Islamabad’s Fateful Assumptions

WHEN INDIA HIT the Nur Khan airbase of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) early on May 10, alarm bells rang in Rawalpindi. The airbase is barely five kilometres from the Strategic Plans Division (SPD), the or­ganisation tasked with the command and control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. That very day Pakistan sued for peace when its director general of military operations (DGMO) picked up the hotline and spoke with his Indian counterpart. By evening there was an agreement on cessation of hostilities.

It was a strange ‘war’ for Pakistan to wage. If its response to the Indian attack on terrorist facilities at Bahawalpur and Muridke, among others, was to make India back away, it was a failure. Paki­stan, and not India, wanted to be bailed out. If the use of armed force was for a political objective, that too remained inconclusive: the objective is not known and the military response was blunted. India hit eight out of almost three dozen airbases in Pakistan and encountered no resistance. Had the conflict persisted for another day, the damage would have been more extensive.

What was Pakistan thinking?

In the welter of claims and coun­terclaims and flows of information and misinformation, one question re­mained unanswered: Was Pakistan’s behaviour irrational?

Irrational behaviour at the level of individuals has well-developed theo­ries which have been subjected to continuous empirical testing for a century. Developed by economists and psychologists, these theories have stood the test of time. These concepts and theories cannot be easily extended to the domain of nation-states. Nation-states are not individuals and their decision-making, unlike those of individuals, involves multiple layers, institutions and people.

Until very recently, international relations (IR) scholars avoid­ed approaches based on rationality to unpack how countries be­have. One recent and notable exception is the theory outlined by John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato in their 2023 book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy. They cut through the problems of applying rational choice theory to the IR domain. Their argument has two ingredients. One, rational states have a theory to explain “how the world works”. This is not some meta­physical or cosmological statement about the world but “logical explanations” based on realistic assumptions and supported by substantial evidence about the workings of the international sys­tem, and they employ these to understand their situation and determine how best to navigate it.

The second, equally important, argument is that “rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a delib­erative process, one marked by robust uninhibited debate.” This point is crucial for understanding Pakistani behaviour.

It is interesting to examine Pakistan’s behaviour from the per­spective of this theory. The first thing to ask is whether Pakistan had made reasonable assumptions about India’s behaviour in case conflict broke out between the two countries. This includes assumptions about the conditions under which conflict could start between the two.

Pakistan clearly did not update its assumptions and beliefs about Indian behaviour; in short, its “theory about Indian behav­iour” proved to be inadequate. Almost all the crises between the two countries—the Brasstacks Crisis of 1986-87, the “compound crisis” of 1990, the Kargil conflict in 1999, and the 2001-02 border confrontation—involved, in one way or another, the US playing a role to defuse potential confrontation. In all these crises, Paki­stan’s intention was to “internationalise” South Asia’s “tinderbox situation” and somehow force India to negotiate Kashmir with Pakistan, preferably under the aegis of a great power that would help Islamabad. This worked for a long time.

Then something changed. The last two encounters, in 2016 and 2019, witnessed India “expanding the envelope” of conventional operations against Pakistan until, in 2025, the scope reached the point of a normal, near-war, series of operations where missiles were used against Pakistan. This was the first time two established nuclear powers, which possess not just the weapons but also the means to deliver them, came to blows with each other. The two ear­lier instances when two nuclear-armed countries confronted each other—Rus­sia and China in the Ussuri River con­flict in 1969 and India and Pakistan in Kargil in 1999—are not examples in the class of Operation Sindoor. China and Pakistan, in 1969 and 1999, were rudimentary nuclear powers.

In light of the last decade’s experience, Pakistan should have updated its assumptions about India. It did not. Islamabad con­tinues to believe that a “short crisis” would lead to global powers intervening on its behalf before substantial damage is inflicted by India. That assumption—of quick gains before India could mobilise its armed forces—was also outdated. India had 15 days to prepare for a response and it quickly ramped up its conventional attack in a single night.

In the end, Pakistan was able to call the US to its aid. And the US sought to “encourage” India to hold bilateral talks with Pakistan. But within days of those statements from Donald Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly rebuffed them twice in less than 24 hours.

What about Pakistan’s own preparedness to meet the Indian challenge in case the situation turned into a conventional armed conflict? At the military level, as events would prove, this turned into a nightmare for Pakistan. Its woefully inadequate air defence assets could not save its key airbases at Sargodha and Chaklala (Nur Khan) against India. But this military aspect is closely linked to assumptions about Indian behaviour: Pakistan never consid­ered an eventuality where India would strike at it before a great power intervened on its behalf.

The second requirement of rational behaviour—the aggrega­tion of information and a thorough deliberation before taking a decision—also broke down in the Pakistan’s case.

In Pakistan, at the formal level, the prime minister is the most powerful person and the chief of army staff does not come even among the top five ranks. But in practice, it is the other way round. All political decisions that involve the use of armed force are taken by the army chief and the prime minister is a mere permissions office. What this does is reduce a complex and collective decision-making problem to a decision by an individual, albeit a very power­ful individual. Ultimately, Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir faced a set of paired preferences, reminiscent of a microeconomics text­book situation. One can list two, given his recent pronouncements: “Muslims strong” versus “Hindus weak”; and “go to war” versus “don’t go to war”. These are caricatures of what are otherwise com­plex decision problems that involve a number of variables ranging from military to political and from diplomatic to economic consid­erations, way beyond the cognitive abilities of a single individual.

In the days after the conflict, scholars and analysts have chal­lenged the claim that Pakistan behaved irrationally. One scholar has claimed that Pakistan is rational, just that its cost-benefit cal­culation is different.

That claim, however, runs into problems immediately. If Pakistan has a different set of cost-benefit calculations, surely it could bear some more “pain”. Only 11 of its 40 airbases were hit by India and even for those that were hit only some were rendered inoperative due to damage to runways. In others only buildings were hit. What then prompted Pakistan to quickly de-escalate? One answer is that after Nur Khan and other bases were hit, the possibility of future attacks—in the course of the current conflict—forced Pakistan to recalculate the costs involved. But sure­ly these costs ought to have been considered beforehand. Pakistan ought to have known that it lacked sufficient air defence assets to prevent India from launching a catastrophic attack. The inability to anticipate an unexpected turn in a conflict is closely linked to its strategy of “internationalising the conflict” within days.

India’s assumptions, too, have been questioned. One analyst questioned that if a handful of terrorists could push India to war how that could become official policy. This analyst questioned the rationality of India’s choices.

In game theory literature a “non-credible threat” or an “incred­ible threat” is one where the cost of carrying out the threat is higher than the cost of not carrying it out. To that extent a situation wherein a few terrorists kill a number of Indians and the Indian government threatens to attack Pakistan (to check terrorism) would appear to be an incredible threat. But was this really an incredible threat?

For one, the cost of terrorism over decades has become so high for India that not attacking the “nerve centre of terrorism” would be costlier than attacking it. Not attacking Pakistan would certain­ly lead to more terrorists being dispatched to India. For another, since 2016, this is India’s third attack on Pakistan without that country being able to counter-damage India, say, by waging war. Again, the differences in comprehensive national power between India and Pakistan are so wide that any attack on India now risks Pakistan being damaged in a debilitating manner. It is interesting to note that India’s own ‘theory of Pakistan’ and the manner in which information is aggregated by the Indian leadership are a mirror image of that in Pakistan: a comprehensive evaluation of facts and circumstances and careful deliberation at the highest level of government. The results are for everyone to see.

2025 India-Pakistan warOperation SindoorPahalgamPakistanPakistan ArmyPakistan prime ministerShehbaz Sharif