Asymmetric Battleground: Terrorism and the Indo-Pakistani Protracted Conflict

Abstract The Indo-Pakistani conflict has been heavily influenced by cross-border terrorism, particularly after the Cold War. Pakistan initially used unconventional warfare against India during the First Kashmir War, but it was not until the mid-1980s that it fully embraced and pursued these methods in a systematic fashion. Despite India’s military superiority, Pakistan developed a strong system of state-sponsored terrorism and employed terrorism as a foreign policy tool to achieve its revisionist goals against India. In conformity with its revisionist policy, Pakistan’s unrestrained use of proxy strategies, combined with radical Islam and nuclear threats, helped sustain political unrest in Kashmir and further its political interests without significant fear of retaliation from India. The use of terrorism helped Pakistan, apart from securing leverage with India, to rationalize its strategic interests and project itself as a relevant geo-strategic player in the great powers’ struggle for supremacy in multipolar Asia. On the bilateral plane, now terrorism is taking a perennial turn, albeit slowly, as Pakistan is blending its long-term goals with the tested methods of unconventional warfare – in close conformity and alignment with China – to prevent India’s peaceful rise in the Indo-Pacific.