The ceasefire stopped the missiles. It did not stop the motorcycles. On the afternoon of May 10, 2025, the directors general of military operations in New Delhi and Rawalpindi agreed to halt all firing across the Line of Control and the international boundary, and within hours the four-day conventional war that had opened with Operation Sindoor’s twenty-three-minute missile barrage fell silent. What did not fall silent was the other war. Through the months that followed the truce, men on small motorcycles kept pulling alongside cars on Lahore’s avenues, gunmen kept waiting outside mosques in Karachi, and senior militants kept dropping in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh. By the opening quarter of 2026 the tempo of these shootings had not merely resumed but quickened, producing more eliminations of wanted operatives in a handful of months than the covert programme had achieved in any earlier full year. This article reconstructs that quickening, asks why a diplomatic pause designed to cool South Asia instead overlapped with the most intense phase of India’s shadow war, and examines what the paradox reveals about a campaign that has slipped loose from the constraints governing ordinary statecraft.

The Preceding Link

Everything in this chapter follows from a single event in May 2025, and that event is best understood as a merger. For roughly four years before Operation Sindoor, India had been running two distinct instruments against Pakistan-based terrorism, and the two had never operated at full strength simultaneously. One instrument was conventional and visible: the air force, the missile arsenal, the doctrine of punitive strikes that ran from the 2016 cross-border raids through the 2019 Balakot bombing. The other instrument was covert and deniable: the silent programme of targeted killings carried out by unidentified gunmen, which had begun with the 2021 car bomb near Hafiz Saeed’s Lahore residence and matured across 2023 into a recognisable pattern. Operation Sindoor is the moment those two instruments fused. The convergence that produced the dual-track dynamic took a campaign that had run quietly in the background and welded it to the full conventional weight of the Indian state, and the result was a single integrated posture that the rest of this story will trace into 2026.

A reader needs the longer history before the surge makes sense. For most of the period between the 1999 hijacking of flight IC-814 and the 2021 Lahore car bomb, India’s response to Pakistan-based terrorism oscillated between two unsatisfying poles. One pole was conventional retaliation, used rarely and at great risk: the 2016 special-forces raids across the Line of Control after the Uri attack, and the 2019 Balakot airstrike after the Pulwama bombing. Each of those operations was significant, each broke a prior taboo, and each was followed by a return to the strategic stalemate that had defined the relationship for decades. The other pole was strategic patience, the long absorption of attacks without a proportionate answer, justified by the genuine danger that any escalation between two nuclear-armed states carried. Neither pole solved the underlying problem, because neither reached the militant networks where they actually lived, inside Pakistan, under the protection of the Pakistani state.

The covert programme was the answer to that gap. Its opening move is generally dated to June 2021, when a car bomb detonated in the Johar Town neighbourhood of Lahore, close to the residence of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba. That blast announced a new willingness to reach into Pakistan’s heartland. The following year, in 2022, Zahoor Mistry, one of the IC-814 hijackers living openly in Karachi, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen. Then came 2023, the year the pattern became impossible to dismiss, with a sequence of killings of wanted figures across multiple Pakistani cities. The year the elimination pattern became undeniable is the moment the covert track stopped being a series of isolated incidents and became, in the assessment of analysts on both sides of the border, a campaign. The four years from 2021 to 2025 were the programme’s developmental phase, the period in which it built the assets, the methods, and the local knowledge that the post-Sindoor surge would later draw upon.

The four developmental years deserve a closer look, because they explain why the post-truce surge had a foundation to stand on. The 2021 Johar Town bombing was a statement of intent more than a sustainable model; a vehicle bomb is loud, indiscriminate, and difficult to repeat with precision. The campaign that followed evolved toward something quieter and more controllable. The 2022 killing of Zahoor Mistry, an IC-814 hijacker, demonstrated a different method: a precise shooting of a specific, named, individually significant target. That shift, from the blast to the bullet, was the campaign finding its mature form. The 2023 sequence then proved the form could be repeated. Across that year, wanted figures fell in city after city to attackers who arrived, fired, and vanished, and the consistency of the method across so many incidents was what convinced analysts on both sides of the border that they were watching a programme rather than a coincidence. By the time Pahalgam occurred in April 2025, the covert track had four years of accumulated method behind it, a tested template, a growing human network, and a body of operational experience. It was, in short, ready, and the events of May 2025 would hand it an environment in which readiness could translate directly into tempo.

It is also worth being precise about what the convergence of May 2025 changed and what it did not. Operation Sindoor did not create the covert programme; the programme was four years old. What Sindoor changed was the relationship between the two tracks and the political context in which the covert track operated. Before Sindoor, the covert killings were a deniable irritant running beneath an otherwise managed relationship. After Sindoor, they became the continuing edge of an openly declared confrontation, the instrument that carried the pressure forward once the conventional instrument had been set down. The convergence did not give the campaign new capabilities. It gave the campaign a new role, and a new and more permissive political environment in which to exercise the capabilities it already had.

The trigger that fused the two instruments arrived on April 22, 2025. Militants walked into the Baisaran meadow above Pahalgam, a high alpine pasture popular with tourists, separated the men from the women, asked the men their religion, and shot twenty-six of them dead in front of their families. The Resistance Front, an outfit widely regarded as a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, initially claimed responsibility. The tourist massacre that broke India’s patience ended a long period in which New Delhi had absorbed cross-border terrorism without a proportionate military answer. Targeting civilians by religious identity, in a setting chosen for its visibility, was understood in India as a deliberate attempt to provoke communal division, and it produced a national demand for a response that no government could have ignored.

What followed was two weeks of deliberation, and the length of that interval would later become its own subject of debate. India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty on April 23, the first time the 1960 agreement had been placed in abeyance, closing the Wagah-Attari crossing, expelling Pakistani diplomats, and signalling that the answer would extend beyond the military domain. In the days afterward, local reporting in Muzaffarabad described India releasing water from the Uri dam into the Jhelum without warning, and satellite imagery showed declining flows in the Chenab. Then, on the night of May 6 into the early hours of May 7, the air force launched Operation Sindoor, striking nine sites it described as terrorist infrastructure across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The strikes lasted twenty-three minutes. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told the country on May 8 that at least one hundred militants had been killed, a figure Pakistan disputed. India stated publicly that it had deliberately spared Pakistani military installations, framing the action as a counter-terror operation rather than an assault on the state itself.

Pakistan did not accept that off-ramp. Between May 8 and May 10, its forces launched a counter-campaign codenamed Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, a sequence of drone strikes, rocket salvos, and artillery barrages aimed at Indian military bases and, by Indian accounts, at religious sites including a gurdwara in Poonch. The Poonch shelling alone killed sixteen civilians and destroyed hundreds of homes. The confrontation became the first drone battle between two nuclear-armed nations, and as Pakistani strikes targeted Indian positions, India expanded Sindoor’s scope to hit eleven Pakistani air bases in a single coordinated push, including the Nur Khan base sitting in the shadow of the army’s general headquarters. The day-by-day record of the crisis shows an escalation ladder that climbed steeply across those days before the hotline call on the afternoon of May 10 pulled both armies back.

The conventional war therefore had a clean ending. A Pakistani director general of military operations placed a call to his Indian counterpart, the two agreed that all firing on land, in the air, and at sea would stop at five o’clock in the evening, Indian standard time, on May 10, 2025, and although both capitals accused each other of violations in the hours that followed, the missiles genuinely stopped. The definitive account of Operation Sindoor lays out the sequence in full. One detail from the ending would generate a long argument: President Trump announced the agreement first, on his social media platform, before any spokesman in New Delhi or Rawalpindi, and claimed an active American mediating role. Prime Minister Modi told the Lok Sabha on July 29, 2025, that no foreign leader had asked India to halt operations, that the pause had followed a request from Pakistan, and that the military had stopped only once its objectives were met. Some Indian analysts argued the truce came too early, that India had already established air superiority by May 10 and could have inflicted greater damage on Pakistani military assets before agreeing to stop. Whatever the merits of that argument, the conventional track had clearly entered de-escalation by mid-May 2025.

