Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
Ten years ago, Indian special forces teams crossed the Line of Control (LoC) and attacked Pakistani terrorist launchpads in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK). The surgical strikes of September 28, 2016, were a response to the terrorist attack on an Army camp in Uri on September 18 in which 19 Indian Army soldiers were killed.
Indian commandos had crossed the LoC numerous times in the past, in one particularly bloody retaliatory raid, Operation Ginger in 2011, where they reportedly killed multiple Pakistan Army soldiers. Ginger was in response to a Pakistan Army Border Action Team (BAT) raid where six Indian soldiers were killed, three of them decapitated, with their heads taken to Pakistan as trophies. In the manner of several other clandestine raids, Ginger was never officially acknowledged.
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But the surgical strikes, as the cross-border commando raids of 2016 were called, were different.
On September 29, they were confirmed by the Indian Army’s Director General Military Operations (DGMO) Lt General Ranbir Singh in a statement read out by the MEA spokesperson. The Indian officials termed them “counter-terrorist operations in which significant casualties had been caused to the terrorists and those trying to support them”.
This was the first time India had publicly taken ownership of a cross-border strike. It was an exceptional because it was the first publicly announced military operation after the nuclearisation of the subcontinent in May 1998.
What would follow was a series of carefully calibrated cross-border retaliatory strikes which continued over the past decade, each increasing in intensity and moving up the threshold of retaliation under the nuclear overhang, Balakot in 2019 and the 88-hour Operation Sindoor between May 7-10, 2025.
GENERAL BEG’S NWET STRATEGY
The surgical strikes were the first time India had responded to a strategy of the Pakistani military shielding its terrorist proxies using nuclear weapons. In the early 1990s, Indian strategist Commodore C Uday Bhaskar (retd) termed this strategy Nuclear Weapons Enabled Terrorism or NWET.
This strategy was the brainchild of General Mirza Aslam Beg, an Azamgarh-born general who commanded the Pakistan Army between 1988 and 1991. Born in Muslimpatti village in Azamgarh in 1928, Beg graduated from the Shibli National College in the district in 1949, and later that year, migrated to Pakistan with his parents. He joined the Pakistan Army’s Special Services Group (SSG).
Beg escaped being taken prisoner of war in East Pakistan because he had been sent back to the West before the war, and led a low-profile existence until he was catapulted into becoming Vice Chief of the Pakistan Army in 1987.
Beg took over as the Army chief after the death of dictator General Zia-ul-Haq in a plane crash in 1988. He also became de-facto head of Pakistan’s nuclear programme which his predecessor had snatched from civilian control in the 1977 coup. Beg resisted temptation to take over as dictator and handed power over to a civilian President. He, however, had a controversial stint as army chief. Zia’s family accused him of conspiring to kill General Zia.
Former diplomat Khaled Ahmed accused Beg of clandestinely transferring nuclear enrichment technology to Tehran using the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network.
The gold-rimmed Ray Ban sporting general’s lasting contribution lay elsewhere. In 1989, Beg oversaw the first Zarb-e-Momin (Sword of the Believer) exercises, Pakistan’s largest since the 1971 war that implemented a concept of offensive defence. The exercises coincided with a rising tide of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir.
Beg’s concept argued that nuclear weapons created an umbrella under which the Pakistan Army could conduct conventional operations or sustain lower-level conflict without inviting full-scale Indian conventional response. The exercises coincided with a worsening internal situation inside Jammu and Kashmir.
In early 1990, US spy satellites picked up a Pakistani F-16 loaded with nuclear weapons. In March 1993, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed how Bush administration officials rushed to India and Pakistan to prevent a nuclear weapons crisis. The March 12, 1993 serial bombings of Mumbai that killed 257 civilians, orchestrated by the Pakistan Army’s ISI, saw no military response from India.
Both crises blew over, but it convinced the Pakistan Army that it could continue unabated support for violence in Kashmir without India’s retaliation. This linkage was evident once there was a significant spurt in insurgency and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir from 1989 onwards, soon after the acquisition of nuclear weapons capability by Pakistan,’ Indian nuclear expert Manpreet Sethi wrote in Air Power in 2007.
When both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in May 1998, the Pakistan Army believed it had led to a military stalemate on the subcontinent. General Musharraf’s Kargil War plan ended in defeat, but convinced him that India had been deterred by Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, to not expand the zone of conflict. Convinced that India would not retaliate, the Pakistan Army extended Beg’s strategy to an asymmetric war.
Pakistan stepped up terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir using its Jihadi proxies LeT and JeM who brought in waves of ‘fidayeen’ or suicide terrorists. India did not strike even after the sensational December 13, 2001 attack on its Parliament, multiple attacks on Mumbai in 2006 and 2008, and a nationwide series of bomb blasts traced to Pakistani proxies, the Indian Mujahideen.
That policy of restraint ended on September 28, 2016, with the surgical strikes and culminated in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on May 12, 2025, where he spelt out India’s new red lines – if there is a terrorist attack, a fitting reply would be given; India would not tolerate nuclear blackmail and would strike “precisely and decisively at terrorist hideouts developing under the cover of nuclear blackmail”. And lastly, India would not distinguish between the government sponsoring terrorism and the masterminds of terror.
Beg’s response to Operation Sindoor is not known. He is now 98 and out of the public eye. In a 1994 article titled ‘Pakistan’s Nuclear Imperatives’, Beg compared nuclear weapons to oxygen, saying, “Oxygen is basic to life, and one does not debate its desirability. Nuclear deterrence has assumed that life-saving property for Pakistan.”
A popular 1990s joke has Bollywood screen villain Ajit recommending a person be dumped into liquid oxygen – “the liquid will not let him live, the oxygen will not let him die”. Pakistan’s predicament in 2026 is quite like Ajit’s hapless victim.
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
