India-Pakistan Tensions Are Back
Brinkmanship between India and Pakistan is the highest between the two countries since the 1999 Kargil War. The current crisis began on April 22, 2025 when Pakistan-trained terrorists infiltrated into Indian Kashmir and slaughtered more than two dozen Indians. They demanded the Indians recite a verse from the Quran and, when they could not, the terrorists executed them in front of their families.
India Has a Tough Choice To Make on Pakistan
The terror attack—which affected Indians in the same way that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack impacted Israelis—came after Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Army chief gave a speech denying that Muslims and Hindus could ever live together (as they do in India) and demanded the jugular be cut. In both India and Pakistan, ordinary people and officials alike saw his comments as a green light to terror.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi should therefore not simply aspire to quiet as U.S. and European diplomats privately counsel but rather work behind-the-scenes to ensure the cost of terror is too high for Pakistan to bear.
On May 6, 2025, India launched “Operation Sindoor,” striking almost simultaneously nine locations in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Pakistan’s Punjab province. India chose its targets carefully: It avoided Pakistani military installations and instead targeted terror camps. This gave the Pakistani authorities plausible deniability to save face and stand down; if Pakistan meanwhile sought to avenge terrorists, then it would show Islamabad’s culpability.
India, however, should not stop with symbolic action. For decades, Israel “mowed the grass” in Gaza before suffering on October 7, 2023, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently concluded he had no choice but to uproot the lawn and could no longer simply settle for periodic degradation of terrorist military capabilities. Prime Minister Narendra Modi should therefore not simply aspire to quiet as U.S. and European diplomats privately counsel but rather work behind-the-scenes to ensure the cost of terror is too high for Pakistan to bear.
Just as Israel launched “Operation Wrath of God” to hunt down and murder every terrorist that participated in the 1972 Munich Olympics slaughter of Israeli athletes and coaches, so too should Indian intelligence eliminate every terrorist who participated in the massacre at Pahalgam.
They must also extract a financial price, lest Pakistan will continue to play its proxy games, much as the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey both do. Here, the ports of Gwadar and Karachi could be central.
They must also extract a financial price, lest Pakistan will continue to play its proxy games, much as the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey both do.
More than 200 people died when an explosion rocked the port of Beirut five years ago. To this day, its cause remains disputed. Insurance companies refuse payout to Lebanese affected by the blast due to questions about whether the explosion was an accident set off by improper storage at the Port of Beirut or an act of war. Hezbollah and its sympathizers spread rumors that Israeli jets flew over the area at the time to sidestep accountability for their negligence.
The Beirut explosion would not be the last in a port controlled by Iranian proxies.
Despite the 2018 Stockholm Agreement, the Houthis continue to operate in, smuggle through, and otherwise control the Yemeni port of Hudaydah. Ten months ago, after a Houthi drone strike on Tel Aviv, Israeli jets attacked Hudaydah, destroying fuel and weapons storage and a power plant in an attack that caused tens of millions of dollars in damage and killed a dozen Yemenis. The Israeli strike interrupted Houthi weapons smuggling through the port.
On April 26, 2025, an explosion rocked the Port of Shahid Rajaee, near Bandar Abbas, Iran. As with Beirut, the cause remains unclear although, like Beirut, suspicion focuses on improper storage of explosives and chemical precursors.
While port explosions appear increasingly frequent in the Middle East, they are not limited to the region. The largest manmade explosion prior to the bombing of Hiroshima occurred on December 6, 1917, when the French ship SS Mont-Blanc, laden with explosives, collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The resulting explosion killed almost 1,800 people and flattened much of the city’s harbor and downtown. In July 1944, a similar mishap involving munitions bound for war sparked an explosion in the Port of Chicago that killed more than 300.
If an explosion took Gwadar offline, it would send a signal to both Islamabad and Beijing.
Back to Pakistan: Gwadar is not a large port, but it is the terminus for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a predatory scheme that has landed Pakistan more than $40 billion in debt and betrayed Pakistani sovereignty to Beijing. China privately has backed Pakistan in its terror fight against India, shielding its neighbor and satrapy from Financial Action Task Force terror finance and money laundering sanctions, and otherwise offering it diplomatic support. If an explosion took Gwadar offline, it would send a signal to both Islamabad and Beijing.
The same is true in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest port which is responsible for 60 percent of Pakistani shipments.
What Not To Do
India should never claim an attack on Pakistani ports; the two states are nuclear powers and Pakistan always needs a way to save face less it be forced into an escalatory cycle. Frankly, Pakistani incompetence is also high enough that the world would likely believe India’s denials. Simultaneously, however, failure to assign a cost to Pakistan’s terror sponsorship only greenlights more terror.
Quiet is not always a virtue, nor is addressing a moderate crisis now always an undesirable option if the cost of short-term quiet is a far greater crisis down the road as terrorists regroup until they inevitably strike a target that forces the two neighbors into full, unrestricted war.
