The larger point, however, is that Pakistan, because of its state sponsorship of terror, has created ungoverned spaces and, therefore, become the epicentre of instability, not only in South Asia but across the world
On March 3, 2009, I had described Pakistan as the Somalia of South Asia after a dastardly attack on Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore. At that point in time an eminent editor with a keen interest in strategic affairs had written an editorial against me in a leading daily newspaper decrying that equivalence.
I meant and mean no offence to Somalia that is still, a decade and a half later, grappling with its own challenges from the terror outfit, Al-Shabaab. It has to contend with ungoverned spaces where the writ of the government just does not run. This instability has ominous implications for Somalia’s neighbours, too.
The larger point, however, is that Pakistan, because of its state sponsorship of terror, has created ungoverned spaces and, therefore, become the epicentre of instability, not only in South Asia but across the world.
This analogy was evidenced by two statements made by two leading US diplomats. Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, on December 2, 2008, in the wake of the 26/11 the Mumbai terror outrage, had famously described Pakistan as an international migraine. She had stated “Pakistan continues to be an international migraine. It has poverty, extremism, issues of nuclear non-proliferation and a weak government. It needs to learn how to deal with extremism and the issue of nuclear non-proliferation…”
Another former US secretary of state Hilary Clinton had warned Pakistan on October 21, 2011, that it would pay a very heavy price for the state sponsorship of terror. She opined while addressing a press conference in Islamabad with the Pakistani foreign minister in tow, “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.” Pakistan’s use of terror as an instrument of state policy has devastated its own society, especially its minorities.
What is moot is that Pakistan’s terrible track record, both as a net exporter of terrorism and as a notorious nuclear proliferator, is so well documented in the esoteric echelons of international high perfidy that it is surprising it still continues to stay the course on its toxic trajectory without the global opprobrium that should have buried it by now.
It is in this context that it becomes important to contextualise whether India’s kinetic actions between May 7 and 10, 2025, and the subsequent diplomatic outreach spearheaded by parliamentary delegations that fanned out across the world were able to reinforce the documented reality of official Pakistan’s direct involvement in perpetrating terror into India?
Let us begin by examining the kinetic actions initiated by India between May 7 and 10, 2025. The fact is that these actions were initialised and efficaciously culminated notwithstanding that there was no element of surprise post Pahalgam. It, therefore, goes to the credit of the Indian Armed Forces. For this without the inherent element of surprise always was a bridge too far even in tactical theology. Pakistan was cognisant of the fact that after India had established a new threshold by retaliating conventionally against asymmetric warfare, a robust military response would be the order of the day.
Going by reports in the public space it seems that there was no softening of Pakistan’s air defence infrastructure as the mandate to the Indian Air Force ostensibly seems to have been to target the infrastructure of terror in Pakistan rather than their military structure. That obviously seems to have caused certain damage to India’s air assets.
There are, however, two overarching outcomes that need to be factored into any objective analytical calculus. From whatever momentum the diplomatic outreach seems to have gathered from the efforts of their respective interlocutors, India managed to assert itself without being drawn back into the Cold War-era “India-Pakistan” hyphenation that once defined global diplomacy. Second, despite Pakistan’s lobbying and that of its few remaining allies, Jammu & Kashmir failed to regain any traction whatsoever on the global agenda.
For the first two-and-a-half decades after Independence, the idea that India and Pakistan were two sides of a single strategic coin shaped international policy, media narratives, and diplomatic engagements. Things started to change after India’s decisive military victory in 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh.
After 1991, when India liberalised its economy, the politico-economic trajectories of India and Pakistan diverged so dramatically with India progressing rapidly that the narrative of hyphenation peddled by elements sympathetic to Pakistan in the Western establishment started sounding fake and hollow.
Anyone who has dealt with the strategic elite of Pakistan knows they can live with India criticising them but can’t live with India ignoring them which is also one of the lesser triggers of this state-sponsored terrorism, the principal one being the institutional scar on the collective psyche of the Pakistani military establishment as a consequence of the “whipping” they received in December 1971 at the hands of the Indian armed forces.
India’s calibrated response to the Pahalgam attack featuring precision strikes across Pakistan stemmed from a broader base of international credibility that India has meticulously cultivating through economic resilience, diplomatic outreach and a firm anti-terrorism narrative now going back many decades.
Unlike in the formative years ago, major global actors do not rush to invoke moral equivalence or pressure both countries equally. The back-channelling this time around was also focused on de-escalation as has become the norm stretching back years now.
Despite four tense days of cross-border hostilities Jammu & Kashmir did not re-emerge as a subject of urgent international concern. There was no emergency UN session, no mediation offers from European capitals and no renewed calls for dialogue centred on the so-called “Kashmir question”.
This silence is not a diplomatic oversight. It was a direct result of years of consistent Indian policy. New Delhi has persistently argued that Jammu and Kashmir is a domestic matter and not an international dispute. That framing, once hotly debated, now enjoys quiet acceptance across key global capitals.
Moreover, that Pakistan’s use of terrorism as an instrument of state policy has nothing to do with Jammu & Kashmir is also now widely understood across the world.
India effectively has succeeded thanks to aeons of sustained diplomatic effort in sidelining Pakistan’s longstanding narrative that unrest in Kashmir is organic rather than externally sponsored.
India’s military doctrine of “controlled escalation” or a “war on the rocks” carries intrinsic risks. Repeated military actions, even limited ones, could inadvertently lower the threshold for conflict and brings back the quintessential dilemma — is a conventional response efficacious in proscribing asymmetric warfare?
