achoudhury wrote:I am little disappointed that a consensus is settling on de-escalation and that we should react only if attacked once again. IMHO, this will be totally wrong. Now that we have changed status quo and a new normal is established, it will be suicidal to go back to reactive mode. We must pre-emptively strike whenever we have good intelligence. Even if striking deep in Pakistan may not be feasible all the time but terrorist lauch pads will be easy to strike from stand off distances using the air power. That should be absolute minimum. Also, keeping low intensity war may be in our favor to continuously bleed Pak. Also, India has to raise its covert capability. A regular strike on Pakis especially CPEC assets in Balochistan and sindh will break Pakis. While we can keep a public posture of fighting terrorism overtly, we need to keep inflicting thousands cuts on Pakistan to break it economically. We all know that only a splintered Pakistan is a long term solution.
There are 2 dimensions of the recent Indian action.
1. A response.
2. Pre-emptive action.
The way I read the recent action.
1. Response is now the new normal especially to spectacular attacks but NOT to every attack.
2. Even after Pulwama, there have been terror attack that have targeted the security forces AND where the security forces took far greater causality than the terrorist were we lost about 6 security forces for 2 pests. This is not even a equal exchange, even then the forces have not gone for a response apart from taking care of the immediate pests.
3. *Pre-emptive* is just a choice of words but it was still a response to Pulwama attack. Language is important for international diplomacy but one must not read too much into that.
I would suggest the following
1. Response to *spectacular* attack is now the NEW normal.
2. Every such attack India ends up India raising the bar and raising the cost to bakistan, which is a good thing.
3. Raising the bar will be a series of small steps over a period of time.
4. While I don't think the current action was *Pre-emptive*, its introduction was still significant. It allow time for all international players to get comfortable with that word so that in future they will not react adversely when we really start taking preemptive action. Familiarity breeds comfort.
5. Small attack too need to be responded to. The recent firefight on the LOC was again, in my view, a response to a lot of small incidents that have happened since the Balakot response. Though we suffered some casualties in that too the pain it caused to the other side was multiple time what they could do to us.
6. In agreement with you, we have to start/expand intelligence based and intelligence led covert action inside bakistan. We have to play the game bakis think they can play within India. Inline with this thought, I have suggested that our first line of defense should not be the LOC but inside bakistan.