Here is where the chain delivers its central irony, and the irony is the engine of everything that follows. A ceasefire is, by definition, an agreement to stop fighting. The world reasonably expected that the agreement of May 10 would cool the entire confrontation, conventional and covert alike, because that is what such agreements are understood to do. The covert track did not receive the message. While the conventional instrument wound down through the second half of May 2025, the silent programme did not pause, did not slow, and did not appear to register the truce as a constraint at all. Within days of the agreement, unidentified gunmen were again at work inside Pakistan. The motorcycles kept coming. What had been one war told in two voices now became two wars moving in opposite directions, and the link that follows this one is the story of that divergence widening into a chasm. The conventional track had reached its punctuation mark. The covert track read straight through it. The chapters that follow trace what reading straight through a ceasefire actually looked like on the ground, month after month, across the width of Pakistan.

What Happened

The plainest way to describe the post-truce period is through its arithmetic, and the arithmetic is stark. In 2022, the silent campaign was credited with two to three eliminations across the whole year, a tempo so low that observers debated whether a pattern existed at all. By 2023, the figure had climbed to roughly seven significant killings in seven months, the year that made the programme impossible to dismiss. The 2024 total rose further as the campaign matured. Then came the post-Sindoor surge, and the 2026 surge data records more than thirty militants linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen shot dead by unidentified attackers in the opening months of 2026 alone. A campaign that had once managed a handful of targets in twelve months was now managing dozens in a single quarter. The line on any honest tempo chart does not bend gently upward after the ceasefire; it turns almost vertical. The contrast between the two periods is worth stating in its sharpest form. The campaign’s quiet years and its surge year are separated by a factor of roughly ten in annual tempo, and the surge achieved its rate in a fraction of a year rather than across twelve full months. No earlier phase of the programme, not even the breakthrough year of 2023, approached this density of operations. The numbers describe not a continuation of an existing trend but a step change, a discontinuity in the campaign’s history that coincides almost exactly with the conventional ceasefire. A discontinuity of that magnitude demands an explanation, and the explanation is the subject of the section that follows.

To make the acceleration concrete, it helps to walk the calendar. The conventional war ended on May 10, 2025. The covert killings resumed within days, and they did not resume at a cautious, probing pace. Through the second half of 2025, reports of operatives shot by unidentified gunmen arrived from province after province, and the rhythm of those reports steadily compressed. What had been an occasional event became a monthly event, and then a more-than-monthly event. By January 2026 the cadence had tightened further, and across the first quarter of that year the campaign was registering multiple killings in some weeks. The shape of the curve is the finding. A campaign exploiting a one-time opening would have produced a brief spike followed by a return to baseline. The post-Sindoor programme produced no such return. The elevated tempo held, week after week, which is the signature of a sustained operational capacity rather than a passing opportunity.

The texture of an individual operation deserves description, because it is the texture that the word “surge” abstracts away. The campaign’s recognisable method is consistent enough to function as a signature. A target, a wanted man living with some degree of openness, follows a routine. He travels to a mosque for prayers, drives to a market, attends a public function, or, in one notable case, records a morning television programme at a channel office. The routine is the vulnerability, because a routine is a prediction, and a prediction is what an attacker needs. Two men arrive on a motorcycle, or wait in a parked car along the target’s known route. The shooting itself takes seconds. The attackers fire at close range, confirm the result, and leave, and within minutes they have dissolved into the traffic of a large city. There is no standoff, no siege, no exchange that would give security forces a target to engage. The operation is over before any official response can begin, and the gunmen are off the radar before the first police report is filed. This is why Pakistani agencies have recovered so little: there is nothing at the scene but a body and witnesses who saw two ordinary-looking men on an ordinary-looking vehicle.

The method also explains why the surge could scale so quickly. An operation that depends on a siege, a bombing, or a complex assault requires extensive preparation, specialised equipment, and a tolerance for failure, and it cannot be repeated thirty times in a quarter. An operation that depends on two men, a motorcycle, a pistol, and an accurate pattern-of-life picture is, by contrast, highly repeatable. Once the intelligence pipeline is producing target packages, the execution end of the campaign becomes a throughput problem rather than a creativity problem, and throughput is exactly what scales. The post-Sindoor surge is, in part, the visible output of a pipeline that had been built during the quieter years and that, after May 2025, was simply run at full capacity.

It is worth pausing on what the surge did not look like, because the absence is as informative as the presence. The post-truce killings did not include large bombings that killed bystanders indiscriminately. They did not include attacks on Pakistani security forces or state institutions. They did not spread into a generalised wave of violence. They remained, throughout, narrowly focused on individuals with documented links to cross-border terrorism. That discipline is itself evidence of central direction. An uncoordinated wave of violence, or a campaign that had lost control of its own operatives, would have produced collateral incidents, mistaken targets, and attacks that served no strategic purpose. The post-Sindoor surge produced very few of those. It stayed on its targeting logic across dozens of operations and many months, and a campaign that stays on its logic at that scale is a campaign under firm control.

Geography tells the same story of intensification. The killings of the post-truce phase were not confined to a single province or a single anonymous district. Reports placed them in Lahore, in Karachi, across Punjab and Sindh, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and in Balochistan, a spread that covers nearly the entire populated width of the country. Each theatre carried its own logic. Karachi remained the densest of them, and the analysis of why Pakistan’s largest city dominates the geography of these shootings explains the reasons: a sprawling population of more than fifteen million offers anonymity, a chronically overstretched police force offers slow response, the city’s endemic background of sectarian and political violence offers cover, and a long-standing concentration of militant cells offers a deep pool of targets. Sindh beyond Karachi, and the smaller towns of Punjab, offered a different profile, quieter places where a wanted man might feel safe enough to settle into a visible routine, and a visible routine is precisely what the campaign needs.

What changed most visibly after May 2025 was the regular appearance of Lahore as a dateline. For most of the campaign’s history, Punjab’s capital had been treated as too dangerous to operate in. Lahore is the headquarters city of Lashkar-e-Taiba, with the group’s nerve centre at Muridke on the city’s outskirts. It is the home of Hafiz Saeed. It is a garrison town, thick with military and intelligence presence, the kind of place where an operation could be expected to fail and the operatives expected to be caught. The campaign’s earlier reach into Lahore had been limited to the 2021 Johar Town car bomb, a single dramatic strike that was not followed up. The 2026 wave that reached into Lahore changed that, marking the surge’s most aggressive geographic statement. To kill repeatedly in Lahore is to demonstrate that the fortress city’s protection was always partly an illusion, and the post-Sindoor months stripped that illusion away.

The Karachi case warrants closer attention, because the city’s role in the surge is frequently misread. It is tempting to treat Karachi’s dominance as simple opportunism, the campaign going where the targets happen to be. The reality is more deliberate. Karachi has functioned for years as a destination of choice for militants seeking to disappear, precisely because its scale and disorder offer cover that smaller, more legible towns cannot. A wanted man in a village is conspicuous. A wanted man in a metropolis of more than fifteen million, with its informal settlements, its weak documentation, and its overwhelmed policing, can vanish into ordinary life. That very quality, which made Karachi attractive to the militants, also made it attractive to the campaign hunting them. The same anonymity that shelters a target shelters the gunman who comes for him, and the same overwhelmed police force that fails to track a militant fails to track his killer. Karachi is not merely where the targets are. It is a city whose conditions favour the hunter and the hunted equally, and the campaign understood that the balance of those conditions tilted, on the whole, toward the side that struck first and left fastest.

The Lahore development should be read against that backdrop, because it represents the campaign accepting a far less favourable balance. Lahore offers the campaign almost none of Karachi’s advantages. It is smaller, more orderly, more heavily policed, and saturated with the military and intelligence presence of a garrison city, and it is the headquarters of the very organisation the surge was dismantling. To operate in Lahore was to operate where the protective environment was strongest and the risk of failure highest. That the campaign chose to operate there anyway, and to do so repeatedly, is the clearest possible signal of confidence. A programme that extends into its enemy’s fortress is a programme that believes its intelligence and its tradecraft are good enough to overcome a hostile environment, and the fact that the Lahore operations succeeded suggests the belief was justified. The geographic progression of the surge, from the favourable conditions of Karachi to the hostile conditions of Lahore, is therefore a progression in confidence as much as in reach.

