For most of the past two decades, India fought terrorism with two separate hands that rarely knew what the other was doing. One hand was uniformed, declared, and slow. It belonged to the conventional military, and it moved only when a crisis grew loud enough to demand a visible answer, as it did after Uri in 2016 and after Pulwama in 2019. The other hand was silent, unattributed, and patient. It belonged to the intelligence apparatus that ran the elimination programme inside Pakistan, the campaign of motorcycle-borne gunmen and mosque-gate killings that observers eventually learned to call the shadow war. These two hands operated on different clocks, answered to different chains of command, and pursued different definitions of success. Then came the night of 6 May 2025, and for the first time both hands closed at once. Operation Sindoor was the moment the two campaigns stopped being parallel and became a single instrument.
That sentence sounds simple, but the idea inside it is the most consequential analytical claim in the entire story of India’s counter-terrorism evolution. To see why, picture two timelines drawn one above the other on the same sheet of paper. The upper line is the conventional track. It is mostly flat, punctuated by sharp vertical spikes in September 2016 and February 2019, and then it goes quiet again for years at a stretch. The lower line is the covert track. It begins as a barely visible tremor around 2021, when a car bomb detonated near Hafiz Saeed’s Lahore residence, and it rises steadily afterward, gaining slope through 2022 and climbing sharply across 2023 as wanted men kept falling to unidentified attackers in Karachi, Rawalkot, and Sialkot. For most of the period between 2019 and early 2025, those two lines never touch. They run side by side, each doing its own work, each ignorant of the other’s calendar. The argument of this analysis is that during the second week of May 2025 the two lines crossed, fused, and afterward continued as one thicker line. New Delhi did not merely conduct a missile operation while the assassinations happened to continue. It discovered, possibly by design and possibly by accident, that a state which can both kill quietly and strike loudly possesses something neither capability delivers alone. It possesses a full spectrum.
It helps, before tracing the mechanics, to fix the right mental image of what changed. The wrong image is of two armies merging into one. The correct image is of a musician who has spent a career playing two instruments in separate rooms, never together, and who walks one evening into a single room and discovers that the two instruments, played at once, produce a sound neither could make alone. The intelligence services and the conventional military are still two instruments. They still have separate players, separate rehearsal schedules, and separate repertoires. What the May operation revealed is that when they sound together they generate an effect, the abolition of the safe interval, that is genuinely new. The fusion is best understood not as a reorganisation chart but as the discovery of a chord.
There is a temptation, common in commentary on the 2025 fighting, to treat the missile operation and the elimination programme as the same story told twice, as if the gunmen of the quiet campaign were simply small-calibre versions of the cruise missiles. That framing obscures the very thing worth noticing. The two campaigns are not the same act at different scales. They are opposites along the dimensions that matter most to a state. The missile strike is maximally visible and the killing is maximally deniable. The missile strike is internationally scrutinised and the killing is internationally invisible. The missile strike is a declared act of a uniformed force and the killing is an act no government will own. Precisely because the two campaigns sit at opposite poles, their simultaneous operation is significant rather than redundant. A state that can occupy both poles at once has not done one thing twice. It has done two genuinely different things in a way that, combined, produces a third thing neither delivers alone.
A full spectrum means that every rung of the escalation ladder is occupied. At the lowest rung sits the unattributed pistol shot outside a mosque, deniable and surgical, costing one life and producing no headline in any capital that matters. At the highest rung sits the cruise missile through the roof of a seminary, undeniable and thunderous, costing a building and producing headlines in every capital at once. Between those poles lie drone strikes, loitering munitions, special-forces raids, and air-launched stand-off weapons. Before 2025, India could reach the bottom rung through the intelligence services and the top rung through the air force, but the two reaches were owned by different institutions that did not coordinate their timing. What changed during the May operation was that both reaches fired inside the same seventy-two-hour window, against targets drawn from the same list, in service of the same political message. The result was not addition. It was multiplication. A terror commander who might once have calculated that a missile season would be followed by a quiet recovery period now had to assume that the quiet period itself was lethal, because the covert track never paused even while the missiles flew. This is the convergence, and understanding how it formed, whether it was planned, and whether it will last is the work of the pages that follow.
The stakes of getting this right are not academic. If the convergence was a one-time accident produced by the specific pressures of a specific crisis, then Pakistan’s planners can treat the May operation as an outlier and resume their old assumptions about how India behaves. If, on the other hand, the convergence is a permanent feature of India’s posture, then the entire risk calculus on the other side of the border has shifted, because there is no longer a safe interval between Indian responses. The covert track has become the connective tissue that links one conventional spasm to the next, ensuring that pressure is continuous rather than episodic. That is a profound change, and it is the reason this particular link in the twenty-six-year chain deserves its own examination rather than being folded into a general account of the 2025 fighting.
One clarification belongs at the outset, because it frames everything that follows. This is a story about a chain, and a chain is only as legible as the links on either side of the one being examined. The link immediately before is the Pahalgam massacre, the provocation that made a dual-track response necessary. The link immediately after is the post-ceasefire acceleration, the surge of eliminations that proved the merger had outlived its triggering crisis. The development examined here sits between those two, and it cannot be understood in isolation from either. It was caused by the link before it and it caused the link after it, and that double relationship, consequence of one thing and cause of another, is the property that makes it a genuine link in a chain rather than a standalone episode. Keeping the two neighbouring links in view is therefore not a digression. It is the only way to see the merger for what it is.
The Preceding Link
Nothing in the May convergence makes sense without the massacre that preceded it by sixteen days. On 22 April 2025, gunmen walked into the Baisaran Valley meadow above Pahalgam, a high pasture reachable only on foot or horseback, and opened fire on holidaymakers who had no way to run and no cover to reach. Twenty-six people died, almost all of them tourists, and the killers reportedly selected victims in a manner that turned a terror attack into something closer to a sectarian execution. The Resistance Front, a label widely understood to be a flag of convenience for Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed the killings and then, as international condemnation mounted, tried to walk the claim back. That retraction fooled no one. The atrocity at the meadow is examined in full in the account of the trigger event that ended India’s strategic patience, and the granular forensics of the attack itself appear in the dedicated study of the tourist massacre that killed twenty-six and triggered Operation Sindoor. What matters for the convergence story is narrower. Pahalgam did not merely demand a response. It demanded a response large enough and visible enough to satisfy a public that had watched, in near real time, an act of cruelty designed for maximum emotional damage.
Here lies the first thread of the convergence. The covert campaign, for all its accumulating successes, could not answer Pahalgam. By April 2025 the elimination programme had compiled an impressive record. It had reached LeT logisticians, Jaish-e-Mohammed recruiters, Khalistan-linked operatives, and a string of mid-tier facilitators, and the cumulative tally had grown undeniable across the previous two years. Yet a campaign whose entire design rests on deniability cannot serve as a public answer to a public wound. A government cannot stand at a podium and point to a body in a Karachi lane and tell a grieving nation that justice has been done, because doing so would shatter the very deniability that lets the covert track function. The silent campaign is built to deny the state a megaphone. After Baisaran, New Delhi needed a megaphone. That requirement is what pulled the conventional military off its bench.
The second thread runs the other way. The conventional military, summoned to provide the loud answer, arrived carrying a problem of its own. A missile strike is a single event. It happens, it is photographed, it is debated, and then it ends. Balakot in 2019 demonstrated the limitation precisely. The air force crossed into undisputed Pakistani territory, dropped its payload on a hillside near a Jaish facility, and flew home, and within seventy-two hours the strategic conversation had moved on to whether the bombs had hit anything at all. A one-time spike, however dramatic, allows the adversary to absorb the blow and wait out the storm. The doctrinal evolution that produced this dilemma is traced in the study of how the Pahalgam crisis redefined New Delhi’s approach to cross-border terrorism, and the predecessor strike that revealed the limitation is reconstructed in the account of how the 2019 airstrike broke decades of restraint. The conventional hand could deliver a thunderclap but not a sustained pressure. The covert hand could deliver sustained pressure but not a thunderclap. Pahalgam created a situation in which the state needed both at once, and that need is the engine that drove the two tracks toward each other.
