The guns have fallen silent on the Line of Control. And so have the voices in the media. Now is the time to look at the assertions made during the recent India-Pakistan crisis. One school of thought deems war as the only suitable response to every provocation from Pakistan. They perhaps, and mistakenly so, equate war with obliteration of Pakistan. Pakistan is a country of 170 million, with a 5.5 million strong standing army and the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world.

Pakistan is not to India what Gaza is to Israel or what the Taliban in Afghanistan was to the United States. India is not going to militarily trample Pakistan and even if it tramples Pakistan without miraculously invoking a nuclear response, what is the end-state in Pakistan that India desires? Military victories are meaningless unless they are the means to obtain a political end. War, to invoke the oft-quoted Clausewitz dictum, is not merely an act of policy but a continuation of politics by other means. It is thus a political decision executed by the military. And media’s job is to report the war, not to provoke it.