Individual cases give the abstraction a face, and several of them are worth setting out in detail. In Sindh province, a Lashkar operative named Razaullah Nizamani, better known by the alias Abu Saifullah Khalid, was shot dead by three unidentified gunmen. Nizamani was no minor figure. Indian agencies linked him to the 2006 assault on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in Nagpur and to other attacks during the previous decade, and he had spent years active inside India before relocating to the relative safety of Pakistan. His killing placed a man with a documented operational record inside the campaign’s stated targeting criteria, and it removed an operative whose institutional memory of cross-border attack planning was valuable to his organisation. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a senior Lashkar commander, Sheikh Yousuf Afridi, was killed when attackers opened fire on him without warning, giving him no time to react. Afridi was described by those who tracked the group as an important link in its regional operations and a close aide of Hafiz Saeed. His death fed directly into the leadership crisis that the next section of this chapter will examine, because the loss of a trusted aide of the founder is not the loss of an interchangeable foot soldier; it is the loss of a load-bearing beam.

There is a third case toward which the whole surge was building, and it belongs properly to the chapter that follows this one, so it is named here only as a marker. Amir Hamza, a founding member of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the organisation’s chief ideologue, was attacked in Lahore. That a campaign which had once struggled to reach mid-tier operatives in anonymous towns could climb all the way to a founding member, in the group’s own headquarters city, is the clearest single measure of how far the surge had carried the programme. These cases were not outliers. They were representative entries in a list that grew almost weekly through early 2026, and the comprehensive ranked record of every operative eliminated on foreign soil folds them into a roster organised by seniority and organisational damage.

The organisational distribution of the post-truce killings is itself a finding worth dwelling on. Two groups absorbed most of the losses. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the outfit profiled in depth in the complete guide to the network’s structure, funding, and leadership, lost commanders, recruiters, and ideological figures across multiple provinces. Hizbul Mujahideen, the Kashmir-focused group with a longer history of operations inside the Kashmir Valley, lost cadres at a comparable rate. The concentration on these two organisations is not an accident of availability. It maps directly onto the groups most closely tied to the Pahalgam attack and to the wider campaign of cross-border terrorism that had provoked Operation Sindoor in the first place. A campaign simply absorbing whatever targets a chaotic environment produced would have killed across a wider and more random spread of outfits. A campaign that concentrates on the two groups at the centre of the original grievance is a campaign executing a targeting logic, and that logic held firm through the surge’s loudest phase exactly as it had held through its quietest.

A responsible account must also draw a careful line around the figure of thirty, because the number is more contested than headline reporting suggests. The “more than thirty” figure that appears across Indian and Pakistani coverage is not a clean, audited tally. It aggregates killings attributed broadly to “unknown gunmen,” and not every such death necessarily belongs to the India-linked campaign. Pakistan’s cities, Karachi above all, carry a substantial baseline of violence that has nothing to do with the shadow war: sectarian killings between Sunni and Shia organisations, gangland score-settling, political violence, and intra-militant feuding over money, leadership, and ideology. All of that produces its own steady stream of unidentified-attacker shootings. Some fraction of the thirty may belong to that background noise rather than to the covert programme. The honest analytical position is to state the inclusion criteria openly. A killing belongs to the campaign if the target appears on India’s designated-terrorist lists, is named in a National Investigation Agency charge sheet, or is otherwise documented as a wanted cross-border operative, and if the killing follows the campaign’s recognisable method of a swift attack by unidentified gunmen who escape cleanly. By that standard, the core of the surge is solid even if its precise edge is blurry. The acceleration does not need the maximalist count to be remarkable. Even a conservative tally shows a tempo with no precedent in the campaign’s history, and the disputed margin changes the headline number without changing the conclusion.

Set the conventional and covert tracks on the same timeline and the divergence becomes impossible to miss. Run a finger along the conventional line from May 2025 forward and it descends. The ceasefire holds. The missile arsenals return to their silos. The drone fleets stand down. Diplomatic channels, frozen during the crisis, reopen at a minimal level. The public conversation shifts from war to recovery, from strikes to reconstruction. By the autumn of 2025 the conventional confrontation has the texture of an aftermath. Run the same finger along the covert line across the identical months and it climbs. The eliminations resume within days of the truce. The targets grow more senior as the months pass. The geography widens to include the headquarters city itself. The monthly cadence reaches a rate the programme had never before sustained, and then holds that rate into the new year. The two lines do not move together. They move apart, and they move apart sharply, beginning at almost the exact moment the truce took effect. That widening gap is the findable artifact of this chapter. It is the visible signature of a campaign that has stopped behaving like an extension of conventional policy and started behaving like an independent instrument with its own clock, its own targeting cycle, and its own complete indifference to the diplomatic calendar that governs everything around it.

Why It Happened

A surge this sharp invites a single tidy explanation, and the temptation should be resisted, because the evidence points to two causes working at once. The first cause is the condition of Pakistan’s protective apparatus after the May war. The second is the maturation of India’s covert capability over the preceding four years. These factors are not rivals so much as partners, and the more interesting question is not which one operated but how their combination produced an acceleration steeper than either could have generated alone.

Consider first the degraded-protection argument. Operation Sindoor and the four days that followed it placed enormous strain on the Pakistani military, and a military under strain protects its clients badly. The conventional war forced the army to surge resources toward air defence, toward the eastern border, and toward the urgent reconstruction of capabilities that the strikes had exposed as inadequate. Post-war reporting describes a sweeping rebuilding effort, each element of which is a confession of a specific failure. A new Pakistan Army Rocket Force Command was stood up around the FATAH-series guided multi-launcher rocket system, a direct response to the inability to retaliate effectively against India’s long-range missile strikes. Artillery divisions at Gujranwala and Pano Aqil were restructured. A new ammunition production facility for heavy artillery shells was fast-tracked, because shortages during the sustained May engagements had concentrated minds. Procurement orders went out for helicopters, drones, electronic-warfare systems, and naval vessels. An institution consumed by that scale of rebuilding has limited attention left for the close protection of individual militants scattered across five provinces. The bandwidth that might once have guarded a Lashkar commander in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, screened the approaches to a recruiter’s home in Sindh, or maintained the surveillance perimeter around a known operative in a Punjab town was redirected toward the strategic emergency.

The argument has a respected pedigree. Sumit Ganguly, the political scientist at Indiana University who has written extensively on the India-Pakistan rivalry, has argued that ceasefires in this particular relationship do not constrain covert action precisely because the conventional crisis they end leaves the losing side too preoccupied to police its own territory. The post-Sindoor months fit that argument closely. The truce ended one emergency, and in ending it created the conditions for another. A state rebuilding its conventional deterrent at maximum urgency is a state that has, for the duration of that rebuilding, fewer resources to spend on the unglamorous work of bodyguard rotations, route security, and the protection of men whose presence the state would prefer not to acknowledge in the first place. The window did not open because anyone decided to open it. It opened because the May war had pulled the Pakistani security establishment’s attention to a different fire.

The maturation argument runs alongside the first and is in some ways the more important of the two. A degraded-protection environment explains why operations became easier; it does not by itself explain why the operations that succeeded were so precise and so senior. Hitting more than thirty specific, named, often well-hidden figures across a single quarter is not something a security vacuum hands to an attacker for free. It requires a deep and current map of where each target lives, what route each takes to a mosque or a television studio or a market, which vehicle each uses, who travels with each, and at what hour each is alone and exposed. That map is the product of years of patient asset development, the slow recruitment and cultivation of human sources, the building of local networks willing and able to provide pattern-of-life intelligence, and the development of the logistical chains that move a gunman to a doorstep and away again. The four years between the 2021 Lahore car bomb and the post-Sindoor surge were exactly the period in which such a map could be built. The campaign documented in the year the elimination pattern became undeniable was already demonstrating, in 2023, the kind of granular knowledge that lets a gunman arrive at the right doorstep at the right minute. By 2026, that knowledge had compounded, because every successful operation teaches its planners something and every cultivated source can recruit further sources.

Seniority of the targets is the clearest single piece of evidence for maturation. A campaign merely exploiting chaos would kill whoever became available, and the available are usually the low-ranking and the careless. Foot soldiers and minor operatives move predictably, take few precautions, and are easy to reach. A campaign reaching the second tier of Lashkar’s leadership, taking trusted aides of the founder, and ultimately reaching toward a founding member is a campaign whose intelligence has ripened to the point where it can choose. Senior figures are guarded, cautious, and aware that they are wanted; reaching them requires knowing far more than their address. It requires knowing their habits well enough to predict the one moment of exposure. Manoj Joshi, the analyst at the Observer Research Foundation, has framed the post-Sindoor intensification as something more than an aftershock, suggesting it may represent a distinct new phase of the campaign rather than a temporary spike. The target quality supports that reading directly. Phases are defined by capability thresholds, and the ability to reach the leadership tier is exactly such a threshold.