A third thread deserves naming, because it is the one most often missed. The two tracks had been growing more compatible for years without anyone declaring an intention to merge them. The intelligence services that ran the covert programme had spent the period since 2019 building the target dossiers, the human networks, and the geolocation capacity that any precise operation requires, whether that operation ends in a pistol shot or a cruise-missile coordinate. The same dossier that tells an asset where a Jaish recruiter sleeps also tells a targeting officer where a Jaish seminary stands. The institutional history behind that quiet accumulation is laid out in the examination of how India’s covert operations doctrine evolved from defensive intelligence to offensive counter-terrorism, and the agency story behind it appears in the full account of India’s external intelligence service from its founding vision to the present campaign. By April 2025 the covert and conventional tracks were no longer strangers. They were drawing on a common pool of intelligence. Pahalgam simply forced them to act on that common pool simultaneously, and in doing so it revealed a fusion that had been latent for years.
The latency is worth dwelling on, because it explains why the merger could appear so suddenly in May without anyone having announced it. A fusion that has been quietly prepared over years can look, when it finally surfaces, like a spontaneous innovation, when it is in fact the visible tip of a long accumulation. Consider what the elimination programme had built between 2021 and early 2025. It had constructed human networks inside Pakistani cities capable of sustained surveillance. It had developed the geolocation discipline required to fix a moving individual to a place and a time. It had learned the rhythms of how militant figures travel, gather, pray, and recover. Every one of those assets is a counter-terrorism capability in its own right, but every one of them is also a targeting capability usable by a conventional planner. The quiet campaign, in other words, had spent four years building an intelligence foundation broad enough to support both kinds of action, and it had done so without anyone needing to declare that a fusion was coming.
There is also a political thread to this preceding link that deserves explicit statement, because it shaped what kind of response was possible. By the spring of 2025 the Indian public had absorbed a particular lesson from the preceding decade. It had watched the surgical strikes of 2016 and the Balakot strike of 2019, and it had learned to expect that a major terror provocation would be answered with a visible, dramatic, attributable act. A government that, after a massacre as emotionally charged as the one at the Baisaran meadow, offered only the quiet campaign as its answer would have been understood by its own population as having offered nothing, because the quiet campaign by design produces no podium moment. The expectation of spectacle, built up over a decade, made the conventional track politically unavoidable. The merger was, in part, a product of that expectation, because it was the public demand for a visible answer that guaranteed the loud track would join the quiet one already at work.
What Happened
To describe the convergence accurately, the two tracks must first be drawn separately, because the whole analytical point is that they moved at the same time. Begin with the conventional line.
Soon after midnight on 7 May 2025, India launched the missile operation it codenamed after the vermilion mark that Hindu married women wear, a name chosen to evoke the widows the Baisaran massacre had created. The opening wave lasted roughly twenty-three minutes. Air-launched stand-off weapons and loitering munitions struck nine locations spread across Pakistan’s Punjab and the territory India calls Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The target set was not random. It was drawn directly from the infrastructure of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Hizbul Mujahideen, the three organisations most deeply implicated in the cross-border campaign against India. The most symbolically loaded coordinate was the Jaish headquarters complex in Bahawalpur, the seminary known as Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah, long understood to be the operational and ideological centre of Masood Azhar’s organisation. Azhar himself later acknowledged that the strike on that complex killed ten members of his family and four of his aides. A second resonant coordinate lay at Muridke, the sprawling Lashkar campus near Lahore that has functioned for decades as the group’s nerve centre. The four-day fight that followed, including Pakistan’s retaliatory operation and the negotiated halt, is documented day by day in the complete chronology of the 2025 conflict from Pahalgam to ceasefire, and the operation’s full strategic accounting appears in the definitive guide to India’s missile strikes and the four-day war.
The character of the conventional strike is worth describing with some precision, because its features matter to the fusion argument. The May operation leaned heavily on stand-off weapons, munitions launched from a distance that allowed Indian aircraft to strike without crossing the border, and on loitering munitions that can circle a target area before committing to a final dive. Observers of the campaign noted that New Delhi drew on domestically developed or assembled systems, including its supersonic cruise missiles, its layered air-defence units, and its loitering munitions, rather than relying on foreign platforms or external logistics. That self-reliance carried a doctrinal message of its own, but the feature most relevant here is precision. A stand-off weapon guided to a specific seminary, rather than a barrage aimed at a general area, is the conventional analogue of the quiet campaign’s single targeted shot. Both the missile and the gunman are precision instruments, and that shared precision is one reason the two tracks could be fired against the same dossier without the conventional strike behaving like an indiscriminate act of war.
The escalation that followed deserves a moment of its own, because it shows how a punitive strike can grow into something larger without anyone intending it to. New Delhi had declared from the outset that its operation was measured and aimed only at militant infrastructure, not at the Pakistani state, and that the burden of escalation would lie with Islamabad. Pakistan, however, had irresistible incentives to answer. Unlike after Balakot, when it could plausibly deny that anything had been hit, this time the damage was visible and casualties were admitted on the militant side almost immediately, which made a forceful reply domestically unavoidable. Pakistan’s counter-offensive on 10 May, aimed at Indian military installations, drew an Indian response against Pakistani air bases, and within seventy-two hours a strike on terror infrastructure had become a genuine military exchange between nuclear-armed neighbours. That escalation is not incidental to the fusion story. It is the proof that the conventional track, once summoned, behaves like conventional war, with all the momentum and danger that implies, which is exactly why a state would value a quiet track that can carry strategic pressure without that momentum.
Conventional action did not stop with that first wave. When Pakistan retaliated on 10 May with its own operation, a counter-offensive aimed at Indian military installations, New Delhi widened the aperture of its campaign and began striking Pakistani air bases directly. What had started as a punitive strike on terror infrastructure escalated within seventy-two hours into a genuine exchange between two nuclear-armed states, complete with the first drone battle the subcontinent had ever seen. The fighting was halted by a ceasefire that took effect in the late afternoon of 10 May, with director-general-level military talks scheduled to follow. Indian officials placed the militant death toll from the strikes at more than one hundred. Pakistan disputed the entire framing, asserting that the missiles had fallen on mosques and homes and had killed thirty-one civilians. The damage assessment remains genuinely contested, and an honest account must say so rather than adopt either government’s arithmetic as fact. What is not contested is the shape of the conventional line on the timeline: a sharp, loud, four-day spike, the largest such spike since the subcontinent’s last full war.
Now draw the covert line for the same calendar window, and the convergence becomes visible. The elimination programme did not pause for the missile operation. Across the very weeks in which the air forces of two nations fenced at stand-off range, the silent campaign continued its own work. Unidentified attackers kept reaching wanted men inside Pakistan, and the operational tempo of the quiet track showed no dip corresponding to the conventional spike. This is the single most important empirical observation in the convergence thesis, and it deserves to be stated plainly. The two tracks were not taking turns. They were running concurrently. While the cameras pointed at Bahawalpur and at the air bases, the older campaign of motorcycle-borne gunmen carried on in the lanes the cameras ignored.
That continued operation took the form the quieter campaign had taken for years. Its signature method was the motorcycle-borne assassin, two men on a single machine able to approach a target in traffic, deliver fire at close range, and dissolve into a city’s congestion before any cordon could form. Its preferred settings were the predictable points in a target’s week, the mosque gate, the route to a known address, the gathering that recurred on a fixed day. None of that changed because missiles were flying elsewhere. The quiet track did not need to adopt wartime methods, because its methods were already calibrated for a permanent low-visibility campaign rather than for a crisis. That is part of why it could run straight through the conventional operation without disruption. A campaign built for crises would have been thrown off balance by a war. A campaign built for permanence simply continued. The pattern of that quieter work, its methods and its rhythm, is laid out in the broader study of India’s evolving covert operations doctrine, and the sheer acceleration of eliminations that the period produced is catalogued in the record of a single year in which more than thirty militants fell to unknown gunmen.
