It was widely understood that India would respond militarily to what it called a Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack that occurred on April 22 in the town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, which resulted in the deaths of more than two dozen people. But very few anticipated the far-reaching nature of that response—and the resulting counter response.
By last week, India and Pakistan were flying armed drones above each other’s territories, targeting military installations, and spreading panic about the possibility of a full-scale war or even nuclear weapons use. On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a cease-fire “[a]fter a long night of talks.”
The escalatory dynamic was a surprise because it marked an apparent shift in India’s military strategy. This was not the first time that India has been at the receiving end of Pakistan’s well-documented support for terrorist attacks on its territory. But—at least since Manmohan Singh of the Indian National Congress party was serving as prime minister more than a decade ago—New Delhi had traditionally responded according to a doctrine of strategic restraint, placing a priority on avoiding escalation.
By contrast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, taking note of public sentiment deeply in favor of retaliation, gradually scaled up India’s response to last month’s attack, culminating in a missile attack against Pakistan on May 7. Some Indian army experts have described it as a strategy of “calculated pressure” that is calibrated to avoid a full-scale war but resolved to impose decisive costs on Pakistan.
Judged according to those standards, it’s unclear if India succeeded. Its retaliation on May 7 certainly soothed the anger of Indians. But if it was aiming to deter continued Pakistani support for extremists and compel Islamabad to end its alleged support for terrorism, then there’s reason to remain unconvinced.
Among the nine sites that India claims to have hit was the headquarters of a U.S.-sanctioned group called Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), located nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) inside Pakistan in Bahawalpur. The militant jihadi group is led by Masood Azhar, who was born in the city and runs the organization as a family enterprise. While he was behind a string of attacks against India including the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, his brother is believed to have been involved in the killing of Daniel Pearl, a Pakistan-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal..
In attacking edifices linked to Azhar and JeMt, India was sending a message that it is aware of these groups’ hideouts and is prepared to strike them.
In total, India said it hit nine targets, including a site in Muridke that it claimed was linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), another Pakistan-based terror group, which was behind the siege of Mumbai in 2008, during which 166 people across more than 26 nationalities were massacred. LeT is led by Hafiz Saeed, who is considered a specially designated global terrorist by the United States and has a bounty of up to $10 million.
Syed Ata Hasnain, a former commander of the key Kashmir-based 15 Corps of the Indian Army, wrote in a column for Indian broadcaster NDTV that Muridke is a “known LeT stronghold near Lahore,” adding that it had historically “been off-limits due to proximity to civilian areas.” But the fact that India has now struck it conveyed that New Delhi would respond to terrorist groups wherever they are and weaken their support in their bastions. The move “signals an acceptance in terms of the kind of escalation acceptable to India. It also undermines Hafiz Saeed’s ideological stronghold and recruitment network,” he wrote.
Zahid Gishkori, a Pakistani investigative journalist based in Islamabad, said that the first Indian strikes on Bahawalpur and Muridke looked “precise.”
“The facts on the ground and my talks with locals suggest that India hit precise targets—execution looks accurate,” he told me. “In Bahawalpur, the hit on the madrassa or the mosque was accurate [in] that the family members of Masood Azhar were said to be killed. Although no one is confirming on record, everyone—locals in particular—knows his blood relatives and friends were there.”
One of India’s military objectives was to display superiority in military capabilities.
“There is a lot of anger in Pakistan over how India evaded the radars, and locals asked how the Pakistani anti-missile system did not work,” Gishkori added.
Hasnain argued that another one of the hits—on Sialkot, “a strategically located military-industrial town near the Jammu border,” home to Pakistani strike formations, supply depots, and forward command structures—was intended to convey that if provoked, India will target these, too—“not just militant proxies.”
When Pakistan responded in kind to India’s retaliation with missiles, drones, and shelling across the border, the Indian government boasted about its air defense system—the Russian-made S-400 missile system—which the government said had efficiently eliminated armed drones hovering above various Indian cities and military installations. It also claimed that it had damaged Pakistan’s own air defense system in Lahore.
