Pakistan will remain major security concern: Ex-CDS

Nearly a month after Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye signed a key joint defence agreement, former CDS Gen Anil Chauhan on Saturday said such accords may induce “overconfidence” in Pakistan, which may lead Islamabad to make another “miscalculation.”

Delivering a lecture on ‘Threats and Challenges to India’s Security’ at an event hosted at the Teen Murti Bhawan complex here, he also said, “Pakistan will remain, I think, a major security concern and a threat for times to come.”

He further said that Operation Sindoor, holding of Indus Water Treaty in abeyance and some practical measures may “hopefully change or induce behavioural change in our neighbour.”

“But, we’ve also seen some kind of agreements and accords that they have recently signed. This sometimes, I feel, may induce some kind of overconfidence into Pakistan, and they may make some kind of a miscalculation again. We’ve got to be careful about that,” the former CDS said.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye on August 7 signed the ‘Makkah Joint Defence Agreement’ under which an attack against one of them will be treated as an attack against all of them. The move had come amid increasing security concerns in the wake of escalating tensions in West Asia. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had signed the pact after the Makkah Al-Mukarramah Summit for Joint Defence at the Al-Safa Palace in Islam’s holiest city of Mecca, according to a joint statement issued by the three countries earlier.

Gen Chauhan (retd) was delivering the 22nd Bharat Ratna Pt Govind Ballabh Pant Memorial Lecture to a packed audience, becoming the first speaker from an armed forces background to do so.

“India’s external threat environment is shared by a large number of factors: unresolved borders... cross-border terrorism, non-state actors, contested spaces which are known as global commons, then expanding cooperation and competition in space, cyber and the maritime domain. These factors interact. They cannot be examined in separate compartments; they have to be looked at in one perspective,” he said.

“Let me talk about our western neighbour. So Pakistan will remain, I think, a major security concern and a threat for times to come,” the former CDS cautioned.

India’s Operation Sindoor, which also demonstrated the jointness and integration among the three services of its armed forces, was conducted in May last year, when he served as the Chief of the Defence Staff.

Gen Chauhan (retd), even after his retirement in May 2026, has maintained that Operation Sindoor, which was conducted to avenge the deadly April 22 Pahalgam attack last year, is “not over” but just on pause, and has urged the armed forces to keep a constant operational readiness.

In his nearly 50-minute address, while referring to Pakistan, he said, “The existence of nuclear weapons has created a degree of static stability at the apex level. And this is what has induced instability at the lowest level. So it’s classically known as a stability-instability paradox”.

“So the idea of Pakistan has been to reduce space for conventional operations, and expand the space for sub-conventional operations, that is terrorism and cross-border activities, and reduce the space for conventional operations, due to nuclear weapons. That’s been their strategy, Gen Chauhan added.

So, “terrorism” and “proxy war” have been central to this particular approach and strategy, he said.

“Non-state actors provide deniability, reduce apparent cost and seek to provoke political and communal consequences. Even when a particular terrorist network is degraded, the enabling ecosystem- that’s the ideology, the recruitment system, the finance, training, propaganda and state support- can recreate it, reorganise it,” the former general officer said.

So, India must go by this premise that terrorism and proxy war will remain a “major challenge” for it, the former CDS cautioned.

“And the only way you can defeat it is to create credible deterrence. And that’s what we demonstrated in three cross-border operations — Uri, then Balakot, and then Operation Sindoor. So deterrence must operate across the spectrum. India must be able to raise the cost of proxy war and terrorism for Pakistan, so that it stops using this as an instrument of state policy,” he asserted.

In his address, he enumerated some of the major challenges that armed forces in general and the Indian military may face in the future, as the nature of warfare evolves.

“The future will favour the forces that learn and adapt faster than their adversaries. We must therefore be strong in both old and new domains, land, sea and airspace, cyber, electromagnetic spectrum, physical and the cognitive domain, synthetic domain, all together.

“Jointness and integration are essential because technology erases organisational boundaries faster than bureaucracies do. Sensors, decision-makers, and shooters must be connected across all domains,” the former CDS said.

One of the reasons why Indian forces performed better than their adversaries during Operation Sindoor was because “we had better battlefield transparency and better situational awareness of what’s happening. We could take faster and better decisions,” he said, adding that services and domains supported by a common operational picture and a resilient network will be important for the future.