Place the two lines together and the geometry tells the story. From 2019 through April 2025 the conventional line and the covert line ran parallel and apart. The conventional line was mostly flat. The covert line climbed steadily. They did not interact. During the second week of May 2025 the conventional line produced its enormous spike, and crucially, the covert line did not flatten to make room for it. Both lines were at full height in the same window. That overlap is the convergence point. After the ceasefire the conventional line dropped back toward its flat baseline, exactly as it had after Balakot, but the covert line did not merely continue. It accelerated, climbing higher in the months after May than it ever had before. The aftermath of that acceleration is examined in the study of how targeted killings surged dramatically once the missiles stopped. The combined picture is a single thicker line emerging from the convergence point, a line that carries forward the loud track’s strategic message through the quiet track’s persistent pressure.
Read the merged line forward and a doctrine becomes legible inside the geometry. The thicker single line that emerges from the crossing point is not simply the sum of two campaigns. It is a division of labour. The conventional component supplies the rare, deliberate, maximally visible punctuation marks, the events that tell a domestic public and an international audience that a line has been crossed and answered. The quiet component supplies the continuous prose between those punctuation marks, the steady attritional pressure that ensures the militant organisations enjoy no recovery interval in which to rebuild. A doctrine of this shape does not require the missiles to fly often. It requires only that the elimination campaign never stop and that the conventional option remain visibly available to be summoned. Understood this way, the fusion is economical rather than maximalist. It does not promise perpetual war. It promises perpetual pressure, delivered cheaply by the quiet track and reinforced expensively, and only when necessary, by the loud one.
The economics of that arrangement deserve a moment of attention, because they are part of why the merged instrument is sustainable rather than merely impressive. A conventional operation is enormously expensive in every currency a state cares about. It consumes munitions that take years to manufacture, it burns diplomatic capital with every capital that urges restraint, it places a domestic public under the strain of a possible wider war, and it invites the scrutiny of an international press that will narrate the event on its own terms. A state cannot run that kind of operation continuously, and no state has ever tried. The quiet track inverts every one of those costs. It consumes almost no munitions, it generates no diplomatic bill because no government admits it is happening, it imposes no wartime strain on a population that does not know a campaign is underway, and it draws no sustained press scrutiny because an unattributed killing in a distant lane is not a story an international newsroom can easily tell. Because the quiet track is cheap along every axis where the loud track is expensive, it can be run without pause, and because it can be run without pause, it can supply the continuous pressure that the merged doctrine depends upon. The fusion works, in other words, precisely because its two components have opposite cost structures, and a planner can lean on the inexpensive one indefinitely while reserving the expensive one for the rare moment that genuinely demands a public answer.
Consider what this geometry means from the perspective of a Lashkar or Jaish commander watching it unfold. Before May 2025, that commander could reason as follows. A major Indian attack will be a discrete event. It will be terrifying for a few days, and then it will end, and the period afterward will be a recovery window during which the organisation can regroup, relocate, and rebuild. This reasoning had history behind it. It held after Balakot. It would have held after Uri. The convergence destroys that reasoning at its foundation. The May operation demonstrated that the recovery window itself is now a kill zone, because the covert track operates precisely in the interval the conventional track leaves empty. The commander can no longer treat the loud campaign and the quiet campaign as separate threats with separate schedules. They are now a single threat with no schedule at all, a continuous pressure that uses missiles when a public answer is required and uses gunmen when deniability is required, and that never stops doing one or the other.
Follow that commander’s dilemma one step further, because the second-order effect is where the fusion does its real damage. A militant organisation survives by managing a small number of irreplaceable people, the founders, the master trainers, the financiers who hold the donor relationships. Protecting those people is the organisation’s central security task, and protection has always meant matching the countermeasure to the threat. Against an anticipated conventional strike, the countermeasure is dispersal, moving the irreplaceable few away from known buildings. Against the quiet campaign, the countermeasure is unpredictability, breaking the routines that let a watcher fix a target. The fusion forces the organisation to run both countermeasures at the same time, and the two countermeasures pull against each other. Dispersal moves a senior figure into an unfamiliar location where his routines are improvised and his protection is thinner, which is the exact environment the elimination campaign is built to exploit. Unpredictability, meanwhile, complicates the orderly relocation that dispersal requires. An organisation cannot fully optimise against either threat without degrading its defence against the other, and that mutual interference, rather than any single dramatic killing, is the fusion’s most corrosive product.
There is a further dimension to what happened, and it concerns the intelligence underneath both tracks. A missile strike on a Bahawalpur seminary and a pistol shot outside a Sialkot mosque are radically different acts in their visibility, their politics, and their legality. They are not different acts in their informational requirement. Both demand the same thing: precise, current, verified knowledge of where a specific human being or a specific facility is located, who is around them, and when the moment of access will arrive. The intelligence architecture that produced the coordinates for the nine struck sites in May is the same architecture that produces the dossiers for the quiet campaign. When New Delhi fired both tracks at once, it was not coordinating two intelligence systems. It was drawing two kinds of output from one intelligence system. That is the deepest layer of the convergence. The merger of the tracks was possible because, beneath the visible difference between a cruise missile and a motorcycle, the two campaigns had always been fed by a common source. The institutional rivalry and capability balance behind that source is examined in the comparative study of the long intelligence war between the agencies of India and Pakistan.
It is worth being clear about why the deniability of the quiet track survives even after a fusion that placed it alongside a fully declared war. A conventional missile strike is announced, photographed, and claimed, and its authorship is never in question. The unattributed killing is structurally different. It happens in a lane, it is ascribed by Pakistani authorities to unidentified attackers, and no Indian official confirms it. Pairing the two campaigns in time did not force the quiet one to shed its anonymity, because anonymity is not a function of timing. It is a function of how an operation is conducted and what a government chooses to say afterward. New Delhi said nothing about the quiet track during the May fighting, just as it had said nothing before, and so the elimination campaign emerged from the crisis with its deniability intact. That preserved deniability is what allows the quiet track to keep functioning as a continuous instrument after the loud one falls silent, and it is therefore essential to the fusion rather than incidental to it.
The merger also did something to the catalogue of responses available to the other side, and this effect is easy to miss because it is a subtraction rather than an addition. Islamabad has a reasonably well-rehearsed repertoire for answering a conventional Indian strike. It can mobilise its own air force, it can shell across the Line of Control, it can take its grievance to friendly capitals and to multilateral forums, and it can frame the exchange for a domestic audience as an aggression weathered. Every item in that repertoire is designed to answer a declared, attributable act. None of it functions against an unattributed killing. A state cannot mobilise its air force against a gunman whose authorship its adversary will not confirm, cannot lodge a formal complaint about an operation that the other government insists is simply a domestic crime, and cannot rally a public against a campaign that has no visible face. By running the quiet track straight through the loud one, New Delhi ensured that a meaningful share of the pressure it was applying fell into the exact category against which Islamabad’s response repertoire is useless. The convergence therefore did not merely add a second Indian capability. It quietly removed the relevance of much of Pakistan’s answering toolkit, and a contest in which one side keeps its options while the other watches half of its own options become inapplicable is a contest whose balance has shifted in a way no casualty figure will record.
It is worth pausing to be precise about a word that does heavy lifting in this analysis. Convergence does not mean that the air force and the intelligence service merged into one organisation, signed a joint command charter, or even necessarily spoke to each other during the May operation. The institutions remained distinct, with distinct cultures and distinct chains of authority. Convergence here describes an effect rather than a bureaucratic event. It describes the fact that, from the target’s point of view, the two campaigns now function as one, because they fire at the same list in overlapping windows and never leave a safe interval. Whether that effect was deliberately engineered by planners or emerged from the simple fact that two ongoing campaigns happened to coincide in May is the question the next section must confront. But the effect itself, the disappearance of the safe interval, is not in doubt. It is the observable signature of the convergence, and it is what makes the May operation a genuine turning point rather than merely another spike on a familiar graph.
Why It Happened
The honest analyst has to begin this section by admitting a difficulty. The convergence might be a discovery dressed up as a design. It is entirely possible that no planner ever sat in a room and decided that the covert and conventional tracks would henceforth operate as a fused instrument, and that the simultaneity of May 2025 was simply the product of two independent campaigns that happened to be running when Pahalgam forced a crisis. Pattern-reading after the fact is a seductive and dangerous habit, and a responsible account must hold open the possibility that the convergence is partly an artefact of hindsight.
