Ajai Sahni
The long nights of ‘vengeance’ are over. It is time to ask, what has been achieved? Frenetic campaigns of falsehoods have enabled both sides to claim that they have engineered a notable victory. The whole truth, partly protected by legitimate interests of state, partly by vested partisan political interests, will never be known. But much can be measured in falsehoods as well.
The first truth that emerges through the noise is that the clear victory the Indian leadership sought has been tainted with ambiguity. Another is the tragic reality that domestic politics invariably trumps national security on both sides of the border.
Operation Sindoor was not a strategic imperative, nor was it timed for maximal strategic impact. It was a response to an orchestrated, partisan political campaign to whip up public sentiments, and was timed to meet partisan political, and not maximal strategic, objectives. For all the talk of “a compulsion to prevent, deter, and to pre-empt” attacks in India by Pakistan-based terrorist groups, the Operation simply had no potential to secure these objectives, and it was timed to a political calendar – the imperatives of being seen to have done ‘something big’, rather than doing something effective to secure these declared goals – that saw the launch of the coordinated strikes after a fortnight of media and public frenzy, and a succession of threats from the highest offices of the land. The result was, the Operation was initiated at a time when the Pakistani forces were on the highest levels of alert, dramatically escalating the risks for the attacking force.
Nevertheless, at the tactical and operational levels, Operation Sindoor did secure most of its objectives. At the tactical level, the delivery of nine precision strikes on widely dispersed selected targets deep inside Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and Pakistani Punjab – including one at Bahawalpur, over a hundred kilometres from the International Border, that killed at least three prominent Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terrorists, and another two of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) at Muridke, both in Punjab, was a signal military achievement. India claimed at least 100 terrorists killed; Pakistan insisted that just 31 ‘civilians’ had been killed in the first strikes.
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