A strategic balance sheet after Operation Sindoor

The spectacle is over, and we are now on the freeway to forgetfulness. If we do not pause to remember the fallen, and to audit the costs and benefits of Operation Sindoor, this would be as great a tragedy — if not greater — than the massacre at Pahalgam's Baisaran Maidan. It is useful to review the developments of the past weeks, and the questions that have been raised, to arrive at a strategic ‘balance sheet’ that will help plan and project future policies and responses.

The first question that arises is: could the Baisaran massacre have been prevented? And was there an intelligence failure? We are all very wise after the event. There are reports that ‘intelligence warnings’ had been given, specifically including the claim that there ‘could be’ an attack against tourists in Srinagar, around the Dal Lake. It is useful to remind ourselves that that is not where the Baisaran incident occurred. Moreover, this hardly constitutes actionable intelligence.

There had already been a targeted killing of two tourists in Pahalgam in 2024, on 18 May, when terrorists attacked a couple from Jaipur. Before the Baisaran massacre, the South Asia Terrorism Portal recorded at least 44 targeted killings of tourists in J&K, since 2000. It takes no special genius or extraordinary ‘intelligence’ to suggest that there ‘could be’ an attack on tourists — in Srinagar or elsewhere in Kashmir.

But was the available intelligence sufficient to provoke a deployment of additional force, or a review of protocols at Baisaran? In other words, was the intelligence ‘actionable’? The answer is unqualified, in the negative. Baisaran was, in fact, a policy, propaganda and planning failure. At the policy level, to have opened up Kashmir to millions of tourists (estimates put the number at 23 million in 2024, and expectations were higher for 2025, before Baisaran) under a false assessment of ‘zero terrorism’ was the root error.

To project the overwhelming influx of tourists into the Valley as an index of ‘normalcy’ was, moreover, tantamount to putting a target on every tourist’s back. Having enticed these millions of tourists into the Valley, without a proper process of ensuring that all potential locations were documented and either placed under an adequate security cover, or regulated, was a planning failure that needs investigation, and accountability. After Operation Sindoor, and the wild disinformation campaigns on both sides, arriving at an approximation of the truth is difficult.

It is significant that both sides declared victory after the ceasefire, but the weight of available (and potentially flawed) evidence suggests that, at the tactical and operational levels, India has emerged the stronger side. Tactically, the first strikes against nine terrorist targets were delivered with accuracy and with validating evidence.

At the operational level — despite some possible reverses in the first wave of Pakistani retaliation (which the Indian government is yet to concede) — Indian forces were able to establish escalation dominance, convincingly responding to each intensifying retaliation by Pakistani forces, while Pakistan was less successful in inflicting comparable damage on the Indian side. The strategic objective of deterrence, however, will remain elusive. Pakistan’s doggedness in continuing drone operations and artillery fire even after the declaration of the ceasefire sends a message that it is far from overawed.

Threats of vengeance have already been made by terrorist and extremist formations, including Jaish-e Mohammad, Al Qaeda in the Indian Sub continent (AQIS) and Jamiat Ulema-e- Islam–Sindh. Crucially, Pakistan has gone through four wars against India, in each of which it was defeated (a reality it will not admit to) and is yet to dilute its commitment to its ‘core issue’ and ‘jugular vein’.

It is useful to recall, in this context, that the United States carried out an unrelenting campaign of thousands of drone strikes against terrorist targets and leaders on Pakistani soil, over 14 years, but at no stage did Pakistan give up its support to the Taliban — who were eventually installed in power in Kabul, after Americas disordered flight from Afghanistan. To believe that occasional military strikes like Operation Sindoor will be a decisive deterrent to all future engagement in terrorism is simply delusional.

Prime Minister Modi has now declared that Operation Sindoor has only been suspended, and will resume the moment there is another Pakistan-backed terrorist transgression. This, he declaimed, was the ‘new normal’. Thus, punitive military strikes will hang as a sword of Damocles over Pakistan’s head; but they hang, equally, over India’s.

The ‘new normal’ has made it incumbent on New Delhi to react militarily to every future terrorist action as an ‘act of war’; but each iteration of such responses would require escalation, since the past instance failed to secure the desired ‘deterrence’; and each iteration will push the ‘Kashmir issue’ further towards ‘internationalisation’.

US President Donald Trump has declared that he chose to intercede in the Indo–Pak conflict because “millions of good and innocent people could have died”, thus exploiting the bogey of nuclear war — a tool that Pakistan has often deployed to manipulate the international community. It is useful to remind ourselves that South Asia is at present a hotly contested region, and the Western powers, led by the US, will eagerly seize upon the nuclear bogey to snatch a new and wider role for themselves in the region. This can only be deeply destabilising, and starkly contrary to Indian interests.

India’s ‘new normal’ moreover has costs across a complex range of factors. Repeated military interventions across the border will project India as an unstable power and will result in reluctance to invest, and will particularly undermine immediate plans to relocate many critical industries from China.

Operation Sindoor-like actions disrupt normal life across the country, with vicious and frenzied campaigns of disinformation creating an environment of distrust and rage. This will certainly impact the economic life of the country, and its ‘growth story’. Crucially, military adventurism is far from the only option available to India to impose penalties on Pakistan for its continuing sponsorship of terrorism.

A range of non-kinetic but potentially even more damaging instrumentalities needs to be explored in a protracted campaign against Pakistan, to impose costs for wrongs, that must eventually prove beyond the country’s capacity to endure.

Despite its relative success, especially in comparison to the surgical strikes of 2016 and the Balakot bombing of 2019, Operation Sindoor has undermined strategic stability without ensuring strategic dominance or deterrence. Pakistan will take compensatory action, shoring up its defence to address the vulnerabilities that have been exposed, even as terrorist formations operating from Pakistan make adaptive adjustments, going deeper underground to evade future punitive strikes.

The exposure of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the two countries’ defence systems during the recent armed engagement will provoke an accelerated arms race, with China’s unqualified support to Pakistan. If India’s miserly allocations to defence remain unchanged, it will be difficult to establish the decisive edge over Pakistan necessary to create an effective deterrent against future malfeasance.

Dr Ajai Sahni is founding member and executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, which maintains the South Asia Terrorism Portal