[enugu]

> They were unable to locate the terrorists even after two or three weeks and needed a distraction.

This does not make sense. When France attacked Daesh in 2015 after the terrorist attacks in Paris or when the US attacked Afghanistan after 9/11, the objective wasn't to target the exact people who carried out the attacks, but the organization behind the attacks. People can always be found as long as the organization remains.

The goal of the attacks would be to make any future terrorist attack an expensive option for the Pakistani military as opposed to something which can be done routinely. There was a sharp drop in the terrorist attacks in Kashmir after the 2019 confrontation.

[whatshisface]

>when the US attacked Afghanistan after 9/11, the objective wasn't to target the exact people who carried out the attacks, but the organization behind the attacks

The mission in Afghanistan was very much to find Bin Laden. It was changed after he escaped.

[pwthornton]

It was very much to dismantle Al Qaeda and senior leadership. Just killing Bin Laden wouldn’t have done that much.

[SauciestGNU]

Apropos of this conflict, to where did Bin Laden escape?

[profsummergig]

I hope it wasn't to a military cantonment in Pakistan. That would be wild.

[lazide]

1) Pakistan is a lot less stable right now than 2019 (as is the world).

2) The putative organization is in Pakistan, and likely supported by the military.

The biggest threat India is doing (IMO) is threatening the water supply. That is getting everyone in Pakistan’s attention.

These strikes are more about managing the local political situation in India, which requires some degree of obvious violent retribution.

[enugu]

The incentives of the Pakistani generals to permit organizations like LeT to commit further terrorist attacks is a different domain from whatever the local political situation is like in India. There has been a past regime where Pakistani generals were able to train and send militants regularly to conduct terror attacks in India. Without an effective response from India putting pressure on these generals, that can easily become the new normal again.

[lazide]

Do you think (plausibly) threatening to cut off water to large swathes of Pakistan, or blowing up some random terrorist camps, is the bigger actual threat?

[enugu]

Cutting off water supply is clearly the bigger threat. However, it involves a longer time frame - building infrastructure which one expects not to use in a normal situation.

Importantly, even once built, it selects the wrong targets, not terrorists or military bases - but regular people who will be faced with scarcity of water and food, as the crops use Indus water. This would be something highly unethical, and also not something sustainable - once visuals of hunger start reaching screens across the world, the force to restart the supply would be strong.

[int_19h]

What force, though? Israel does something similar, and how much actual pushback (as opposed to sternly worded statements) did it actually get?

Even if it were to translate to sanctions, I'm not so sure BJP wouldn't welcome it. "The Fatherland is besieged, let's unite together around Dear Leader and fight back like one" tends to be a very popular take in authoritarian countries for a reason, and it's that much easier to pull off when you can actually point at some way in which your country is targeted.

[enugu]

Dont buy your description of India. Elections matter, BJP can and does lose many elections, India is dependent on oil from Gulf countries, it doesn't have US to shield it from actions which it shouldn't even be doing in the first place, there are much better options against Pakistan etc.

[rendang]

Can India build new aqueducts/pipelines to divert water from the headwaters they control? Dams only have finite capacity after all

[lazide]

Yes, albeit they would be susceptible to being shelled. With, uh, unpredictable but likely bad consequences if they happens.

[m0llusk]

"less stable" === yikes

[reverendsteveii]

We could have gone after the people who actually did 9/11 but that was a bit of a non-starter. Also I think you're equivocating between multiple interpretations of "the terrorists" when most people absolutely wouldn't draw a distinguishing line between, using 9/11 as an example again, the actual hijackers and Osama bin Laden. There's absolutely no question that any time the phrase "the 9/11 terrorists" is used it means both the actual perpetrators and the people who planned and supported the attack.

[enugu]

The context was a reply to an assertion that the terrorists in Pahalgam were not found by Indian security. I interpreted this as people who physically did the attack.

If by terrorists, we mean the planners of the operation, that trail leads directly to Pakistan. Musharraf, the ex-army chief, is on record saying that the military has funded several militant organizations in Kashmir including LeT. (Osama's haveli in Abbotabad was incidentally also very close to the Pakistan Military Academy). The permission for the operations probably came all the way from the top as the attack came right after a strong statement on Kashmir by the army chief.

[dmurray]

"funding militant organizations" isn't the same as committing acts of terrorism. Nobody would have said the US should have responded to the 9/11 attacks with airstrikes on the CIA headquarters.

[enugu]

We are not talking about re-targeting of training and weapons from Afghanistan to Manhattan, but direct planning of an attack with ability to restrain and release the groups on demand. Contra the truthers, even the CIA wouldn't go that far. Musharraf explicitly mentioned the groups operating in Kashmir. He wasn't talking about fighters in Afghanistan.

[somenameforme]

The CIA wouldn't go that far? Operation Northwoods [1] is obvious evidence to the contrary. The one and only reason that that operation wasn't carried out is because of a President who refused to sign on to it, who would shortly thereafter be assassinated by a 'deluded gunman.' [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

[2] - https://youtu.be/MdejNPSuKek?t=62

[nindalf]

> There was a sharp drop in the terrorist attacks in Kashmir after the 2019 confrontation.

There were fewer terrorist attacks, certainly. I'm sure the Indian government would like to believe that the 2019 strike had an effect, but far more likely causes are

- Money. Pakistan's economy has stagnated and the country has lurched from one IMF bailout to the next (2019, 2023, 2024). It got so bad at one point that politicians were asking people to drink less tea so they could conserve foreign currency.

