Opinion | Nuclear-Armed India and Pakistan Have No Bridges Left to Burn

Pakistan, on the other hand, has been mired for two decades in economic, political and security crises. One institution there reigns supreme: a powerful army that dominates decision-making and has very significant conventional and nuclear military capability. Although beleaguered, Pakistan, with its own ambitions to remain a regional power, is unwilling to back down against India and on issues such as Kashmir that are central to its national identity.

In decades past, it was usually Indian restraint in the face of Pakistani actions that maintained an uneasy equilibrium. Even after deadly incidents such as the 2008 attack in Mumbai by Pakistan-based terrorists, which killed 166 people, India typically responded with moderation and periodic peace overtures.

Under Mr. Modi, that has changed. Over the past decade, he has shifted to a strategy of seeking to isolate Pakistan internationally coupled with covert operations, subversion and targeted killings. At the same time, Pakistan, and in particular its army, has showed signs of interest in stepping back from its traditional anti-India posture for a period. After a border conflict in 2019, Pakistan exercised more restraint than perhaps at any other point in the two nations’ fraught history, including restoring a cease-fire in 2021. But by then, India had moved on.

Even if the two sides back off and the current hostilities fizzle, India seems determined to pursue a more absolutist endgame of long-term pressure aimed at changing Pakistani political calculations on India and inflicting irreparable damage to Pakistan’s main power center, its army. Since the Kashmir attack last month, prominent Indian politicians and analysts have taken a more maximalist position, arguing that Pakistan is a failed rogue state and that India must actively seek its destruction.

Pakistan, aware of this shift, has abandoned hope of normalized relations with India and appears to be girding for a prolonged confrontation. Ominously, the confrontation is threatening crucial guardrails that prevented conflicts from spiraling. India last month suspended a 1960 treaty on the sharing of rivers, in particular the Indus waters, threatening one of Pakistan’s most important water supplies. Pakistan previously warned that such a suspension would be considered an “act of war” and has threatened to abandon a 1972 agreement that established the border in a divided Kashmir.