakistan could respond. Then 2023 accelerated the cadence into the range Pakistani investigators tallied at six or more for the year, the year that produced the clustered November strikes and that earned its description as the year the campaign became undeniable. By the time the report appeared, the trajectory across the pre-publication period was already one of acceleration, from a handful of operations to a sustained monthly rhythm. The report did not interrupt a steady state. It documented a rising curve.

Now set down the post-publication record, and do it with care for the sequence. The months immediately after April 2024 were quiet, the continuation of the lull the report had recorded. That quiet is real and should not be erased to make the argument cleaner. Then the quiet ended, and what ended it was not a decision about the story. It was an attack. In 2025 the massacre of tourists at Pahalgam in Kashmir killed civilians in a way that detonated the entire framework of Indian restraint. The Pahalgam trigger event ended India’s strategic patience and produced Operation Sindoor, the open military campaign that ran in parallel with the covert one. And in the wake of Sindoor the covert tempo did not merely resume. It surged. The post-Sindoor period saw eliminations at a rate the campaign had never previously sustained, and by 2026 the count of militants killed across Pakistani cities in a single year had climbed past thirty, a figure documented in the record of the 2026 acceleration. More than thirty in one year, set against a handful per year at the campaign’s careful start, is not continuity. It is a campaign that, somewhere between the report and 2026, shifted into a register of operational confidence it had never before displayed.

The comparison can be sharpened along three axes, because raw frequency is only the first of them. The second is target seniority. The early campaign struck mid-level figures, handlers and organizers and operatives whose deaths mattered but who sat well below the leadership tier. The post-report campaign climbed the hierarchy. By 2026 the operations were reaching into the senior leadership of Lashkar-e-Taiba itself, a penetration that the early campaign would not have attempted because the early campaign did not yet have the intelligence reach or the operational nerve. The third axis is geography. The early strikes concentrated in a predictable belt, in Lahore and Karachi and Rawalpindi, the urban centers where India’s intelligence reach was deepest. The later strikes expanded into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, into Pakistan-administered Kashmir, into terrain that demanded either local assets or an infiltration capability that the campaign’s first phase had not demonstrated. On all three measures, frequency, seniority, and geography, the post-report campaign was not the pre-report campaign continued. It was the pre-report campaign escalated.

This is the findable shape of the thing, and it can be stated without ornament. The British newspaper published the most damaging account ever produced of the shadow war, and the two years that followed contained more killings, of more senior targets, across more of Pakistan, than the two years that preceded it. Exposure was followed by escalation. The correlation is not in dispute. The dispute, the genuine and unresolved dispute, is about what the correlation means.

Here the analysis has to slow down and refuse the easy conclusion, because the easy conclusion is wrong, or at least unproven. The tempting reading is that the report emboldened the campaign, that India, having watched the most credible possible exposure produce no consequences, concluded that the operations were effectively cost-free and accordingly ran them harder. This reading has a certain logic. A state learns from the world’s reactions, and if the world’s reaction to a full exposure is a shrug, the state has been taught that the conduct is tolerated. Banerji’s institutional framework lends the emboldenment reading some support, because a service watching a foreign newspaper detail its operations and watching the international system fail to respond would, on any rational calculus, downgrade its estimate of the operations’ diplomatic cost.

But the emboldenment reading collides with a fact it cannot absorb, and intellectual honesty requires naming the fact rather than burying it. The largest single driver of the post-report surge was not the report. It was Pahalgam. The 2025 massacre was an exogenous shock, a terrorist atrocity that would have produced an Indian escalation regardless of whether the London newspaper had ever published a word. A campaign that surges after a mass-casualty attack on its own civilians is not necessarily a campaign emboldened by a press exposé fourteen months earlier. It is, far more straightforwardly, a campaign responding to a provocation. The post-Pahalgam acceleration has an obvious and sufficient cause, and that cause is not the coverage.

So the correlation between the April 2024 publication and the subsequent surge does not establish causation, and an account that claimed it did would be overreaching. The most that the evidence sustains is a weaker and more precise claim, and the weaker claim is the one this analysis will commit to. The report demonstrably failed to deter. Whatever else is uncertain, that much is certain, because deterrence is measured against outcomes and the outcome was escalation. What remains genuinely open is whether the report was causally inert, a published document that the campaign’s planners simply ignored as they responded to Pahalgam, or whether the report was a contributing condition, one input among several that lowered New Delhi’s estimate of the cost of continuing. The evidence cannot adjudicate between those two. It can only rule out the third possibility, the comforting one, that exposure constrained the campaign. It did not. The campaign that the world’s reading public learned about in April 2024 was, by 2026, the most active it had ever been.

