THE temptation to draw comparisons between the recent 12-day Israel-Iran war, and Pakistan’s encounter with India earlier this summer, is difficult to resist. Both conflicts demonstrated an erosion of the psychological barriers that may have once restrained or deterred states from striking each. Initiators in both conflicts seemed united in their belief that launching short wars is not only possible, but, in fact, politically desirable. Both conflicts saw the targeting of major cities, not just borders and hinterlands. And both conflicts underscored the imperative for targeted states to strike back to establish some form of deterrence.

But the parallels also have limits. Pakistan has a nuclear deterrent, hence the escalation dynamics in the India-Pakistan dyad are fundamentally different from those in the Israel-Iran dyad, at least for now. India and Pakistan are also near-military competitors, evenly matched for purposes of a short conflict (the fact that Pakistan could have resorted to using its cruise missiles to target Indian military sites in the most recent encounter, but chose not to, is a different subject). Finally, Pakistan and India are contiguous neighbours, with disputed borders, shorter flight times, and a historical precedent of ground incursions — characteristics not shared by Iran and Israel.

Laying out these differences may be useful, because of the risks that come with erroneously equating the two dyads, and drawing, somewhat uncritically, lessons from one theatre to the other.

What are those possible extrapolations?

Lessons can be drawn from two recent conflicts.

One is that because the world was largely acceptant of a 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran, the next conflict between India and Pakistan doesn’t have to be a short four-day confrontation. It could easily be a seven-day, 10-day or even two-week conflict. This inference will likely find ready audiences among constituents being fed a steady diet of claims that it was the ‘other side’ that was pressing for the May ceasefire.

The second is the utility of wide-ranging opening salvos, given the high premium on damage and terror inflicted in the earliest phases of a crisis or war. If Israel thought Tehran was fair game and Iran thought Tel Aviv was fair game, in a future India-Pakistan conflict, both Islamabad and New Delhi may now be tempting targets. This misappropriation dangerously discounts the risks of bringing the war to population-dense metropolises, not realising it forces the other side into responding in kind.

A third dangerous lesson lies in Israel’s opening volley, which saw the targeting of not just Iranian military assets, but also Iran’s decision-making leadership. If that playbook is attractive, it may lead some to believe that, in a future conflict with Pakistan, the deliberate or inadvertent removal of key military leaders would be a major psychological blow that could force Islamabad to yield. This would, of course, be an enormous miscalculation, and will likely have the opposite effect, but it is also clear that decision-makers and their domestic publics in South Asia are past the point of understanding the limits of what each side might tolerate.

A fourth lesson lies in Israel’s deep infiltration of Iranian systems, enabling Israel to identify and strike high-value targets, including key military and technical personnel. That kind of intelligence infiltration will likely be watched enviously by India, which for several years has been looking to expand its own foreign intelligence ca­­pabilities and ex­­ploit Pakistan’s in­­formational vulne­rabilities, parti­­cu­-­larly from Pakis­t­a­n’s western borders.

Finally, even though Pakistan established its capacity and readiness to decisively strike back, the Israel-Iran conflict has provided further credence to the idea that the notion of victory in modern warfare has changed, and much now rests on how not just your own population but the international community perceives the outcome of war, either through satellite imagery or drone footage. Better immediate battlefield damage assessment capabilities now have enormous currency, and so we should expect crisis actors to try to ensure they have every possible informational and PR advantage going forward.

On balance, these extrapolations from the Israel-Iran conflict — questionable as some of them might be — risk emboldening a more expansive, less restrained approach in the next crisis between India and Pakistan. For policymakers in South Asia, then, the challenge rests in anticipating and preparing for scenarios in which the adversary’s strategic calculus may be informed to a greater extent by someone else’s last war, not its own.

The writer is an assistant professor of political science at Tufts University.

Published in Dawn, July 13th, 2025