A further dimension of the maturation argument concerns the human terrain rather than the tradecraft. A campaign of this kind does not run on technology alone; it runs on people inside Pakistan willing to provide information, shelter, transport, and the thousand small services an operation requires. Building that human terrain is the slowest and most delicate part of any covert programme, because each recruited source must be found, assessed, cultivated, tested, and protected, and a single compromised source can unravel an entire network. The four developmental years gave the campaign time to do this work patiently. By 2026, the programme appeared to possess a human network deep enough and reliable enough to support a high operational tempo across five provinces simultaneously, and that depth is not something a security vacuum can supply. It is something only time and careful work can build, which is why the maturation argument does not merely complement the degraded-protection argument but, in an important sense, underpins it. The vacuum opened a door; the human terrain was what allowed the campaign to walk through it at speed.

The interaction of the two causes also helps explain a feature of the surge that a single-cause account cannot: its geographic breadth. If the surge were purely a product of post-war chaos, it would concentrate where the chaos was greatest. If it were purely a product of matured intelligence, it would concentrate where the intelligence networks happened to be deepest. Instead it appeared across Lahore, Karachi, the wider Punjab and Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan more or less at once. That simultaneity is the fingerprint of a campaign that had both a broad human network in place and a broadly degraded protective environment to exploit. Each province offered the same combination of known targets and thin protection, and the campaign, possessing the reach to operate everywhere, operated everywhere. The breadth is the interaction made visible on a map.

One more consideration belongs in the causal account, and it concerns deterrence. A reasonable observer might ask why the targeted organisations and their patrons did not simply harden their protection after the first wave of post-truce killings, restoring the difficulty the campaign had to overcome. The answer is partly that hardening is expensive and slow, and a security establishment rebuilding its conventional deterrent could not easily fund a second, parallel effort to bodyguard hundreds of militants. But the answer is also psychological. The surge moved fast enough, and reached high enough, that it outran the adaptation. By the time the organisations grasped the scale of the threat, the campaign had already taken many of the figures who would have organised a defensive response. A campaign that decapitates an organisation also removes the people who would have hardened it, which means the surge, by its own success, suppressed the adaptation that might have slowed it. That self-reinforcing quality is part of why the tempo line stayed elevated rather than bending back toward baseline.

The two causes therefore interlock, and the interlock is the real explanation. Degraded protection lowered the cost of each operation. Matured intelligence raised the value of each target. A campaign that had spent four years building the capacity to choose its targets found itself, after May 2025, facing an environment in which choosing had suddenly become cheap. Neither factor alone produces a near-vertical tempo line. A security vacuum without a mature intelligence picture produces a few opportunistic, low-value killings. A mature intelligence picture without a security vacuum produces a steady but constrained campaign, because each operation against a well-protected target remains expensive and risky. Put the two together, and the constraints fall away on both sides at once: the targets are known and the protection is thin. The surge is what that combination looks like plotted on a calendar.

Now to the paradox at the centre of this chapter, the question that gives it its title and its weight: why did a ceasefire and an acceleration occupy the same months? The resolution lies in recognising that the conventional and covert tracks answer to fundamentally different logics and operate under fundamentally different constraints. The conventional track is bound by everything that makes open war between nuclear-armed states dangerous. It is bound by the risk of escalation toward the nuclear threshold, a risk that grows with every exchange of missiles. It is bound by the attention of foreign capitals, which intervene precisely because an India-Pakistan war frightens the world. It is bound by the pressure of markets, by the disruption of trade and aviation and investment that open conflict inflicts. It is bound by the sheer difficulty of controlling a confrontation once missiles are flying, the way each side’s response narrows the other’s options. A ceasefire relieves all of those pressures at once. That is why both governments wanted the May 10 agreement, why it was reached within four days, and why it held. The conventional track stopped because every actor with influence over it had a powerful reason to want it stopped.

The covert track is bound by none of those things. A killing carried out by an unidentified gunman on a Karachi street carries no flag. It triggers no nuclear signalling, because it involves no missiles, no aircraft, no movement of forces that an adversary’s early-warning systems can detect. It invites no formal foreign mediation, because there is no declared conflict for a mediator to mediate and no government openly admitting a role. It can be denied by every party with an interest in denying it: by the state that may have ordered it, which prefers deniability, and by the state on whose soil it occurred, which prefers not to admit that foreign operations are running unchecked across its territory. The covert track, in short, generates none of the pressures that a ceasefire is designed to relieve, which means a ceasefire gives the covert track nothing and takes from it nothing. The truce constrained the instrument that was dangerous to use and left entirely untouched the instrument that was safe to use.

It is possible to push the argument one step further, and the further step is the genuinely uncomfortable one. The ceasefire may not merely have failed to constrain the covert campaign. It may actively have liberated it. Consider where the world’s attention went after May 10, 2025. It went to the truce itself, to the question of whether the fragile agreement would hold, to the accusations of violations that both capitals traded in the days afterward, to the diplomatic argument over who had brokered the pause, to the analysis of what the four-day war had revealed about each military. The conventional confrontation, even in ending, absorbed the spotlight. A campaign that depends for its survival on deniability and on the absence of scrutiny is a campaign that benefits enormously when the spotlight swings elsewhere. While analysts and diplomats and journalists studied the durability of the ceasefire, the gunmen worked in the relative dark that the ceasefire’s drama had created around them. The same dynamic that explains why the aftermath of the May agreement looked so fragile also explains why the shadow war could ignore that agreement so completely. Two tracks, two clocks, one truce that stopped only one of them, and a covert programme that may have found the truce not a cage but a cloak.

The paradox at the centre of this chapter also rewards a closer look at the question of attention, because attention is a resource that both tracks compete for and that the ceasefire redistributed. During the four days of conventional war, the covert campaign operated in conditions of maximum scrutiny. The world’s intelligence services, its press, and its diplomats were all focused intently on South Asia, and a deniable killing carried out in that environment would have struggled to stay deniable. The ceasefire changed the distribution of attention sharply. Once the missiles stopped, the acute crisis passed, and the global spotlight, which never lingers long, began to drift toward the next emergency elsewhere in the world. The residual attention that remained on South Asia fixed itself on the conventional aftermath: the durability of the truce, the procurement decisions, the diplomatic recriminations. The covert campaign, by contrast, slipped back into the low-attention environment in which it functions best. The ceasefire did not merely fail to constrain the covert track. By drawing scrutiny toward the conventional aftermath and then allowing that scrutiny to fade, it actively restored the conditions of obscurity that the covert track requires. This is the precise mechanism behind the claim that the truce may have been less a cage than a cloak.

It is also worth confronting directly the possibility that the divergence between the tracks was not designed at all. A tidy account would have India deliberately orchestrating a ceasefire on the conventional track while deliberately accelerating the covert one, a single mind running two instruments in calculated counterpoint. The honest assessment is that the divergence may be substantially emergent rather than designed. The conventional track stopped for its own reasons, chiefly the universal interest in halting a dangerous war. The covert track accelerated for its own reasons, chiefly the post-war vacuum and the maturation of capability. The two developments coincided not necessarily because a planner intended the coincidence but because the same event, Operation Sindoor and its aftermath, happened to push the two tracks in opposite directions. That the divergence may be emergent rather than engineered does not make it less significant. An emergent divergence that no one fully controls is, if anything, more troubling than a designed one, because a designed divergence could in principle be redesigned, while an emergent one reflects a structural feature of the two-track posture that will recur whenever the conditions recur.

There is a deeper implication buried in the paradox, and it deserves to be stated as plainly as possible. If a formal ceasefire between two armies cannot slow the covert campaign, then the covert campaign is not, in any meaningful operational sense, an extension of the conventional confrontation. An extension would move with the thing it extends. A genuine subordinate instrument would answer to the same diplomatic authority that ordered the missiles to stop. The covert programme did neither. It kept its own pace through the truce, which means it has become a separate enterprise, with its own tempo, its own targeting cycle, and its own indifference to the diplomatic calendar. The campaign has acquired what can fairly be called operational autonomy from the conventional confrontation. That separation is the single most important thing the post-Sindoor months revealed, and the long-term section of this chapter will trace what it means for the years ahead. The killings did not slow when the missiles stopped, and a campaign that does not slow when the missiles stop is a campaign that has, in effect, stepped outside the framework of crisis and ceasefire that has governed the India-Pakistan relationship for three quarters of a century.

