A new normal in India-Pakistan ties

On September 22, 1965, during a speech at the UN Security Council, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was then part of the Ayub Khan administration, declared that Pakistan “will wage a war for 1,000 years” against India.

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Years later, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, who captured power in a 1977 coup by toppling Prime Minister Bhutto (who was later executed), turned Bhutto's ‘1,000 years of war’ into a ‘Bleed India through a Thousand Cuts’ doctrine — use low-intensity and sub-conventional warfare with militancy and infiltration to continue to bleed India. Pakistan suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1971 war, which saw the creation of Bangladesh. The Pakistani military, having failed in conventional warfare, turned to this indirect approach. The doctrine gained traction after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistan, with support from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, had successfully applied the ‘Thousand Cuts’ tactic in Afghanistan against the country’s communist regime and its Soviet backers. Bled out by the Pakistan and U.S.-backed mujahideen’s thousand cuts, the mighty Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. The same year marked the beginning of a surge in militancy in the Kashmir valley. By the early 2000s, terror was exported to other parts of the country. India’s Parliament was attacked in December 2001; and in 2008, Mumbai, the country’s commercial hub, suffered a major terrorist assault. By then, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, two anti-India terrorist outfits with close links to Pakistan’s security establishment, had built sprawling networks in Pakistan. The Pahalgam massacre of April 22, 2025, in which 26 people, mostly civilian tourists, were brutally gunned down by terrorists, was the latest sign that the ‘Thousand Cuts’ doctrine remains alive in Rawalpindi’s strategic thinking. The attack came days after Pakistan's military chief Gen. Asim Munir said “Kashmir is our jugular vein”. The Resistance Front, which India believes is a front of Lashkar-e-Taiba, initially claimed responsibility for the attack, but later denied any role.