Bharat Pakistan Terrorism United States USA War World

Pakistan May Use Iran as a Smokescreen to Spread Terror in India

Intelligence warnings are flashing red. The arrests are piling up. Pakistan does not need a reason to export terror to India. It needs an opportunity. And right now, with West Asia in open conflict, Pakistan’s deep state believes it has exactly that. Rahul PAWA | X – @imrahulpawa Every major world crisis has provided Pakistan’s terror machinery with operational cover to strike India, timed with cold precision to moments of maximum international distraction or diplomatic leverage. On March 20, 2000, the eve of Bill Clinton’s arrival in India, 35 Sikh men were lined up and shot dead in Chittisinghpora village in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district. The terrorists wore Indian Army uniforms and spoke Punjabi and Urdu, a calculated false flag designed to hand the visiting American president fresh images of fabricated Indian Army atrocities in Jammu and Kashmir. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating under the Pakistan Army’s direction and its foreign intelligence agency ISI’s direct command. After 9/11, with American attention consumed by Afghanistan and the world watching Islamabad perform as a frontline ally in its “war against terror”, Pakistan’s deep state moved with characteristic audacity. On December 13, 2001, LeT and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, killing nine security personnel and nearly triggering a full-scale war. The attack was not opportunistic. It was a calculated attempt to internationalise Jammu and Kashmir at a moment when the world was already in crisis and the Islamic world was split. In November 2008, as Gaza descended into violent escalation and global Islamic outrage peaked, ten Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists sailed into Mumbai and held the city hostage for sixty hours, killing 166 people across multiple coordinated sites including the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and the Nariman House Jewish centre. The terrorist attack was meticulously planned, with Pakistan Army and its ISI providing training, logistics, and real-time operational guidance. This is not Pakistan-sponsored terrorism born of desperation. It was Pakistan Army strategy, executed with maximum cynicism. In 2001 it wore the mask of America’s indispensable ally against terror while simultaneously directing terror at India. Today it wears the mask of a responsible Islamic middle power and self-appointed Iran mediator while running active cells across Indian cities. The mask changes. The target never does. Domestically, the amendment of Article 370 of the Indian constitution in August 2019 began delivering what Pakistan had spent decades of propaganda insisting was impossible. Pakistani generals watched in horror as peace and normalcy returned to Jammu and Kashmir. Tourism surged. Investment flowed. A new generation of Kashmiris was experiencing connectivity and economic opportunity rather than terror branded as jihad. The Kashmir valley, whose civilisational roots run deep into Hindu tradition, whose saints and ancient temples reflect centuries of Hindu practice long preceding the region’s recent history, was beginning to rediscover itself on its own terms. The Pakistan Army could not allow this. A peaceful, prosperous Jammu and Kashmir demolished the foundational premise of Pakistan’s existence and its seventy-year investment in terror, war, and propaganda. So it recalibrated and struck. On April 22, 2025, three Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists armed with American M4 carbines, AK-47s, and a GoPro camera traced to a Chinese distributor and activated in Dongguan fourteen months before the attack, descended into Baisaran Valley and separated Hindu men from their wives and children before executing them in cold blood. They fled before Indian security forces arrived and were hunted down a few months later, with Home Minister Amit Shah confirming their elimination in Indian Parliament on July 29. From the bodies of attackers, investigators recovered Pakistani voter ID slips linked to Lahore constituency NA-125 and Gujranwala constituency NA-79, and biometric data from Pakistan’s National Database on a micro-SD card recovered from a broken satellite phone. The objective, as evidenced by the immediate operational claim on social media by The Resistance Front, a proscribed outfit and proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba operating out of Muridke, was precise. Blame Hindus, declare Kashmir exclusively Islamic land, and manufacture an outsider and insider narrative implying that the very Hindus who form the civilisational core of Kashmir since its existence were settlers and occupiers. A fabricated narrative lifted directly from recent collaborators Hamas and Hezbollah’s playbooks in West Asia, designed to erase the Hindu soul of a valley Pakistan has spent decades trying to destabilise. India’s response was decisive and precise. Operation Sindoor struck nine confirmed terrorist training sites: Markaz Taiba in Muridke, LeT’s headquarters where the 26/11 Mumbai attackers were trained; Markaz Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, Jaish-e-Mohammed’s nerve centre; the Masjid Syedna Bilal camp in Muzaffarabad; the Gulpur camp in Kotli; the Sawai Nala camp in Muzaffarabad; the Abbas camp in Kotli; the Mehmoona Joya facility of Hizbul Mujahideen in Sialkot; the Barnala camp in Bhimber; and the Sarjal facility at Tehra Kalan, a key weapons storage site. These were not arbitrary targets. They were the nerve centres behind decades of attacks on India including the IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Indian Parliament attacks, and the 2008 Mumbai carnage. Pakistan’s response was to have its generals and senior officers attend the funerals of globally proscribed terrorists and then escalate. Pakistani forces deployed KARGU-2 loitering munitions and Bayraktar TB2 drones procured from Turkey and China in waves against Indian civilian and military targets. On the night of May 9 to 10, Indian air defence intercepted a Pakistani Fatah-II hypersonic ballistic missile over Sirsa in Haryana, aimed at targets near Delhi. In response to Pakistani escalation, Indian armed forces struck eleven Pakistani airbases including Nur Khan in Rawalpindi, the Pakistan Air Force’s central command and logistics hub, Rafiqui in Shorkot, Sargodha’s Mushaf Base, Murid in Chakwal, Skardu in Gilgit-Baltistan, and Bholari in Sindh, degrading frontline squadrons, runway infrastructure, drone hubs, and radar installations across the country. SEAD operations disabled air defence radars in Lahore and Gujranwala. The Indian Navy’s Western Fleet, including an aircraft carrier, repositioned in the northern Arabian Sea within operational range of Karachi. The intensity and reach of India’s strikes forced Pakistan’s DGMO to call his Indian counterpart and