Why did exposure fail to deter? The mechanics of the failure are worth setting out, because they are not mysterious and because they generalize beyond this case. Deterrence through exposure requires a transmission belt. The exposure has to reach an actor with both the will and the capacity to impose a cost, and that actor has to then impose it. The belt failed at every link. The dispatch reached Western governments, but Western governments declined to convert the reading into policy. India by 2024 was too central to Western strategy, too important as a counterweight to China, too large a market and too significant a defense partner, for a newspaper report about the killing of designated terrorists to trigger sanctions or downgrades. The targets’ status mattered here and mattered enormously. The men killed were, in the main, figures associated with groups responsible for atrocities, and a Western government weighing whether to punish India for killing a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander faced a question with an uncomfortable answer. The moral energy required to sanction a democratic partner for killing a mass-casualty terrorist simply did not exist in Western capitals. The report supplied the information. It could not supply the will, and information without will does not deter. The selective silence that followed the report was not an oversight. It was a choice, and it was the choice that drained the report of consequence.

There is a second mechanism, and it concerns the domestic Indian audience, and here the analysis of Shekhar Gupta is the sharpest available instrument. Gupta’s career as an editor gives him a particular fluency in how the Indian press and the Indian public process a story about national security, and his observation about episodes of this kind is that a foreign exposé of Indian toughness frequently produces, inside India, the opposite of shame. It produces a quiet pride. When the London newspaper reported that India had ordered the killing of terrorists in Pakistan, large segments of the Indian commentariat and the Indian public did not experience the expose as an accusation to be answered. They experienced it as a fact to be savored. The Indian media’s handling of the report split along entirely predictable lines. A liberal slice treated it as a serious allegation of executive lawlessness, raising the proper questions about accountability and the rule of law. A far larger slice treated it as a foreign newspaper inadvertently confirming that the government was doing exactly what a strong government should do, and a noisy fringe treated it as proof of an anti-India conspiracy that had, in its eagerness to wound the Prime Minister, ended up flattering him. Gupta’s point, generalized, is that exposure cannot deter a state whose population approves of the exposed conduct. Deterrence assumes the conduct is shameful. When the conduct is popular, exposure is not a punishment. It is publicity. The report told Indian voters, weeks before an election, that their government killed the men who killed Indians, and it is difficult to design a worse instrument of deterrence than a message the target audience receives as good news.

The two mechanisms compound. Abroad, the report met governments with the information but not the will to act, because the targets were terrorists and India was indispensable. At home, the piece met a public that read it as a credential. An exposure that produces no foreign cost and a domestic benefit is not a deterrent. It is, functionally, a campaign asset, and the campaign’s subsequent acceleration, whatever its precise causal relationship to the report, unfolded in an environment the report had helped make permissive. The doctrine behind the campaign, traced in the covert operations doctrine that India developed across these years, did not have to overcome the report. The investigation, by failing to generate cost, became part of the environment in which the doctrine operated freely.

One more strand belongs in the long-term chain, and it is the strand of institutional learning. The contest between India’s external service and its Pakistani counterpart, examined in the ISI versus RAW intelligence war, is a contest in which each side learns from each episode. What the Pakistani service learned from the report was bitter. It learned that even a full international airing of its grievance, in a credible foreign newspaper, did not produce the diplomatic rescue it needed, because the world’s response to the airing was muted. The internationalization strategy, the strategy of taking the grievance to a British masthead, had been Pakistan’s best available move, and it had not worked. What India’s service learned was the converse and was emboldening regardless of whether emboldenment translated directly into the post-Pahalgam surge. It learned that the worst-case information outcome, a detailed foreign exposé naming the agency and describing the method, was survivable. An institution that has survived its worst-case information scenario is an institution with a lowered sense of risk, and a lowered sense of risk is the precondition for the operational confidence the campaign displayed by 2026. The history of the Research and Analysis Wing is in part a history of an agency learning, across decades, what it can get away with, and the April 2024 report taught it that it could get away with a great deal.