This caution matters because the human mind, looking back at a sequence of events, is strongly inclined to impose a purpose on it. A run of separate decisions, each made for its own local reason, can look in retrospect like the unfolding of a single master plan, simply because the analyst already knows where the sequence ended. The fusion is vulnerable to exactly this distortion. It is possible to assemble the surgical strikes, the Balakot strike, the elimination campaign, and the May operation into a tidy narrative of deliberate progression toward a unified instrument, and the narrative would be elegant, and it might be wrong. Guarding against that elegance is a basic discipline. The claim defended here is therefore deliberately modest. It is not that a single architect designed the fusion years in advance. It is that the conditions for it were built up incrementally, that the Pahalgam crisis made it necessary, and that the decision-makers, at the moment of choice, allowed it. That is a weaker and more defensible claim than a master plan, and it is all the evidence will bear. With that caution stated, the evidence still points toward a fusion that was at minimum enabled by deliberate choices, even if it was not announced as a doctrine. Three forces drove the two tracks together, and they deserve separate examination.
The first force was structural and had been building for years. New Delhi’s counter-terrorism posture had been hardening in a single direction since at least 2016, the direction of greater willingness to act across the border and greater tolerance for the risk that such action carries. The surgical strikes after Uri established that ground forces could cross the Line of Control. The Balakot strike after Pulwama established that air power could reach undisputed Pakistani territory. The covert campaign, gathering pace from 2021 onward, established that lethal operations could be conducted deep inside Pakistani cities. Each of these developments lowered the threshold for the next. By 2025 the conceptual distance between a covert killing and a conventional strike had narrowed almost to nothing in the minds of Indian decision-makers, because both had become normal tools rather than exceptional gambles. When Pahalgam demanded a response, the planners did not have to invent the idea of using both tracks. The idea was already implicit in a decade of escalation. The progression from restraint to a willingness to use force across the border is the central thread of the twenty-six-year arc from the Kandahar hijacking to the present, and the convergence is best understood as that arc reaching its logical destination.
The structural force has a feature that distinguishes it from the other two and makes it the most important of the three. The Pahalgam crisis was a particular event that will not recur in the same form, and the decision not to pause the quiet track was a particular choice that a different set of decision-makers might have made differently. The decade of hardening, by contrast, is not an event or a choice but a direction, and directions persist. Each step in that direction had lowered the threshold for the step after it, and by 2025 the threshold for using the conventional and quiet tracks together had been lowered to the point where doing so required no special act of daring. The structural force, in other words, did not merely make the fusion possible in May. It made the fusion the path of least resistance, the natural thing for a hardened posture to do when a crisis demanded both a public answer and a sustained one. That is why the merger, even if it was not planned, was also not surprising.
A second force was the specific shape of the Pahalgam problem, which has already been described and need not be repeated at length. The massacre simultaneously required a loud public answer, which only the conventional track could supply, and a sustained punitive pressure, which only the covert track could supply. A crisis that demanded exactly one capability would have produced a single-track response. Pahalgam demanded both, and so it produced a dual-track response. In this sense the convergence was pulled into existence by the nature of the provocation rather than pushed into existence by a pre-existing plan. The covert hand was not summoned to join the conventional operation. It was already at work, and the conventional operation simply arrived alongside it, and the decision-makers chose not to pause the quieter campaign in deference to the louder one. That choice, the choice not to pause, is the closest thing to a deliberate act of convergence that the available evidence supports.
The third force is the one most resistant to confident statement, and it concerns intention at the highest level. There is a reading of the May operation in which the convergence was not merely permitted but actively wanted, in which planners understood perfectly well that running both tracks at once would produce a pressure no adversary had faced before, and chose to do so precisely for that effect. This reading cannot be proven from open sources, because the covert track is by construction undocumented and the deliberations behind a national security decision of this magnitude do not appear in press releases. But the reading is plausible, and its plausibility rests on a simple observation. If the convergence had been unwelcome, if New Delhi had wanted the conventional operation to stand alone as a clean, bounded, deniably-decoupled event, it could have quietly suspended the covert campaign for the duration of the crisis. It did not. The quiet track ran straight through the loud one. A state that did not want its two hands to be seen working together would have hidden one of them. India hid neither, and that absence of concealment is the strongest available indication that the convergence, whatever its origins, was at least welcomed by the people directing the campaign.
One can press the point harder by asking what a genuinely unwanted fusion would have looked like. A state determined to keep its two campaigns strictly separate has straightforward ways to do so. It can pause the quiet programme for the weeks of a crisis, accepting a temporary loss of attritional pressure in exchange for a clean, single-track conventional event. It can sequence the two so that one clearly follows the other rather than overlapping. It can, at minimum, ensure that the timing of any quiet action during a crisis is such that it cannot be read as coordinated. New Delhi did none of these things. The elimination campaign ran at full tempo through the loud one, with no visible effort to sequence, pause, or decouple. The simplest explanation for an absence of decoupling is an absence of any desire to decouple, and that is why the evidence, while it cannot prove a premeditated doctrine, does support the more limited conclusion that the merger was a chosen tolerance rather than an unwelcome accident.
Weighing these three forces together yields a measured conclusion rather than a dramatic one. The convergence was neither a pure accident nor a fully premeditated doctrine. It was an emergent outcome that a decade of hardening had made possible, that the Pahalgam crisis made necessary, and that the decision-makers, given the chance to prevent it, chose instead to allow. Emergent outcomes of that kind have a way of hardening into doctrine after the fact, because once a state has discovered that a particular combination of capabilities produces a desired effect, it tends to institutionalise the combination. That is the bridge to the question of permanence, which the analysis must take up after first tracing what the convergence produced in the weeks immediately after the guns fell silent.
The Immediate Consequences
The most immediate consequence of the convergence was a change in what India could credibly threaten, and therefore a change in what India could credibly deter. Deterrence is not built from capabilities a state possesses in the abstract. It is built from capabilities an adversary believes will be used. Before May 2025, Pakistan’s planners could believe two separate and comforting things. They could believe that a conventional Indian strike, if it came, would be a bounded event followed by a recovery period. They could believe that the covert campaign, however irritating, was a manageable background nuisance that did not threaten the organisational core of the militant groups. The convergence dismantled both beliefs in a single week. The conventional strike was shown to be the visible component of a continuous pressure rather than a bounded event, and the covert campaign was shown to be capable of operating even under the spotlight of a shooting war, which meant it could not be wished away as a peacetime irritant. A state that has demonstrated both of those things has expanded the menu of consequences its adversary must fear, and an expanded menu of feared consequences is, by definition, expanded deterrence.
There is a subtlety in this deterrence gain that should not be lost. Deterrence works best when an adversary can predict that a given provocation will draw a given response, because predictability is what makes a threat credible enough to shape behaviour in advance. The fusion improves Indian deterrence not by making the response more violent but by making it more certain and more continuous. Before May 2025, a Pakistani planner contemplating support for a cross-border operation could reasonably hope that New Delhi would absorb the provocation, as it had absorbed many, or would answer with a bounded strike that could be weathered. After the merger, the same planner must reckon with a response that does not end, because the quiet track will continue exacting a price long after any conventional spike subsides. A cost that is certain and continuous is a stronger deterrent than a cost that is severe but bounded, and the fusion converted India’s deterrent from the second kind into something closer to the first.
The deterrence gain also reached an audience beyond Islamabad, namely the outside capitals that watch the subcontinent and weigh how far each crisis might run. For years the international reading of an India-Pakistan flare-up followed a familiar template. A provocation would occur, New Delhi would answer with a bounded strike, foreign ministries would issue calls for restraint, a ceasefire would be brokered, and the episode would be filed as closed. The convergence complicates that template in a way diplomats noticed. An episode that produces a four-day conventional spike and then appears to end can no longer be filed as closed, because the quiet track keeps the underlying contest live long after the cameras leave. Outside observers who once treated each crisis as a self-contained event must now treat it as one visible segment of a campaign that does not stop, and that shift changes how seriously they take New Delhi’s threats in the period between spikes. A state whose pressure is understood to be continuous is taken more seriously, and is granted more latitude, than a state whose pressure is understood to switch off the moment a ceasefire is signed. The convergence, by making the pressure legibly continuous, raised India’s standing in the calculations of the very third parties whose opinions shape how much room either side is given in the next crisis.