Geopolitics International United States USA War World

Washington’s Narrowest Gamble: A Seizure, Not an Invasion

Three places will signal when this war evolves: the Strait of Hormuz, Kharg Island, and the hills above southern Lebanon. Everything else is noise. Rahul PAWA | X – @imrahulpawa There is a particular kind of tension that settles over a theatre of war when everything is in place and nothing has yet happened. It is the tension of a held breath. That is where West Asia finds itself today. The aircraft carriers are in position. The Marines are at sea. The Israeli Defense Forces are clearing southern Lebanese hills. And yet the orders to cross into Iran has not been given, and may not be. Late last week, U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the deployment of roughly 5,000 Marines to West Asia aboard amphibious assault ships, including the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit sailing from Japan and the 11th from California. An 82nd Airborne rapid-reaction brigade is already in the region. This is the largest American force concentration since the war with Iran began on February 28th. It is not subtle. It is not meant to be. And yet President Trump, asked directly whether he was considering a ground invasion, said he was not. He spoke instead of being “close to our goals.” His Secretary of Defence said something rather different. Analysts say something different still. This is not necessarily contradiction. It may simply be the grammar of coercion: you do not announce a landing before you need to make one. What, then, are these forces actually for? The honest answer is that they are for several things at once. They are a signal to Tehran that the cost of continued resistance is rising. They are an insurance policy against Iranian escalation in the Strait of Hormuz. And they are, according to several ground reports, the forward edge of contingency plans to seize Kharg Island, the oil export terminal that accounts for the majority of Iran’s crude shipments, along with the islands of Abu Musa and the Tunbs. Seizing Kharg would be a surgical act of economic strangulation rather than an invasion in the traditional sense. U.S. air power has already struck the island’s coastal defences, deliberately sparing the oil tanks themselves. The logic is legible: destroy Iran’s ability to sell oil and you destroy its ability to fund a war, without needing to take Tehran. The Marines would be the lock, not the key. Further north, Israel is pursuing what it sees not as an open-ended war of choice, but as a necessary security campaign with increasingly durable aims. Defence Minister Israel Katz has signalled that Israel may seek to hold southern Lebanon up to the Litani River, roughly twenty miles from the Israeli border. Since mid-March, Israeli ground forces have been clearing villages, bridges, and access routes across a broad arc, with the objective of creating greater strategic depth against Hezbollah and other Iran-backed armed groups. From Israel’s perspective, the logic is clear: push the threat farther north, deny hostile forces proximity to the border, and prevent the northern front from once again becoming a platform for sustained attack. Hezbollah has vowed to resist. What is taking shape, therefore, looks less like a temporary manoeuvre and more like the early outline of a more enduring military posture. Israel’s calculus is that Hezbollah cannot be defanged from the air alone. Netanyahu has said as much, repeatedly. But holding southern Lebanon is not a surgical strike. It is an open-ended commitment that risks inflaming the region and straining the alliance with Washington, which has its own timelines and its own thresholds. The two campaigns, the American one in West Asia and the Israeli one in Lebanon, are coordinated in broad strategic terms but not necessarily in lockstep. To the east, Pakistan has quietly closed its border crossings with Iran and reinforced its long held Balochistan frontier. Islamabad is not preparing to join any offensive. It is preparing for the consequences of one: refugee flows, cross-border terrorism, the destabilisation of a region already stretched thin. Pakistan’s deputy prime minister has been making calls, invoking a Saudi defence pact to urge Iranian restraint. The mountains of Balochistan, are not friendly to armoured advances in any direction. Iran, for its part, is not without leverage. Its missile and drone inventory, numbering in the thousands, remains largely intact. Its networks in Iraq and Syria are on alert. The Houthi rebels in Yemen have declared themselves ready to strike Gulf shipping routes the moment Iran gives the word, threatening to close the Bab al-Mandeb strait as a second chokepoint alongside Hormuz. Iranian officials have warned that any strike on its coastline would trigger naval mining operations across straits, with consequences for world oil markets that no government in the West is eager to contemplate. Diplomacy has not provided an exit. A fifteen-point Saudi-led ceasefire proposal was rejected by Tehran. Germany and France have said they will not endorse military escalation absent a truce framework. In the United States, public appetite for a ground war in Iran is low, even as polling suggests most Americans expect ground troops to go eventually. That gap between expectation and appetite is the space in which policy is made, and it is a narrow one. What this moment most resembles is not the eve of a great offensive. It resembles the final hours of a negotiation conducted entirely through the movement of ships and soldiers: a bid to extract a concession from Tehran before the Marines are ordered ashore. Whether Iran will read it that way, or whether it will conclude that the Americans are bluffing, will determine what happens next. The honest assessment is this. Three thousand six hundred combat troops, divided between two Marine battalions and a paratroop brigade, are not an invasion force for a country of ninety million people and one of the largest standing armies in the region. They are, at most, a raiding party with strategic objectives. Kharg Island. The Hormuz approaches. Time-limited. Defined. Reversible, if things go wrong quickly enough. Whether

