Lessons for Pakistan from the Israel/Iran conflict of June 2025

[Oscar]

... I like these a lot:

If Pakistan was an army officer, it would be the one who spends years confusing crisis management with strategy, gives PowerPoints instead of results, creates half the mess through “calculated interventions,” then steps in at the last minute to contain the fire and expects a medal for saving everyone from the disaster it helped engineer.

If Pakistan was an army officer, it would be the brigadier who keeps creating unstable situations, thrives in the chaos he helped build, pulls off a last-minute containment job, and mistakes that for doctrine.

Pakistan would be the officer who mistakes permanent emergency mode for leadership, micromanages everything outside his lane, neglects his actual command function, and then blames civilians, foreigners, and fate when the unit is still a mess.

Pakistan is that officer who is hyperfocused in the firefight, zero personal growth memory after it, endless improvisation, no boring follow-through, and total shock every time the same failures return.

Pakistan would be the officer who treats every self-created crisis as proof that only he can restore order, which is impressive until you notice he has been standing near the fuse every single time...

Oh no... Oh no.. .wait...

 

[JonAsad]

and then learns absolutely nothing before doing it all again.

Are you describing America?

 

[TallGuy]

WoW! What does Pakistan Need to learn as a lesson! from Iran-US War?

its in two parts - in parrellel
1. Strong Leadership
2. Unity
3. Ability to sacrifice/Steadfastness
==========
1. Our own Satalites for Coms/Nav & Recon
2. Strong locally developed Conventional aeroballistic - MaRV missile program (180-1500km range)
3. Robust one way strike drones 30-90kg warhead 140-900km ranges
4. Strong locally developed EW Program.

Developed these ability as Black Program like we did for Nukes

Will shall eat grass but get this tech.

 

[Hopefully Pessimistic]

I actually think the caution in your post is fair, but the bearishness goes a bit too far because it ignores another deeply Pakistani national characteristic...

The same low effort, improvised, dysfunctional culture you are describing also produces a weird kind of short-term crisis resilience. Pakistan repeatedly stumbles into the wall, then somehow patches together just enough elite consensus, external financing, coercive discipline, and social adjustment to avoid the full collapse that confident doomers keep predicting. That is not strength in the healthy sense, but it is still a real pattern, and by now it should be obvious that Pakistan is often better at surviving crises in the short run than reforming itself in the long run.

That is where the “resilience narrative” actually matters. Pakistan has repeatedly used IMF programs, emergency financing, fiscal tightening, remittances, and administrative controls to stabilize after near crisis moments, including the recent period when it moved away from imminent default and restored a degree of stability. Even the World Bank’s recent assessment describes the gains as fragile rather than nonexistent, which is an important distinction.

So yes, there are plenty of reasons to be cautious, especially on governance, productivity, poverty, and long term trajectory, but those same realities should also make people cautious about being too bullish on imminent collapse. Pakistan’s story for decades has been short term wins, longer holds, and delayed consequences, and any serious leader should have recognized early that this survival capacity can become its own trap.

Just enough resilience to avoid reform

BUT

Never enough reform to escape the cycle.

You've nailed it

The real question here is how do you build a genuine long-term commitment and consistency to work towards national goals without falling off-track?

Maybe the lack of commitment stems from a lack of true patriotism, maybe comfort allows our corrupt traits to shine through too easily, maybe it is the fundamentally lazy & incompetent civilian class of beurecrats.

You notice that whenever Pakistan goes into crisis mode, the sitting beureacrats opinions are usually side-lined and they bring in more competent people for idea-checking and implementation — it is a tacit admission that Pakistan's political structure and recruitment mechanism is extremely counter productive and shitty quality. This would ideally be the first place of reform.

