New Delhi: The military response that India carried out against Pakistan-based terror groups—and their patron, the Pakistan Army—has placed Pakistan’s military planners under pressure from jihadist factions, especially the Jaish-e-Mohammad. The group has repeatedly announced its intention to avenge the deaths of its cadre, including close associates of its chief, Maulana Masood Azhar, who were killed in the Indian airstrike in Bahawalpur.
There is rising concern within Pakistan’s General Headquarters (GHQ) that overt restraint against Jaish could fracture the military–terrorist equilibrium that Rawalpindi has cultivated for decades, risking internal blowback from groups it may no longer fully control.
Following the significant damage inflicted during the Indian operation—not limited to airbases but including undocumented penetrations and the disabling of key military assets—Chief of Army Staff General Asim Munir is said to be deeply wary of another Indian strike, one that he has been warned could cripple Pakistan’s military capabilities.
According to defence sources, this assessment led Munir to instruct his commanders to quietly reach out to India and request a cessation of hostilities—despite the bravado later displayed by the military and political establishment in public.
Compounding Munir’s difficulties is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s clear declaration that India will not entertain any foreign mediation or pressure on Islamabad’s behalf—a fallback option that Munir had been counting on. With this rule of engagement now clearly established, Pakistan’s strategy of triggering a terror strike and relying on ‘influential’ countries to restrain India no longer holds.
As post-Operation Sindoor developments showed, Delhi is now unlikely to halt military operations until it has achieved its minimum calibrated threshold of damage—a level that could be devastating for Pakistan.
According to diplomatic sources, Gulf nations and key Western allies have privately informed Pakistan of both the risks involved and their limited ability to assist if a broader confrontation is triggered through a proxy strike. This underscores India’s newfound strategic capital in the post-Sindoor environment.
Operation Sindoor marked India’s transition from “strategic restraint” to “strategic assertion”—a shift that has dismantled Pakistan’s decades-old charade of “strategic denial” after terror attacks. That script will no longer work.
Indian defence planners believe that Pakistan’s military was caught off guard by India’s decision to directly target key strategic assets. This action has introduced a new layer of unpredictability into Pakistan’s threat calculus—one where Rawalpindi is no longer confident about how Prime Minister Modi might instruct the armed forces to respond in the event of a future terror attack.
With Jaish-e-Mohammad publicly reaffirming its intent to target India, the Pakistan military is now deploying its own resources to restrain the group, fearing that any fresh terror strike would provoke an overwhelming Indian military response—one that this time, Delhi is unlikely to call off at Pakistan’s request.