Defence Security Technology War

India’s Futuristic Defence Forces Vision for 2047

India’s Defence Forces Vision 2047 signals something rarer than modernisation, a change in how the military thinks about war itself. Rahul PAWA | X- @imrahulpawa Something shifted when India released Defence Forces Vision 2047. Not the release itself. Long-range planning documents are neither rare nor automatically consequential. What shifted was the register. This is not a document about what India wants to buy. It is a document about what kind of military power India intends to become, and why that question can no longer be deferred. For decades, Indian defence planning operated within a particular institutional grammar. Threats acknowledged obliquely, ambitions framed modestly, modernisation treated as a procurement exercise rather than a strategic project. Vision 2047 breaks from that tradition with unusual directness. It places the armed forces at the centre of India’s emergence as a developed nation, argues that economic and military power are not parallel ambitions but co-dependent ones, and states plainly that a Viksit Bharat which cannot secure its trade routes, defend its borders, or resist coercion below the threshold of open war is not, in any meaningful sense, developed. That is not a bureaucratic formulation. It is a declaration of how India now understands the relationship between national power and national security. The document’s ambition on jointness alone represents a historic shift in institutional intent. Theatre commands, integrated logistics, tri-service doctrine, a joint operations coordination centre. These ideas have circulated in Indian defence circles for the better part of two decades. Seeing them anchored in a formal long-range vision, with new institutional bodies proposed to carry them forward, signals that the conversation has moved from aspiration to architecture. The distance between those two things is enormous, and crossing it begins with exactly this kind of formal commitment. What distinguishes Vision 2047 most sharply from its predecessors is that it thinks about the nature of war itself. It does not simply list formations to be restructured or platforms to be acquired. It grapples seriously with AI, autonomous systems, quantum technologies, hypersonics, and cognitive operations, and asks what kind of institution India must build in response. It recognises that future conflict will be multi-domain, that the line between peace and war has effectively dissolved, and that the adversary of 2047 will not be defeated by the organisational logic of earlier decades. The most ambitious claim in the paper is also its conceptual spine: that warfare is evolving from network-centric to data-centric and ultimately to intelligence-centric models, and that India intends to build its future force around that trajectory. The destination is right. The framing rewards closer examination to appreciate what it is actually reaching for. Network-centric warfare, as it was theorised in the late 1990s, was always about converting informational advantage into decision advantage. Data centricity was not a later stage of that idea. It was the original premise. What Vision 2047 is pointing at, more precisely, is the collapse of decision timelines. The compression of the entire sensor-to-shooter cycle to machine speed, across every domain simultaneously. That is the real rupture that AI, autonomous systems, and edge computing are now producing in military competition. Find, fix, decide, strike, before the adversary can move, disperse, or retaliate, at speeds that exceed human cognition. The document senses this clearly. Intelligence-centric warfare is the right direction of travel. It now needs operational definition, intelligence for what decisions, at what echelon, against which adversary, to drive the specific force structure choices that must follow from it. That work lies ahead, and Vision 2047 has created the mandate to do it. Equally significant is the document’s insistence on intellectual sovereignty. It calls for shedding colonial institutional practices and building a strategic culture rooted in Indian knowledge, Indian geography, and Indian threat realities. The argument is that a genuinely self-reliant military must also be self-reliant in thought. Borrowed frameworks produce borrowed outcomes, and Indian doctrine built on foreign templates will always fit imperfectly. This is a more radical proposition than any of the new commands or agencies the paper proposes. A Cyber Command can be stood up by notification. A genuinely native strategic culture takes a generation to build. Vision 2047 names that project and takes ownership of it. The three-phase roadmap, transition by 2030, consolidation by 2040, excellence by 2047, is sequential. Restructure first, integrate second, mature into a world-class force third. What matters is that the sequencing reflects a genuine understanding that transformation of this scale is not an event but a sustained institutional process, one that must survive budget cycles, government changes, and the friction of organisations that resist their own reinvention. Most defence establishments, when confronted with the pace of change in modern warfare, default to hardware. Platforms are concrete. Paradigms are not. India has chosen to lead with the paradigm, to ask what kind of war is coming before asking what to build for it. That choice, embedded formally in a long-range vision document, changes what is possible in every planning conversation that follows. Vision 2047 does not solve India’s defence challenges today. It does something arguably more important. It reframes them. Transformation of this kind begins not in the procurement cycle or the budget, but in the willingness to say clearly what you are building toward, and why. India has said it out loud. That is where it starts. The author is an international criminal lawyer and director of research at New Delhi based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies (CIHS).

Artificial Intelligence Cyber Security Defence Security Technology War

Race for Deploying Humanoid Soldiers Has Begun

The next soldier will not bleed, will not tire, and will not hesitate. It is already being built, and the race to send it to war is underway. Rahul PAWA | X – @imrahulpawa In late January 2026, three Russian soldiers emerged from a destroyed building to surrender. There was no Ukrainian infantryman waiting for them. There was an armed ground robot, holding the position. The humans were already behind the line. That moment was not a military curiosity. It was a marker of where war is heading, and how fast it is getting there. When U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran in February 2026, AI was embedded across the entire operation, from target identification to guiding autonomous drones through GPS-denied, signal-jammed environments. Nearly 900 strikes in the first 12 hours, a tempo no previous conflict had achieved.Two wars. Two continents. Same conclusion. The age of AI war is not arriving. It is already here. While Ukraine remains the world’s most consequential testing ground for autonomous war, its front line increasingly held not by soldiers but by machines and the skeleton crews that control them, Iran has shown what the next level looks like in combat. In the strikes on Iran, air defense networks, drone salvos, and electronic warfare operated simultaneously across multiple theatres at a speed and complexity that compressed years of strategic assumption into days. In both wars the pattern is identical. The human body has become the most vulnerable object in modern war. The machine has become the primary fighter. The soldier has become support. Every serious military establishment on earth is watching, and accelerating. What they are accelerating toward is a new generation of bipedal robots designed to do what a soldier does. Carry weapons. Breach doors. Move through terrain. Hold a position. Resupply under fire. The most advanced can pick up and operate rifles, pistols, shotguns, and grenade launchers already in service across existing armies. The design logic is deliberate. Decades of weapons, vehicles, and military infrastructure have been built for human hands and human bodies. A robot engineered to fit that existing architecture requires no new logistics chain. It steps into one already built. Ukraine proved these systems endure. Iran proved they can decide. The most advanced humanoid built explicitly for war is the Phantom MK-1, developed by Foundation, a San Francisco startup with U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force research contracts and approved military vendor status. At 5 feet 9 inches and 180 pounds, it is designed around one principle: operate with everything a soldier already carries. Two units are currently on reconnaissance trials in Ukraine. The Marine Corps is training them on breach entry, placing explosives on doors so troops stay back from the fatal funnel. Current per-unit cost sits at approximately $150,000, projected to fall below $100,000 by 2028 and below $20,000 at scale. Production targets for 2026 stand at 10,000 units, scaling to between 40,000 and 50,000 by end of 2027. At that price a robot battalion becomes economically competitive with a human one, without the casualties, the trauma, or the political cost of repatriated bodies. The United States is not alone in this. Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, builds autonomous drone interceptors, electromagnetic warfare systems capable of collapsing enemy drone swarms, and the Ghost Shark, a fully autonomous submarine already operational with the Australian Navy. Scout AI demonstrated in February 2026 a complete autonomous kill chain in which seven AI agents identified, located, and neutralized a target with no human involvement at any stage. Boston Dynamics, majority owned by Hyundai, has been testing its Atlas bipedal robot in environments with direct military adjacency since 2021. Figure AI is developing general purpose humanoids with clear dual-use potential. China’s People’s Liberation Army has been funding humanoid robotics research through state institutions including Beijing Institute of Technology and Zhejiang University since at least 2015. Russia is developing dual-use platforms under direct military sponsorship, with the Central Research Institute for Robotics and Technical Cybernetics in St. Petersburg among the primary state facilities. Iran unveiled Aria, a domestically built autonomous combat robot, in September 2025, built entirely under international sanctions. Goldman Sachs projected between 50,000 and 100,000 humanoid robots shipping globally in 2026 alone. Morgan Stanley forecasts the total humanoid market exceeding $5 trillion by 2050. The largest share of that growth is in defense. Every major power is building. None are waiting. While the race accelerates, the technology has real distance left to travel. A humanoid moves through roughly 20 individual motors, each a potential failure point under combat stress. The platforms are heavy, power dependent, and not yet proven against sustained rain, mud, extreme cold, and kinetic impact. A captured or compromised humanoid is not simply lost equipment. It carries intelligence, has potential software access points, and could in the wrong hands be turned. These are engineering problems, and engineering problems get solved. Expert consensus places initial combat deployment at two to three years for leading platforms, with broader fielding across multiple militaries by the early 2030s. The harder problem is judgment. International Humanitarian Law requires that any use of force distinguish between combatants and civilians, that it be proportionate, and that all feasible precautions be taken to avoid civilian harm. These obligations do not change because the trigger is pulled by a machine. But in both Ukraine and Iran that standard is already under pressure. In Ukraine, when communications are jammed, drones default to onboard AI targeting because the operational alternative is paralysis. In Iran, AI systems processed and prioritised over a thousand targets at a speed no human oversight structure was built to match. These are black box decisions, made by opaque models running on algorithms whose reasoning cannot be audited, reconstructed, or explained after the fact. The law says one thing. The war is doing another. That gap is where the most consequential argument of this era is playing out. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross have jointly called for a binding treaty

