No talks, no threats, India should answer Pakistan with retaliation
The only thing one can agree on in the fiasco surrounding the cancellation of the national security advisor level talks with Pakistan - is that nobody can seem to agree on anything.
India has over the last two decades tried everything - talks, no talks, cold shouldering and cancellation - none of which has yet yielded positive results.
Perhaps the only option India has never used against Pakistan's continual provocations since nuclear deterrence set in 1987 has been the military option. The military option is a polarising one - with loud proponents and equally trenchant opponents. The public hysteria after a major terror attack seems to demand military escalation rather than staying passive and perpetually reacting.
Right response
Given this bellicosity it would be germane to look at two international examples: countries that face the same problem of outrageous cross-border attacks and are either nuclear armed, under the nuclear shield or face a nuclear armed adversary. South Korea and Israel are both technologically advanced industrial states with a higher level of sophistication in their military technologies than India can afford or operate.
South Korea in many ways follows the Indian template.
For most part it avoids provoking North Korea just like India avoids provoking Pakistan. Sometimes it fails to respond appropriately to the most blatant aggression like the sinking of its corvette the Cheonan by a North Korean submarine in 2010, something that would be considered an outright act of war. This is no different to the 26/11 attacks that were effectively a command strike on an Indian metropolis - an attack that India did not or could not respond to. Sometimes however it engages in limited and commensurate responses like retaliating for the shelling of Yeonpeong Island also in 2010.
This too mirrors the Indian reluctance to resort to an equivalent response except on rare occasions. None of these limited responses or non-responses have been able to yield predictable results - as evidenced by the laying of a mine in South Korea by North Korea costing the lives of two Southern soldiers.
New strategy
The South Korean calculus though is not guided by the kind of absence of strategy that characterises Indian pusillanimity. Though the Koreans face an equally implacable enemy, with whom they have no clue what to do to change - their military responses are guided by the concept of opportunity cost.
This means when they chose to not retaliate they do a simple cost benefit analysis. Take the case of the sinking of their ship the Cheonan. Its destruction by a North Korean submarine, killed 46 sailors and injured another 57.
The analysis in this event was - we have lost 46 sailors, while this may merit heavy retaliation, the question is how many more lives will we lose if we react? With the Yeonpeong Islands, their remoteness led to the decision that retaliation was both feasible and the risks manageable.
Clearly however - the Korean strategy of talking but not retaliating, very similar to India's strategy has not yielded positive results. Yet there is little evidence that the converse yields any better results - and that is the case of Israel.
Israel does not have formal ties with its most troublesome neighbours and refuses flatly to talk to the groups that are responsible for the attacks it faces - namely Hezbollah and Hamas. What it does do however is retaliate overwhelmingly in the face of provocations. This retaliation is not the kind of aimless retaliation aimed at a domestic audience to give them the satisfaction of having stood up for oneself.
This is a focused retaliation aimed at identifying the immediate threat and eliminating it rather than merely responding to it. These deadly reprisals are carried out both to attrition the adversaries capabilities and to impose human and material costs to deter them for future attacks.
Frequently Israeli retaliation seems completely out of pro-portion - involving full on air land and sea offensives against Gaza in 2014 and Lebanon in 2006 and an unprovoked pre-emptive strike against a Syrian nuclear facility in 2007. Yet both these territories remain hotbeds of terrorism and the threat they pose to Israel remains undiminished.
Rogue state
In the Indian case we do not seem to have an intelligible opportunity cost matrix, nor do we have the decisive military capability to do what Israel does and South Korea can do.
These latter two states have made air power their primary response mechanisms and have prioritised them over ground forces. In India largely due to obsolete doctrine and bad choices by the Air Force, the Army has prevented the transition to air power-centric warfare. However even if we did transition to air forces over ground forces, the international examples given above would seem to suggest that demonstrably successful solutions to the rogue states behaving badly simply do not exist.
So in the midst of this painful introspection we subject ourselves to every time something goes wrong or goes "boom", we need to remember that rogue states are a problem that cannot be solved by any means at our disposal currently. This is not unique to India - the United States and its allies, Russia, Israel, Korea are all in the same boat as us - fumbling, trying to find solutions whether diplomatic or military and failing miserably in the process. Ultimately this is a case of stamina - who outlasts the other, so instead of crying over spilt milk it's time to move on with life.