A second consequence concerned the militant organisations directly, and it operated on the level of their internal security culture rather than their headline casualty count. Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed had spent years developing protective routines calibrated against a particular threat model. They knew how to disperse before an anticipated conventional strike, moving senior figures out of known facilities when the diplomatic temperature rose. They knew, separately, how to harden against the covert campaign, varying the routines of individuals, thinning the predictable gatherings, increasing the layers of vetting around any new face. What they had never had to do was defend against both threat models at once, because the two had never been active in the same window. The convergence forced exactly that. A senior figure who relocated from a known headquarters to avoid a missile now found himself relocating into precisely the kind of unfamiliar, improvised, less-controlled environment in which the covert campaign thrives. The two threats did not merely add together. They interfered with the countermeasures each would have used against the other. The condition of the commanders trying to survive inside that interference is examined in the study of the terror leaders who have outlasted the campaign and how they adapt.
The pressure on the militant organisations also operated on a dimension that casualty figures never capture, namely the cost of constant defensive adaptation. An organisation that must continuously vet its members, vary its routines, thin its gatherings, and relocate its leadership is an organisation spending an ever-larger share of its energy on survival rather than on operations. Counter-terrorism analysts sometimes call this the imposition of a defensive tax, the diversion of an adversary’s effort away from attacking and toward not being attacked. The fusion raised that tax sharply, because defending against two simultaneous and mutually interfering threats consumes far more organisational attention than defending against either alone. A group paying a heavy defensive tax may show no change in its published casualty count for months and still be growing measurably weaker, because the resource it is losing is not personnel but operational tempo, planning capacity, and the freedom to act on its own schedule.
There is a further effect that operates below the level of organisation charts and casualty arithmetic, and it concerns the inner condition of the people who staff a militant group. A campaign that runs without pause changes what membership feels like from the inside. When a threat arrives as a discrete event, separated by long calm intervals, a recruit can tell himself that danger is occasional and survivable, and a commander can promise his juniors that the present pressure will lift. A campaign with no pause removes that consolation. The danger becomes a permanent background condition rather than an episode to be endured, and a permanent danger erodes morale in ways an episodic one does not. Recruitment becomes harder when a prospective member can see that joining means entering a state of indefinite exposure with no recovery window in sight. Retention becomes harder when mid-level figures conclude that survival, rather than advancement, has become the realistic ceiling of a career inside the organisation. None of this appears in a body count, and none of it produces a dramatic headline, but the slow drain of confidence among the people a militant group most needs to keep is one of the quieter ways the convergence imposes a cost. An organisation can absorb losses. It struggles far more to absorb the steady knowledge, shared by everyone inside it, that the pressure is never going to stop.
A third consequence reshaped the strategic conversation inside Pakistan’s own security establishment. The promotion of the army chief to field marshal in the days after the ceasefire was, on its surface, a declaration of victory, an assertion that the conventional fight had been weathered and even won. Whatever one makes of that claim regarding the four days of declared combat, it could not address the covert track at all, because the covert track had no ceasefire to point to. The negotiated halt of 10 May stopped the missiles. It did not, and by its nature could not, stop the gunmen, because the gunmen belonged to a campaign Pakistan did not officially admit existed and India did not officially admit conducting. A ceasefire is an agreement between two states about their declared forces. The covert track is, definitionally, undeclared. This asymmetry is the quiet engine of the convergence’s lasting power. Pakistan could negotiate an end to the loud war. It had no instrument with which to negotiate an end to the quiet one, and the convergence ensured that the quiet one carried the strategic pressure forward across the very ceasefire that was supposed to deliver relief.
This asymmetry between a negotiable loud war and a non-negotiable quiet one had a consequence inside Pakistan that is easy to underestimate. A state that has accepted a ceasefire expects, reasonably, that the truce will produce a period of calm in which it can recover, reassure its public, and reset. The fusion denied Pakistan that expected calm. The missiles stopped on schedule, but the elimination campaign did not, and there was no forum in which Islamabad could even raise the quiet campaign as a grievance, because doing so would require it to describe in detail a category of attack that both governments preferred to leave undescribed. Pakistan found itself in the awkward position of having negotiated an end to the war it could admit while remaining fully exposed to the war neither side would name. That awkwardness is a structural feature of the merger, and it is one of the reasons the fusion delivers lasting strategic advantage rather than a one-week tactical effect.
The fourth and broadest immediate consequence is the one captured by the phrase full-spectrum capability, a phrase that deserves to be unpacked rather than left as a slogan. A counter-terrorism instrument is full-spectrum when it can apply force at every level of intensity and visibility that a situation might require, and can move between those levels without changing instruments. Before the convergence, India had to choose its instrument before it chose its response, and the choice of instrument constrained the response. Reaching for the conventional military meant accepting a loud, escalatory, internationally scrutinised event with a hard ceiling and a hard floor. Reaching for the covert services meant accepting a quiet, deniable, internationally invisible operation with a low ceiling. Each instrument came bundled with a fixed band of the spectrum. The convergence unbundled the choice. A state that runs both tracks as one instrument can occupy the loud band and the quiet band at the same time, and can shift its weight between them as the situation evolves, leaning on missiles when the public mood demands spectacle and on gunmen when the diplomatic moment demands silence. That flexibility, the ability to be loud and quiet at once and to modulate between them in real time, is what full-spectrum actually means, and it is what India did not possess before May 2025 and did possess after. The covert dimension of that spectrum is detailed in the broader account of how the silent campaign operates as a doctrine, and the conventional dimension in the study of the defence doctrine the Pahalgam crisis produced.
It is worth grounding the abstraction of the spectrum in a concrete contrast. Imagine a future provocation smaller than Pahalgam, serious enough to demand an answer but not so atrocious that a domestic public would accept nothing less than missiles. Before the fusion, India’s choice in that situation was uncomfortable. A conventional strike might be disproportionate and dangerously escalatory, while the quiet campaign alone might be invisible enough to read, at home, as inaction. The state was caught between an instrument that was too loud and an instrument that was too quiet, with nothing in between. A full-spectrum posture dissolves that dilemma. It allows a calibrated answer, perhaps a visible increase in the elimination tempo paired with a credible but unused conventional threat, that matches the size of the provocation without overshooting or undershooting it. The deepest gain of the merger is not raw destructive power. It is the recovery of the middle of the spectrum, the range of measured responses that a state confined to one instrument can never reach.
It would be a mistake, though, to present these consequences as uniformly favourable to New Delhi, and a serious analysis must register the costs the convergence also generated. A full-spectrum instrument is a more provocative instrument. When the covert track ran in the background of peacetime, it gave Pakistan a reason for grievance but not a reason for general mobilisation, because its very deniability kept it below the threshold of a casus belli. By fusing the quiet campaign visibly with a conventional war, the convergence raised the covert track’s profile and, with it, the risk that a future covert operation might be read by Pakistan not as an isolated criminal act but as the opening move of another conventional campaign. The convergence, in other words, may have made every individual covert killing more escalatory than it used to be, because each one now sits inside a demonstrated pattern of fusion rather than standing alone. That is a genuine cost, and it belongs in the ledger alongside the gains in deterrence and flexibility.
The Long-Term Chain
The decisive long-term question is whether the convergence is permanent. Did the May operation establish a new and enduring default posture, or did it merely describe an unusual alignment that the specific pressures of one crisis produced and that will dissolve once those pressures fade? The question matters because the answer determines whether Pakistan’s planners should treat the convergence as a structural feature of their environment or as an outlier to be discounted. The evidence is genuinely mixed, and the responsible course is to set out the case on each side before reaching toward a judgement.
The case for impermanence is not weak. It begins with the observation that the conventional track has always been crisis-driven and has always returned to its flat baseline once a crisis ends. The surgical strikes of 2016 were a single event. Balakot in 2019 was a single event. Both were followed by long quiet periods in which the conventional military returned to readiness rather than action. By that historical pattern, the May operation should be expected to behave the same way, a sharp spike followed by a return to dormancy, and indeed the conventional line did drop back toward baseline after the 10 May ceasefire. If the conventional track reverts to its old episodic rhythm, then there is nothing for the covert track to converge with during the long intervals between crises, and the fusion of May becomes a description of one week rather than a permanent doctrine. On this reading, the convergence is real but temporary, a property of crises rather than of the steady state.