Bharat Cyber Security Defence Geopolitics Security Technology United States USA War

116

US Tech Stack That Took Out Khamenei and Why It Matters to India

The joint US-Israeli strike of February 28, 2026 that killed Khamenei was full-spectrum corporate warfighting; satellites, AI, cloud, autonomous swarms, and information dominance working as one lethal system. India watched. It must now evolve. Rahul PAWA | x – iamrahulpawa In the predawn hours of Saturday, February 28, 2026, something extraordinary happened in the Shemiran district of northern Tehran. Khamenei, Iran’s Leader for 37 years, the man who had survived assassinations, wars, and decades of sanctions, was killed not primarily by a bomb, but by an algorithm. The operation, codenamed Epic Fury, was the first high-level decapitation strike in military history to be substantially driven by artificial intelligence across the kill chain. By the time Israeli aircraft and American munitions found their target, Palantir’s software had fused the intelligence, Anduril’s autonomous drone swarms had penetrated Iran’s air defences, Starlink had held communications together across a contested electromagnetic environment, and Claude’s Anthropic’s AI model, deployed on classified US defence networks had processed petabytes of intercepted Persian-language communications and generated targeting scenarios that human analysts would have taken weeks to produce. Ukraine had proved that Silicon Valley could hold a frontline. Venezuela had proved it could topple a government and secure an oil state. Iran was where both lessons converged into a single, decapitating strike. Invisible Architecture of a Visible Strike When news of Khamenei’s death broke, global attention fixed on the ordnance: 200 Israeli fighter jets in the largest military flyover in Israeli Air Force history, US bunker-busters, strikes across 24 Iranian provinces. What received less coverage was the invisible architecture that made it possible. Starlink was central long before the first missile launched. The Trump administration had covertly smuggled thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran in the months prior, sustaining a communications corridor for intelligence sources inside the country even as the Iranian regime drove national internet connectivity down to 4% of normal levels. When Iranian forces shut down Starlink networks, they were confiscating the same infrastructure that was feeding real-time intelligence upstream to US planners. Satellite connectivity was not a supporting element; it was the nervous system of the operation. Palantir provided the operational software layer; sensor fusion, targeting architecture, and the command-and-control framework that translated intelligence into actionable strike packages. Its Lattice system enabled autonomous drone swarms to communicate threat data laterally: when Iranian air-defence radar locked onto one drone, the entire swarm adapted, dispatching subgroups for electronic deception and anti-radiation strikes in real time. This is software-driven warfare weapons that are, as defence-tech investors now openly describe them, “code wrapped in aluminium shells.” Anduril’s YFQ-44A drones, operating through Hivemind AI pilots capable of executing complex missions without GPS, satellite communication, or human operators, demonstrated capabilities that rendered Iran’s hardware-centric air defences clumsy against algorithmic iteration. Shield AI’s autonomous systems operated in environments where traditional military drones would have been jammed and blinded. Amazon Web Services provided the cloud backbone, data continuity, logistics support, and the secure infrastructure that kept coalition planning intact against Iranian cyber-retaliation, which simultaneously targeted US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE. Anthropic’s Claude AI, which had already proven itself in Venezuela processing intelligence, mapping command chains, and generating scenario simulations that compressed weeks of human analysis into hours, ran the same playbook on Iran, this time trawling Persian communications and mapping fractures in the Revolutionary Guard’s targeting structure. Trump banned Anthropic the day before the strikes. US Central Command used Claude anyway, through Palantir and AWS, as bombs fell on Tehran. The corporate stack had become so load-bearing that a presidential order could not sever it mid-operation. It was not peripheral to American military power. It was the operation. From Sindoor to Stack For Indian strategic planners watching the war in West Asia unfold, the lesson is not comfortable. India has pieces of this architecture. It does not have the stack. India’s defence-industrial base is strongest where the old model still dominates: physical production. Native manufacturing capability is real, and Atmanirbhar Bharat has added momentum. But industrial production is the bottom layer of the stack US operation in West Asia demonstrated. Everything above it; connectivity, cloud, AI, autonomous systems, information operations is where India’s ambition is still catching up with requirement. India is building a commercial space sector, with domestic satellite launches accelerating and a small but growing constellation in development. It is not yet capable of blanketing a contested theatre with resilient satcom, let alone covertly sustaining intelligence networks inside an adversary state but the foundation is being laid. In operational software and autonomous systems, an iDEX-incubated startup ecosystem is producing native drones and ISR platforms, promising early capability, not yet embedded in classified pipelines at wartime depth. In frontier AI, India has launched sovereign large language model initiatives and is developing government-facing AI infrastructure but the institutional pathway from commercial deployment to classified defence integration remains nascent. In the information domain, digital public infrastructure is maturing, though platform-level influence at global strategic scale remains beyond reach. Iran’s near-total internet blackout could not sever the intelligence flow because a commercial satellite alternative existed. India is working toward equivalent resilience. However, it is not there yet. The operation that killed Khamenei was not a triumph of numbers. Iran was never going to match US and Israeli firepower. It was a triumph of the stack; satellites, AI, autonomous systems, cloud, and information dominance mobilised as one unified architecture. India already knows this, because it has lived it. Operation Sindoor 2025 was India’s own inflection point. AI fused multi-source battlefield data in real time. Native electronic intelligence software evolved mid-operation to pinpoint and rank threats. Over 600 drones were defeated in a single wave. Loitering munitions and FPV strike drones executed precision hits on high-value targets. The instinct was right. The native capability was real. But Sindoor also exposed the distance still to travel. The stack America deployed over Tehran was embedded in doctrine. India’s is battle-proven but not yet fully built. India need not replicate America’s model. But the underlying