However, India is quieter on the losses that it has reportedly endured. Pakistan claimed that it downed five Indian fighter jets, including the state-of-the-art French export—the Dassault Rafale fighter. While Pakistan hasn’t produced evidence of its feat, CNN reported that according to a French intelligence source, at least one Rafale was downed.
In the fog of disinformation, some analysts were worried about an accidental full-scale conventional war between two equally committed armies. Rahul Bedi, an Indian defense journalist and analyst, said that on balance, India and Pakistan’s armed forces were “evenly matched,” and he worried about the nationalist fervor and unrealistically high expectations from Indian soldiers taking hold of his country.
Moreover, the jury is still out on whether a limited military response inside Pakistan will deter Pakistan from sheltering anti-India groups or aggravate the situation further by empowering the Pakistani Army at home.
Taha Siddiqui, a Paris-based Pakistani journalist in exile who fled his country in the fear of arrest and possible assassination by the Pakistani Army, said that although it isn’t clear if the Pakistan army orchestrated the April attack it does “allow militants who orchestrate such attacks, so they are complicit in that sense.” He added that, “just recently Pakistan’s army chief said Hindus and Muslims can’t live together, he was kind of dog whistling, encouraging such a thing.”
“Since ’99, Pakistan has instigated a low-intensity conflict—their idea was ‘this is how we are going to keep the conflict alive, by backing anti-India groups,’” he said. “The thinking has been that India will never do anything in response to terrorism they commit inside Indian territory” Siddiqui added. “Now, India has.”
“But I am not sure if Pakistan will learn anything,” Siddiqui said. “It is a security state, and the military uses perceived and actual threats to justify its overarching presence, its big budget, its political interference. It is unlikely that the military will say: Now India has exposed us, and we should rethink. Instead, they will use India’s attack inside Pakistan to further strengthen their position in the country.”
A former Indian diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity, who for years sat at the table where many of India’s responses to Pakistan were drafted, said it was still too early to say whether India’s new strategy—punitive deterrence instead of strategic restraint—has worked.
“If, in the next 10 years, India does not face a terrorist attack, then of course you can say the kinetic response worked. But if it is only slightly better, then that isn’t adequate reason to take the risks such a strategy entails,” the former diplomat told me.
After the 2008 attack in Mumbai, the Indian government exposed and shamed Pakistan internationally and opted for diplomatic ways to deter Islamabad from supporting anti-India groups. The diplomat asserted that, for a long time afterward, there was relative peace. India faced the next major attack in 2016, when JeM terrorists crossed over into Uri, a town in India-administered Kashmir, and slaughtered 19 Indian soldiers. By that time the Modi government was in power, and it carried out what it called a “surgical strike” and sent ground troops to hit a JeM camp in Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
The next attack on India came in 2019, in the Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir, where 40 Indian soldiers were killed and JeM claimed responsibility. India went a step further and this time hit a JeM base in the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but it used a limited strike. That episode ended with Pakistan returning an Indian pilot who was captured by Pakistani forces.
And yet, the terrorists returned to carry out a more vicious attack, this time on tourists.
“India took kinetic action in 2016; there was no attack for three more years. In response to the attack in 2019, again, India hit deeper inside,” the Indian diplomat added. “Now you have had another attack in 2025, and you went deep inside Pakistani territory, which invited their retaliation and could have escalated. The point is: Is this better or worse” than strategic restraint?
India’s opposition Congress party has accused the Modi government of failing in its attempt to lobby against Pakistan at the International Monetary Fund, which approved a roughly $1 billion loan for Islamabad in the middle of the India-Pakistan crisis.
The Indian opposition has also asked if New Delhi has accepted third-party mediation after Trump announced the cease-fire and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote that India and Pakistan will “start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site.” India has painstakingly avoided Western arbitration in the dispute over Kashmir, which it believes is a bilateral issue that could get unnecessarily complicated if any global actors intervene with their own agendas in mind.
Syed Akbaruddin, a former Indian ambassador to the United Nations, told Foreign Policy that India’s hit on Pakistan was “certainly a telling blow.” He added: “India has basically shown Pakistan that nobody is there to stop India, and Pakistan did not have the capabilities to stop it from carrying out the strikes.”
But Akbaruddin wasn’t sure if that will end Pakistani-backed terrorism on Indian soil.
