For Pakistan Army, war is the performance of its nationhood. Ceasefire violation warns of new conflicts ahead

The end India should seek is the construction of Pakistan other than the country its generals and clerics have imagined into being. Furious words and spasms of rage won't cut it.

Pakistan Chief of Army Staff and now Field Marshal Gen Asim Munir speaking at the Overseas Pakistanis Conference in April | Representational image | Screengrab

The stage was carefully set, and the actors perfectly costumed for the performance of their nationhood: soldiers in their creased uniforms, armed police in bright maroon sweaters, a man in a blue business suit, and a black-robed cleric. To them, General Asim Munir said: “Those who fight Allah and his Prophet and bring strife to the land will be punished in this life as well as the afterlife. This is your law. And this is Allah’s law. And because you are enforcing Allah’s law, you are his soldiers. There is no force on earth which can defeat you.”

Less than two hours after President Donald Trump announced an immediate ceasefire between India and Pakistan on Saturday, Srinagar and Jammu began to be targeted by drones. “This is no ceasefire,” Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said. There are stories, possibly apocryphal, that the missiles fired were inscribed with the names of Masood Azhar Alvi’s slain kin, a gesture of support for the internationally proscribed terrorist’s loss.

The unravelling of the ceasefire—or the belief of some Pakistani commanders that it does not apply to the Line of Control—showed at least some in the Pakistan Army had taken the words of General Asim earnestly. They answer only to the law of God. To India, it ought to be an education on the real reasons why punitive retaliation to secure deterrence against terrorism hasn’t worked.

For many in Pakistan’s armed forces, as well as influential forces in its civil society and politics, the use of violence in India isn’t a means to an end. Instead, it is the inexorable outcome of a state of irreducible hatred, which can only be requited with a final war of annihilation.

The Green Books

Listening in to the Pakistan Army when it talks to itself, the scholar C. Christine Fair taught us that religious millenarianism was core to the institution’s idea of itself. Through the Green Books, compilations of essays by mid-level officers published by the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi since at least 1990, Fair revealed a Pakistan Army stripped of its veneer of modernisation. It was an institution riven with anxieties over religious identity, hatred of India, and a driving desire to reinvent Pakistan as a theocratic state.

Tariq Majid, a naval officer writing in the 1990 Green Book, thus argued that “the Islamic state, apart from the standing forces, keeps a volunteer force of the people and employs the other lot of able-bodied manpower to strengthen the other elements of the military system during wartime.” This volunteer force, of course, comprised the jihadist proxies Pakistan used in Kashmir and had used against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In the 1994 Green Book, Brigadier Saifi Ahmad Naqvi proposed that it was critical to remember that Pakistan “is an ideological state, based on the ideology of Islam.” Therefore, “the existence and survival of Pakistan depend upon the complete implementation of Islamic ideology in true sense.” This, he went on, meant that the Army was responsible not just for guarding Pakistan’s territorial integrity but “the ideological frontiers to which the country owes its existence.”

Following the events of 9/11, this belief congealed into a kind of maniacal conspiratorialism. Even as his forces fought alongside the United States against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Brigadier Muneer Mahmood warned in the 2002 Green Book that Pakistan was being cast as the “torch-bearer of the Muslim ummah [global community] by the biased Western media and Jewish lobby.” Thus, it was “likely to be the target of these forces.”

Later, in the 2008 Green Book, Brigadier Waqar Hassan Khan argued that “the superpower’s entry into [the] Middle-East and West Asia [sic] was not possible without a Pearl Harbour; 9/11 was either created or supported to be labelled as the second Pearl Harbour.”

The diplomat and scholar Husain Haqqani, in his sharply etched history of Pakistan, observes that the Pakistan Army’s jihadist project was “not just the inadvertent outcome of decisions by some governments.” Instead, he argued, the Pakistani state’s use of Islam “gradually evolved into a strategic commitment to jihadi ideology.”

In 1956, the country’s first constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic republic—a notion unknown to classical theology—and mandated that no laws repugnant to the Quran and Hadith be passed. General Ayub Khan removed the prefix “Islamic” from Pakistan’s name but appointed a council of clerics to guide the country’s affairs. His successor, the hard-drinking General Yahya Khan, allied with Islamists in East Pakistan. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in turn, bowed to clerical pressure, pushed forward with anti-minorities measures, and declared Islam the state religion.