Afghanistan Geopolitics Pakistan Security Terrorism United States War

Pakistan’s War of Its Own Making: Durand Line, Pashtun Identity, and Terrorist Blowback

How a colonial boundary drawn in 1893 planted the seeds of war that now threatens to engulf the entire region and why Pakistan is its own worst enemy. Rahul PAWA | x – iamrahulpawa On February 26, 2026, Pakistani jets struck targets in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar, Paktika, and Khost provinces. Kabul retaliated. Islamabad declared open war. The international community scrambled for its talking points. But for anyone who has studied the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship with any intellectual honesty, there was nothing surprising about this moment. It was, in every sense, inevitable, the product of a colonial wound never properly healed, an ethnic identity never properly reconciled, and a strategic miscalculation of historic proportions that Pakistan inflicted upon itself In November 1893, British civil servant Sir Mortimer Durand sat across a table from Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan and drew a line across a map. That line, 2,670 kilometres of mountain, desert, and river became the Durand Line, and it bisected the Pashtun tribal homeland with surgical indifference to the people who lived there. It was a colonial instrument of administrative convenience, not a meaningful border between two nations. When Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947, it inherited the Durand Line as its western frontier. Afghanistan refused to accept it. Kabul was, in fact, the only country in the world to vote against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations that year, a remarkable act of diplomatic hostility toward a nation barely days old, driven entirely by the conviction that Pakistan had absorbed Pashtun lands that had no business being part of a new Muslim state in the subcontinent. Every Afghan government since; monarchy, communist, mujahideen, the first Taliban, the Western-backed republic, and now the second Taliban has refused to formally recognise the Durand Line as an international border. Pakistan has spent 75 years insisting the matter is settled. It is not settled. It has never been settled. And that unresolved dispute is the tectonic fault line beneath everything that has erupted in 2026. Fifty Million People Who Refuse to Be a Border Roughly 50 million Pashtuns live across both sides of the Durand Line. They share language, tribe, genealogy, and code, the ancient honour system of Pashtunwali that governs loyalty, hospitality, and revenge in equal measure. To a Pashtun tribesman in Waziristan, the line on Pakistan’s map means little when his cousin lives in Khost. Cross-border movement, cross-border marriage, and cross-border allegiance are not insurgent behaviour. They are culture. Pakistan’s military establishment has never fully grasped or chosen to accept this reality. Its periodic attempts to fence and fortify the border, most aggressively from 2017 onward, have been met with fierce resistance from tribal communities that view the fence not as a security measure but as a colonial imposition. Skirmishes between Pakistani border forces and Afghan fighters over the fence are practically routine. The current war did not materialise from a vacuum; it escalated from a slow-burning conflict that has been claiming lives along the Durand Line for years. The Monster Pakistan Built To understand how Pakistan arrived at this catastrophic juncture, one must understand the doctrine of “strategic depth.” Pakistan’s generals, perpetually preoccupied with the Indian infatuation on their eastern border, became obsessed with ensuring that Afghanistan would never side with India, or worse, open a second front. The solution, as conceived by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) through the 1970s and 1980s, was to cultivate a network of jihadist proxies in Afghanistan that Islamabad could control and deploy. The Afghan mujahideen. The Taliban. Assorted terrorist networks that moved through Pakistan’s tribal areas with impunity. The Taliban of 1994 were, in significant measure, a Pakistani creation. The ISI funded them, armed them, and provided the political scaffolding that allowed them to sweep to power in Kabul in 1996. For five years, Pakistan had the compliant Afghan government it had always wanted. Then came 11 September. Under intense American pressure, and out of greed for US dollars, Islamabad was forced to publicly disavow the very asset it had spent two decades cultivating. What followed was perhaps the most cynical double game in modern geopolitical history. Pakistan publicly cooperated with the American-led war on terror while elements of its intelligence apparatus continued to shelter, fund, and facilitate the Taliban through two decades of conflict. Safe houses in Quetta. Sanctuaries in Baluchistan. The Haqqani network operating from Pakistani soil. American generals and CIA directors said it in public, in congressional testimony, with barely concealed rage. Pakistan denied everything, pocketed billions in American aid, and continued. Blowback: The Reckoning When the Americans abandoned Afghanistan in August 2021 and the Taliban swept back into Kabul, General Faiz Hameed, Pakistan’s former ISI chief, was famously photographed sipping tea at Kabul’s Serena Hotel. But Pakistan had not fully reckoned with what came next: the Afghan Taliban, now rulers rather than stateless militias, showed little appetite for serving as Pakistan’s instrument. They had decided long ago to govern as Afghans and think as Pashtuns. And they have shown no meaningful inclination to police their eastern border on Islamabad’s behalf particularly not against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban known as TTP. The TTP is, in ideological and genealogical terms, indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban. They share theology, ethnic identity, and in many cases, blood. The Afghan Taliban’s refusal to launch operations against TTP is not weakness or negligence, it is a deliberate choice rooted in Pashtun solidarity. Pakistan created the militant infrastructure that spawned the TTP. It nurtured the ideology that animates them. It is now being consumed by the very forces it engineered, and it wants the Taliban to solve a problem that Pakistan itself created. That is blowback in its purest form. TTP has killed thousands of Pakistani soldiers since 2007. It has Pakistani military installations. Pakistan has responded by demanding the Afghan Taliban act, and when they don’t, by launching airstrikes into Afghan territory. Those airstrikes kill civilians. They inflame Pashtun sentiment on both sides of the Durand Line. They validate every Afghan suspicion

