The Meadow in Pahalgam
On April 22, last year, five gunmen walked into a meadow near Pahalgam, a mountain town in Jammu and Kashmir popular with tourists. They asked people their religion. Then they opened fire. Twenty-six civilians were killed. Twenty-five of the dead were Hindu tourists who had come for the mountain air and the meadows. One was a local Muslim pony-ride operator who tried to stop the attackers.
India's National Investigation Agency chargesheeted Lashkar-e-Taiba and its proxy group, The Resistance Front, for the attack. The Resistance Front had initially claimed responsibility - twice - before retracting.
This was the deadliest attack on Indian civilians since the 2008 Mumbai massacre. And it happened less than a year after Pakistan had been removed from the Financial Action Task Force grey list - a global watchdog's list of countries that fail to stop terror financing.
What Two US Reports Just Confirmed
In the last two weeks, two major American institutions published reports that confirmed what India has argued for thirty years.
The first came from the US Congressional Research Service - an independent research body that briefs American lawmakers. Updated on March 25, the report was prepared by South Asia specialist K. Alan Kronstadt. It identifies Pakistan as a base of operations for 15 major armed and terrorist groups. Twelve of those 15 are formally designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations under US law.
The report names the groups that target India directly: Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Harakat-ul Jihad Islami, and Harakat ul-Mujahidin. Hizbul Mujahideen alone has an estimated 1,500 armed cadre. Jaish-e-Mohammed has roughly 500 armed supporters spread across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India.
The report's most damning line is also its most honest. It states that "several major military offensives, including airstrikes, and hundreds of thousands of 'intelligence-based operations' have failed to defeat the numerous US- and United Nations-designated terrorist groups that continue to operate on Pakistani soil."
The second report came from the Center for a New American Security - a Washington think tank - authored by Lisa Curtis, Keerthi Martyn, and Sitara Gupta. Titled "Repairing the Breach: Getting US-India Ties Back on Track," it notes that India "has been disappointed by the overall lack of US attention to the problem of terrorism that emanates from Pakistan" - even after Washington designated The Resistance Front as a Foreign Terrorist Organization after Pahalgam. The report also warns Washington to "refrain from talking about mediating the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir."
America's own Congress researchers confirm Pakistan shelters the groups. America's own policy analysts confirm India is right to be disappointed. And yet the Trump administration has simultaneously pursued what it called a "decisive reset" in US-Pakistan relations - including warm outreach to Pakistan's Army Chief, General Asim Munir.
The Scale of the Problem
Pakistan is not just a source of terrorism targeting India. It is now the most terrorism-affected country on Earth. The Global Terrorism Index, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, ranked Pakistan number one out of 163 countries - the first time it has ever held that position.
Pakistan recorded 1,139 terrorism deaths and 1,045 incidents in a single year. That is its highest toll since 2013. It is also the sixth consecutive year that terrorism deaths in Pakistan have risen.
The provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan accounted for 74 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths. Pakistan now sits alongside Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, and the Democratic Republic of Congo as one of five countries where nearly 70 percent of all global terrorism deaths occur.
Here is the central contradiction: Pakistan is simultaneously the world's leading exporter of terrorism targeting India and the world's leading victim of terrorism blowback. The infrastructure it built to target India - the madrassas, the militia networks, the ISI directorate that funds them - has now turned inward and is consuming the country. A state that cannot control the forces it created is not a reliable partner for anyone.
What Has Already Been Tried
India has not been passive. The response to each attack has escalated over time.
After the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, carried out by Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, India mobilized troops to the border in what became Operation Parakram. International pressure pushed both sides back. No strikes were launched inside Pakistan.
After the 2008 Mumbai attacks - 166 people killed over three days by Lashkar-e-Taiba - India presented evidence to Pakistan and demanded action. Pakistan's courts arrested LeT commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and then released him on bail. The judicial process in Pakistan went nowhere for over a decade.
After the 2016 Uri attack, India launched Surgical Strikes - small cross-border operations targeting militant launch pads along the Line of Control - the first time India had struck across the border in the modern era.
After the 2019 Pulwama attack - 40 paramilitary soldiers killed by a Jaish-e-Mohammed suicide bomber - India launched the Balakot airstrikes, striking deep inside Pakistan proper for the first time since 1971.
After the Pahalgam massacre, India launched Operation Sindoor: drone and missile strikes on nine terror infrastructure sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, including the alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba headquarters and the Jaish-e-Mohammed compound in Bahawalpur - 150 kilometers inside Pakistan. India's Defense Minister Rajnath Singh said at least 100 militants were killed. The strikes were followed by three days of cross-border aerial and artillery exchanges before a ceasefire on May 10.
Each response has been larger than the last. The groups reform, rebuild, and reattack.
On the diplomatic side, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty - a 1960 water-sharing agreement that survived three wars - citing Pakistan's support for cross-border terrorism. It was the first time India had ever gone through with a threat it had made multiple times before, including after Uri in 2016 and Pulwama in 2019.
Pakistan designated the suspension an "act of war." Army Chief Asim Munir reportedly warned at a dinner in Florida that Pakistan would destroy any dam India builds. Former Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto separately threatened that Pakistan would "secure all six rivers" if water was not shared. The reaction alone tells you the suspension worked.