The seniority axis is the one that should most trouble anyone who expected exposure to induce caution, because climbing a target hierarchy is the opposite of what a chastened campaign does. A campaign that fears scrutiny stays low. It strikes the replaceable, the handlers and fixers whose deaths generate local headlines and little else, because striking the replaceable keeps the operations beneath the threshold of international attention. A campaign that strikes the irreplaceable, the founding leadership, the names that carry decades of history, is a campaign that has decided international attention is a price worth paying or no longer a price at all. The post-report trajectory climbed that hierarchy steadily, and by 2026 it had reached figures whose elimination the early campaign would not have dared, not for lack of desire but for lack of nerve and reach. The progression from handlers to commanders to co-founders is not the signature of a campaign that read its own exposure as a warning. It is the signature of a campaign that read its own exposure as a clearance.

The operational comparison can be made more concrete by holding two snapshots side by side. Picture the campaign as it stood in the months just before the report. Its confirmed tempo, after the 2023 surge, was a sustained rhythm of roughly one significant elimination every several weeks, concentrated in a handful of Punjabi and Sindhi cities, striking handlers and organizers and mid-tier operatives, using a method, the motorcycle pair and the close-range shot, that had not varied since the campaign began. Now picture the campaign as it stood in 2026, two years after the report. Its tempo had risen to a point where the annual count crossed thirty, an average that compressed the interval between operations from weeks to days in the most intense stretches. Its geography had broken out of the original urban belt into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and into Pakistan-administered Kashmir, terrain that the early campaign had not touched. Its targets had climbed from handlers to commanders to, in the campaign’s most audacious reach, the senior co-founding leadership of Lashkar-e-Taiba itself. The two snapshots are not the same campaign at two volumes. They are a campaign that, in the interval bracketed by the article, underwent a qualitative change in ambition.

The method itself evolved across the same interval, and the evolution is its own evidence of growing confidence. The early campaign’s reliance on recruited locals and deceived shooters was, among other things, a security measure, a way of keeping each operation insulated and deniable. The later campaign, by several accounts, grew willing to mount operations of greater complexity and greater risk, operations that reached protected figures in guarded settings, operations that implied either a deeper bench of local assets or a willingness to expose more of the apparatus to gain access to higher targets. A campaign becomes more elaborate when its planners believe the environment will tolerate elaboration, and the environment, after the report had been published and absorbed without consequence, evidently was believed to tolerate it. None of this proves the report was the cause. It does establish that the report was followed by precisely the pattern, escalating ambition and escalating method, that a lowered estimate of cost would predict, and that the comforting alternative, a campaign chastened into caution by the glare of exposure, is contradicted by every measurable indicator.

The international response, or more precisely the international non-response, deserves a country-by-country accounting, because the silence was not uniform and its texture reveals the calculation behind it. The United States, having itself indicted an Indian operative over a foiled New York plot, was in a delicate position. Washington had demonstrated, through that indictment, that it would act when the target of an alleged Indian operation was on American soil. It demonstrated with equal clarity, in its response to the story about Pakistan, that it would not act when the target was a designated terrorist on Pakistani soil. The American distinction was jurisdictional and moral at once. A plot against a person in New York was an attack on American sovereignty and on a person under American protection. A killing of a Lashkar-e-Taiba figure in Lahore was neither, and the United States, deep into a strategic embrace of India as a counterweight to China, had no interest in manufacturing a grievance over the death of a man Washington itself would have been content to see prosecuted. The American response to the report was therefore a near-silence, broken only by the mildest diplomatic boilerplate.

The United Kingdom, the report’s own home, was quieter still. A British newspaper had produced the inquiry, but the British government treated it as a press matter rather than a policy one. London had its own deepening trade and security relationship with New Delhi to consider, and a government with an eye on a post-Brexit economic partnership was not going to let a newspaper investigation, however well sourced, become a diplomatic incident. The European Union issued nothing of substance. Australia, a partner of India in the Quad grouping, said nothing that registered. The pattern across the Western democracies was consistent and it was not accidental. Each of them had independently concluded that the strategic value of the Indian relationship exceeded the diplomatic value of a principled stand over the killing of men associated with mass-casualty terrorism. The report had informed all of them. It had moved none of them.