The Immediate Consequences

The first consequences of the surge were felt not in New Delhi or in any foreign capital but inside the militant organisations themselves, and the damage there was structural rather than merely numerical. When a campaign removes more than thirty operatives from two groups in a single quarter, and removes them disproportionately from the commander, recruiter, and ideologue tiers rather than the foot-soldier tier, it does not simply thin the ranks. It hollows the spine. The post-truce killings stripped Lashkar-e-Taiba of experienced figures faster than the organisation could replace them, and the men lost were carriers of the institutional knowledge that holds a militant network together: the contacts built over decades, the trusted routes across borders, the recruitment relationships in particular towns and seminaries, the operational tradecraft accumulated through years of planning and execution. A foot soldier can be replaced in months. A commander who knows which families in which districts will shelter an operative, which handlers can be trusted, and how a cross-border infiltration is actually staged represents years of accumulated capability, and that capability does not regenerate on demand.

A leadership vacuum was the visible result. Indian intelligence officials, speaking to reporters through early 2026, described a Lashkar increasingly short of the kind of forceful, charismatic command that had once defined it. Hafiz Saeed, the founder, is old, and the May war and the surge that followed had pushed him into a posture of extreme caution. His public appearances, once frequent and defiant, grew rare. He devoted his limited visible activity to the work of rebuilding the organisation, but he did so from behind heavy protection and out of public view. The killing of close aides such as Sheikh Yousuf Afridi sent an unambiguous message that protection at the top tier was no longer reliable, and a founder who responds to that message by withdrawing from sight inevitably weakens the organisation he is trying to preserve, because a militant group draws cohesion from the visible presence of its leader. The same officials drew an explicit comparison to Jaish-e-Mohammed, another group that has struggled in the prolonged absence of a commanding central figure. A network without a fierce, visible leader loses its centre of gravity, and the post-Sindoor surge was steadily corroding exactly that centre within Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The surge also reshaped the daily existence of the men who survived it, and that change is a consequence worth examining in its own right. For two decades, a certain kind of senior militant in Pakistan had lived a strikingly open life. He could be a public figure, address gatherings, run a charity front, appear on television, and move through his city with the confidence of a man under state protection. That openness was itself a form of power, a visible demonstration that the organisation and its patrons could place their people beyond the reach of consequence. The post-Sindoor surge ended that openness for anyone paying attention. The surviving militants faced a choice between continuing to live visibly, and thereby remaining targetable, or retreating into a genuine underground of changed addresses, varied routines, reduced public presence, and constant low-grade fear. Either choice damaged the organisation. Continued visibility fed the casualty list. Retreat into the underground stripped the groups of the public presence through which they recruited, raised funds, and projected strength. The surge, in other words, imposed a cost that could not be avoided, only chosen between, and both choices weakened the networks.

There is a consequence for the Pakistani state that runs deeper than the embarrassment of unsolved killings. A state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force inside its own territory is the foundation of its sovereignty, and a sustained campaign of foreign-linked killings that the state can neither prevent nor solve is a visible puncture in that monopoly. Every successful operation that goes unpunished is a small public demonstration that, on this particular question, the writ of the Pakistani state does not run. For a security establishment that has built its domestic authority partly on the claim of being the indispensable guarantor of national security, that demonstration is corrosive in a way that extends well beyond the militant ecosystem. It is one thing for the army to absorb a conventional defeat in a four-day war that can be reframed at home as a draw. It is another for the army to be seen, month after month, as unable to protect even the clients it has chosen to shelter. The surge therefore imposed a slow reputational cost on the Pakistani state itself, and that cost is part of why Islamabad’s silence was so studied.

A final immediate consequence concerns the calculus inside India. A campaign that produces results at this tempo generates its own momentum within the system that runs it. Success invites continuation; a programme that is visibly achieving its aims is a programme that attracts resources, institutional support, and political cover. The post-Sindoor surge, by demonstrating that the covert track could operate at scale and reach the leadership tier, likely strengthened the position of that track within India’s broader security architecture. That is not a neutral development. A covert instrument that has proven itself, that has acquired institutional momentum, and that has shown it can operate even through a ceasefire is an instrument that will be harder to wind down later, should winding it down ever become desirable. The surge, in this sense, did not merely demonstrate the campaign’s independence from the diplomatic calendar. It may also have deepened the campaign’s permanence within the Indian system, which is a consequence whose full weight will only be felt in the years the next section considers.

A second consequence, less obvious but arguably more corrosive over time, was the collapse of trust between the rank and file and everyone above them. Operation Sindoor had already damaged that trust, because the missile strikes on training infrastructure exposed the gap between the promises made to recruits and the protection those recruits could actually expect. Young men are drawn into militant organisations on a proposition that combines ideology, purpose, belonging, and an implicit assurance of significance and security within the group. The surge attacked the security half of that proposition directly. When a cadre watches commanders, recruiters, and ideological heads gunned down on ordinary streets, in daylight, with what looks like ease, the cadre asks an obvious and dangerous question. If the senior men, the men with bodyguards and intelligence-service protection and decades of survival behind them, can be killed this easily, what guarantee protects an ordinary member? That question erodes a militant organisation from within more effectively than any external strike, because it attacks the recruitment proposition itself and it spreads by word of mouth through exactly the population the organisation most needs to retain.

The disillusion did not stop at the organisation’s own leadership. The same cadres also began questioning the Pakistani establishment, the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate that had long presented themselves as patrons and protectors of these groups. For decades, the relationship between the Pakistani security state and certain militant organisations had rested on an exchange: the groups served as instruments of state policy toward India, and in return the state offered shelter, funding, and protection. The surge exposed the protection side of that bargain as hollow. A patron that cannot keep its clients alive is a patron whose authority drains away, and the post-truce months saw exactly that drainage across the militant ecosystem. Officials tracking the groups reported cadres openly wondering whether the establishment’s promises were worth anything, and a militant network that no longer trusts its state patron is a network in a more unstable and unpredictable condition than the one Pakistan had managed for decades.

The comparison with Jaish-e-Mohammed that Indian officials drew deserves to be unpacked, because it illuminates exactly what kind of damage the surge was inflicting. Jaish has long been understood as an organisation shaped, and in some respects limited, by its dependence on a single dominant figure, with the consequence that the group’s fortunes rise and fall with the visibility and vigour of that leadership. Lashkar-e-Taiba had historically been different. It had built a deeper bench, a more institutional structure, a layered leadership in which ideologues, commanders, recruiters, and administrators each carried part of the load. That institutional depth was a source of resilience; it meant Lashkar did not depend on any single person in the way Jaish did. The post-Sindoor surge attacked precisely that depth. By killing across the layered leadership rather than concentrating on a single figure, the campaign worked to erase the very structural advantage that had distinguished Lashkar from its weaker rival. When Indian officials said the surge was pushing Lashkar toward the Jaish condition, they were describing a deliberate strategic effect: the conversion of a resilient, institutionally deep organisation into a brittle, leadership-dependent one. That conversion, if completed, would be a more profound achievement than any single killing, because it would change not just who leads Lashkar but what kind of organisation Lashkar is.

Pakistan’s own response to the surge was, by most accounts, conspicuously thin. Authorities issued few official statements about the killings, attributed them vaguely when they attributed them at all, and made little visible progress identifying or arresting the attackers. The men who carried out the shootings completed their work and vanished, leaving security agencies with no suspects in custody and no network to roll up. Officials acknowledged privately that they had achieved almost nothing in tracing the gunmen. That public quiet had its own cold logic. Acknowledging a sustained foreign campaign of targeted killings on Pakistani soil would force two damaging admissions at once. The first is that the state cannot protect its own territory from foreign covert operations, a confession no security establishment makes willingly. The second is more awkward still: a loud official acknowledgement would draw international attention to the question of why so many internationally designated terrorists were living openly enough inside Pakistan to be located and shot in the first place. Pakistan has spent years denying that such figures enjoy freedom on its soil, and a vigorous public response to their killings would undercut that denial. Quiet was, from Islamabad’s point of view, the less damaging of the available options, and the state chose quiet.