Thinking about deterrence

The crisis of 2025 should prompt India’s strategic establishment to recognise that this system of millenarian belief—which rests on a bedrock of faith in a coming apocalypse that will open the passage to utopia—can be deterred, at least in a simple military sense. The crisis of 2001-2002, which followed the terrorist attack on Parliament House in New Delhi, led General Pervez Musharraf to institute a ceasefire and scale back cross-border terrorism. The General’s primary considerations, though, were his country’s flailing economy and pressure from America.

For Musharraf and the circle around him, the 2001-2002 crisis was evidence that their nuclear weapons had deterred India—not of military weakness in the face of a conventionally superior enemy. This learning was to prove of use to his successor, General Pervez Kayani, who authorised the 26/11 attack, confident India would not go to war.

The 2016 cross-LoC raids conducted by India similarly led to a series of retaliatory Fidayeen attacks across Kashmir and a marked rise in terrorist violence over the following years. The 2019 Balakot strikes were perceived in the country’s strategic community as a victory for Pakistan since India had missed its targets, lost a jet, and failed to prevent the bombing of its Brigade Rajouri.

For some in India, the answer lies in escalating coercion against Pakistan to the point where deterrence sets in. Theorists of war have long warned, though, that no war can guarantee outcomes. The 19th-century General and theoretician Carl von Clausewitz famously argued against the idea of total victories: “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” “All actions take place in something virtually akin to dusk, which in addition, like fog or moonlight, gives objects an exaggerated size and a grotesque view.”

Even when a nation-state was beaten and its forces destroyed, this did not guarantee permanent victory. Like the Austrians and Russians who lost to France in 1805—and as Pakistan did after 1971—defeated enemies rose again, harbouring fantasies of vengeance. It would harbour thoughts of revenge, of reversing the setback. Thus, it was prudent to negotiate what could be had rather than hold out for maximal ends.

That is what India did in 2001-2002 and again in 2019: A ceasefire on the LoC, limiting infiltration, and the placing of restraints against terrorist attacks on its major cities. Each agreement held—until the next attack.

Vowing that every future terrorist attack will be treated as an act of war and treated thus is polemic. No nation-state in the world, not America, Russia, or China, has done this because it is unaffordable and impossible to execute. Polemic will not be taken seriously by adversaries and thus cannot be deterred. India needs a longer-term strategy.

Total attrition

Lawrence Freedman, in his magisterial survey of strategy, defined it as “identifying objectives, and the resources and methods for meeting such objectives”. This, put simply, means the strategy is the point at which means and ends converge. A single factor is key when considering means. First, as scholar Pranay Kotasthane has written, India has run anaemic military budgets for over a decade, retarding its modernisation. The scholar Walter Ladwig has observed that there is no reason to believe the Indian military can obtain either a surprise or a decisive edge against Pakistan.

Then, what options remain? Early in the 20th century, the military historian Hans Delbrück suggested all strategy could be divided into two basic types: Niederwerfungsstrategie, or annihilation, and Ermattungsstrategie, or attrition.

Even as it has pursued military means to deter Pakistan, India has never crafted a thoroughgoing strategy to exhaust its adversary’s resources through the systematic use of all national means. The decision to put the Indus Waters Treaty into abeyance is an example of what such a national strategy might entail, even if its practical utility remains unclear.

The country also has a range of economic tools at its disposal, including the prospect of pushing Pakistan into an arms race it cannot afford. India might want to ally itself with particular interests in Pakistan, like its fledgling middle class and industrialists, while punishing other segments and actively engaging in political subversion and intrigue.

Executing such a policy will require persistence, ingenuity, and learning. Thinkers in India often envision themselves as engaged in a game of geopolitical chess. However, the great Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann warned that chess was “a well-defined form of computation, not a game.” “Life is not like that,” he said. “Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do.”

Then, India may have to live with the less-than-perfect. Terrorism may persist, though at levels that do not pose an existential threat to the country. Friction at the border might be a periodic fact of life. The end India should seek, though, is the construction of Pakistan other than the country its generals and clerics have imagined into being.

For far too long, platitudes about deterrence have been opiates for India’s establishment, allowing policy-makers to wallow in the comforting haze of patriotic self-delusion. There is no option now but a tough decision on means and ends. Furious words and spasms of rage just won’t cut it.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)