Munir-led Rawalpindi GHQ will go back to the drawing board and reboot the ‘Thousand Cuts’ doctrine. To increase the cost of sponsoring terror, India must remain unpredictable in its retaliation
Anti-terror financing watchdog FATF’s recent condemnation of the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack shows that Operation Sindoor continues to be in play. For, Op Sindoor wasn’t a mere retaliatory strike for the Pahalgam attack. It was a natural progression of the surgical strikes of 2016 and the Balakot air strikes of 2019. As a multi-domain campaign — kinetic, cyber, diplomatic, informational — Op Sindoor was designed not just to punish but to also message that Pakistan’s long-standing strategy of bleeding India by a thousand cuts could not be pursued without commensurate costs.