Where Eagles Dare: India’s Deep Strike Into Pakistan’s Heartland

Operation Sindoor played out like a Cold War thriller, as Indian fighter jets shattered Pakistani sanctuaries while whispering a warning near its nuclear vault.

There is something profoundly destabilising about knowing that every inch of your territory lies within your enemy’s reach. It is a lesson that Israel has taught its adversaries for decades—responding not just to rocket fire, but to the factories that produce them and the bunkers that shield their makers. With Operation Sindoor, India has entered that league.

What began as retribution for the April 22 Pahalgam massacre of Indian tourists has ended with the stark revelation that Pakistan’s military depth is no shield against Indian reach.

As Operation Sindoor unfolded, the hum of India’s Rafales over the plains of Punjab and the forbidding ridges of Sargodha echoed like a page torn from a Frederick Forsyth novel.

India comprehensively dismantled the myth that Pakistan’s airspace was sacrosanct while apparently giving a chilling warning that even its nuclear sanctuaries were no longer untouchable, something which had Islamabad and Washington breaking into a cold sweat.

The psychological impact of Sindoor has been such that unverified claims are flying thick and fast on social media of a supposed strike on the fabled Kirana Hills, which is believed to conceal one of Pakistan’s most secure nuclear vaults. Viral videos doing the rounds on social media claimed that the strike had kissed the tunnel entrances of a suspected nuclear storage site.

While the claims have since proven untrue, the gesture suggested India was taking a leaf straight out of Israel’s playbook, particularly during the latter’s Osirak strike on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in 1981. India’s strikes into the Pakistani heartland also echoed Cold War-era brinkmanship, of Cuban missiles and DEFCON alerts and the whispered hotline calls between Washington and Moscow.

But Sindoor showed a regional South Asian power making a point before the world with French Rafales, SCALP missiles and HAL-integrated BrahMos cruise weapons, asserting that India could, and would, operate on a new doctrine where even the enemy’s nuclear command and control nodes are no longer sanctuaries.

Since the days of Zia-ul-Haq and Rajiv Gandhi, the idea of deep strikes into Pakistan had been checked by the spectre of escalation. That calculus changed in 1999 with Kargil when Pakistani regulars intruded into Indian territory and the two countries fought a limited war under the nuclear overhang. The pattern was repeated with every provocation, from the Parliament attack in 2001 to the horrific Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008, to the Pathankot and Uri incidents in the following decade.

But as forewarned by Prime Minister Modi after the Pahalgam terror attack last month, Operation Sindoor, unlike the Balakot strikes of 2019, would be far bigger and more precise.

While Balakot sent Mirage jets across the Line of Control (LoC) to bomb a terrorist training camp in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindoor struck deep into Pakistani Punjab, hitting Sialkot, Bahawalpur and beyond.

Besides terrorist training centres, Indian jets struck Pakistani military assets in eleven locations, damaging up to 20 percent of the Pakistan Air Force’s (PAF) infrastructure as per estimates. At least one squadron leader, several airmen, and fighter jets were reportedly killed or destroyed at Pakistan’s Bholari air base.

By bypassing or jamming Pakistan’s Chinese-built air defence systems, Indian jets demonstrated that Beijing’s exports were not as impenetrable as advertised. Indian Rafales, armed with SCALP cruise missiles and supported by a homegrown digital warfare ecosystem, flew unchallenged into the heart of Pakistan’s defences.

Pakistan, encumbered by outdated Soviet-era doctrines and Chinese systems stitched together, found itself utterly outclassed during Sindoor.

Much of the credit lies not in foreign acquisitions but domestic innovation. The Akashteer system, built indigenously, intercepted hundreds of Pakistani drones and missiles during the retaliation, confirming its layered, network-centric preparedness. In doing so, it underscored a broader point: defence is not about what you buy, but what you integrate. The Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) -led development of the BrahMos cruise missile, (launched from Su-30 MKIs) once thought too ambitious, had finally come of age. Where Russia had quoted exorbitantly for adapting BrahMos to air-launch platforms, India built it in-house at no profit. That engineering leap turned Indian fighters into long-range precision platforms.

What does it mean to live beside a nuclear-armed enemy? For decades, the answer has been paralysis. Yet the message that India sent out to Pakistan by Operation Sindoor was the opposite one, that proximity no longer protects.

Pakistan has long operated on the assumption that its nuclear umbrella allows it to wage a low-intensity conflict through terrorist proxies, irregulars and rogue elements within its military without facing conventional retaliation. That assumption has now been shredded to bits.

This shift is reminiscent of how Israel has treated Syria and Iran. For years, Israel has conducted strikes within Syrian territory and against Iranian nuclear scientists without triggering full-scale war. Its strategy: hit hard, hit surgically and communicate its red lines clearly. India seems to have borrowed a page from that playbook when it targeted terrorist networks like the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Bahawalpur, a region even American drones had avoided.

It is also reminiscent of American doctrine post-9/11. After the Taliban refused to give up Osama bin Laden, the US not only struck terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan but dismantled the regime that sheltered it. India has not sought regime change, but it has erased the distinction between ‘non-state actors’ and the state that harbours them.

Perhaps the most significant fallout of Operation Sindoor has been strategic, and not tactical. For the first time, India and Pakistan’s friction was not framed through the lens of Kashmir. By striking targets across Pakistan’s geography, and not just in PoJK, India clearly declared that its grievance was with the state’s support of terror, not mere territorial disputes.

This de-hyphenation has been a long-standing goal of Indian diplomacy. Operation Sindoor may have achieved on the battlefield what years of white papers could not.

With the endgame far from over, this doctrine is still being written. But its outlines are becoming clear: zero tolerance for terrorism, a readiness to strike deep inside enemy territory and a belief that precision can prevent escalation. Operation Sindoor has redefined the Indo-Pak dynamic by effecting a psychological shift from reaction to anticipation.

India, by demonstrating that it can target even the most sensitive parts of its neighbour without triggering war, has upended the strategic balance. Whether this deters Pakistan or provokes new asymmetries remains to be seen in the coming days. But one thing abundantly clear post the launch of Sindoor is that the red lines are not where they once were. And for the first time in decades, it is Pakistan that must count the cost of crossing them.