By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A senior Pakistani military commander told one of Asia’s most prominent security gatherings on Saturday that his country’s conduct during a four-day war with India last year had settled, once and for all, a question that has haunted South Asian strategic thinking for decades: whether a limited conventional conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbours was ever truly possible.
The answer, said Lieutenant General Nauman Zakria, commander of Pakistan’s I Corps, is no.
“Pakistan’s resolute response has effectively debunked the notion of space for war in South Asia,” Zakria told attendees at the Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual defence summit held in Singapore that draws defence ministers, military chiefs, and security analysts from across the globe.
The May 2025 conflict began when India launched air strikes on targets in Punjab and Azad Kashmir on May 7 of that year — a military escalation New Delhi said was a response to a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-occupied Kashmir that it attributed to Pakistan. Islamabad denied any involvement and demanded a neutral international investigation. Within days, Pakistan said it had downed five Indian aircraft in air-to-air combat, a figure it later revised upward to eight. Both sides exchanged strikes on each other’s airbases before the United States brokered a ceasefire on May 10.
The four days of fighting — brief by conventional measures but alarming in their intensity — rattled capitals well beyond the subcontinent and revived fears about how quickly a crisis between nuclear powers could spiral beyond anyone’s control.
Speaking to the Singapore forum, Zakria offered what amounted to a Pakistani military postmortem of the conflict, one freighted with strategic implications. He said the fighting had demonstrated Pakistan’s capacity for “effective multi-domain operations,” enabled by what he described as tight coordination among the army, navy, and air force, and supported by cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, intelligence and surveillance systems, space-based assets, and coordinated information operations.
The general’s tone throughout was not triumphalist but cautionary, framing Pakistan’s conduct less as a victory to be celebrated than as a demonstration that the old assumptions about manageable, below-nuclear conflict in South Asia no longer hold.
“Postconflict dynamics have further constrained the prospects for conventional war,” he said. “However, continued Indian militarisation coupled with persistent adversarial rhetoric and the absence of robust crisis management mechanisms continue to undermine regional stability.”
He acknowledged that South Asia’s strategic environment remained deeply complicated — shaped by nuclear deterrence, conventional imbalances, unresolved territorial disputes, and the persistent ideological rivalry between Islamabad and New Delhi. But he also departed from some of the more familiar contours of Pakistani strategic rhetoric, welcoming China’s role in the region as “a constructive and stabilizing factor” that contributed to strategic balance, regional connectivity, and economic cooperation.
The bulk of Zakria’s remarks ranged beyond the May 2025 conflict and into what he described as the rapidly transforming landscape of global security — one being reshaped by artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems, cyber operations, space-based capabilities, and the growing speed and complexity of military decision-making.
“Rapid advances in AI, autonomous systems, cyber capabilities, quantum technologies, and multi-domain operations are transforming military decision-making, command and control structures, and strategic competition,” he said, “while simultaneously introducing new vulnerabilities, risks of miscalculation, attribution challenges, and unintended escalation.”
He pressed the assembled delegates on three interconnected challenges. First, he said, states needed to exercise responsible governance over emerging technologies, insisting that human oversight remain central to any decision involving the use of force — particularly in systems with strategic implications. “Technological innovation cannot be divorced from ethical responsibility and strategic accountability,” he said, calling for internationally agreed norms governing the military use of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cyber operations, and space technologies.
Second, he called for stronger institutionalised crisis management mechanisms — a pointed reference, in context, to the near-total breakdown of communication between Islamabad and New Delhi during the May fighting. “Even during periods of geopolitical rivalry, dialogue must never collapse,” he said. “History repeatedly demonstrates that strategic stability is preserved not only through deterrence but through communication as well.”
Third, he urged nations to work together on setting norms around space testing, prohibitions on attacks against civilian infrastructure, and human oversight of autonomous weapons. “Norms do not discourage competitiveness,” he said, “but they do set boundaries that make deterrence more calculable.”
Running through all of it was a concern about what Zakria described as the deteriorating integrity of information itself — the degree to which AI-generated content and disinformation campaigns were eroding trust, distorting narratives, and compressing the timelines within which leaders must make decisions. “The control of information and data integrity has emerged as a critical determinant of strategic stability,” he said, “alongside conventional military balance.”
He closed with a line that carried unmistakable resonance in a room gathered just weeks after two nuclear powers had traded airstrikes. “Peace and stability have never been involuntary outcomes of technological progression,” he said. “They have always depended on political responsibility, strategic restraint, and sustained international engagement.”
The Shangri-La Dialogue, organised annually by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is considered one of the most significant gatherings of its kind in the Indo-Pacific. This year’s sessions have been dominated by discussion of the India-Pakistan conflict, the implications of the American-brokered ceasefire, and the broader question of how the international community should manage the risks posed by rival nuclear states operating in an era of accelerating technological change.
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