Sajid Farid Shapoo
On April 22, the serene meadows of Pahalgam, a celebrated tourist destination in Kashmir, became the site of a horrifying terrorist attack. Twenty-six civilians – mostly Indian tourists – were gunned down in an act that bore the chilling hallmarks of calculated brutality. The attack, claimed by a little-known outfit, The Resistance Front (TRF), with suspected links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, shattered not only lives but the fragile illusion of normalcy in the Kashmir Valley. The massacre has ignited national grief and outrage and also forced India’s strategic and military thinkers to confront a recurring dilemma: how to respond punitively, yet wisely, in a high-stakes nuclear neighborhood.
From the 2001 Parliament attacks to the Pulwama strike, India has repeatedly faced the same conundrum: how to punish Pakistan without triggering a nuclear crisis. Each response – Operation Parakram’s costly mobilization (2001–02), the surgical strikes (2016), and the cross-border Balakot airstrike (2019) – did not yield the desired results. Today, as calls for “limited war” resurge, India must realize that symbolic military action alone cannot coerce a nuclear-armed adversary that views terrorism as a low-cost, high-reward tool.
Still, voices that believe that a calibrated military response could coerce Pakistan to rein in cross-border terrorism and dismantle the terror infrastructure are getting louder. The logic of coercion, compelling a change in adversary behavior, has thus moved from academic circles to television studios and strategic briefings. But as history and theory remind us, such paths are rarely straightforward. The fragile understanding of the concept of coercion and an even shakier grasp of what “limited war” entails further complicates the matter.