There is an institutional dimension to the case for impermanence as well, and it is the dimension most often underrated. Fusing a covert campaign with a conventional one is not merely a matter of timing two operations to overlap. It implies, if it is to be sustained, a degree of coordination between institutions whose cultures, security practices, and tolerance for visibility are sharply different. The intelligence service that runs the quiet track depends absolutely on deniability and operates on long, patient timelines. The military that runs the loud track depends on declared authority and operates on the compressed timelines of a shooting war. An instrument that genuinely fuses the two would require shared targeting, deconflicted operations, and a joint understanding of how a covert act in one week affects a conventional option in the next. Building that kind of integration is hard, and the difficulty of welding India’s institutions into structures capable of multi-track action has been a persistent theme in the work of analysts of the country’s civil-military relations. The scholar Anit Mukherjee, whose study of the absent dialogue between India’s political and military institutions is widely cited, has long argued that the country’s defence establishment struggles to integrate capabilities across institutional boundaries. If that argument holds, then the convergence may prove difficult to institutionalise even if New Delhi wishes to, and the May fusion may remain an effect produced by crisis adrenaline rather than by durable machinery.
A second strand of the impermanence case concerns secrecy itself, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. The quiet track derives its strategic value from being deniable, and deniability is a fragile asset that heavy use can erode. Each operation conducted, each pattern repeated, each city in which the campaign becomes an open secret chips away at the plausible-deniability framework that lets the elimination programme function below the threshold of a casus belli. A fusion that makes the quiet campaign more prominent, more discussed, and more obviously coordinated with conventional force accelerates that erosion. There is a version of the future in which the elimination track becomes so visible, so undeniable, that it can no longer be run as a deniable campaign at all, at which point it would either have to be acknowledged, which changes its character entirely, or curtailed. On this reading the merger carries the seed of its own limitation, and the unified instrument may prove less durable than it currently appears, not because the institutions cannot coordinate but because the secrecy that one track depends on cannot survive indefinite exposure.
Now the case for permanence, which is in the end the stronger case, though not overwhelmingly so. Its first and most important pillar is empirical. If the convergence had been a one-time crisis artefact, the covert track should have subsided along with the conventional one after the May ceasefire. It did not. The quiet campaign accelerated after the guns fell silent, reaching a higher operational tempo in the months following the ceasefire than it had achieved before the crisis. That post-ceasefire acceleration, documented in the study of the surge in eliminations that followed Operation Sindoor, is difficult to explain on the impermanence reading. A campaign that was merely riding the coattails of a conventional crisis should have lost momentum when the crisis ended. Instead it gained momentum. The most natural explanation is that the convergence did not depend on the conventional spike to sustain itself, that the covert track had become the permanent carrier of the strategic pressure and the conventional track merely its occasional, visible reinforcement. On that reading the convergence is not a property of crises. It is the new steady state, with the quiet campaign running continuously and the loud campaign available to be summoned when a public answer is required.
The empirical pillar can be stated as a simple test, and the test has now been run. If the fusion were a crisis artefact, removing the crisis should remove the fusion, and the elimination campaign should have subsided once the conventional war ended. If the fusion were structural, removing the crisis should leave the quiet campaign undiminished or stronger. Reality delivered the second outcome unambiguously. The conventional war ended in May and the elimination campaign, far from subsiding, reached its highest tempo afterward. A hypothesis that predicted subsidence has been falsified by events, and a hypothesis that predicted continuity has been confirmed. That is about as clean a verdict as the study of a deliberately concealed campaign ever permits, and it is the single strongest reason to regard the quiet track’s permanence as established rather than speculative.
The second pillar of the permanence case is conceptual and follows from how states treat capabilities they have discovered to be effective. Once a government has learned that a particular combination of instruments produces a strategic effect it values, it tends to preserve the combination, build doctrine around it, and assign institutions to maintain it. The analyst Arzan Tarapore, who studies Indian military operations, has examined the May campaign as a candidate for exactly this kind of doctrinal institutionalisation, asking whether the fusion of tracks represents a deliberate and lasting integration rather than a passing alignment. The question is not yet settled, and Tarapore’s own assessment treats it as genuinely open. But the logic of state behaviour leans toward permanence. A full-spectrum instrument, once possessed, is not easily surrendered, because surrendering it means voluntarily returning to the old condition in which the choice of instrument constrained the response. Few security establishments choose to re-impose a constraint they have just escaped.
There is a refinement worth adding to the institutionalisation argument, because it answers a natural objection. One might say that a state cannot institutionalise a campaign it refuses to admit conducting, since doctrine is normally written down and a deniable programme cannot be written into a public doctrine. The objection has force, but it misjudges how covert capabilities are sustained. A deniable programme is institutionalised not through a published charter but through budgets, career paths, dedicated units, accumulated tradecraft, and the quiet expectation within the relevant services that the programme will continue. None of that requires a public document. It requires only that the people who run the elimination track understand it to be a permanent assignment rather than a temporary expedient. The post-ceasefire acceleration is evidence that they do understand it that way, because a programme treated as temporary winds down when its triggering crisis ends, while a programme treated as permanent does not. Institutionalisation, in the covert domain, is visible in tempo rather than in paperwork, and the tempo says the merger is being institutionalised.
The third pillar is the structural argument already developed in the discussion of causes. The convergence was the destination toward which a decade of hardening had been travelling. The surgical strikes, the Balakot strike, the steady climb of the covert campaign, and the doctrinal shift after Pahalgam were not isolated events but stages of a single trajectory, and that trajectory pointed at the fusion of tracks long before May 2025 arrived to consummate it. Trajectories of that kind do not casually reverse. The connective logic of the whole sequence, from the Kandahar tarmac of 1999 to the present, is examined in the account of the complete twenty-six-year chain, and within that chain the convergence reads less like an aberration than like an arrival.
None of this means the merger is cost-free over the long run, and the regional risks compound rather than fade with time. A permanent quiet campaign running continuously inside a nuclear-armed neighbour is a permanent source of friction, and friction sustained over years has more opportunities to produce a miscalculation than friction confined to a brief crisis. The danger is not that any single quiet operation triggers a war. The danger is that the fusion normalises a condition of unending low-level conflict in which both states grow accustomed to operating just below the threshold of general war, and accustomed parties are precisely the parties most likely to misjudge where the threshold actually lies. A doctrine that abolishes the safe interval for the adversary also abolishes, for both sides, the periodic pauses in which tempers cooled and signals were reset. The long-term chain therefore carries a structural hazard that the merger’s tactical brilliance can obscure, and an honest accounting names it rather than letting the elegance of the unified instrument paper it over.
Set the two cases side by side and a measured judgement emerges. The conventional track will almost certainly revert to its episodic rhythm, spiking in crises and lying flat between them, because that is what conventional military action has always done and there is no evidence the May operation changed it. But the covert track shows every sign of having become permanent and continuous, and the post-ceasefire acceleration is the decisive piece of evidence for that claim. What the convergence therefore established is not a permanent state of fused loud-and-quiet action, but a permanent covert campaign that functions as the connective tissue linking one conventional spike to the next. The safe interval has not returned, and it is the disappearance of the safe interval, rather than the perpetual presence of missiles, that constitutes the lasting doctrinal change. The institutional obstacles that Mukherjee’s work identifies are real, and they may limit how tightly the two tracks can be coordinated in any future crisis, but they do not undo the basic fact that the quiet campaign now runs without pause.
