India and Pakistan are again facing a dangerous deterioration in relations after a major militant attack in Jammu and Kashmir triggered accusations, military alerts and increasingly confrontational rhetoric across the border. New Delhi has linked the attackers to Pakistan-based militant networks and argues that Islamabad continues to tolerate organisations capable of carrying out violence inside India, while Pakistan has rejected responsibility and warned against Indian military retaliation. The immediate security question is familiar, but the strategic environment is not. Both countries possess nuclear weapons, both have experienced repeated cycles of terrorism and retaliation, and both understand that a conventional exchange can escalate much faster than either originally intends. This creates one of the most difficult problems in international relations: how can a state punish or deter attacks originating from outside its borders without creating a chain of escalation in which the eventual cost of demonstrating resolve becomes greater than the original harm it was intended to deter?
India has a legitimate obligation to protect its citizens and cannot treat repeated cross-border terrorism as an unavoidable feature of geography. A state that consistently absorbs attacks without imposing costs can create a moral-hazard problem: militant organisations and any institutions supporting them may conclude that violence produces political effects while retaliation remains limited by India’s fear of escalation. This helps explain the evolution of Indian policy from the comparatively restrained responses after earlier attacks towards the 2016 surgical strikes and 2019 Balakot air strike. The strategic message was that nuclear weapons should not provide Pakistan with a shield beneath which lower-level violence can occur without consequence.
Yet deterrence is much easier to describe than to calibrate. If India retaliates too weakly, the action may not alter the adversary’s incentives. If it retaliates too strongly, Pakistan faces pressure to respond in order to preserve its own deterrent credibility. India then interprets Pakistan’s response as another escalation requiring punishment. Each state can therefore describe its own action as restoring deterrence while describing the other’s identical logic as aggression. This is the stability-instability paradox: nuclear weapons reduce the probability of unlimited conventional war because both governments fear catastrophic escalation, but that same fear can create space for lower-level conflict because each side assumes the other will eventually exercise restraint.
This is why attribution becomes morally and strategically essential. There is a major difference between an attack conducted directly by the Pakistani state, one conducted by an organisation receiving active state support, and one conducted by militants operating despite attempts by Pakistani authorities to constrain them. The appropriate Indian response should depend on which of those conditions evidence supports. Collective punishment based on nationality is not deterrence; deterrence requires identifying the actor whose future behaviour the punishment is intended to change. Intelligence therefore becomes as important as military capability because using force against the wrong causal mechanism can increase hostility without reducing the probability of another attack.
Pakistan faces its own responsibility here. Even where Islamabad denies directing militant attacks, the existence of armed organisations operating from Pakistani territory has repeatedly created strategic consequences for the Pakistani state. Sovereignty carries rights against foreign intervention, but it also carries responsibilities concerning what occurs within one’s territory. A government cannot plausibly demand complete respect for sovereignty while arguing that organisations operating inside its borders are entirely outside its responsibility whenever their actions affect neighbours. The state may genuinely lack perfect control, but weak control does not eliminate responsibility to build stronger control, particularly when non-state violence repeatedly risks war between nuclear powers.
At the same time, Indian strategy should distinguish between Pakistan as a state and militant organisations seeking precisely the escalation that follows terrorism. Terrorism is partly a form of political communication. A relatively weak organisation cannot defeat India militarily, but it may be able to provoke India into actions that radicalise populations, damage international perceptions or destabilise relations with Pakistan. In that sense, an overreaction can allow the attacker to determine part of the victim state’s policy. Strategic restraint therefore should not be confused with passivity. Sometimes refusing to respond in the way an adversary wants is itself an exercise of power.
This is particularly important in Kashmir because security policy and political legitimacy interact. Militancy requires policing and intelligence, but long-term stability also depends on whether ordinary Kashmiris believe political institutions provide meaningful representation, economic opportunity and legal protection. These objectives are not substitutes. Development cannot persuade every ideologically committed militant to abandon violence, and security operations cannot by themselves generate political consent. A stable state requires both capacity and legitimacy: enough coercive capability to enforce law and enough political acceptance that coercion does not become the primary relationship between citizens and government.
This distinction is fundamental to political philosophy. Hobbes was right that without order, rights become difficult to exercise because violence destroys the conditions under which ordinary life is possible. But a purely Hobbesian state can become insufficient once order exists. Citizens also ask whether power is exercised through rules they can regard as legitimate. The state needs force because law without enforcement is ineffective; it needs legitimacy because force without accepted law eventually becomes domination. Kashmir tests India’s ability to maintain both principles simultaneously under exceptionally difficult security conditions.
The nuclear dimension should make political leaders particularly cautious about public red lines. Leaders often believe aggressive rhetoric strengthens deterrence because the adversary becomes convinced they cannot retreat. Sometimes it does. But public commitments also reduce room for private compromise. If an Indian leader promises overwhelming retaliation and a Pakistani leader promises immediate counter-retaliation, both can become trapped by their own audiences even when intelligence or diplomatic channels suggest restraint would be preferable. Credibility purchased by eliminating one’s own flexibility can become strategically expensive.
This is why back-channel communication is indispensable during crises. India and Pakistan do not need political friendship to communicate military intentions. Hotlines, intelligence contacts and third-party intermediaries can clarify whether an operation has ended, whether a missile launch was accidental or whether a particular action is intended as limited retaliation rather than preparation for larger war. Communication does not weaken deterrence. It reduces the probability that deterrence fails because one side misunderstands what the other is doing.
China adds another dimension because Pakistan remains one of Beijing’s closest strategic partners while China itself has a serious unresolved border dispute with India. India therefore cannot analyse a prolonged India-Pakistan confrontation entirely as a bilateral problem. A major military mobilisation towards Pakistan can create opportunity costs along India’s northern frontier, while Chinese diplomatic or material support affects Pakistan’s confidence. This is one reason India benefits from keeping crises short, bounded and politically purposeful rather than allowing them to consume strategic attention indefinitely.
India’s growing economic power also changes the calculation. A larger economy gives India more military and diplomatic options, but it simultaneously creates more assets vulnerable to prolonged instability. Investors price geopolitical risk, airlines reroute, tourism declines and government attention moves from infrastructure and development towards crisis management. The opportunity cost of conflict therefore rises as a country becomes wealthier. Power gives states greater ability to fight, while prosperity gives them more reasons to avoid unnecessary fighting. Mature strategy requires recognising both.
The most effective Indian response should therefore be judged by outcomes rather than spectacle. Does it reduce the probability of another militant attack? Does it impose costs on the organisations actually responsible? Does it preserve India’s international legitimacy? Does it avoid giving Pakistan incentives for a wider military response? Does it strengthen security in Kashmir without unnecessarily alienating the population whose cooperation intelligence services ultimately require? These are harder metrics than the number of targets struck, but they are strategically more meaningful.
India and Pakistan have survived previous crises because leaders eventually recognised that neither can obtain political objectives worth the risk of uncontrolled nuclear escalation. That restraint should not become an excuse for terrorism, but neither should terrorism be allowed to make escalation automatic. A state demonstrates sovereignty not merely by proving that it can retaliate when attacked, but by retaining enough control over its own response that the attacker does not get to decide what happens next.
The coming days will therefore test something more difficult than military capability. India needs to show that it can defend citizens and impose accountability while keeping the political objective of any response clearly bounded. Pakistan needs to demonstrate that sovereignty includes preventing its territory from becoming a platform for attacks on its neighbour. Both governments already possess enough weapons to make escalation catastrophic. The scarce strategic resource is judgement: the ability to use power without allowing the need to appear powerful to become more important than the security power was supposed to protect.