Geopolitics International Terrorism United States War

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Lions, Shadows & Silk Roads

Israel-Iran clash reshaped West Asia’s strategic chessboard with US getting in. India will have to display maturity, dexterity, openness and exercise its strategic autonomy. N. C. Bipindra The Middle East was thrust into dramatic escalation of hostilities as Israel launched “Operation Rising Lion,” a comprehensive preemptive military campaign against Iranian targets, taking out military and nuclear facilities, on June 13, 2025. The operation, which included airstrikes, cyber-attacks and targeted assassinations was Israel’s most extensive cross-border military endeavour in recent years. In response, Iran activated proxy militias, launched missile attacks via Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and escalated its hybrid warfare tactics across the region. After calling for asking Iran to surrender, US President Donald Trump approved American air strikes completely obliterating three key Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan, yet noting “now is the time for peace.” This confrontation has far-reaching implications for regional stability, global oil markets, US foreign policy and emerging trade corridors like India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and India-Isreal-UAE-USA (I2U2) group. For India, which has been investing heavily in regional diplomacy and infrastructure partnerships such as IMEC and I2U2, the conflict raises urgent questions about risk, resilience and realignment in its West Asia strategy. Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s Gambit Israel’s Operation Rising Lion was triggered by a surge in Iranian backed attacks on Israeli diplomatic and economic interests in northern Iraq, Syria and transfer of precision-guided missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon apart from repeated calls for use of nukes to annihilate Israelis. The operation marked a shift in Israel’s longstanding “campaign between the wars” doctrine into an open and assertive military campaign targeting Iranian infrastructure, weapons convoys and senior commanders in multiple theatres. Key components of the operation included coordinated airstrikes on IRGC installations, targeted killing of senior operatives, military leadership and taking out nuclear facilities. The operation included cyber strikes and group covert attacks that disrupted Iranian air defence networks, missile stations and fuel supply chains. Anticipating a counterstrike from Iran, Israel deployed its new laser-based missile defence system which had been tested successfully against Iranian cruise missile barrages. Most of the Iranian attacks were intercepted though some have penetrated the air defence system to hit Israeli cities and towns including a hospital complex. Israel declared the operation a strategic necessity to “decapitate Iran’s regional encirclement architecture” and pre-empt future multi-front attacks including the nukes. While tactically effective, it has risked triggering a full-scale war with Iran and its axis of resistance apart from getting US and Russia-China involved in the war. Iran’s Proxy Retaliation, Strategic Posturing Iran’s counter-response blended military retaliation, strategic ambiguity, and proxy warfare. Apart from direct state-to-state confrontation with Israel — still a risky escalation — Iran relied heavily on asymmetric tactics. Iran fired hundreds of drones and rockets into Israel, overwhelming Iron Dome systems despite Israeli air superiority. The Houthis, an Iranian proxy in Yemen, have dubbed the US strikes on Iran as a “declaration of war” and have fired several missiles at Israel. Iran’s missile strike on Israel marked the first direct hit from Iranian territory since the April 2024 skirmish, indicating a new threshold of confrontation. Though Iran is trying to avoid full-scale war, its response is carefully calibrated to bleed Israel politically and militarily, while also testing the resolve of US deterrence commitments in the region. US Strategic Overstretch? The US was quickly pulled into the maelstrom, just over a week into the launch of military hostilities. Though Trump only issued warnings for a week, providing intelligence support to Israel and deploying at least two aircraft carriers to the region, his administration seems to have decided that enough is enough. Washington now faces accusations of strategic inconsistency. While it pushed for de-escalation publicly, on the parallel it supported Israeli operational aims covertly. This dualism will further strain US ties with Gulf States like Oman and Kuwait who fear further regional de-stabilisation. Furthermore, as tensions peaked, Trump administration’s G7 engagement was interrupted, which complicates America’s long-term global balancing act. Disruptions, Opportunity for India India has deep economic, energy and strategic stakes in West Asia. Operation Rising Lion and its aftermath present both direct threats and unexpected opportunities for New Delhi. IMEC Corridor in Jeopardy: The IMEC, announced at the 2023 G20 Summit, depends on regional stability across UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan. The Israel-Iran conflict has disrupted port operations in Haifa and Eilat, key to IMEC’s Mediterranean leg. It has jeopardised land connectivity across Jordan due to increased Israeli military mobilisation. The insurance premiums on Red Sea maritime routes are expected to spike by about 35 per cent hurting Indian exporters. While not dead, IMEC’s viability is now under serious question until a ceasefire or détente is re-established. I2U2 Faces Diplomatic Strain: The I2U2 grouping aimed at high-tech cooperation, food security and infrastructure investment now faces political turbulence. UAE, a key I2U2 pillar, is deeply wary of regional conflict spilling over and has called for restraint putting it at odds with Israel’s aggressive posture. India is caught between maintaining its longstanding ties with Israel and its desire to deepen linkages with Iran, UAE and the Arab world, especially after recent Chabahar Port developments. India’s diplomatic tightrope is getting narrower. Energy Security and Diaspora Risks: Iran’s retaliation threatens commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz if India is seen backing Israel. While largely rhetorical, these threats would increase Brent crude prices beyond current rates, putting India’s inflation control at risk. There is heightened concern on nine million-strong Indian diaspora in the Gulf, as militias near Kuwait and Bahrain showed signs of mobilisation. India has had to yet again evacuate her citizens from Iran, Israel and the spill over of the conflict to other States in the region would compound the evacuation tasks on hand. Strategic Recommendations for India In navigating the evolving West Asian crisis, India must pursue a multi-vector strategy. It must reinvigorate strategic neutrality. India must avoid taking sides publicly while conducting quiet shuttle diplomacy between Israel, Iran and Gulf countries. A role in