- Covid. Affected everything, but certainly harder to think about waging conflict when such a massive problem is affecting the country.

- Internal political instability, especially when Imran Khan took on the military and lost. The military was actually in danger of losing their primacy for the first time in decades.

- Conflict with the Taliban and Pakistani Taliban. The ISI had nurtured the Taliban to be tame pets and it turned out not to be the case. Crushing these was the highest priority, not least because it made their policy of nurturing terrorists look idiotic.

All of these factors meant Pakistan wasn't and isn't in the best shape to wage war overtly or covertly with India. India's economy has continued to grow, in contrast to Pakistan. The official Indian policy of "benign neglect" towards Pakistan appeared to work well.

I'm sure these attacks will be spun as a success in the future. Safe to say a Bollywood movie dramatising the events is already in the works. But Pakistan's own economic and political problems are far more likely to influence its decisions to engage in this sort of behaviour.

[enugu]

If you are actually arguing that a country targeted by a terrorist attack does not gain deterrence with a counterstrike relative to letting things go on, then how uniform do you consider this prescription? Should the terror attacks in the US or France not have had a military response?

What happens to the incentives of terror groups in response to such a policy?

---

The role of money only becomes an issue when conducting a terrorist attack becomes expensive. Missiles and jets consume much more money in comparison to training recruits via an intermediary organization like LeT and sending them across the border to carry out attacks.

A regime in which a terror attack leads to a high pressure, expensive situation for the Pakistani military is completely different from regularly scheduled, train and deploy terror attacks from militants which used to happen earlier.

In that situation, the military has to respond to economic pressure, pressure from allies and pressure from its own people.

[nindalf]

The Pakistani military cares about itself, above all. It wants to maintain its role as the primary protector of the Pakistani people, answerable to no one but themselves. As long as the threat of India looms large, their primacy is guaranteed. As a reward generals are allowed to grow filthy rich.

Support for the Pakistani military was at its nadir during the era of benign neglect because there wasn't an Indian boogeyman to justify their interference in politics and economic exploitation. But now that India has attacked Pakistani targets this will quiet any internal criticism of the Pakistani Army.

In other words, the military absolutely loves it when India engages in so-called deterrence. No Pakistani army soldier died (according to both sides). Pakistani people support the Pakistani Army more strongly than ever. It's absolutely perfect for the Army. I fully expect that they'll fund more terrorists, leading to a constant cycle of violence.

[spwa4]

> I fully expect that they'll fund more terrorists, leading to a constant cycle of violence.

Yes, that's the defining characteristic of all terrorist organizations. Get money, not through politics or production or economy, but by damaging others. Then get paid for not doing quite as much damage. This model has spread quite a bit in the past 5 years.

[mistrial9]

5 million years

[enugu]

Yes, an outside target can be used to tackle internal strife. But, there is no sign that the Pakistani army is actually in any danger of being removed from power, barring a major military defeat, nor that it will lose its autonomy over military policy.

If say, India were to let this slide, the default outcome is another such attack. Given the above motivation of the military to create a conflict and the ideological bent seen in Gen.Munir's speech, the expected outcome would be to repeat till this they get a conflict.

Yes, the deterrence won't be perfect. The Pakistan Army might end up repeating an attack whenever there is a relief from economic constraints(it doesn't have money for frequent purchases of expensive weapons) or from pressure from its allies (who dont want their oil trade or pipelines to suffer). But this means that what India has to do to minimize the number of attacks is to not let an attack slide by with low cost for the army.

The best case scenario would be a peace deal, as was arrived in Vajpayee and Sharif's time, but it was sabotaged by the Kargil operation, for exactly the reason you mentioned - a peace deal marginalises the army.

[intended]

No, the default outcome is not another attack.

This action guarantees another attack, because it has paid of in the actual PR dividends the ruling forces of both sides desired.

This has zip to do with the citizens, and everything to do with party / power bloc legitimacy.

Winning on economics and good governance is hard.

[SR2Z]

I can't even begin to understand this logic.

Why do you think Pakistan orchestrated the last attack? Do you think those reasons had anything to do with the expectation of retaliation from India?

The default is that Pakistan's motivations do not change and they keep doing what they've been doing. Ergo, another attack.

Yes this is stupid and worse for both sides, but it only takes one party to start a fight.

[lmm]

> Should the terror attacks in the US or France not have had a military response?

Probably, yes. Military responses to terrorism are almost always counterproductive. I don't know which specific attacks you're talking about, but the ones I can think of the US did far more damage to itself with the blowback than the original attack ever achieved.

[enugu]

Note that I am not referring to the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, much less of Iraq here. Rather, something like a strike which targets bin Laden and other organizers of the terrorist attack.

[lmm]

So it doesn't matter that military responses that have actually been tried in the real world have been counterproductive, because you can imagine other kinds of military responses and you imagine that those kinds of military responses would have gone better?

[enugu]

The French air strikes after the Paris attacks was not an occupation of Syria. There is no inevitable logic for a prolonged occupation.

[ashoeafoot]

we wenr green and attacked oil revenues that financed terror.

[nitwit005]

> What happens to the incentives of terror groups in response to such a policy?

You're imagining these people to be some sort of loyalists, rather than something closer to anarchists. Triggering military responses is going to be viewed as a bonus.

I'll note people rather frequently claimed Bin Laden wanted the US to be tied up in the military quagmire that their terror attacks produced. There's certainly some logic to that idea. His organization was too small to do much direct damage.

[selimthegrim]

They were also suggesting that they should import less foreign expensive cheeses