The contrast with how the same democracies had responded to comparable conduct by other states is the sharpest possible illustration of the double standard, and it is a contrast worth drawing precisely. When Russia poisoned a former intelligence officer on British soil in 2018, the Western response was immediate and collective, a coordinated mass expulsion of Russian diplomats across more than twenty countries. When Saudi Arabia killed the journalist Jamal Khashoggi the same year, the response was less unified but still substantial, a sustained diplomatic chill and a lasting reputational cost. When India was credibly alleged, by a British newspaper, to have killed roughly twenty people in Pakistan, the collective Western response was effectively nothing. The defenders of the asymmetry have an argument, and it is not a frivolous one. The targets were different. Russia’s target was a defector, Saudi Arabia’s was a journalist and dissident, and India’s were, in the main, convicted or credibly alleged terrorists. A moral framework can coherently hold that killing a terrorist is not equivalent to killing a journalist, and that framework, rather than naked strategic interest, may explain part of the gap. But only part. The honest assessment is that the Western non-response was a product of both the targets’ status and India’s strategic indispensability, and that disentangling how much weight to assign to each is not really possible, because in the Western capitals that mattered the two factors pointed the same way and reinforced each other.

The Indian domestic reception requires a fuller treatment than the immediate-consequences account allowed, because the domestic reception is, in the end, the deepest reason the report failed as a deterrent, and Shekhar Gupta’s reading of it is the most useful guide. Gupta’s long vantage on the Indian press lets him see a dynamic that a foreign observer can miss. The Indian media ecosystem of 2024 was not a single thing. It was at least three things, and the coverage passed through all three and emerged transformed. The first was a shrinking segment of liberal and centrist outlets that treated the report as what its authors intended, a serious allegation of executive action outside the law, and that asked the accountability questions, who authorized this, under what legal theory, with what oversight. The second and by far the largest segment was a nationalist mainstream, much of it television, that received the report as confirmation of competence. On those channels the report was not debated as an allegation. It was celebrated, more or less openly, as evidence that the government had the resolve to reach India’s enemies wherever they hid. The third was a hyper-nationalist fringe that performed a remarkable inversion, treating the dispatch as a hostile foreign operation that had backfired, a smear so clumsy that it had ended up advertising the Prime Minister’s strength to the electorate. Gupta’s essential observation is that a report cannot shame a polity when the polity’s dominant media segments are not ashamed, and the Indian media’s dominant segments were not ashamed. They were pleased. The report intended as an exposé was, across most of India’s screens, repackaged within a day as a tribute.

This domestic dynamic is what closes the case on the deterrence question. A deterrent works by raising the cost of conduct, and cost has an external component and an internal one. The external cost, the foreign-policy cost, was nullified by the strategic and moral calculus that produced the Western silence. The internal cost, the domestic political cost, was not merely nullified but inverted, converted into a domestic political benefit by an electorate and a media that approved of killing terrorists abroad. A report that generates no external cost and a domestic benefit has not deterred anything. It has, if anything, supplied the government with a windfall, an authoritative foreign confirmation of toughness delivered free of charge in an election season. The mechanics of deterrence simply were not present. There was no cost for the report to raise.

That conclusion forces a return to the genuinely open question, the question of whether the report emboldened the campaign or was merely irrelevant to a campaign that escalated for its own reasons. The case for emboldenment runs as follows. A state, like any actor, updates its risk estimates on evidence, and the expose was a large piece of evidence. It was the most comprehensive exposure the campaign would ever face, and the world’s response to it was a shrug. A rational planner in New Delhi, watching that sequence, would have revised downward the estimated cost of the campaign, and a lowered cost estimate makes a more aggressive campaign more likely. On this reading the report did not cause the surge directly, but it removed a restraint, it taught the planners that exposure was survivable, and it thereby widened the space in which the post-Pahalgam escalation could occur. The case against emboldenment is the case from sufficiency. Pahalgam was a mass-casualty attack on Indian civilians, and a mass-casualty attack is, on its own, a complete explanation for an Indian escalation. No additional cause is needed. A campaign that surges after Pahalgam is a campaign responding to Pahalgam, and invoking a fourteen-month-old newspaper report to explain a response that the massacre already explains is to multiply causes beyond necessity. Both cases are coherent. The evidence does not decide between them, and an analyst who claims it does is overreaching. What the evidence does decide, and decides cleanly, is the third possibility, the possibility that the report constrained the campaign. It did not. The campaign that the document exposed in April 2024 was, by the count of bodies in 2026, the most active it had ever been, and that single fact disposes of any account in which exposure produced restraint.

