[17th July 2026] The Hindu OpED: It is not all bad between India and Pakistan 

Mentor’s Comment

A letter signed by 117 prominent Indians and Pakistanis has revived the debate on whether India should resume dialogue with Pakistan after the 2025 Pahalgam terror attack. While relations are often seen only through the lens of conflict, history shows that both countries have also exercised restraint during wars and cooperated on several issues. However, these efforts have repeatedly been undermined by terrorism.

Do India and Pakistan’s three wars support a narrative of implacable hostility, or a shared doctrine of restraint?

1. Restraint as the norm: In all three wars (1947, 1965, 1971), both militaries made deliberate efforts to avoid bombing each other’s cities and civilian spaces.
2. Exceptions test the rule: The church at Ambala was hit in 1965 while Pakistan targeted the adjoining air base, and the only serious civilian-area attack, at Chheharta, occurred hours after a ceasefire while originally aiming at a radar station in Amritsar.
3. 1971 target discipline: Both sides restricted attacks to military targets, including oil storage sites, even in the most decisive of the three wars.
4. Military over civilian toll: India’s official count places military dead across all three wars at 8,211, against Pakistan’s broader estimate of about 15,000; no credible civilian casualty data exists for either side.
5. Restraint held until terrorism: This battlefield discipline was set aside only once terrorism entered the relationship, marking terrorism as a distinct category from conventional war.

What do WWII bombing doctrines and the collapse of Russia-U.S. arms control show about the India-Pakistan record, by comparison?

1. Allied “area bombing” in Germany: Deliberate targeting of civilian areas killed an estimated 3,00,000-6,00,000 German civilians under the Allied doctrine of “area bombing.”
2. Dresden’s limited military value: The bombing of Dresden alone killed 25,000 civilians despite the city holding hardly any military value.
3. Tokyo and Operation Starvation: The bombing of Tokyo killed 1,00,000 civilians, while Allied mining of the seas under “Operation Starvation” was designed to deny Japan its fishing.
4. Contrast with the India-Pakistan battlefield concept: Unlike the Axis and Allied doctrines that treated civilian life as expendable, India and Pakistan’s militaries retained a battlefield concept restricting engagement to military objectives.
5. Nuclear CBM outlasting Russia-U.S. arms control: The 2005 India-Pakistan nuclear confidence-building agreement remains functional, with its last meeting held in January 2026, even as arms control agreements between Russia and the United States have collapsed in the same period.

Is terrorism a battlefield failure, or a deliberate departure from the restraint both sides otherwise observed?

1. Terrorism as the sole disruptor: Once terrorism entered the relationship, the battlefield restraint that governed three conventional wars was set aside entirely.
2. Tacit cooperation despite terrorism: A third assassination attempt on General Musharraf in 2003 was foiled quietly with Indian intelligence support, tacitly acknowledging strong Pakistani action against terrorist groups even during hostility.
3. External coercion, not voluntary restraint: This cooperation followed Islamabad being told to cooperate with the U.S. or risk being “bombed back into the Stone Age,” indicating external pressure rather than bilateral goodwill drove the action.
4. Escalating and shifting targets: Relations deteriorated sharply once terrorism began, moving from military targets initially to civilians more recently, as seen in the Pahalgam attack.
5. Pakistan as terrorism’s later victim: Groups Pakistan once supported, such as the Taliban, have since turned against it, showing terrorism has become a threat to Pakistan’s own internal security as well.

Has diplomatic outreach between India and Pakistan failed where military-level restraint has held?

1. Post-26/11 refusal: President Asif Ali Zardari’s instruction to ISI Chief General Shuja Pasha to visit Delhi and cooperate in the 26/11 investigation was flatly refused by then Army Chief General Kayani.
2. Civilian leadership’s weak position: A year later, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden told the British that Zardari feared being “taken out,” and the “Memogate” scandal exposed his appeal for help against the generals.
3. Repeated outreach, repeated rupture: Nawaz Sharif was first to congratulate Narendra Modi in 2014 and hosted him at a family wedding in December 2015, but the Pathankot attack followed weeks later in January 2016, and Sharif was removed from office within a year on unproven corruption charges.
4. Political capital spent without result: Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Modi all invested significant political capital in outreach to Pakistan, with Manmohan Singh facing particular criticism for his efforts, and all three initiatives ultimately failed.
5. Military channel outlasting diplomacy: General Bajwa’s restrained response during the Imran Khan years, his advocacy for trade corridors, and the reaffirmation of the ceasefire commitment despite the Galwan incursions and the 2019 abrogation of Article 370 show cooperation persisting through military channels even where diplomacy failed.

What single precondition would need to be met for India-Pakistan cooperation to resume durably?

1. Terrorism trend worsening: Terrorism rose by 34% in 2025 amid growing unrest in Occupied Kashmir, the tribal areas and Balochistan.
2. Weakened state capacity: Years of military rule have weakened Pakistan’s state institutions, complicating any consistent counter-terror commitment.
3. Existing areas of functional cooperation: Cooperation remains possible in glacial melt, stubble-burning alternatives and narcotics trafficking, areas where both countries have previously worked together.
4. The singular precondition: The key step is for Rawalpindi to demonstrate a clear and visible end to its support for terrorism.
5. Potential downstream gain: Meeting this precondition could open the way for a renegotiation of the Indus Waters Treaty to mutual benefit.

Conclusion

India and Pakistan’s history is not one of unbroken hostility but of deliberate mutual restraint in conventional conflict and durable institutional cooperation that has survived wars, political failures and direct provocations such as Galwan and the abrogation of Article 370. Terrorism, not conventional war or political rupture, has been the sole consistent disruptor of this cooperation. Renewed cooperation is possible only if Pakistan visibly ends its support to terror groups, since only this precondition removes the single variable that has repeatedly derailed nuclear confidence-building, backchannel diplomacy and functional cooperation.