Washington: India, for nearly a decade, had been gradually shedding the rhetoric of strategic restraint, with its cycle of responses to major Pakistan-based terrorist attacks, including Uri in 2016, Balakot in 2019, and Pahalgam in 2025 revealing an unavoidable reality, renowned international analysts reckoned on Saturday.

John Spencer, the Executive Director at the US-based Urban Warfare Institute and Lauren Dagan Amoss, an international academic expert on India’s foreign and security policy, argued that limited and predictable retaliation against cross-border terrorism has not deterred attacks; rather, it has enabled them.

According to the experts, restraint, once assumed to be stabilising — had become strategically risky; its predictability enabled militant groups to plan the next att

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