The total restructuring and recreation of the CSS system and its recruitment system, restructuring of how beureacracy works

 

[Yasser76]

My lessons would be

1) Our air bases are like US air bases in the GCC. Very close to the enemy and undefendable against massive drone swarms. HAS and more dispersal are the order of the day.
2) We cannot afford the amount of interceptor missiles Israel/GCC/US are using heavily, we need laser anti-missile systems at all vital bases from China asap
3) Special assets like AEW/EW will be vulnerable
4) Any air campaign should be cordinated with a land campaign so we take at any drone launch pads near Pakistan
5) Like Iran has done, we must not fight India militarily, but also economically. Hit Bangalore and Mumbai hard, make any conflict have a massive economic cost

 

[Oscar]

Are you describing America?

You could apply that but one could aptly describe it more towards inner core America and republican leadership - however not at a national level - which you can for Pakistan.

 

[Hopefully Pessimistic]

My lessons would be

1) Our air bases are like US air bases in the GCC. Very close to the enemy and undefendable against massive drone swarms. HAS and more dispersal are the order of the day.
2) We cannot afford the amount of interceptor missiles Israel/GCC/US are using heavily, we need laser anti-missile systems at all vital bases from China asap
3) Special assets like AEW/EW will be vulnerable
4) Any air campaign should be cordinated with a land campaign so we take at any drone launch pads near Pakistan
5) Like Iran has done, we must not fight India militarily, but also economically. Hit Bangalore and Mumbai hard, make any conflict have a massive economic cost

Rocket Force to hit high-value targets and long-distance one will be critical, and Kamikaze drones. Will work well alongside the air force.

 

[Yasser76]

Rocket Force to hit high-value targets and long-distance one will be critical, and Kamikaze drones. Will work well alongside the air force.

Rocket Force already being worked on it seems, need to mass produce kamikaze drones, like properly mass produce...

 

[Michael]

2) We cannot afford the amount of interceptor missiles Israel/GCC/US are using heavily, we need laser anti-missile systems at all vital bases from China asap

This is no joke.

These items can truly be purchased on AliExpress.

Russia is buying Chinese-made agricultural anti-wild boar radars from AliExpress to counter Ukrainian FPV drones—and the results are highly effective.

 

[hasssanali8998]

This is no joke.

These items can truly be purchased on AliExpress.

Russia is buying Chinese-made agricultural anti-wild boar radars from AliExpress to counter Ukrainian FPV drones—and the results are highly effective.

he meant interceptors for missiles not for drones ( which can be made fairly easily with hobbyist parts )

 

[Michael]

he meant for interceptors missiles not for drones ( which can be made fairly easily with hobbyist parts )

In the context of defense, "detection capability" takes precedence over "interception capability." You must first possess the ability to detect a threat—thereby securing sufficient time to react—before you can even begin to consider the issue of interception.

For an anti-missile system, the primary prerequisite is the possession of long-range early-warning radar. The ideal scenario is one in which you acquire intelligence—and begin deploying countermeasures—the very moment an adversary's missile is launched.

Given the current state of technological capabilities, the capacity of laser systems to intercept missiles remains highly limited. Such systems are typically employed to intercept low-speed airborne targets; their effectiveness against high-speed missiles is extremely limited—to the point of being virtually negligible. (It can blind missiles equipped with optical seekers, but it cannot destroy them.)

 

[Falcon26]

You are still making two flawed assumptions. First, you are talking about ISI as if it has the resources, reach, institutional freedom, and operational insulation to act like an all seeing state within the state, when even agencies like the CIA or NSA cannot deliver that kind of omniscience or control.

Intelligence services work under budget limits, political interference, poor interagency coordination, bad source validation, and imperfect local partners. So when you list every downstream failure of Afghan policy, militancy, border insecurity, and proxy blowback and then collapse all of it into “ISI failed,” you are effectively expecting one institution to perform as god.

Second, you’re comparing ISI to RAW or Mossad in a completely lopsided way. You’re looking at the small percentage of visible successes from those agencies and treating that as the whole picture, while looking at Pakistan through the lens of every visible failure and treating that as the whole picture too. That’s just sampling bias. You don’t see the failed ops, bad reads, missed targets, political restrictions, internal screwups, and strategic blunders on the other side with the same level of visibility, so naturally the comparison ends up distorted.