There was a darker consequence as well, and Indian intelligence officials warned about it openly through early 2026. A militant network under this much pressure, suffering this much structural and reputational damage, faces enormous internal pressure to demonstrate that it remains capable and relevant. The classic response of a cornered organisation is a spectacular attack. A major operation on Indian soil would, in the grim arithmetic of these groups, restore the appearance of strength, shore up the morale of cadres who have begun to doubt, reassure the patrons that their investment still yields returns, and distract attention from the steady, demoralising attrition. Indian officials assessed that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and the army were actively working to help Lashkar stage exactly such a comeback strike, partly to rebuild the trust factor among the cadres and partly to divert attention from Pakistan’s internal difficulties. This is the escalation risk the surge created, and it is genuine. The very success of the covert campaign generates a powerful militant incentive to retaliate inside India, and a successful retaliation would in turn pressure New Delhi toward another conventional response, restarting the cycle at a higher and more dangerous level. The geography of that risk concentrates where the surge has been most aggressive, and the pressure building in and around Lahore is also pressure building toward a possible reprisal. A campaign that hollows an enemy can also corner that enemy, and a cornered network with patrons demanding a demonstration of strength is among the most dangerous configurations in the entire South Asian security picture.

The Long-Term Chain

The post-truce surge will be remembered less for the thirty-odd individuals it removed than for what it proved about the nature of the campaign, and that proof reshapes the years ahead. The central lesson is the one established in the section on causation: India’s covert track now operates independently of the conventional track and independently of the diplomatic calendar. A ceasefire that stopped two armies could not stop the gunmen. That fact, once demonstrated, cannot be un-demonstrated, and it changes the strategic situation permanently. Every actor in the region now knows it, which means every actor must now plan around it.

Begin with the consequences for the May agreement itself. A ceasefire derives its value from the expectation that it lowers the overall temperature of a confrontation, and the post-Sindoor months showed that this particular truce lowered only half the temperature. The conventional half cooled. The covert half did not, and indeed grew hotter. That asymmetry makes the agreement structurally fragile in a way that ordinary ceasefire fragility does not capture. A normal truce is fragile because either side might choose to break it. This truce carries a different and deeper instability: it contains, running underneath it, a live and accelerating campaign that one side cannot acknowledge and the other side cannot stop without shattering the agreement. The analysis of why the truce was fragile from the start identified the absence of any underlying political settlement as the core weakness, and the surge supplies the precise mechanism by which that weakness could become a rupture. Every senior militant killed during the ceasefire is a fresh provocation that Pakistan’s military must absorb without a conventional response, because a conventional response would end the truce that Pakistan, having come off worse in the May war, has reasons to want preserved. The pressure accumulates with each killing. A truce that contains an accelerating covert war is not a stable peace. It is a deferred crisis, and the deferral has a limit.

Consider next the consequences for India’s broader posture. The campaign’s indifference to the May agreement is entirely consistent with the doctrine that crystallised after Pahalgam, and the redefinition of India’s defence approach following the 2025 crisis sets out the logic plainly. New Delhi has signalled that it will not return to normal engagement with Pakistan until cross-border terrorism stops, that it will treat any future terror attack as grounds for a fitting response, that it will not be deterred by nuclear blackmail from striking at terrorist infrastructure, and that it will no longer distinguish between the sponsors of terrorism and its perpetrators. A covert programme that keeps running straight through a ceasefire is the operational expression of that doctrine. It communicates to Islamabad that diplomatic gestures, pauses, and even formal agreements between the militaries will not purchase relief for the militant networks, and that the only route to genuine safety for those networks runs through the cessation of cross-border attacks. Read this way, the surge is not a violation of India’s stated doctrine but its purest demonstration. The doctrine says the pressure will not stop until the terrorism stops, and the surge is the pressure not stopping.

The independence of the covert track also reframes the long argument over foreign mediation, an argument that consumed a great deal of diplomatic energy after May 2025. Much of that energy went into the question of who had brokered the ceasefire, with President Trump claiming an active mediating role and New Delhi insisting firmly that the pause had been bilateral. The examination of the American role in the 2025 de-escalation shows how acutely sensitive India was to any perception of third-party involvement, treating the appearance of outside mediation as a diminishment of its sovereignty. The surge renders much of that argument beside the point. Foreign mediation can broker a conventional ceasefire because conventional war is visible, formal, declared, and therefore susceptible to outside pressure; a mediator can lean on both governments because both governments are openly conducting the war. Foreign mediation cannot broker an end to a campaign of deniable killings, because there is nothing for a mediator to grip. There is no declared conflict, no formal admission, no government willing to sit at a table and negotiate the cessation of operations it denies conducting. The covert track is, by its very nature, beyond the reach of the diplomacy that ended the conventional war. A mediator can stop the missiles, because the missiles are fired by states that answer to diplomacy. A mediator cannot stop the motorcycles, because the motorcycles answer to no one a mediator can summon.

The independence of the covert track raises a question that the region’s strategic community has only begun to confront: how does a confrontation end when one of its principal instruments answers to no ceasefire? Conventional wars end because conventional wars can be ended; they have declared participants, formal mechanisms, and the shared interest in survival that pushes nuclear-armed states toward de-escalation. A continuous covert campaign has none of those off-ramps. It does not end with a hotline call. It ends, if it ends at all, only when its political purpose is satisfied or when its targets are exhausted. India has tied the campaign’s purpose explicitly to the cessation of cross-border terrorism, which means the campaign’s natural endpoint is a Pakistani decision rather than a negotiated agreement. That is a profound shift in the structure of the confrontation. For most of its history, the India-Pakistan rivalry could be cooled by mutual or mediated agreement. The covert layer cannot be cooled that way, because there is no agreement that reaches it, and that fact narrows the menu of available exits dramatically.

There is also a question of imitation and precedent that belongs in the long-term ledger. A campaign that has demonstrably succeeded, that has operated through a ceasefire, and that has reached an enemy’s senior leadership is a campaign other states will study. The post-Sindoor surge is now a worked example of how a determined state can run a sustained covert programme against militant networks sheltered on hostile soil, and the example is unlikely to go unnoticed. Within South Asia, the demonstration that such a campaign can be insulated from the diplomatic calendar may encourage its continuation and expansion. Beyond South Asia, the surge adds to a growing global body of practice in deniable, decentralised targeted killing, a body of practice that erodes, case by case, the older norm against assassination as an instrument of state policy. The post-Sindoor months are therefore significant not only for what they did to two militant organisations but for what they contributed to an international trend, and that contribution is part of the chapter’s long shadow.

A sober assessment must also weigh the campaign’s limits. Decapitation, however thorough, does not by itself dissolve the conditions that produce militancy. The grievances, the ideology, the recruitment pipelines, and the state sponsorship that sustain groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba are not killed when a commander is killed. A campaign that removes leaders faster than they can be replaced can disrupt an organisation severely, degrade its operational capacity, and impose real fear on its members, but it cannot, on its own, end the phenomenon. The most the surge can plausibly achieve is to make the cost of sheltering and deploying cross-border terrorism high enough that the calculus of the sponsoring state shifts. Whether that calculus actually shifts is a question the surge alone cannot answer, and it is the question on which the entire campaign’s ultimate success or failure will turn.

What does the chain look like extended forward from the surge? Three trajectories are plausible, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first trajectory is sustained tempo. The campaign holds something close to its early-2026 rate, steadily attriting the militant leadership tiers, until the targeted organisations are functionally decapitated, their experienced commanders gone, their recruiters dead, their ideologues silenced, their surviving members too frightened and too disorganised to plan ambitious operations. In this trajectory the surge does not end so much as complete its work. The second trajectory is reprisal and escalation. The cornered networks, pushed by patrons who need a demonstration of relevance, attempt a major attack inside India. That attack triggers another conventional crisis, possibly another operation on the scale of Sindoor, after which the dual-track pattern simply repeats at a higher and more dangerous level, with a new ceasefire that again fails to constrain a covert campaign that again accelerates. The third trajectory is gradual exhaustion of targets. The surviving militants, having watched their seniors die, disperse, abandon their open and visible lifestyles, change their routines, stop appearing on television programmes and at public gatherings, and sink into a genuine and disciplined underground. The campaign’s tempo then falls, not because the campaign has weakened, but because the targets have become genuinely hard to find. The most probable future blends the first and third trajectories, a continued high tempo that slowly declines as the easy targets are exhausted, with the constant shadow of the second hanging over everything. What is no longer plausible, in any of these futures, is a return to the situation that prevailed before 2021, in which Pakistan-based militants lived in real and reliable safety. That era has ended, and the post-Sindoor surge is the proof that it ended for good.

