Op Sindoor: How we won, and lost

There are no clear wins in wars these days, especially when terrorising populations, or nuclear blackmail, is the goal. Pakistan’s war manual may well be The Quranic Concept of War (1979) by Brigadier S K Malik, with its pithy statement: “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself... Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him.” Notably, this book has a forward from General Zia-ul-Haq, their then President.

In War From the Ground Up (2012), Emile Simpson, a former British Army officer, argues that modern wars often lack binary outcomes due to their political and informational complexity. Thus you could both win and lose a war, and that’s what Operation Sindoor’s outcome is.

On the plus side, India won a military victory. India leveraged its integrated air defence, long-range missiles, global positioning satellites, and drone decoy technology to achieve aerial dominance. This enabled India to make pinpoint strikes, first on terrorist enclaves, and then on Pakistani military sites, including, it is said, nuclear storage silos.

India surprised most observers because it was not only through expensive imported fighter jets that it deprecated Pakistan’s offensive capabilities, but also indigenous drones, loitering munitions, and cruise missiles. India needs strategic autonomy, because foreign suppliers, and supply chains, are not dependable. They keep the kill switches and can turn off the spigot.

India may well have ushered in a step-change in modern warfare, an age where drones and missiles tilt the balance rather than fighter jets, although the latter continue to remain key. Maybe it is sufficient to have slightly less advanced jets rather than procuring top-end F-35s, Su-57s etc. But there is a caveat: fighter jet engines. India must get its Kaveri engine working, for self-reliance.

India also established strategic red lines: terrorist attacks will henceforth invite military retaliation because there is a military-terrorist nexus, with Pakistani soldiers cosplaying as terrorists as a way of sub-critical harassment with plausible deniability. Furthermore, India’s strikes have exposed the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear command authority, effectively diminishing the leverage of future threats.

So what are the negatives? The biggest is that this skirmish has not put even a dent in Pakistan’s use of terrorism as state policy. Indeed, the next encounter with terrorists has already taken place in Kishtwar on May 22, exactly one month after Pahalgam, with one Indian soldier killed. Terrorism and war with India continue to be the raison d’etre of the Pakistani state.

India comprehensively lost the narrative war. Operation Sindoor is portrayed in the Western media on Pakistan’s terms (including the usual bogey of ‘nuclear war’), and their claims of shooting down 5-6 Indian jets are accepted as the truth. Many Pakistanis are embedded in Western media outlets, and that is not accidental. As they say, you can wake up a sleeping person, but not someone who is pretending to be asleep.

In that sense, the all-party delegations visiting various capitals is an exercise in futility, because the West is not interested in India becoming a peer-level competitor: the G2 with China is bad enough, who wants a G3 with India as well? Also, just as EAM S Jaishankar told Europe that their (Ukraine) problem is a European problem, the West sees India’s problems as not theirs.

Pakistan’s ability to internationalise the issue is a failure for India’s stance that Kashmir is a bilateral issue. Fortunately, nobody actually cares, including the UN or its Security Council.

This conflict and its aftermath also revive questions around the Haji Pir Pass which was needlessly given away in Tashkent in 1966. It is a major route for infiltration for terrorists, its commanding heights dominate Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, and it cuts the Uri-Poonch distance from 282 km to 56 km. Alas, a resounding military victory has been morphed into a stalemate.