It is worth holding the two scholarly readings side by side rather than collapsing them, because the disagreement between them is genuine and the evidence does not fully settle it. Anit Mukherjee’s account of the Indian security state stresses how weakly its civilian and military institutions actually talk to one another, and a reader persuaded by that account will doubt that anything as tidy as a fused doctrine could survive contact with the real bureaucracy. On that reading the May simultaneity was a coincidence of two campaigns that the system is structurally incapable of integrating, and the convergence will dissolve the next time the institutions are asked to cooperate under pressure. Arzan Tarapore’s work on Indian strategic behaviour points the other way, emphasising how a posture, once it has demonstrated an effect, tends to be repeated and refined regardless of whether the formal machinery for it exists. On that reading the absence of a joint command charter is beside the point, because the convergence is a pattern of behaviour rather than an institutional arrangement, and patterns of behaviour persist through institutional friction. The honest position is that both scholars are describing something real. The institutions are genuinely uncoordinated, and the behaviour genuinely recurs. What the post-ceasefire record settles is narrower than either thesis. It does not prove a doctrine and it does not prove a coincidence. It proves only that the quiet track did not stop, and that single fact is enough to make the safe interval a thing of the past whichever scholar turns out to be the better guide to the bureaucracy behind it. Permanence, properly understood, attaches to the continuity of the covert track and to the abolition of the recovery window, not to a fantasy of unending simultaneous fire.
One further long-term implication deserves statement, because it concerns the entire counter-terrorism enterprise rather than the convergence narrowly. A full-spectrum instrument creates a temptation that the instrument’s own designers have warned against. When a state can apply force at every level of visibility and intensity, it may begin to treat that capacity as a substitute for the slower, less satisfying work of diplomacy, financial pressure, and the patient erosion of the militant recruitment pipeline. Analysts of the May operation, including Walter Ladwig, who has written closely on the escalation dynamics of India-Pakistan crises, have cautioned that a cost-imposition strategy, however impressive its individual operations, cannot by itself dismantle an adversary as entrenched as Pakistan’s militant infrastructure, and that military and covert action are properly supporting efforts rather than the main line. The convergence makes the supporting effort more powerful and more flexible. It does not make the supporting effort sufficient. A state intoxicated by the spectacle of full-spectrum capability could mistake a sharpened sword for a completed strategy, and that mistake, more than any institutional friction, is the genuine long-term risk the convergence carries forward into the next link of the chain.
The Next Link
The convergence did not close the story. It set up the next chapter, and the shape of that chapter was visible almost as soon as the May ceasefire took effect. If the central claim of this analysis is correct, that the covert track became permanent while the conventional track reverted to dormancy, then the months after the ceasefire should show one line flat and the other line climbing. That is precisely what they showed. The conventional military returned to readiness, the diplomatic temperature cooled from the boil of early May to a wary simmer, and by every visible measure the loud war was over. The quiet war, however, did not cool. It accelerated, and it accelerated sharply, producing a density of eliminations in the period after the ceasefire that exceeded anything the campaign had managed before the crisis.
That acceleration is the next link in the chain, and it is the strongest possible confirmation of the convergence thesis, because it demonstrates that the fusion was not an illusion produced by the crisis spotlight. A campaign sustained only by crisis adrenaline would have faded when the crisis faded. This one intensified. The detailed account of that intensification, its tempo, its geographic spread, and its reach toward steadily more senior figures, is the subject of the study of how targeted killings surged in the months after the operation. The paradox at its centre is worth naming in advance. The ceasefire stopped the missiles, and it was supposed to deliver relief. Instead the interval the ceasefire created became the most lethal period the covert campaign had yet produced, because the convergence had abolished the very recovery window that a ceasefire is meant to provide.
The next link also tests the fusion thesis in a way no argument could, simply by letting time pass. A claim that the quiet track had become permanent was, in the immediate aftermath of the May ceasefire, still a forecast. Forecasts about deliberately concealed campaigns are usually impossible to verify. This one became verifiable because the months that followed either would or would not show the predicted pattern of a flat conventional line and a climbing quiet one. They showed it. Watching the prediction come true is itself part of the next link, because each elimination in the post-ceasefire period was a fresh data point confirming that the merger had outlived the crisis that produced it. The story that follows is therefore not only an account of an acceleration. It is the account of a thesis being proven by events rather than asserted by analysts.
There is a second strand to the next link, and it concerns altitude. The covert campaign had spent years reaching logisticians, recruiters, and mid-tier facilitators, important figures but not the founding leadership. The post-ceasefire phase began to reach higher. The trajectory pointed toward the senior tier, toward the men whose names appear on the founding documents of the militant organisations rather than in their operational rosters, and the campaign’s eventual approach to a figure of that rank is examined in the account of the operation against a Lashkar co-founder in Lahore. The convergence, by proving that the covert track could operate continuously and at full intensity even across a conventional war, had effectively removed the ceiling that deniability was once thought to impose. If the quiet campaign could run through a shooting war, it could run anywhere, and against anyone. The next link in the chain is the story of what a covert campaign does once it discovers it has no ceiling, and it is to that story, the post-ceasefire acceleration and the climb toward the senior leadership, that the narrative now turns.
Before the narrative moves on, one observation is worth fixing in place, because it frames everything that follows. The convergence analysed here was a turning point precisely because it was not a single dramatic act that a viewer could point to on a given evening. It was a change in the underlying structure of how India applies force, and structural changes are the kind that genuinely persist. A spectacular raid can be reversed by the next spectacular raid. A change in the resting shape of a doctrine cannot be reversed that way, because there is no single event to undo. What May 2025 altered was the default assumption a militant commander must now carry at all times, the assumption that there will be no quiet period in which to rebuild. That assumption, once installed, does not switch off when a ceasefire is signed or when a news cycle moves on. It is the permanent residue of the convergence, and it is what makes the months that follow not a separate story but the direct continuation of this one.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean that Operation Sindoor merged the shadow war with conventional military action?
It means that for the first time the covert elimination campaign inside Pakistan and the conventional missile and air operation ran at full intensity in the same window, against targets drawn from the same list of militant organisations. Before May 2025 the two campaigns operated on separate clocks, the conventional one spiking only in crises and the covert one running quietly in the background. During the May operation both fired at once. From the perspective of a militant commander, the two campaigns stopped being separate threats with separate schedules and became a single continuous pressure with no schedule at all.
Were covert killings actually happening during the missile operation?
The available evidence indicates that the covert campaign did not pause for the conventional operation. Across the weeks in which the air forces of the two countries fenced at stand-off range, unidentified attackers continued reaching wanted men inside Pakistan, and the operational tempo of the quiet track showed no dip corresponding to the conventional spike. Because the covert campaign is by design undocumented, a precise tally for that specific window cannot be stated with certainty, but the absence of any slowdown is the central empirical observation behind the convergence argument.
Is the covert-conventional convergence permanent or a one-time event?
The judgement of this analysis is that the convergence is partly permanent and partly not. The conventional track will almost certainly revert to its old episodic rhythm, spiking in crises and lying flat between them, exactly as it did after the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot strike. The covert track, however, shows every sign of having become permanent and continuous, because it accelerated rather than subsided after the May ceasefire. What endures is a permanent covert campaign that links one conventional spike to the next, abolishing the recovery window that used to follow an Indian response.
What is full-spectrum counter-terror capability?
A counter-terrorism instrument is full-spectrum when it can apply force at every level of intensity and visibility a situation might require, from the deniable pistol shot at the low end to the undeniable cruise-missile strike at the high end, and can move between those levels without switching instruments. Before the convergence, India had to choose its instrument before choosing its response, and that choice constrained the response. A full-spectrum instrument unbundles the choice, allowing a state to be loud and quiet at once and to shift its weight between the two as a situation evolves.
Did India plan the convergence or did it happen by accident?
The most defensible answer is that it was neither a pure accident nor a fully premeditated doctrine. A decade of hardening since 2016 had made the fusion possible, the specific shape of the Pahalgam crisis made it necessary, and the decision-makers, given the opportunity to prevent it by quietly suspending the covert campaign during the crisis, chose instead to let it run. That choice not to pause the quiet track is the closest thing to a deliberate act of convergence that open evidence supports. Emergent outcomes of this kind often harden into formal doctrine afterward.
How did the convergence change Pakistan’s strategic calculations?
It dismantled two comforting assumptions at once. Pakistani planners had been able to believe that an Indian conventional strike would be a bounded event followed by a recovery period, and that the covert campaign was a manageable peacetime nuisance. The May operation showed that the conventional strike was the visible component of a continuous pressure rather than a bounded event, and that the covert campaign could operate even under the spotlight of a shooting war. An adversary that has lost both assumptions faces an expanded menu of consequences it must fear.