Geopolitics International Security War World

565

Ukraine Takes Drone Wars to Next Level

From Trojan Horse to pager bombs, Ukraine’s drones have rewritten war tactics while Russia puts up a red face. N. C. Bipindra Ukraine’s audacious drone attacks on airbases deep inside Russian territory are so brazen that such tactics have never been attempted before. The targeting of five Russian airbases — one of them over 4,500 km away from the Ukrainian border has reportedly destroyed over 40 military aircraft, including some long-distance bombers that were tormenting Ukrainians for nearly two years now. The use of cheap, off-the-shelf modified and armed drones is asymmetry in warfare taken to the next level. The drone strikes on June 1, 2025, are now being likened to Israeli Mossad pager bombs that took out a massive number of Hezbollah terror operatives inside Lebanon and the visit of unknown gunmen to wanted terrorists inside Pakistan in recent years. The drone attacks came after a long-drawn-out plan by Ukrainian military along with its intelligence units. The Ukrainians packed the armed drones onto cargo trucks and hid them with wooden planks under the truck roofs. Once the trucks reached too close to four airbases that were targeted — Belaya in Siberia’s Irkutsk region, Olenya in Arctic Murmansk area, Ivanovo Severny near Ivanovo city, Dyagilevo in Ryazan and Ukrainka in Russia’s Far East the drones swarms were unleashed on Russian military aviation assets parked there. While the Belaya base in Irkutsk region was some 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from Ukraine’s border with Russia, the Olenya base near Murmansk in the Arctic Circle was more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Ukraine’s border. The shortest distances covered by drone-carrying trucks were to Diaghilev airbase in Ryazan Oblast, some 520 kilometers (320 miles) from Ukraine and Ivanovo air base for Russian military transport aircraft was some 800 kilometers (500 miles) from the border. These visible distances notwithstanding, Ukraine’s daring drone attacks under Operation Spider Web targeted Ukrainka, the furthest airbase at over 8,000 km in Russia’s East, too far away from the war frontline. In Trojan-horse style attacks, Ukraine launched 117 drones concealed in container trucks, according to one Ukrainian account, striking with precision at airbases across Russia. Ukraine seems to have chosen this covert operation because the Western missiles supplied to it, such as the American ATACMS and European Storm Shadow, lacked the range to reach so deep inside Russia. Ukraine has been using drones against Russian targets, including Moscow, for last three years now. But majority of these drone attacks have been intercepted by Russians, essentially due to low speed of these unmanned aerial vehicles. Operation Spider Web’s audacity essentially played out due to Ukraine smuggling them into Russia and deploying them next to its target sites. Russia, obviously, was complacent with security of at least three of the five air bases, comfortable in the thought that it was too deep inside its territory for Ukrainians to even think of targeting them, a devastating mistake in defence preparedness, when military operations were prolonged beyond what was first envisaged when it began in February 2022. Moscow had presumed its airbases and military facilities deep inside its territory were safe, given their distance from Ukraine. Russia-Ukraine war, progressing for last three years now, has turned the warfare paradigm upside down. Till the Russia-Ukraine war began over Kyiv’s attempt to join the anti-Russia military bloc in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), military thought leadership was talking for nearly two decades about a short, swift and destructive warfare. Russia’s obvious military strength notwithstanding, its military operations did not result in quick surrender of a comparatively weaker Ukraine. The Russian neighbour a nation that was once part of the Soviet bloc held back the military onslaught for a while and by doing so, got the support of its friends in NATO. The US, Germany and other NATO nations sent billions of dollars’ worth arms and ammunition, battle tanks, air defence systems and fighter jets to Ukraine for its David vs Goliath moment. Satellite images, videos and photographs of the damage on these five airbases show Russia’s Tu-160, Tu-22 and Tu-95 nuke-carrying bombers key to their air power were hit badly with plumes of black smoke rising. Among destroyed air assets of Russia were Ilyushin Il-78 airborne refueling aircraft and advanced A-50 early warning and control aircraft a prized possession for airborne intelligence and radar warnings. Though Russia had tried to protect these assets with decoys, these measures failed miserably. Whether Western powers were involved in planning and execution of Operation Spider Web will be known later as more details of Ukraine’s attacks on Russia become public. But what could be worrying both Ukraine and NATO nations would be Russia’s response to Operation Spider Web. Ukraine and its friends in the West would be hoping that Ukraine’s drones circumventing Russian defenses and blowing up their military aviation assets would cause a major psychological blow to Russia’s air force. Truth be told, Operation Spider Web did lift Kyiv’s spirits and it is a dent to Moscow’s morale. But what they may have discounted is that Russia still holds air superiority overall against Ukraine and it may come back to deliver a crushing blow to Ukrainians at a place and time of its choosing, including an unequal nuclear response. If the nukes get involved in Russia’s war, then it could be game over for both Ukraine and NATO. The current Russia-Ukraine peace talks in Istanbul have already stalled, with Russian officials signaling no desire for compromise. The Ukrainian drone strike could mean the end of peace with Russia altogether. In response, Britain has announced a £350 million package to supply 100,000 drones to Ukraine by April 2026, reinforcing Kyiv’s growing drone warfare capabilities. In the second Armenia-Azerbaijan war for Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2020, Azerbaijani forces widespread use of drones was seen as crucial in determining the conflict’s outcome in their favour. Since then, drone warfare, particularly the asymmetric nature of advantage cheap, easily modifiable unmanned aerial systems bring to the table, has been a major focus

