India just suffered the worst terrorist attack it has faced in years. On April 22, individuals belonging to The Resistance Front (TRF), an affiliate of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), killed 26 people in the Baisaran valley of Pahalgam in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. According to reports, the terrorists specifically targeted Hindus, and 25 out of the 26 dead are Hindu males (the 26th was a local Muslim man who tried to stop the attack). Even more provocatively, the attacks occurred while U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance was touring India.
The attack comes after years of relative peace, punctuated only by relatively minor violence, something that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attributed to improved security in Kashmir ever since the revocation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution in 2019, which gave the then-state of Jammu and Kashmir additional autonomy.
A major rationale for scrapping the article was to increase Kashmir’s integration with the rest of India by improving security, fostering tourism, and boosting the economy. However, the Pahalgam attack demonstrates the limitations of this approach, especially as long as Pakistan continues to maintain links with groups such as TRF.
Although TRF is a supposedly new, secular, and nonsectarian “homegrown” organization, Indian officials believe that the group merely rebranded itself to avoid sanctions, obfuscate links to LeT, and appeal to human rights organizations by using non-Islamist language.
The Indian government blamed Pakistan for the attack and has since suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which governs the sharing of water of six rivers between the two countries. This marks the first time the treaty has been suspended since it was signed in 1960, and could represent a major escalation, especially since the Indus River system is the lifeblood of Pakistan.
In retaliation, Pakistan suspended the Simla Agreement of 1972, which established the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir between Indian- and Pakistani-controlled territory, and provided for the bilateral and peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute, although arguably Pakistan has violated the spirit of the Simla Agreement for years.
As more intelligence comes to light, the extent of Pakistan’s support or operational knowledge of the attacks will become clearer, as will the question of which agencies or individuals in Pakistan were aware of or involved with the attack. Possibilities could range from high-level support to institutional and routine assistance, such as funding and providing a safe-harbor for a variety of groups, one of which pulled off a lucky attack in a lightly guarded area. But ultimately, the evidence will likely point to some sort of Pakistani involvement — Pakistan Army Chief General Asim Munir recently gave a provocative speech — and the question is ultimately one of scale.
India would have no choice but to retaliate. While a full-scale attack is unlikely and risky, a performative response would not fly well with the Indian public either. Ultimately, New Delhi should demonstrate that attacking India will have huge consequences and act to degrade the capability of terrorist groups to attack India, without provoking a major war. One option that has been suggested, for example, is a plan to push a few kilometers into Pakistani-held Kashmir in order to capture the launch pads that facilitate militant infiltration there. But regardless, the odds are hardly in Pakistan’s favor.
The question is: why would Pakistan — after years of relative quiet with India — pull off such a stunt, and why now? The geopolitical situation and the court of world opinion do not favor Pakistan at all. Few countries, if any, are sympathetic to Pakistan and to the phenomenon of state-sponsored terrorism in general. Both the United States and Russia have strong ties with India, and are unlikely to push for restraint or tie India’s hands down, should it choose to retaliate militarily or economically. The Trump administration in the United States has cultivated close ties with India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and several top U.S. officials are strongly pro-India. Moreover, the U.S. no longer has a deep interest in Pakistan after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. On top of all this, the U.S. has generally been supportive of Israel’s punitive actions in Gaza, which also came after a major terrorist attack. Why wouldn’t the U.S. similarly support India?
While Pakistan can count on China to put some pressure on India to abstain from a major escalation, Beijing is unlikely to bring the full force of its economic or military power to bear to help Pakistan, especially if it isn’t existentially threatened. After all, China has other, more pressing issues on its plate, not least trade issues with the U.S. and tensions over Taiwan, to invest much in Pakistan’s security. China’s investments in Pakistan have paid off little, and its attempt to build a major port at Gwadar in Balochistan has borne little fruit, with Chinese nationals and projects increasingly targeted by Baloch separatists.
Pakistan has also increasingly grown distant from other Muslim-majority nations, particularly many Arab states with which it previously had closer ties. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf Arab countries have close ties with the U.S. and have increasingly pursued closer relations with India. Moreover, the Gulf Arab states have pushed back strongly against Islamic militancy and the use of Islamism as a political ideology. Pakistan cannot even count on support from the Taliban in Afghanistan, who have their own grievances with Pakistan.
Pakistan itself seems to be barely holding together after years of economic and political turmoil. This turmoil includes unrest in Balochistan, continued tensions with Afghanistan, and violence in Pashtun-majority areas in Pakistan, the arrest of popular leader Imran Khan in 2023, and continuous bailouts from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one as recent as last month.
Both India’s population and economy dwarf Pakistan’s. At the start of the century, Pakistan’s economy was a fifth the size of India’s, but now it is a tenth. As Pakistan has stagnated, India has grown, becoming a major military and economic power, and an important player on the world stage.
So what does Pakistan gain from doing something that could risk massive retaliation from India while it is in such a perilous state? One of the less quantifiable but possible benefits is that a war with India is one of the few things that can unify Pakistanis and distract from its numerous problems. Maybe Pakistan — like Hamas in Gaza in 2023 — is aware of its gradual slide into irrelevance, and wants to act while it still can.
This goes back to the issue of Indian retaliation. Even though the scales are now wildly imbalanced in India’s favor, if Pakistan believes that it can continue to assert some pressure or create news to keep the Kashmir issue relevant in the eyes of the world without consequence, then it will continue to do so, almost like an itch that cannot be gotten rid of. As India’s ties with the United States, the Arab states, and even China continue to grow, the risk for Pakistan is that its bilateral issues with India will largely be forgotten. Likewise, Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was timed to coincide with rumors that Saudi Arabia and Israel would soon normalize relations, which was also fueled by a sense that the world was forgetting about Gaza.
The Pahalgam attack on India feels like a similar plea for attention, or a dare to gauge how far Pakistan can go without provoking India. For Pakistan to stop provoking India, New Delhi would have to retaliate in a way to forever deter future aggression. Deciding when enough is enough is a political decision that the government would have to take with a clear eye to the risks of escalation involved. But there are benefits to an escalation as well, because the odds overwhelmingly favor India, and would give it a chance to incapacitate its enemies. The alternative is turning a blind eye toward attack after attack, and accepting such a state of affairs as the alternative to a major conflict.