On Afghanistan specifically, it is also too convenient to treat long term Taliban blowback as if it proves a uniquely ISI specific analytical collapse. States repeatedly back actors they believe are useful in one phase and dangerous in another; that is not rare in intelligence history, it is almost the norm. The Americans did this repeatedly, the Soviets did it, the Iranians do it, and regional services across the Middle East have done the same. That does not excuse bad judgment, but it does mean the issue is larger than “they didn’t know what they were getting into.” Often they know the risks and still proceed because policymakers prioritize short term gains over long term stability.

And this is where your argument still stretches too far because you’re bundling together strategic miscalculation, policy failure, weak border control, lack of governance, inability to eliminate every hostile leader across the border, and even rogue former operatives, then dumping all of it into one basket called “ISI is ineffective.”

An intel service can be flawed, overstretched, and operating in a declining system without being useless. What you’re really showing is that you expect "near perfect" outcomes from an institution that doesn’t have "near perfect" tools, while giving foreign agencies credit based mostly on the curated highlights people hear about online.

A lot of intelligence agencies failed in Afghanistan, none more so than the ISI & CIA. America is thousands of miles away and so what happens in Afghanistan might not have direct bearings on US national security. But Pakistan does no have that luxury. Pakistan has to face direct consequences of whatever happens in that country.

And I don’t think the outcomes can just be reduced to the ISI prioritizing short term gains. And it is not a sample bias, if you were to examine the ISI conduct as whole throughout the Afghanistan saga, stretching decades, a pattern emerges that the ISI has consequently miscalculated.

It’s not unfair to blame the ISI, and it is beyond budgetary reasons that the ISI is why it is the way it is. Other intelligence agencies don’t indulge in political engineering and extracurricular activities the way the ISI does. So criticism is justified.

And the ISI might be doing a fantastic job behind the scenes, but none of us are privy to that. What we do know and have access to is the publicly available evidence and that evidence does not paint the ISI is a favorable light.

 

[Falcon26]

Well, there is an Indian naval officer still in Pakistani custody that can tell you about how good the ISI is, maybe ask him? Hopefully you can be "all ears" with him....

That’s not saying much. A Pakistani officer was also kidnapped in Nepal, in retaliation. Besides, how many RAW sponsored assassinations inside Pakistan have been carried out since? Not to mention the streak of terror attacks inside Pakistan that continues unabated.

 

[gamaji]

This is the part people forget. Mossad are deeply embedded inside Iran. Not even up for debate.

It's true that Mossad was deep inside Iranian society since Shah's time. But its footprint tremendously expanded horizontally when Iranians gave a free hand to Indian RAW. Large quantities of destructive material (missiles, drone parts, and other sensitive items) were smuggled into Iran through Chabahar port and Afghans were effectively inducted for transporting/processing/assembling these components/materials. Heck, reportedly they even created and operated many drone assembly workshops in Iran mostly manned by Indians and Afghans. The drones assembled in those workshops were used to eliminate top Iranian leadership and scientists.
The scale and lethality of Mossad's spy networks in Iran increased when that port was handed over to India. It is important to note that Iranians turned a blind eye on RAW's anti-Pakistan terrorist activities while using Iran as a springboard. Indian RAW returned the favor to Iranians by forging a solid alliance with Mossad and penetrating deeper into the Iran society and state machinery.

 

[safriz]

The biggest lesson is don't let your population get impressed by a foreign country more than their own.
Shia population of Pakistan are so impressed with iran that they rather turn against Pakistan in support of iran .
So many shia ulema are issuing such statements .

Thing is Iran became the "Holy land" onmy after 1979 bloody revolution.
I remember Iranian thighs and mini skirts from before that .
I also remember waves of Iranians immigrating to Pakistan to escape the the revolution as they didn't want to live under Khomeini.

But Pakistan Shia and Shia around the world existed before 1979 ?
You don't need to prove your loyalty for iran to be a Shia. You can be a Shia without that too.

Now go cry sectsrianism against me fir saying the harsh truth .