Business Policy World

790

War on Inflation Must Continue

Second cut in duties on petrol & diesel, GST rates and further increase in interest rates may be some options to fight price rise K.A.Badarinath / New Delhi Spectre of high inflation and higher interest rates is back with a vengeance. Heady mix of the two make a lethal combination and turn out to be biggest sore points for a growth oriented finance minister like Nirmala Sitharaman. One is reminded of the high inflation and interest rates that singed the Indian economy during 2009 – 14 when the governance was under control of Harvard trained veterans like Dr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister and Palaniappan Chidambaram as finance minister. India’s modern economic history bears testimony to their complete incompetence and failure thereby derailing the famed growth story that stood test of times till then. In 2009, G-20 Presidents and Prime Ministers had gathered in a summit mode at Pittsburgh in US to discuss the economic turmoil heaped on the world owing to collapse of American financial markets that has had contagion effect across geographies. The then US President Barrack Obama famously said that world leaders at the head table leaned heavily on wisdom of Dr Singh to steer the economy out of woods. Well, Dr Singh’s prescription may have had worked for others that went by the rule book. But, India’s economic turmoil thereafter was too huge owing to ‘inaction’ and ‘policy paralysis’ combined with rampant corruption that was hallmark of UPA government in its second tenure. Consumers paid through their nose. Investors lost big time. Real incomes of most people were lost. Pink slips were order of the day notwithstanding economic rescue packages announced by the inept UPA government with Pranab Mukherjee in finance ministry. Kitchen budgets had to be cut. Purchases had to be postponed by force. And, this phenomenon continued till 2014 when the Narendra Modi led juggernaut swept Lok Sabha polls and the first BJP-led majority government came to power post-independence. Today again, globally induced inflation has raised its ugly head again. Inflation in wholesale market has hit a record high of 15.08 per cent in April 2022. At retail level, the consumer price index is inching towards 8 per cent mark. Vegetables (23.24 per cent), Potatoes (19.84 per cent), wheat (10.7 per cent) have contributed big time to inflation last 13-months that has been in double digits. When the WPI passes through to consumers in next few months, the impact is bound to be devastating whether a policymaker concedes or not. Hardening of fuel and power inflation at 38.7 per cent in April 2022 would make things worse for consumers that have been worst hit hard due to two-years of Covid 19, Russia – Ukraine conflict and consequent spurt in commodity prices. Unlike the UPA of yesteryears or Joe Biden’s present democratic administration in US, Indian government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been proactive in limiting consumers and middle-class salaried peoples’ woes. Otherwise, tackling inflation would not have been prioritized over growth with sudden interest rate hike of 40 basis points and increase in cash reserve ratio, Standard Deposit Facility and Marginal Standing Facility. Another round of rate hikes has been anticipated by money policy experts when the multi-member policy committee of RBI meets next month. Another 50 basis points increase is what has been factored in by the markets. Pulling inflation below the acceptable six per cent at retail level is an imperative from which neither the RBI nor the Modi government can escape. Nirmala Sitharaman, on her part, began rolling out measures to counter surge in inflation beginning November 2021. Excise duty on diesel and petrol were slashed. This led to revenue losses of over Rs 49,500 crore. She was willing to absorb these revenue losses too. Food, fuel and fertilizer subsidies form a big chunk of Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget that projected a total spending of Rs 39.45 lakh crore (US $ 527 billion) during this fiscal. She will have to consider tinkering with subsidies to negate impact of high input costs for economy owing to elevated price levels internationally. While the cost push has had its run leading to high inflation globally, easing demand may bring in some respite for finance minister Sitharaman. But then, this war on inflation and prices has to continue in the Indian context like most other economies internationally. Finance Minister Sitharaman and RBI governor Shakti Kanta Das may have to reconcile at sacrificing more of projected 7.5 per cent growth this fiscal with spill over impact for 2023-24. While none should risk stagflation or recession, a fresh round of cut in taxes on petroleum products may have to be attempted to cool down inflationary pressures. Both states and centre may have to act in tandem on this front. Foregoing revenue may turn out to be a clincher for both central and state governments. Fortunately, buoyant money and equity markets, continued demand for goods and services has kept industrial manufacturers and service providers on toes to deliver. As the rate hikes seep in, slowing demand may make things trickier in few months from now. There’s very little elbowroom for the government to rejig the goods and services tax rates. In any case, slash in GST rates can be done only in consultation with state finance ministers that are already under tremendous pressure to meet ends. In this backdrop, government’s decision to continue with infrastructure thrust and spending of Rs 7.5 lakh crore this fiscal is refreshing. This only means that next round of interest rates hike may be front-loaded. Another possibility that government may have to consider is a flexibly designed economic rescue package that needs to be rolled out on mission mode. (Author is Director & Chief Executive of Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies based in New Delhi.)

Disinformation Fact Sheet Human Rights Misinformation Policy World

762

Russia-Ukraine Crisis: India’s Foreign Policy Implications

Rahul Pawa / New Delhi On February 23, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine. Russia has long opposed Ukraine joining the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the West’s defensive military alliance. He accused NATO of threatening Russia’s “historic future as a nation” and announced Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. “The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime,” Putin added. Subsequently, several media outlets reported explosions in numerous locations and large-scale Russian military operations throughout Ukraine. Ever since Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown in 2014 after months of protests against his government, Russian President Vladimir Putin has regularly flagged Ukraine of being taken over by extremists. Russia responded by seizing Crimea’s southern region and sparking a revolution in the east, backing hardliners against Ukrainian soldiers in a war that has claimed 14,000 lives. Regardless, the current issue has its roots in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal when the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s. The US and Russia collaborated with Ukraine to de-nuclearise the country. In a series of diplomatic deals, Kyiv returned hundreds of nuclear warheads to Russia for security assurances against a possible Russian assault. However, the assurances did not stand; below, we examine the 2022 Russia-Ukraine Crisis and discuss India’s foreign policy implications in that context. Download Explainer – Russia Ukraine Crisis (Author is the Director for Research at Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies)

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