The history of Pakistan’s military engagement with India is a catalogue of conventional failure masked by a persistent and delusional belief in the efficacy of asymmetric warfare. This delusion is enshrined in the doctrine of ‘Bleeding India with a Thousand Cuts,’ a strategy officially articulated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and operationalised by General Zia-ul-Haq, but whose roots lie in the humiliation of 1971. It is a strategy born of impotence. Having emerged from the 1947–1948 war with Kashmir divided under a UN-brokered ceasefire, with an equally humiliating stalemate and brutal dismembering in 1965 and 1971, respectively, the Pakistani Deep State–an unholy nexus of the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) concluded that it could not defeat India on the battlefield. Therefore, it instead chose to wage a cowardly shadow war using rented terrorists as strategic assets to inflict pain on India while hiding behind a nuclear shield. The objective was threefold–to seize Kashmir, balkanize India by exploiting internal fault lines, and to create a permanent state of conflict that could potentially justify the Pakistani Army’s stranglehold on its own state resources.
Decades later, the verdict on this strategy is clear–it has failed. The thousand cuts have not bled India; rather, they have gangrened Pakistan. This strategy was predicated on the assumption that India was a fragile mosaic that would shatter under the pressure of constant low-level violence, but it proved to be a fundamental misreading of the Indian character. From the insurgency in Punjab in the 1980s to the proxy war in Kashmir, the Indian state absorbed these shocks with a resilience that the spooks in Rawalpindi could have never anticipated. The attacks were designed to weaken India’s resolve; instead, it hardened it. The horrific suicide bombing at Pulwama on the 14th of February, 2019, which claimed the lives of 40 CRPF soldiers, was intended to be a morale-breaking blow; but instead became the catalyst for a paradigm shift. The Indian response at Balakot, just days later on the 26th of February, 2019, shattered the core assumption of Pakistan’s nuclear blackmail. For years, the Pakistani establishment was living under the belief and assumption that its tactical nuclear weapons gave it immunity to launch conventional terror strikes. New Delhi called this bluff.
By striking deep inside Pakistani territory, targeting the JeM training camps with precision and professionalism, India demonstrated that the threshold for tolerance had been crossed. It signalled to the world, and specifically to the Generals in Rawalpindi, that the era of strategic restraint was over. The ‘New India’ would not just turn the other cheek; it would strike the hand that held the dagger.
This failure is even more stark when viewed from a global perspective. While India has marched forward to become the fifth-largest economy in the world, a hub of technology and a voice for the Global South, Pakistan has regressed into the company of failed states. It shares more DNA today with the warlord-run anarchies of Somalia or the isolated despotism of North Korea than with any functioning modern democracy. The relentless obsession with hurting India has drained the Pakistani treasury, militarized its society, and radicalized its youth. The Deep State has successfully protected its own power, absorbing the lion’s share of the national budget while the people starve, but it has lost the war.
The ‘Kashmir banega Pakistan’ slogan remains a fever dream, useful only for domestic propaganda. The revocation of Article 370 by the Indian government in 2019 was the final nail in the coffin of Pakistan’s territorial ambitions. It integrated the region more fully into the Indian union, rendering Pakistan’s proxy assets increasingly irrelevant. The terrorists they send across the Line of Control are not freedom fighters; they are cannon fodder for a lost cause. They are pawns in a game that their handlers have already lost.
Ultimately, the tragedy of the Thousand Cuts strategy is that the cuts were inflicted on the wrong body. The military establishment uses the bogeyman of an existential Indian threat to maintain its grip on power, to run its business empires, and to avoid accountability. They have turned their own country into a security state where the army has a country, rather than a country having an army. India has moved on. It’s focusing on space missions and economic corridors, whereas Pakistan remains trapped in the geopolitical gutter of its own making, still trying to fight the war of 1947 in the year 2026.
