For sure, that hasn’t prevented it from claiming victory in most, barring 1971 and Kargil. Let’s assess as much evidence as a mere 1,250-word column would permit.
The revisionist history of every war or skirmish is a popular subcontinental phenomenon. Just that in Pakistan, it’s carried out at an industrial scale, including in school textbooks.
Take the 87-hour skirmish. All of Pakistan, from the Field Marshal to the subalterns of its politics, believes it won this round. That this was followed by Donald Trump’s embrace of the historical “stalwart ally” America had dumped was seen as an endorsement of this self-proclaimed “victory”.
The fact is that Munir and his people had planned this earlier. The visit of Steve Witkoff’s son Zach and the crypto deal — through a Pakistani tech whiz kid, corps commander’s son-in-law and now crypto czar with a Cabinet rank — took place just four days after the Pahalgam massacre and nearly two weeks before Op Sindoor.
When he set up Pahalgam, Munir knew there would be Indian retaliation. He, therefore, pre-planned this incredible move to exploit the Trump family’s greed. Give him full marks for understanding it before most people in the world. Or maybe the Saudis alerted him.
He had the Trump “system” in the bag long before any fighting started. And about Pahalgam, he had given us an indication a week earlier with his speech to overseas Pakistanis on April 16, 2025. The killings were his tactics to draw an Indian response. To reopen the Kashmir issue, with Trump sewn up, was his strategic objective. The first worked perfectly, the second failed.
Switch now to the military aspect. Since Pakistan had provoked this knowing India was pre-committed to responding militarily, they could also anticipate the targets. They also knew the tools India would use. They were ready when IAF soared at 1:07 AM on May 7. They weren’t able to prevent the strikes on targets deep inside their territory but that wasn’t their objective. They wanted to limit their response to an aerial engagement.
The combination of AEW (airborne early warning) aircraft hanging back, J-10Cs and JF-17s with PL-15 missiles had been primed and rehearsed for just this tightly-focused action. They got some success, and have been dining out on it. India, at the highest levels, has acknowledged some aircraft losses that night. The outgoing Chief of Defence Staff even attributed it to a “tactical mistake”. Then the IAF planned its payback.
It came first with the anti-radiation drone strikes to suppress Pakistani air defences and then a series of air strikes on PAF’s most heavily defended air bases. No PAF aircraft, whatever the range of their missiles, now rose in defence or to fight back.
By the time Pakistan sought a ceasefire, only one side had the evidence of damage caused to the other: Commercial satellite pictures of damage to at least 13 PAF bases and three radars. Pakistan still celebrates this as a victory simply because it shot down some planes. An Indian commander put it more fairly, even sportingly. It was like a hockey match and we won 3-1. Just that theirs was a centre forward’s field goal and ours three set-piece, perfectly executed penalty corner hits.
Their claims that they struck are backed by zero evidence. It is fiction. All Indian airbases have cities around them, nothing remains hidden, no satellite pictures have emerged. All of the Pakistani claims are what they are: Horse manure. Although I wonder why this is considered less rude and more printable than the other, more popular bovine product.
I am not trying to restate recent history, but only buttressing my central point. That the Pakistani military mind thinks well, but only tactically. It doesn’t anticipate how India will respond. It can be a function of inbuilt incompetence, disrespect for the Indian military or maybe a combination of both. This is an argument we learn from Pakistani writer Shuja Nawaz’s book Crossed Swords.
Talking about Kargil, he writes that the team playing India in the war game anticipated exactly the response the Vajpayee government gave. If they were taken seriously, Pakistan would have saved itself from defeat, retreat and humiliation. But they were laughed away. Tactically, Kargil was brilliant too. In deception, planning, secrecy, the choice of terrain, and the criticality of location. But nobody thought about the “what if” possibility — what if India fought back? That needs a strategic mind that Pakistan lacks. That’s why we said, tactically brilliant, strategically disastrous.
Nobody in the Indian armed forces calls the Pakistanis good for nothing. But, their mindset privileges a few moments of glory over the big picture.
Kargil became a strategic defeat because it brought global affirmation of the sanctity of the Line of Control (LoC). Even on his short stopover at Islamabad airport, Bill Clinton spoke to the Pakistanis on camera and said lines on the map of the subcontinent can no longer be redrawn in blood.
Let’s look at the post-Pulwama story. Since the initiative of launching a terror provocation is always with Pakistan, they knew that after a big enough strike, the IAF will be used for retaliation. That’s how Operation Swift Retort, involving more than 26 PAF aircraft to bait the IAF into a scrap where they didn’t have the numbers or the range was planned and rehearsed, probably for years. They are still celebrating shooting down an IAF MiG-21. Even if that’s a tactical plus, strategically, Indian deterrence lasted seven years — until Pahalgam.
The same story has played out in our earlier, older wars. The Operation Gibraltar (about 10,000 regulars in mufti, or civilian attire, infiltrated into Kashmir Valley), followed by Operation Grand Slam to take Chhamb, then Akhnoor, cut off Kashmir and grab it with ease. Tactically, this was brilliant but again somebody in the Pakistani General Headquarters had to be extraordinarily dumb to think India will simply keel over to lose Kashmir and not expand the war to the plains of Punjab. There was inadequate thought given to the possible Indian response. Within the same war, the surprise armoured thrust in Khem Karan still remains the most audacious use of tanks in the subcontinent, and its objectives were grand. However, the headline to date remains its disastrous failure. Nobody gamed the Indian response. The most important and largest battle of that war was Pakistan’s defeat and the mauling of its best armour.
Pakistan claims victory in that war but, ironically, observes September 6 as “Defence of Pakistan Day”. Their revisionist historians are happy to script pride in defence in a war where they had attacked with a clear objective. This was their last chance to take Kashmir militarily and they blew it.
Whatever the reality of Op Sindoor, the Pakistanis have taken the wrong lessons from it. This will be compounded by the delusions of a rising diplomatic stature. India has to keep that in mind and anticipate a new provocation earlier than what we may have imagined six months ago. Pakistan has decided to collectively buy into its own post-Sindoor propaganda and now believes the world is either dependent on it or distracted. History tells us that these are conditions in which the Pakistani establishment makes its worst, ultimately self-defeating political and strategic blunders, however good they might be tactically.
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