The lineage the report drew, placing India alongside Israel’s Mossad and the old Soviet KGB, became its own long-running argument, and the argument matters because it shaped how the surviving years of the campaign were understood. The India and Israel comparison is a genuine analytical problem rather than a rhetorical flourish, because the two programs really do share a structural logic, the logic of a democratic state deciding that sanctuary abroad will not protect those who plan attacks against it. But the comparison also breaks down at a revealing point. Israel’s program developed over decades inside a society that argued about it, that produced commissions and memoirs and public reckonings, however incomplete. India’s program, by 2026, had endured its most thorough exposure and produced almost no comparable domestic argument, because the exposure had been foreign and the domestic reception had been approval rather than scrutiny. The piece had invited India to see itself as a normal practitioner of a recognized statecraft. A great many Indians accepted the invitation, and accepted it without the unease that, in the Israeli case, had at least occasionally accompanied the acceptance. The lineage framing, intended by the report to raise a warning, instead supplied a precedent that made the campaign feel less like an aberration and more like an arrival.

The institutional learning that the episode embedded will outlast the specific killings, and it is the part of the fallout most likely to shape the next decade. Two services learned two lessons. Pakistan’s service learned that its best instrument, the internationalization of its grievance through a credible foreign press, did not work, because the credibility of the messenger could not supply the political will of the audience. That is a demoralizing lesson for an institution to absorb, and it pushes Pakistan toward the conclusion that the killings cannot be stopped by exposure and must be answered, if at all, by other means. India’s service learned the converse, that the worst information outcome it could realistically suffer, a detailed foreign exposé naming the agency and its methods, carried no operational penalty. An institution that has run its worst-case scenario and emerged unscathed is an institution whose internal sense of constraint has loosened, and a loosened sense of constraint is visible in everything the campaign did after 2024, in the climb up the target hierarchy, in the expansion of geography, in the sheer rising count. The history of the Research and Analysis Wing is in part a history of an agency learning, across decades, what it can get away with, and the April 2024 report taught it that it could get away with a great deal. The wider contest, traced in the ISI versus RAW intelligence war, shifted a notch further in India’s favor not because India had won a battle but because the world had declined to penalize India for fighting one.

A final word on the chronology guards against the misreading that this section has worked hardest to forestall. The story is not exposure, then immediately surge. The story is exposure, then a lull that the exposure did not create, then an attack that reset everything, then a surge. The lull is real and the analysis has refused to erase it. But the lull’s existence is exactly why the report’s defenders cannot claim a deterrent success and the report’s critics cannot claim a clean emboldenment effect. The lull belonged to the Western cases, not to the report. The surge belonged to Pahalgam, not, demonstrably, to the report. The reporting sits in the middle of this sequence as a published fact whose causal footprint is genuinely hard to trace, and the honest analyst’s job is to say so, while insisting on the one thing the sequence does establish beyond argument, which is that the most thorough exposure the shadow war ever received was followed, within twenty-four months, by its most violent and most ambitious phase. The doctrine behind the operations, traced in the covert operations doctrine that India built across these years, did not have to overcome the investigation. The report, by failing to generate cost, became part of the environment in which that doctrine operated freely.

The Next Link

The report’s most important effect on the chain was not what it did to the campaign’s tempo. It was what it did to the campaign’s geography of accusation. Before April 2024, the accusation against India was concentrated on the Pakistan theater. The report, by placing India in the lineage of Mossad and the KGB and by being read worldwide, helped globalize the question, and the globalization of the question is the link to what came next.

Because the next phase of the chain was not about Pakistan at all. The accusations that did the real diplomatic damage to India came not from Islamabad but from Ottawa and from Washington, and they concerned not Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders in Lahore but Sikh separatists in Surrey and in New York. The Canada and United States cases had, as this account has shown, preceded the London report and helped make it possible. But they also followed it, in the sense that their full diplomatic weight, the expulsions, the parliamentary confrontations, the federal indictment of a named Indian operative, played out across the same months in which the report’s fallout was being absorbed. The Western allegations that followed turned India’s two closest democratic partners into public accusers, and they did something the Pakistan accusations and the British report together could not. They attached a price. Pakistan’s grievance was discountable and the newspaper’s report generated no policy, but a Canadian Prime Minister speaking from the floor of Parliament and an American grand jury issuing an indictment were costs of a different order, levied in the currency of India’s most valuable relationships.