The Financial Action Task Force placed Pakistan on its grey list three separate times: in 2008, 2012, and 2018. Pakistan was removed in October 2022 after completing a 34-point action plan. Each removal came with the same result: the underlying machinery of terror finance stayed intact. Groups simply rebranded. Lashkar-e-Taiba renamed its public face to Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Jaish-e-Mohammed collected funds through front charities. The Congressional Research Service report confirms these same groups are still operating today - three years after Pakistan was declared clean.
How Other Countries Have Responded to State-Sponsored Terror
The United States after 2001
After the September 11 attacks, the US invaded Afghanistan, dismantled the Taliban government that hosted Al-Qaeda, and built a global financial sanctions architecture that froze assets and cut off banking access for anyone linked to designated groups. The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control imposed sanctions on individuals, not just organizations - cutting off financiers, recruiters, and logistics coordinators by name. Any bank anywhere in the world that processed transactions for a designated entity faced US secondary sanctions. That made American financial designation globally painful, not just symbolically inconvenient.
India currently has no equivalent capability. Its designations under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act apply to groups operating within Indian territory. They do not reach the financial networks in Pakistan, the Gulf, or Europe that fund Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
The European Union on Russia
After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the EU built a coordinated sanctions regime that targeted not just Russian state entities but also third-country companies and individuals helping Russia evade sanctions through secondary sanctions. The lesson for India is the mechanism: secondary sanctions that reach through borders and punish enablers, not just perpetrators. India has no equivalent tool for the financiers of Pakistani terror groups operating through Gulf-based charities and hawala networks.
Colombia on the FARC
Colombia's FARC was not broken by military force alone. The decisive shift came when the Colombian government combined military pressure with financial disruption: seizing narco assets, designating FARC fronts individually, and working with US Treasury to cut off the group's banking access internationally. A peace deal followed in 2016 because the organization had become financially unsustainable.
The parallel for India: Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are also financial enterprises. The Hindu's OSINT analysis estimated ISI provides direct funding to LeT, while Jaish-e-Mohammed's Al-Rehmat Trust front charity collects tens of millions of dollars annually. Disrupting those financial flows - not just striking the military camps - is what a lasting response looks like.
Who Is Accountable
On the Pakistani side, the ISI's S-Wing is widely identified by Indian and Western analysts as the unit responsible for managing relations with militant groups. Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed remains on international sanctions lists and has been convicted inside Pakistan, but continues to operate through front organizations. Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar has never been prosecuted by Pakistan despite being on the UN sanctions list. On the American side, the Center for a New American Security report identifies two specific failures: Washington failed to consult India before announcing ceasefire terms after Operation Sindoor, and the Trump administration's simultaneous outreach to Pakistan undercut the message that the US takes terrorism against India seriously. India's Ministry of External Affairs and National Security Council are accountable for building an international coalition that treats Pakistan-sponsored terrorism as a global problem rather than a bilateral dispute - and that coalition does not yet exist.
What Would It Cost
Kashmir's tourism sector lost business immediately after the Pahalgam massacre as tourists canceled travel. Operation Sindoor itself required military mobilization whose costs have not been publicly disclosed.
The Center for a New American Security report notes that US-India defence cooperation was disrupted by the fallout from the ceasefire dispute. India's planned purchase of six additional Boeing P-8I maritime surveillance aircraft was put on hold when trade tensions spiked. Each episode of tension triggered by a Pakistan-sponsored attack carries downstream costs in investment confidence, defence procurement timelines, and diplomatic bandwidth.
Pakistan spent approximately 45 crore rupees - around 5.3 million US dollars - on six American lobbying firms during Operation Sindoor, according to US Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, to pressure Washington to stop India's military response. India spent nothing equivalent on public advocacy in Washington during the same period. That is an asymmetry worth fixing.
What Needs to Happen
The Center for a New American Security report recommends that the US State Department "elevate its counterterrorism dialogue with India, focusing on both regional and global terrorist threats." India should hold Washington to that specific ask as a condition for deepening defence and technology ties - and insist that counterterrorism intelligence sharing on Pakistan-based groups is a core deliverable of the renewed 10-year defence framework agreement, not an optional add-on.
On the financial side, India needs to build its own sanctions architecture: designating Pakistani terror financiers under Indian law, publishing those designations publicly, and working with the EU, UK, and Gulf Cooperation Council to replicate those designations in their jurisdictions. The goal is a coalition of designating countries whose combined market access matters to the networks that fund Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
India should make the case at the next Financial Action Task Force plenary that Pakistan's removal from the grey list in 2022 was premature. The evidence is unambiguous. The same groups which triggered the 2018 grey-listing continue to operate. The LeT headquarters in Muridke - struck by India during Operation Sindoor - existed as an operating facility after Pakistan had officially certified it did not.
The Indus Waters Treaty suspension should remain in place, and India should accelerate the hydroelectric projects on the Chenab river basin announced after Pahalgam.
India and the US share the goal of a free Indo-Pacific. But India cannot wait for American political will before building consequences for Pakistan. The US has documented Pakistan's terror ecosystem, designated the groups, and published the reports. What it has not done - and what India cannot depend on it doing - is translating documentation into sustained pressure on Islamabad.
India must build that pressure itself: financial sanctions, water leverage, diplomatic coalition-building, and a military doctrine that Pakistan's army now knows is credible. Operation Sindoor established that India will strike. The next step is making sure the international financial system reinforces the message.