Pakistan will attack, it has to attack, now more than ever, and worse than ever, if it is to reestablish MAD as an effective instrument of deterrence against future Indian attacks. The entirety of Pakistani strategy, in fact the entirety of Pakistan's survival, depends upon impressing India that MAD is the absolute outcome of any Indian conventional attack on its soil and/or territory under its control. This Indian attack by its very nature of defiance to Pakistan's threatened response nullifies the very core of Pakistan's strategy and thus by extension, its very survival.
No rational state can accept this threat. And thus it must attack and through the threat of unacceptable response, deter India from retaliating. Anything less fundamentally undermines Pakistani position. The paradigm Pakistan so painfully crafted and perfected over 30-40 years has been undone. It now requires to act fast before the new paradigm takes hold.
Several years ago, I had proposed the idea of a seemingly irrational player being able to undermine and subdue the strategies of rational players, simply by the threat of irrationality. I'd proposed that the very air of rationality can and will be used against interests of etities that are fundamentally rational, and thus, entirely predictable. Thus it behooved even rational entitites to appear at least notionally irrational, to break the stratagem of opponents intent on using your rationality against you. This is the first time in a long long time India is applying these principles against Pakistan, which has always relied on Indian rationality to get away with acts of terror. I wonder if someone like Doval had similar ideas decades ahead of me.
