Not out of weakness, but calculation. It’s waiting for the international community to bribe it into silence. One advantage of being quasi-democratic (like Russia or China) is the ability to sideline public opinion. Pakistan can afford to wait. India, by contrast, appears to be following an Israel-style doctrine. But Pakistan is more Prussia than Palestine and Modi feels much weaker from this episode (he promised a safe Kashmir).
Competing regional giants and nuclear powers, India and China are widely seen as long-term strategic rivals, sharing a 3,800 km (2,400 mile) Himalayan border that has been disputed since the 1950s and sparked a brief war in 1962. The most recent standoff began in 2020 and thawed only in October 2023, when both sides agreed to a formal patrolling agreement, placing limits on forward deployment and coordinated disengagement. Even between nuclear-armed antagonists, restraint is possible when war threatens mutual prosperity.
Likewise, Putin’s behavior post-Maidan in 2014 was not immediate escalation. Instead, Crimea was seized swiftly, but Russia spent eight years supporting separatists and waging hybrid war in Donbas before launching a full-scale invasion in 2022. It was restraint with intent, waiting for the West to appear divided or distracted.
It’s strange that every time the region stabilizes, something reignites tension. Why would China, India, or Pakistan want instability when wealth and growth depend on peace? Yet here we are.
The BJP base craves nothing short of Pakistan’s annihilation. That’s a fantasy; militarily, diplomatically, and strategically. Why shouldn’t India fully cooperate in an international investigation to determine who was behind the Pahalgam attack? The refusal suggests this moment is being used as a casus belli; leveraging the incident to project force in a world increasingly shaped by Trumpian-Putinesque instincts.
Even the postponement of the IPL was an indirect consequence of what Pakistan could do. This is not a toothless state. Pakistan is David with a nuke or more accurately, an incidental Prussia, hyper-militarized but calculating. The public isn’t rising up against its military; if anything, this round has shown that Pakistan can restrain itself without looking weak.
In fact, Pakistan has consistently been the more restrained nuclear power. Israel has spent two years trying to flatten Gaza with limited success. The U.S. stayed in Afghanistan and Iraq far too long, trapped by asymmetric warfare. These are textbook examples of tactical response leading to strategic drift.
Modi should study those cases. Retaliation may thrill headlines. But strategy lies in staying still until the storm passes and only then, deciding if and how to move.