Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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?

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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.

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.

> 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.

5 million years

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think Pakistan orchestrated the last attack.

The structure was designed for being disavowed.

I expect it was more the army looked away, over condoned.

And yes, the expectations are to generate a response from the BJP.

By this rubric there are 4 actors on the stage.

- The people of Pakistan, the Pakistani army,

- The people of India, the BJP.

I’ve had this discussion with friends who are Pakistani and they concur that this makes the most sense.

The opinions of the Pakistani army have dramatically changed as per their interactions, having been at a nadir due to their domestic handling of events, and now these actions have reinvigorated public opinion.

The BJP has had its military credentials burnished.

I’d go a step deeper and suspect that there was a traditional response from India planned, and then at some point in the past 72 hours, a functionary on the BJP side raised the potential of a massive PR coup and the old guard got sidelined.

This has worked. This means this behavior will be repeated.

> The structure was designed for being disavowed.

> I expect it was more the army looked away, over condoned.

Right, in the exact same way they "looked away" while OBL lived half a mile away from the most prestigious military academy in Pakistan and the same way they "over condoned" the Taj hotel shootings. You are not disagreeing with me here.

> The opinions of the Pakistani army have dramatically changed as per their interactions, having been at a nadir due to their domestic handling of events, and now these actions have reinvigorated public opinion.

This line describes Hamas just as well as the Pakistani state, unfortunately.

> The BJP has had its military credentials burnished.

Indian media always has been and always will be jingoistic and no matter how the government responded, it would gleefully report on the power of the Indian military.

> This has worked. This means this behavior will be repeated.

WHO has this worked for? The BJP isn't more popular because of this. Pakistan hasn't achieved any strategic goals beyond the continuing destabilization of J&K - which is already well on the way to integration.

> 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.

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.

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?

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

So maybe say which specific military responses you want to talk about in the first place rather than just saying "the terror attacks in the US or France" and expecting everyone to read your mind.

we wenr green and attacked oil revenues that financed terror.

> 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.

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

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