The deepest entry in the long-term ledger is conceptual rather than operational. For three quarters of a century, the India-Pakistan confrontation was understood as a series of discrete crises separated by intervals of uneasy calm, and ceasefires functioned as the punctuation marks that closed each episode and opened the next interval of calm. The 1965 war ended and a period of cold peace followed. The 1971 war ended and an interval followed. Kargil ended, the standoff of the early 2000s wound down, the post-Uri and post-Balakot crises subsided, and in each case a ceasefire or a de-escalation marked the boundary between crisis and calm. The post-Sindoor months broke that grammar. The covert campaign does not stop at the punctuation marks. It runs continuously underneath the crises and the calms alike, indifferent to whether the conventional armies are fighting or resting, indifferent to whether the period is one of war or one of supposed peace. The confrontation has therefore acquired a permanent operational layer, a stratum of continuous low-visibility conflict that persists regardless of the state of the visible relationship above it. This is what it means, in the fullest sense, to say the shadow war has become independent. It is no longer an episode in the India-Pakistan story, a chapter with a beginning and an end. It has become a continuous condition of that story, a permanent feature of the landscape, and the ceasefire of May 2025 is the moment that permanence became impossible to deny.

The Next Link

The post-truce surge was an accumulation of cases, and like every accumulation it bent toward a peak. Through the second half of 2025 and into the opening months of 2026, the campaign climbed the militant hierarchy. It took foot soldiers and minor operatives, then it took commanders and recruiters and ideologues, then it reached the second tier of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s leadership, taking trusted aides of the founder himself. Each killing raised the campaign’s reach a little higher. The next event in this chain is the moment that climb reached its summit. In Lahore, the headquarters city itself, the heartland of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the campaign came for Amir Hamza.

Hamza is not an ordinary target, and the difference is the whole point of the chapter that follows. Born in 1959, originally from Gujranwala in Punjab, a veteran of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union, he is one of the founding members of Lashkar-e-Taiba. He is the organisation’s chief ideologue, its most prolific writer, the founding editor of its principal publication, the author of books that shaped the worldview of a generation of recruits, and a figure widely described as the right hand of Hafiz Saeed himself. He sat on the group’s central committee, played a central role in fundraising and recruitment, and negotiated for the release of detained militants. The United States Treasury has designated him a terrorist. To reach a man of that rank, in the open, in the group’s own fortress city, is to do something the campaign had never before done. It is the difference between attriting an organisation’s body and striking at its head, between killing the men who carry out the founder’s vision and killing one of the men who authored it. The attack on Hamza is the point where the post-Sindoor acceleration stops being a statistic and becomes a statement. It is the operation in which the surge announces, unmistakably, that no tier of the militant leadership and no patch of Pakistani ground lies beyond the campaign’s reach.

The link that follows this one takes that operation fully apart. It examines who Amir Hamza was, why he sat so high in the structure that his targeting carried a meaning entirely its own, how the attack on a Lahore street unfolded, how the organisation and the Pakistani state responded, and what it meant that the shadow war had climbed all the way to a founding member of Lashkar-e-Taiba in the city the group considers its capital. The acceleration traced through this chapter was the long runway. The strike on Hamza was the climax it had been building toward across every week of the surge, and it is the subject of the next chapter in the chain. The runway metaphor is worth holding onto, because it captures the relationship between the surge and its climax precisely. A runway is not a separate thing from the takeoff; it is the necessary distance over which speed is gathered until flight becomes possible. The post-Sindoor surge was exactly that gathering of speed. Every operation through the second half of 2025 and the early weeks of 2026 added a little more reach, tested a little more of the campaign’s capability, and brought the leadership tier a little closer to range. The attack on a founding member did not come from nowhere. It came at the end of a long acceleration that had been building toward precisely such an operation, and reading the surge as the runway is the only way to understand why the strike that follows it was possible at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why did targeted killings increase after the May 2025 ceasefire?

The increase happened because the ceasefire constrained only the conventional half of India’s two-track posture and left the covert half completely untouched. The May 10, 2025 agreement was an arrangement between two armies to stop firing missiles and artillery, and it succeeded at that. It said nothing, and could say nothing, about a deniable programme of killings carried out by unidentified gunmen. With the conventional track wound down, the covert track continued at full pace, and because international attention had shifted toward the fragility of the truce and the argument over who had brokered it, the quieter campaign operated with even less scrutiny than before. The surge was the visible result of a pause that stopped one instrument and freed the other.

Q: Did the ceasefire stop the shadow war?

No. The truce stopped the conventional war and had no measurable effect on the covert campaign. Unidentified gunmen were again killing militants inside Pakistan within days of the May 10 agreement, and by early 2026 the tempo of those killings had risen to a level the programme had never previously sustained. The clearest single lesson of the post-truce period is that a formal arrangement between the two militaries does not constrain the silent campaign at all, which means the campaign is no longer a simple extension of the conventional confrontation but a separate enterprise running on its own clock.

Q: How many militants were killed after Operation Sindoor?

Indian and Pakistani reporting credits the campaign with more than thirty militants linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen killed by unidentified attackers in the opening months of 2026 alone. That figure should be read with care. It aggregates deaths attributed broadly to unknown gunmen, and Pakistan carries a substantial baseline of sectarian, political, and gangland violence that produces its own stream of unidentified-attacker shootings. A conservative count, restricted to confirmed India-wanted figures killed in the campaign’s recognisable manner, is lower than the maximalist thirty-plus, but it still represents a tempo without precedent in the programme’s history. The disputed margin changes the headline number without changing the conclusion.

Q: Is the post-Sindoor acceleration a new phase of the campaign?

Several analysts argue that it is. Manoj Joshi of the Observer Research Foundation has suggested the intensification represents more than a temporary aftershock and may constitute a distinct new phase rather than a passing spike. The strongest evidence for that reading is the seniority of the targets. A campaign merely exploiting post-war chaos would kill whoever became available, usually low-ranking and careless figures. A campaign reaching the second tier of Lashkar’s leadership and then reaching toward a founding member is a campaign whose intelligence has matured to the point where it can choose its targets, and that selectivity points to a genuine capability threshold being crossed rather than a brief surge of opportunism.

Q: Did degraded Pakistani security enable the acceleration?

It was one of two enabling factors. Operation Sindoor and the four-day war strained the Pakistani military severely, forcing it to surge resources toward air defence, the eastern border, and the reconstruction of capabilities the strikes had exposed. Post-war reporting describes a major rebuilding effort, including a new army rocket force command, restructured artillery divisions, and fast-tracked ammunition production. An institution consumed by that scale of repair has limited attention left for the close protection of individual militants spread across five provinces, and that reduced protective bandwidth lowered the cost of each operation. Degraded security was real, but it was not the whole story.

Q: What was the other factor behind the surge?

The other factor was the maturation of India’s covert capability over the four years between the 2021 Lahore car bomb and the 2026 wave. A security vacuum makes operations easier, but it does not by itself explain why the operations were so precise and reached such senior figures. Hitting more than thirty specific, often well-hidden targets requires a deep, current map of where each lives, what routes each takes, who travels with each, and when each is alone. That map is built through years of patient asset development and source cultivation. Degraded protection lowered the cost of each killing; matured intelligence raised the value of each target, and the surge is what their combination produced.

Q: How does the covert track operate independently of the conventional track?

The two tracks answer to different constraints. The conventional track is bound by the risk of nuclear escalation, the attention of foreign capitals, market pressure, and the difficulty of controlling open war, and a ceasefire relieves all of those pressures at once. The covert track is bound by none of them. A killing by an unidentified gunman carries no flag, triggers no nuclear signalling, invites no formal mediation, and can be denied by everyone with an interest in denying it. The truce constrained the dangerous instrument and left the safe one running, which is why the conventional war ended while the covert campaign accelerated through the same months.