Why could the ceasefire not stop the covert campaign?
A ceasefire is an agreement between two states about their declared forces. The covert campaign is, by definition, undeclared. India does not officially admit conducting it and Pakistan does not officially admit it exists, so there is no instrument through which it could be formally halted. The negotiated truce of 10 May 2025 stopped the missiles because the missiles belonged to declared military forces. It could not touch the gunmen, and the convergence ensured that the quiet campaign carried the strategic pressure forward across the very ceasefire meant to deliver relief.
What was Operation Sindoor and when did it happen?
It was the conventional military operation India launched soon after midnight on 7 May 2025, in response to the Pahalgam massacre of 22 April. The opening wave lasted roughly twenty-three minutes and struck nine sites linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Hizbul Mujahideen across Pakistan’s Punjab and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The campaign escalated over the following days into an exchange between the two states and was halted by a ceasefire on the afternoon of 10 May. The operation is covered in full in the dedicated guide to the four-day conflict.
What targets did the missile strikes hit?
The strikes hit infrastructure belonging to the three militant organisations most deeply implicated in the cross-border campaign against India. The most symbolically significant coordinate was the Jaish-e-Mohammed headquarters complex in Bahawalpur, the seminary known as Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah, and another resonant target was the Lashkar campus at Muridke near Lahore. Indian officials placed the militant death toll above one hundred. Pakistan disputed that framing and asserted the strikes had killed thirty-one civilians. The damage assessment remains genuinely contested.
How is the convergence different from simply doing two things at the same time?
The difference lies in the effect on the adversary rather than in the bureaucratic arrangement. The two campaigns did not necessarily merge into one organisation or sign a joint command charter. Convergence describes the fact that, from a target’s point of view, the two tracks now function as a single instrument because they fire at the same list in overlapping windows and never leave a safe interval. Two unrelated activities happening to coincide would not abolish the recovery window. The fusion of tracks, drawing on a common intelligence base, does.
What role did intelligence play in linking the two tracks?
A missile strike on a seminary and a pistol shot outside a mosque are radically different acts in their visibility and politics, but they make the same informational demand. Both require precise, current, verified knowledge of where a person or facility is located and when access will arrive. The intelligence architecture that produced the coordinates for the struck sites is the same architecture that produces the dossiers for the quiet campaign. The two tracks could be fired together because, beneath the visible difference between cruise missile and motorcycle, they had always drawn on one common source.
Does the convergence make another India-Pakistan war more likely?
It introduces a genuine risk alongside its deterrent gains. By fusing the covert campaign visibly with a conventional war, the convergence raised the profile of the quiet track and, with it, the danger that a future covert operation might be read by Pakistan not as an isolated criminal act but as the opening move of another conventional campaign. Each individual covert killing may therefore be more escalatory than it used to be. That cost belongs in the ledger alongside the gains in deterrence and operational flexibility.
What institutional changes would a permanent convergence require?
Sustaining a genuine fusion would require coordination between institutions with sharply different cultures. The intelligence service depends on deniability and patient timelines, while the military depends on declared authority and the compressed timelines of combat. A durable convergence would need shared targeting, deconflicted operations, and a joint understanding of how a covert act in one week shapes a conventional option in the next. Analysts of India’s civil-military relations have long noted that the country’s defence establishment struggles to integrate capabilities across institutional boundaries, which may limit how tightly the tracks can be welded.
Why is Pahalgam considered the trigger for the convergence?
The April massacre simultaneously demanded two things that no single instrument could supply. It demanded a loud public answer, which only the conventional military could deliver, and a sustained punitive pressure, which only the covert campaign could deliver. A crisis requiring exactly one capability would have produced a single-track response. Pahalgam required both, and so it produced a dual-track response. The convergence was, in this sense, pulled into existence by the nature of the provocation rather than pushed into existence by a pre-existing plan.
What happened to the covert campaign after the ceasefire?
It accelerated rather than subsided. The conventional military returned to readiness and the diplomatic temperature cooled, but the quiet campaign intensified, producing a higher density of eliminations in the months after the ceasefire than it had managed before the crisis. That post-ceasefire acceleration is the strongest confirmation of the convergence thesis, because a campaign sustained only by crisis adrenaline would have faded when the crisis faded. This one did the opposite, which indicates the convergence was real and the covert track had become the permanent carrier of strategic pressure.
Could India have kept the missile operation separate from the covert campaign?
It could have. New Delhi could have quietly suspended the elimination programme for the duration of the crisis, allowing the conventional operation to stand alone as a clean, bounded, deniably-decoupled event. It chose not to. The quiet track ran straight through the loud one. A state that did not want its two hands seen working together would have hidden one of them. The decision to conceal neither is the strongest available indication that the convergence, whatever its origins, was at minimum welcomed by the people directing the campaign.
Does the convergence mean military force can solve the terrorism problem on its own?
No, and analysts of the May operation have warned specifically against that conclusion. A cost-imposition strategy, however impressive its individual operations, cannot by itself dismantle an adversary as entrenched as Pakistan’s militant infrastructure. Military and covert action are properly supporting efforts that work best alongside diplomatic isolation, financial pressure, and the patient erosion of the recruitment pipeline. The convergence makes the supporting effort more powerful and more flexible. It does not make it sufficient, and mistaking a sharpened sword for a completed strategy is a genuine long-term danger.
Where does the convergence fit in the larger story of India-Pakistan conflict?
It is best understood as the destination toward which a decade of escalation had been travelling. The 2016 surgical strikes, the 2019 Balakot strike, the steady climb of the covert campaign from 2021 onward, and the doctrinal hardening after Pahalgam were stages of a single trajectory pointing at the fusion of tracks. Within the twenty-six-year arc that runs from the Kandahar hijacking of 1999 to the present, the convergence reads less like an aberration than like an arrival, the moment the long progression from helplessness to full-spectrum capability reached its logical conclusion.
How does the convergence compare to how other countries fight terrorism?
Several states have run both covert and conventional counter-terrorism campaigns, and the analytical interest of the Indian case is not that the two campaigns exist but that they were demonstrably fused in a single window against a single target set. The United States and Israel both maintain covert targeted-killing programmes alongside conventional military forces, and analysts of the May operation have noted that India will need to keep improving its targeting tradecraft in the way those states have. What distinguishes the Indian case is the specific effect it produced, the abolition of the recovery interval for the adversary, achieved by running the quiet track continuously across a conventional crisis rather than alternating between the two.
Did the convergence achieve India’s objectives?
The answer depends on which objective is meant. If the objective was to deliver a visible, politically satisfying answer to the Pahalgam massacre, the conventional component supplied that. If the objective was to impose continuous, inescapable pressure on the militant organisations, the quiet component, accelerating after the ceasefire, supplied that. If the objective was to dismantle Pakistan’s militant infrastructure outright, neither component achieved it, and analysts have cautioned that no cost-imposition campaign can achieve it alone. The merger was a success at the level of capability and pressure and remains unproven at the level of strategic resolution, which is a distinction worth keeping clear.
What is the single most important takeaway about the Sindoor convergence?
The most important takeaway is the disappearance of the safe interval. For most of the past two decades, an Indian response to terrorism was a discrete event that an adversary could absorb and then wait out, confident that a recovery period would follow. The merger ended that. By running the elimination campaign continuously and reinforcing it with conventional force when a public answer was required, New Delhi built an instrument that applies pressure without pause. Everything else about the development, the full-spectrum flexibility, the expanded deterrence, the institutional questions, follows from that one structural change, the abolition of the interval in which the adversary used to recover.
Why does this analysis treat the elimination campaign and Operation Sindoor as one story rather than two?
Because during May 2025 they functioned as one instrument from the only perspective that matters strategically, the perspective of the target. The two campaigns kept their separate institutions, methods, and chains of command, and in that bureaucratic sense they remained distinct. But they fired at the same list of organisations in overlapping windows, drew on a common pool of intelligence, and together left the adversary with no safe interval. A militant commander did not experience a quiet threat and a conventional threat. He experienced a single continuous pressure. When two campaigns produce a unified effect on the people they target, treating them as one story is not a simplification. It is the accurate description.