Arsalan Bilal
Pakistan’s Balochistan province is burning. A sharp surge in militant attacks in the province amid a decades-old insurgency has destabilized the entire country. The issue is related to not only internal security but also the deep-rooted Pakistan-India conflict.
Pakistan believes that India is aiding and abetting insurgents in the Balochistan province, which is resource-rich and strategically important. There are reasons to think India might be providing support to militants in Balochistan in a concerted effort to raise Pakistan’s cost for sponsoring cross-border terrorism.
I discern it as New Delhi’s defensive offense strategy, which India’s influential national security advisor Ajit Doval, once a spy inside Pakistan, advocated many years ago. I argue that the strategy has paid important dividends for India by taking the conflict deep inside Pakistan without triggering a full-scale conventional war—but this can become a perilous gamble if a possible escalation is not avoided.
India’s “Defensive Offense” Strategy
Before defining India’s defensive offense strategy, I want to highlight its origins. Interestingly, New Delhi conceived and operationalized the defensive offense strategy in response to what it saw as Pakistan’s efforts to destabilize India internally. Experts believed that Pakistan fanned insurgencies to “bleed India” through “a thousand cuts”. This defined Pakistan’s asymmetric warfare against India.
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