The distinction between the Pakistan theater and the Western theater is the lesson the chain carries forward. In Pakistan, India killed terrorists, the world had no appetite to object, and the most thorough exposure imaginable changed nothing. In the West, India was alleged to have plotted against separatists who, whatever New Delhi thought of them, were citizens and residents of allied democracies, and there the same conduct ran into walls. The shadow war that operated consequence-free against the unknown gunmen pattern of targets in Lahore and Karachi was about to discover that the consequence-free zone had borders, and that the borders ran exactly where India’s strategic partnerships began. That discovery, and the diplomatic crisis it produced, is the next link in the chain.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did The Guardian report about India and Pakistan in April 2024?

The newspaper reported, on April 4, 2024, that the Indian government had ordered targeted killings of individuals on Pakistani soil. The account, built on anonymous intelligence sources in both countries and on documents the paper said it had reviewed, alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing carried out roughly twenty assassinations since 2020 as a matter of policy. It described operations run through sleeper cells based largely in the United Arab Emirates, with local criminals and recruited jihadists used as the actual shooters and substantial cash payments moving through intermediaries.

Did The Guardian prove that India ordered the killings?

No, and the report did not claim to. The newspaper stated explicitly that it could not independently verify the documents it had seen relating to roughly seven of the killings. The article established that intelligence operatives on both sides believed India had ordered the operations and were willing to say so, which is a serious finding, but belief expressed anonymously is not the same as proof. The gap between what unnamed operatives assert and what can be documented is the gap the entire campaign was built to occupy.

How did India respond to The Guardian investigation?

New Delhi’s Ministry of External Affairs dismissed the report as false and malicious anti-India propaganda and pointed to a prior statement by the External Affairs Minister that targeted killing abroad was not government policy. The denial did not engage the report’s specific claims about cases, documents, or methods. It attacked the credibility of the source and restated a general policy denial, a structure consistent with maintaining plausible deniability rather than contesting facts.

How did Pakistan react to the report?

Pakistani officials treated the report as vindication of the formal allegations Islamabad had made in January 2024. The reaction carried an unacknowledged cost, because accepting the story meant accepting its detail that most of the men killed were associated with Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, the very militant figures Pakistan had long denied sheltering. Pakistan therefore emphasized the violation of its sovereignty while saying little about the identities of the victims.

Did the shadow war slow down after the report was published?

No. The months immediately after publication were quiet, but that lull predated the report and, by the account of an Indian official quoted in the report itself, had begun earlier in response to the Canada and United States allegations. The lull then ended. After the 2025 Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor, the tempo of eliminations surged, and by 2026 the annual count of militants killed across Pakistan had climbed past thirty, well above the campaign’s earlier pace.

Did the coverage cause the shadow war to accelerate?

The evidence does not support a claim of direct causation. The largest driver of the post-report surge was the 2025 Pahalgam massacre, an exogenous shock that would have produced an Indian escalation regardless of the report. The honest finding is narrower. The report demonstrably failed to deter the campaign, and it may have contributed to a permissive environment by showing that even full exposure carried no cost, but it cannot be shown to have caused the acceleration that Pahalgam adequately explains.

Why did international exposure fail to stop the killings?

Deterrence through exposure requires an actor with the will and capacity to impose a cost. The report reached Western governments, but those governments declined to act. India had become too strategically important as a counterweight to China and too valuable as a market and defense partner, and the targets were designated terrorists whose deaths few Western capitals were willing to punish. Information without political will does not deter, and the will was absent.

Did the dispatch produce any diplomatic consequences for India?

The report itself produced no measurable policy consequences, no sanctions, no downgrades, no formal censure. The serious diplomatic damage to India came from a separate set of accusations, the Canadian parliamentary statement on a killing in Canada and the United States federal indictment over a foiled plot in New York. Those cases, involving India’s closest democratic partners, attached costs that a newspaper investigation about killings in Pakistan never could.

How did the Indian media handle the report?

Coverage split along predictable lines. A liberal segment treated the report as a serious allegation of executive lawlessness deserving scrutiny. A larger segment treated it as a foreign newspaper inadvertently confirming that the government was protecting national security effectively. A noisy fringe framed it as an anti-India conspiracy timed to the general election. The dominant domestic effect was not embarrassment but a quiet approval, which is precisely why exposure functioned poorly as a deterrent.

Why did the expose appear just before India’s general election?