Q: Is the shadow war now permanently independent of diplomacy?

Evidence from the post-Sindoor months strongly suggests so. A formal ceasefire between two armies is the most powerful de-escalation tool available short of a full political settlement, and it failed to slow the covert campaign at all. If that tool cannot constrain the killings, then the killings are not a bargaining chip that diplomacy can trade away. Foreign mediation can broker a conventional ceasefire because open war is visible and formal, but it cannot broker an end to deniable killings, because there is no declared conflict and no government willing to negotiate the cessation of operations it denies conducting. The covert track has placed itself beyond the reach of the diplomacy that ended the conventional war.

Q: What did the surge do to Lashkar-e-Taiba?

It hollowed the organisation’s leadership spine. Removing more than thirty operatives in a single quarter, concentrated in the commander, recruiter, and ideologue tiers rather than among foot soldiers, stripped Lashkar of experienced figures faster than it could replace them. The men lost carried the institutional knowledge that holds a network together: contacts, cross-border routes, recruitment relationships, and tradecraft built over decades. Indian intelligence officials described a group increasingly short of forceful central command, with an aging Hafiz Saeed withdrawn into caution and rarely appearing in public. The structural damage ran deeper than the raw number of deaths, because a load-bearing commander takes years to replace.

Q: Why did the killings create a trust crisis inside the militant groups?

When cadres watch commanders, recruiters, and ideological heads gunned down on ordinary streets with apparent ease, they ask an obvious question: if the senior men, with bodyguards and intelligence-service protection, cannot be kept safe, what protects an ordinary member? That question attacks the recruitment proposition itself, because militant organisations recruit partly on an implicit assurance of protection and significance. Operation Sindoor had already exposed the gap between those assurances and reality, and the surge widened it further. Disillusioned cadres also began questioning the army and the intelligence service, the patrons who had long presented themselves as protectors but could no longer protect, and that doubt spreads through word of mouth.

Q: Why has Pakistan said so little about the killings?

The silence has its own cold logic. Acknowledging a sustained foreign campaign of targeted killings on Pakistani soil would force two damaging admissions at once. The first is that the state cannot protect its own territory from foreign covert operations. The second is more awkward still: a loud official response would draw international attention to the question of why so many internationally designated terrorists were living openly enough inside Pakistan to be located and shot in the first place. Islamabad has spent years denying that such figures enjoy freedom on its soil. Issuing few statements and making little visible investigative progress is the less damaging option, so the state has largely chosen quiet.

Q: Does the acceleration create a risk of escalation?

Yes, and Indian intelligence officials have warned about it openly. A militant network suffering this much structural and reputational damage faces strong internal pressure to prove it remains capable, and the classic way to do that is a spectacular attack. A major operation inside India would restore cadre morale, reassure the patrons, and distract from the steady attrition. Officials assessed that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and the army were actively working to help Lashkar stage such a comeback strike. A successful covert campaign that hollows an enemy can also corner that enemy, and a cornered network whose patrons are demanding a demonstration of strength is among the most dangerous configurations in the region.

Q: Could the acceleration undermine the ceasefire?

It could. The May agreement derives its value from the expectation that it lowered the temperature of the whole confrontation, but it lowered only the conventional half while the covert half accelerated. Every senior militant killed during the truce is a fresh provocation that Pakistan’s army must absorb without a conventional response, because responding conventionally would shatter the agreement that Islamabad has reasons to want preserved. That pressure accumulates with each killing. A truce that contains an accelerating covert war underneath it is not a stable peace but a deferred crisis, and the surge supplies the mechanism by which that fragility could eventually become a rupture.

Q: Which Pakistani cities saw the most post-Sindoor killings?

The killings of the post-truce phase were spread across Lahore, Karachi, the wider provinces of Punjab and Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan, a distribution covering nearly the entire populated breadth of the country. Karachi remained the densest theatre, favoured for its enormous population, overstretched police, endemic background violence, and concentration of militant cells. The most significant geographic development was the regular appearance of Lahore as a dateline. For most of the campaign’s history, the headquarters city of Lashkar-e-Taiba had been treated as too dangerous to operate in, and the surge breached that long-standing wall.

Q: Who were some of the named figures killed in the surge?

Documented cases include Razaullah Nizamani, known by the alias Abu Saifullah Khalid, a Lashkar operative shot dead by three unidentified gunmen in Sindh and linked by Indian agencies to the 2006 assault on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters in Nagpur. Another case was Sheikh Yousuf Afridi, a senior Lashkar commander and close aide of Hafiz Saeed, killed when attackers opened fire on him in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa without warning. Both men had documented operational records, which placed their killings inside the campaign’s stated targeting criteria, and both were representative entries in a list that grew almost weekly through early 2026.

Q: Did the surge target organisations randomly or selectively?

It was selective. Two groups absorbed most of the losses: Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen. That distribution matters, because it shows the surge was not indiscriminate violence absorbed by the militant ecosystem at large. It concentrated on the two organisations most directly tied to the Pahalgam attack and to the wider campaign of cross-border terrorism that had provoked Operation Sindoor. The targeting logic that had governed the programme in its quieter years held firm through its loudest phase, which is itself strong evidence that the surge was a directed campaign rather than a wave of unrelated killings.

Q: How does the post-Sindoor tempo compare with earlier years?

The contrast is dramatic. In 2022, the campaign was credited with roughly two to three killings across the entire year, a rate so low that observers debated whether a pattern existed. By 2023, the figure had risen to about seven significant eliminations in seven months. The 2024 total climbed further as the programme matured. Then the post-Sindoor wave produced more than thirty killings in the opening months of 2026 alone. A campaign that had once managed a handful of targets in twelve months was managing dozens in a single quarter, and any honest tempo chart of the period turns almost vertical after the truce.

Q: Why did the truce fail to slow the covert campaign when it succeeded at stopping the war?

Because a ceasefire works on the pressures that make conventional war costly, and the covert campaign generates none of those pressures. Open war risks nuclear escalation, alarms foreign capitals, disrupts markets, and becomes hard to control once it starts, and a truce relieves all of that, which is why both governments wanted the May agreement and why it held. A deniable killing risks none of it. It produces no escalation ladder, no nuclear signalling, no formal crisis for mediators to manage. The truce therefore had real leverage over the missiles and no leverage at all over the gunmen, which is the structural reason the two tracks diverged.

Q: What does the acceleration mean for the future of the India-Pakistan confrontation?

It means the confrontation has acquired a permanent operational layer. For three quarters of a century the rivalry was understood as discrete crises separated by uneasy calm, with ceasefires serving as the punctuation marks that closed each episode. The post-Sindoor months broke that grammar, because the covert campaign does not stop at the punctuation marks. It runs continuously underneath the crises and the calms alike, indifferent to whether the conventional armies are fighting or resting. A return to the pre-2021 situation, in which Pakistan-based militants lived in genuine and reliable safety, is no longer plausible. The shadow war has become a continuous condition of the relationship rather than an episode within it.

Q: Was the post-Sindoor surge planned, or did it emerge from circumstances?

The evidence points to a mix of both. The capability behind the surge was clearly planned and built deliberately over the four developmental years from 2021 to 2025, during which the campaign cultivated the assets and the local knowledge required to find and reach senior targets. The timing, however, owed a great deal to circumstance: the post-war degradation of Pakistani security created an opening that the matured campaign was positioned to exploit. The surge is best understood as a long-prepared capability meeting a suddenly favourable environment, with neither element sufficient on its own to explain the near-vertical rise in tempo.

Q: Does the surge prove the covert campaign will continue indefinitely?

It proves the campaign is durable and independent, but indefinite continuation is not guaranteed. The surge demonstrated that no ceasefire and no diplomatic agreement currently constrains the killings, which removes the external brakes that might otherwise have slowed the programme. What could still slow it is internal: the gradual exhaustion of locatable high-value targets as survivors disperse into a disciplined underground, a shift in India’s political priorities, or the satisfaction of the campaign’s stated purpose if cross-border terrorism were genuinely to cease. The honest position is that the surge guarantees the campaign is not vulnerable to the usual diplomatic off-ramps, while leaving open the question of how, and on what timeline, it eventually winds down.