The latest casus belli is the brutal carnage of 26 innocent tourists by terrorists in a verdant meadow in Kashmir on a balmy April 22 evening. Islamabad has denied any involvement but is already rattling nuclear threats and seems well prepared for conventional war.

For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, enough is enough.

As a resolute pacifist, Modi may try to avoid escalation but as a political strongman he wants to put a final stop to Pakistan’s well-documented military policy since 1948 of infiltrating Islamic jihadi terrorists into India, in Kashmir and elsewhere.

Islamabad denies any such perfidy. But Delhi is unconvinced and has long demanded that the US and Europe should designate Pakistan as a terrorist state because of hundreds killed in the alleged Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attacks, several wars linked to those attacks and almost constant skirmishes.

Meanwhile, emulating Israel’s right to self-defense against terrorists, Modi is unfurling multi-pronged diplomatic and other responses buttressed by decisive military action. But he is staying his hand so far to give diplomacy a chance.

Suspicion fell on Pakistani intelligence services for the Kashmir attack because the terrorists separated non-Muslim men from other tourists and murdered them point blank. The killers remain at large and may have escaped across the border.

Importantly, they acted with the military precision of trained commandos using US-made M4 assault rifles with attachments for precision targeting.

Local terrorists are flooded with American small arms from disappeared stockpiles of at least 500,000 abandoned in Afghanistan by withdrawing US forces.

Although Indians are familiar with terrorist attacks, their rage is especially severe this time because the separation of non-Muslim men was a cold-blooded attempt to re-ignite religious hatred. It happened just as tourism and normal economic activity were returning to Kashmir, a hitherto restive region beloved by Indians for its natural beauty and hospitable people.

Modi saw no alternative to vowing revenge and “unimaginable punishment”. He promised to pursue “every terrorist and their backers to the ends of the earth.”

Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who was in India with his family at that time, have pledged full support for India’s fight against terrorists but called for de-escalation to prevent “a broader regional conflict”.

But Pakistan’s military chief Asim Munir, who is the nation’s real decider, seems determined to escalate rapidly.

“Let there be no ambiguity; any military misadventure by India will be met with a swift, resolute and notch-up response,” he declared, addressing troops from atop a battle tank last week.

Importantly. Munir, who earlier served as the Intelligence chief, asserted last month that Pakistan’s religious obligations as an Islamic Republic made peaceful relations with India unworkable.

A top diplomat warned, “We in Pakistan will use the full spectrum of power, both conventional and nuclear.”

To drive the point home, Munir test fired a ballistic missile with a surface-to-surface range of 450 kilometers built with Chinese help, capable of striking deep inside Indian territory with nuclear warheads. He named it Abdali after a prominent medieval Muslim conqueror of Indians.

Pakistan’s military elites loathe India because it is a successful multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual democracy that provides an ever-evolving model of coexistence of Islam with other religions and freedom of political choices for its citizens. They fear collapse of their power and wealth if Pakistanis were to exercise similar freedoms.

Critics allege they have habitually used anti-India rhetoric to create unwarranted fear among ordinary Pakistanis with the purpose of exercising overwhelming power in national governance and expanding their personal wealth through bigger war budgets.

Most Pakistani governments have been military dictatorships or weak civilian leaderships controlled by generals from the back seat.

The military elites operate more like robber barons using dedication to Islam as a veneer, critics say. Instead, their dedication is to perpetuating control over government and expropriating wealth through corrupt business practices and ever-expanding defense budgets regardless of the nation’s impoverishment.

They continue to train, equip and infiltrate Islamic terrorists to maintain perpetual enmity with India at low cost in the name of Islam to distract public attention from the funds they siphoned off from American aid.

Pakistan’s military and intelligence services extracted billions of dollars from Washington over more than 10 years by exploiting its fear of a communist takeover in Afghanistan. Then for 30 years, they were paid to help fight Islamic Jihadists and the Taliban although they had created and nurtured both.

Washington paid willingly despite knowing that Pakistan covertly provided nuclear weapons development support to Iran, Libya, Syria and North Korea while collaborating closely with China.

US intelligence finally admitted a decade ago that Pakistan’s military is riddled with acolytes of Islamic terrorists with American blood on their hands. Aid was cut off after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 but it had already fueled the military’s corrupt dictatorial rule over the nation since the 1970s.

Then, to Delhi’s alarm, Trump personally approved a $397 million military assistance package for Islamabad last January, two weeks before the attack in Kashmir. That may have emboldened Munir because It included support for Pakistan’s F-16 fleet albeit with a stipulation for use only against terrorists.

But Munir may think nothing of betraying Trump’s faith by using the F-16s against India, especially as he is deeply beholden to China’s Xi Jinping for weapons, money and diplomatic support.

But his own standing in the military is being challenged because the US aid cutoff severely hurt the wealth of many ranking officers. They blame hubristic decisions by cadres from Munir’s Punjab province who have dominated the military for over 75 years.

Punjabi military elites own and run Pakistan’s largest industries and farmlands because of the vast decades-long downpour of unaccountable money from Washington.

Some independent experts think a prolonged Punjabi-led war with India could break up the Pakistani state. Its cost estimated at $10 billion dollars a week could unravel Pakistan’s four provinces – Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — into separate states.

The long-suppressed but more populous and productive Sindis now dare to openly voice resentment at a system that hands a large chunk of their wealth to the Punjabis instead of reinvesting locally.

The people of resource-rich Baluchistan are fed up with Punjabi elites that siphon off their wealth and worsen poverty. A 40-year Baluchi insurgency has been fighting the Punjabi army and separatists held a train with over 300 people hostage in March. A 36-hour standoff ended with over 60 dead.

Importantly, Baluchi militancy has scared Beijing, which is heavily invested in a potentially lucrative $60 billion export corridor from China across a large chunk of Baluchistan to a massive new commercial and military port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. It may no longer see value in bowing to the greed of Punjabi generals.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, previously known as the North West Frontier Province, is the restless impoverished tribal land of the battle-hardened Pathan people. They birthed the Taliban who captured Kabul from the Soviets and then Americans after a more than 30-year war.

The region continues to be a hotbed of terrorist Islamic clans nurtured earlier by the military, which is losing control because it no longer has American money to fund them or buy them off.