The timing weeks before the 2024 vote was noted immediately, and Indian critics argued it was a deliberate attempt to influence the election. The timing cuts both ways. A foreign report alleging that the government killed terrorists abroad was, for a large share of Indian voters, less an accusation than an unpaid campaign endorsement, which is part of why the report could not function as its authors might have intended.

Who were the sources for The Guardian report?

The report relied on anonymous intelligence operatives in both India and Pakistan, alongside documents the paper said it had reviewed but could not independently verify. The Pakistani sources could credibly attest to the killings and the methods. The Indian sources supplied the claims about intent and authorization, including the assertion that operations of this kind required approval at the highest level of government. Because all the sources were anonymous, their motives could not be tested.

Why would intelligence operatives talk to a newspaper about secret operations?

The motives differed by side. Pakistani officers had an incentive to internationalize a grievance their government had failed to convert into action through official channels. The Indian motive is subtler. A controlled disclosure can extend a campaign’s deterrent value by communicating a capability the government cannot formally claim, while preserving the deniability that an open admission would surrender. On that reading, the Indian operatives were not betraying the campaign but extending it.

What is the connection between the report and the Pulwama attack?

An Indian intelligence official told the newspaper that India’s shift toward extraterritorial killing followed the 2019 Pulwama attack, in which a suicide bomber killed forty Indian paramilitary personnel. The official framed the new approach as source elimination, reaching the planners and shelterers across the border because the attacks could not be stopped on Indian soil. The piece thereby supplied not just a description of the campaign but a stated motive for it.

Did the report claim the killings had been suspended?

Yes, and this detail is easy to miss. An Indian official quoted in the report said New Delhi had ordered a suspension of targeted killings after Canada and the United States went public with their allegations, and that no suspicious killings had occurred in early 2024. The report thus simultaneously alleged an active program and recorded its pause, which means the operational tempo at the moment of publication was, by the report’s own sourcing, near zero.

Did the investigation mention the Khashoggi case or Israel’s Mossad?

Yes. An Indian official cited Israel’s Mossad and the Soviet KGB as models for extraterritorial operations, and the report noted that the 2018 murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been referenced inside the Indian agency. The placement of India in that lineage was double-edged, read by the report’s authors as evidence of drift toward lawlessness and by many Indian readers as evidence that India had joined the ranks of serious states.

Has any other outlet confirmed The Guardian findings?

The report’s central conclusion sat within a broader pattern of accusation rather than standing alone. Pakistan had made formal allegations in January 2024, Canada and the United States had raised parallel cases about killings and plots on their own soil, and other outlets had reported on individual eliminations. No single piece of journalism produced a verified, on-the-record confirmation that India ordered the campaign, which remains the defining evidentiary feature of the entire shadow war.

Was the report a success or a failure as journalism?

It was a genuine achievement of sourcing and a significant piece of journalism, and it also failed at the thing exposure is often assumed to accomplish. It established a citable account that every subsequent discussion could lean on, which changed what could be said about the campaign for everyone afterward. It did not change what India did. Judged as a record, it succeeded. Judged as a constraint, it failed, because the campaign it exposed went on to become the most active it had ever been.

Why did Pakistan struggle to use the report against India?

The article corroborated Pakistan’s accusation, but it did so by describing a Pakistan whose cities sheltered the leadership of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and the planners of attacks that had killed hundreds. To wave the report as proof of Indian wrongdoing was to wave a document that simultaneously confirmed the harboring Islamabad had spent decades denying. Pakistani officials handled this by stressing the violation of sovereignty and international law while saying as little as possible about the identities of the men who had been killed.

What does the report reveal about the limits of investigative journalism?

The episode is a case study in a hard truth. Investigative journalism can supply information, but it cannot supply political will, and exposure deters only when it reaches an actor willing to impose a cost. When the exposed conduct is popular at home and the targets are figures few abroad will defend, a detailed and credible report can be published, read worldwide, and absorbed without producing restraint. The report did everything journalism can do. Its fate shows the boundary of what journalism, by itself, can change.

How does this episode fit the larger arc of the shadow war?

The story marks the moment the campaign entered the global public record, the point at which suspicion became citation. It did not start the campaign and it did not stop it. It sits in the chain between the 2023 acceleration that made the pattern undeniable and the Western diplomatic crisis that finally attached a price to India’s operations, a price that the killings in Pakistan, however thoroughly exposed, never carried.