If I were them, I would settle in for a Hezbollah style long war. Acquire thousands of cheap but lethal/destructive drones & ballistic missiles. Train thousands of 2-3 man teams to transport, assemble, fire, disassemble, move on. Have them operate throughout border areas in Punjab & Sindh in a semi-autonomous manner, melting into own civilian population between missions. Have them fire dozens to hundreds of drones/rockets/BMs per day, every day, into civilian targets in India (villages, temple towns, tier 2/3 cities, farmlands) continuously for months & years on end. When possible combine with ordering BAT style armed teams, aided by local M guides & support, to cross and commit massacres & other atrocities (remember Nuh episode in Rajasthan).ramana wrote: ↑30 Aug 2025 06:26 Knowing the Indian capabilities revealed in Operation Sindoor, what can Pakistan do to protect itself from those capabilities?
For instance, evacuate their planes beyond the Indus to be safe from the IAF.
Build more runways in airbases.
Convert highway stretches to air strips. Have new trailer-based ammo and fuel stations on highways
What else?
The idea is
1) to saturate and exhaust India's defence grid on the super-cheap, so that major strikes cannot be seen coming among the continuous surge of relatively minor attacks.
2) to eat away at economic activity and political support for BJP state/national government by keeping the entire population of all Indian border states, upto 200-300 km inside the border, in a state of perpetual and long term insecurity.
3) to ensure that any Indian retaliation (like Israeli retaliation today) can be portrayed, in the increasingly powerful information war domain, as aggression against civilians, human rights violations etc (with all of the multi-domain repercussions this can be exploited to yield, both among M communities in India and in various countries worldwide where they have strong lobbying & propaganda networks).
4) If possible, to draw Indian ground forces into Pakistani urban/exurban areas for an asymmetric conflict such as IDF fought against Hezbollah in 2007— it's MUCH easier to set the terms of success & claim victory in this sort of conflict than a conventional war given the imbalance that Op Sindoor clearly revealed.
They have learned that they (not just the jihadi tanzeems, but the "conventional" armed forces of Pakistan) are completely overmatched in a traditional contest with India and cannot hope for anything more than to be crushed, even in a contained & limited conventional war. Their best option is to lean fully into the asymmetric conflict — not just as an extra means of destabilizing & tying down Indian security forces through Jihadi terrorism (the 1990—2014 model) but as a core warfighting doctrine itself.
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