Former Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan (retired) has sounded a note of caution over Pakistan‘s newly signed defence agreements, warning they could breed “some kind of overconfidence” in Islamabad and risk pushing it toward “some kind of miscalculation again.”Speaking at the 22nd GB Pant Memorial Lecture on the theme of threats and challenges to India’s security, Chauhan flagged the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement signed on August 7 between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, under which an attack on any one nation is treated as an attack on all three.The pact follows an earlier Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed last September, and the former CDS made clear India needs to watch this evolving alignment closely.Pakistan, he said, would remain “a major issue of concern” going forward, with terrorism and proxy war continuing to sit at the core of its strategy. He described Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal as having created a curious paradox, static stability at the strategic level, but greater instability lower down, as Islamabad works to shrink the space for conventional military operations while expanding sub-conventional warfare through cross-border terrorism.“Pakistan will remain, I think, a major security concern trying to come. The existing nuclear weapons have created a view of static stability at the highest level, and this is what has induced instability at the lowest level. Classically known as the stability paradox,” he said.Even when individual terror networks are dismantled, Chauhan warned, the broader ecosystem sustaining them, ideology, recruitment, financing, training and state support. These systems simply gets rebuilt, meaning the challenge persists regardless of the tactical successes.As per General Chauhan the answer to this predicament is credible, demonstrated deterrence. Citing the surgical strikes, the Balakot air strikes and Operation Sindoor as proof points, the former CDS argued deterrence must operate across the full spectrum, and that India needs to keep raising the cost of proxy war for Pakistan, including through measures such as keeping the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, until it forces a real behavioural shift. That move followed last year’s Pahalgam attack, though the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague recently ruled the treaty remains fully in force, a verdict India, which did not participate in the proceedings, has rejected as null and void.On the China aspect, Chauhan described the challenge as fundamentally different, “more long-term and comprehensive” than Pakistan’s, rooted in an unresolved boundary dispute where the two sides don’t even share a mutually agreed definition of the Line of Actual Control. Differences in perception, combined with infrastructure build-up and growing capabilities on both sides, create real potential for friction, he said, pointing implicitly to China’s breach of prior agreements during the 2020 Eastern Ladakh stand-off. Even so, Chauhan insisted India’s relationship with Beijing cannot be reduced to boundary issues alone, since the two nations cooperate in some spheres even as they compete for influence elsewhere, a balance he said will substantially shape the future of Asia.
