Instead of making tall claims that proclaim their ignorance of the importance of the human terrain, a better use of Trump and Munir’s energies would be to learn the three lessons that India’s long-term security strategy in Kashmir offers the world in handling proxy wars.

In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, army veteran John Nagl suggests the US entered Vietnam with plans that were worse than useless for the conflict. US forces chose brutal and blunt “search and destroy” over “target, limit, and build”. This contrasts with Governance by Stealth: The Ministry of Home Affairs and the Making of the Indian State by Subrata Mitra, which documents the Indian state’s success in “maintaining public order with the minimum use of force and finding ways and means to minimise resistance to public authority”. While acknowledging that life is lived forward but understood backwards, we see three pillars of our long-term security strategy in Kashmir.

The first pillar of specialisation emerged after some initial missteps. The effectiveness of India’s security forces in tackling terrorism in Kashmir was greatly improved by recognising the need for intelligence-driven, targeted security responses to terrorism: A sharp silver dagger rather than a blunt iron hammer. This recognition led to the army forming the Rashtriya Rifles in 1990, J&K Police forming Special Operations Groups in 1993, and the internal security-trained CRPF replacing the Border Security Force by 1995. In recent years, the substitution of the Central Bureau of Investigation with the National Investigation Agency has significantly accelerated progress on drying the swamp of terror financing.

The second pillar is moderation. Contrast the 1972 Vietnam War photo of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running with her clothes burnt by napalm with the 1993 images of terrorists surrendering with their hands above their heads after the first siege at Hazratbal, and the 2024 pictures of voter lines in state elections. The first killed American legitimacy, the second sparked jokes among Kashmiris about terrorist cowardice, and the third amplified the momentum for peace. The US army, using Agent Orange, napalm, artillery, cluster bombs, and helicopters in Vietnam, ignored their own World War II Marine Manual, which suggested that “the goal is to gain decisive results with the least application of force and consequent minimum loss of life. The ultimate aim is the social, economic, and political development of the people. In small wars, tolerance, sympathy, and kindness should be the keynote of our relationship with the mass of the population.”

The third pillar is democracy. Just as education is too important to be left just to teachers, war is too important to be left to generals. Terrorism rarely ends without the cognitive diversity of politicians, bureaucrats, civil society, and diplomats. Every J&K security official can testify to the constant pressure for elections during every governor’s rule, the continuous presence of civil servants in decision-making, and a tone from the top in Delhi that valued elected politicians, even those who espoused soft separatism. In Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts imply that this third pillar is our most potent weapon against Pakistan, where no prime minister since 1947 has completed their elected term.

The tourist murders are a security setback because our long-term strategy — the abrogation of Article 370, cross-border military strikes, railway connectivity, exploiting Pakistan’s economic weaknesses, globally isolating radical Islam, replacing non-alignment with strategic autonomy, becoming economically stronger, harnessing Saudi Arabia’s moderation, prepping for statehood with central oversight on terrorism, and making J&K Police the face of law — is working, and driving Pakistan’s deep state crazy.

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After the murders at Baisaran — where one of us learnt to roller skate on a wonderful wooden rink surrounded by pine trees — we know Kashmiris agree with terrorist Maqbool Bhat’s thoughtful letter to his niece after the 1971 Pakistani army genocide in Bangladesh: “Rulers who declare war against their people cannot offer anything to anyone else but injustice.”

As India executes punishment for Pakistan’s terror factory, our commentocracy will repeat tired tropes about people in uniform being warmongers. This unfair comment deserves the thoughtful military general’s response from the excellent film Eye in the Sky: “Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war.” Peace depends on courage; the Indian flag on the Zabarwan mountains and Hari Parbat towering over Dal Lake does not flutter in the wind, but with the last breath of those who made the supreme sacrifice protecting it in J&K. This includes 1,608 J&K Police, 511 CRPF, and hundreds of army officers. Veer Bhogya Vasundhara. The brave inherit the earth.

M N Sabharwal is former director general of J&K Police and Manish Sabharwal is a J&K-born entrepreneur. Their recent book is Kashmir Under 370