Kabul, May 7 (IANS) India’s decisive military action met its predefined objectives despite Pakistan’s attempt to escalate, an Afghan media outlet reported Thursday on the commemoration of the first anniversary of Operation Sindoor.
The report said that India achieved its objectives during Operation Sindoor by combining defined targetting with credible escalation reserve and ensuring political objectives fixed on its original purpose, which was degrading the terror infrastructure that was responsible for the heinous Pahalgam massacre of April 22, 2025.
Physically degrading the operational core of the groups responsible for cross-border terrorism in India, shattering depth illusion and managing escalation while accepting calibrated risk were the three objectives of Operation Sindoor, leading Afghan news agency Khaama Press reported.
It stated that Markaz Taiba in Muridke which is the nerve centre of Lashkar-e-Taiba; Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur which is located 100 km inside Pakistan and functioned as the indoctrination and recruitment hub for Jaish; Mehmoona Joya in Punjab which functioned as a Hizbul Mujahideen camp, and many targets in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) were all struck from Indian airspace using long-range standoff weapons, air-launched missiles, and loitering munitions as part of its first objective – a move that preserved the legal posture of India and denied a clear casus belli (occasion for war) to Pakistan.
The report stated that the second objective was shattering what the strategic community had begun to call the depth illusion, where the Pakistani security establishment assumed that the farther inland a terror facility is located, the safer it would be.
India dismantled this assumption by striking Bahawalpur in southern Punjab and Muridke in the Punjabi heartland
“This was the most expansive Indian military operation since 1971, and the targetting removed the perceived sanctuary that Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella had extended over its terror facilities,” the report detailed.
Managing escalation while accepting calibrated risk is shown as the third objective by the report.
According to it, this was achieved by deliberate restraint shown during the operation.
“The first wave avoided Pakistani military installations, aircraft on the ground, forward air defences, and command facilities. India accepted heightened operational risk because the rules of engagement were deliberately narrow. The political intent was to degrade a specific terror ecosystem in Pakistan and PoJK, not to initiate a state-on-state war,” noted the report.
It mentioned that three doctrinal outcomes emerged from Operation Sindoor’s success – that an act of terror would be treated as an act of war with no distinction drawn between state sponsors and proscribed outfits; the conventional space below the nuclear threshold remains usable; and, technological precision, disciplined messaging can together produce a coercive outcome without crossing into general war.
–IANS
ksk/as
