Pak planned 48-hour operation but it folded up in 8 hours: CDS

Pakistan launched multiple attacks on early May 10 aiming to bring India to its knees in 48 hours, but it had to fold up the offensives in eight hours and reach out to New Delhi for talks seeking an end to the hostilities, Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan said on Tuesday.

In the first detailed account of India’s clashes with Pakistan, Gen Chauhan said India’s response to the Pahalgam terror attack was to draw “limits of tolerance” to cross-border terrorism and not tolerating Islamabad’s nuclear blackmail.

In an address at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, the top military commander appeared to reject criticism against him for acknowledging three days ago that India lost an unspecified number of combat jets during the initial phase of Operation Sindoor.

Professional militaries are not affected by temporary losses as overall outcomes are much more important than such setbacks, he said and used cricketing metaphor to draw a clear distinction between initial setbacks and the overall outcome.

Suppose you go into a cricket test match and you win by an innings, then there is no question of wickets and balls etc, he said.

Gen Chauhan, who played a key role in planning India’s response to the Pahalgam terror attack as well as subsequent Pakistani offensives, threw light on various aspects of the conflict.

“On May 10, about 1 am, their (Pakistan) aim was to get India to its knees in 48 hours. Multiple attacks were launched and in some manner, they have escalated this conflict. We had actually hit only terrorist targets,” he said.

The Chief of Defence Staff said the rationale behind Pakistan’s decision could be based on two aspects.

“One — they must have assumed that if they continue, they are likely to lose much more. And second — since they had stuck us at multiple fronts, they still did not have the benefit of understanding what they had struck,” he said.

When the request for talks and de-escalation came from Pakistan, we did accept it, he said.