A year after Op Sindoor, Asim Munir at it again, threatens 'painful' retaliation

Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir used the first anniversary of the 2025 conflict with India to issue a fresh warning, saying any future action against Pakistan would trigger "widespread, dangerous and painful" consequences.

In Short

• Pakistan's Army Chief Asim Munir warns India against future misadventures
• Threat claims consequences would be widespread, dangerous, and painful
• Munir calls past India strikes failed attempts to test Pakistan's resolve

Exactly a year after getting drubbed by India during Operation Sindoor, Pakistan’s Chief of Defence Staff and Chief of Army Staff, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is at it again, threatening India on Sunday that any future “misadventure” against Pakistan would bring “extremely widespread, dangerous, far-reaching and painful” consequences for the enemy.

Munir issued the threat while attending an event at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi as the chief guest, in the presence of Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Babar Sidhu and Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Naveed Ashraf, reported Pakistani newspaper Dawn.

Addressing the gathering, Munir said, “Our enemies should know that if any attempt is made in the future to carry out a misadventure against Pakistan, then the impact of war would not be limited, but extremely widespread, dangerous, far-reaching and painful.” At the start of his speech, he said the day was a “source of pride” for Pakistan, its people, and the armed forces.

Munir claimed that the “enemy made a failed attempt to test our resolve by violating the sovereignty and territory” of Pakistan between the intervening nights of May 6-7 and May 10, adding that it was answered “with full national unity and military force”.

The Army chief further claimed that the conflict between the two sides “was not merely a traditional war fought between two countries or militaries, but in reality, it was a decisive marka (battle) between two ideologies, in which, thanks to Allah, the truth won and falsehood was defeated.”

“The false flag operations of 2001, 2008, 2016 and 2019 are a testament that even in the past, India has made failed attempts to impose an illegitimate war on Pakistan and...achieve narrow-minded, long-term political and military objectives through allegations, exaggeration, warmongering and misleading imagination of limited aggression.”

Reiterating his earlier warning, Munir once again said that if “Pakistan’s enemies” undertook any such move in the future, the effects of war would not remain limited.

However, this was not Munir's first threat to New Delhi in the past year. Last December, after being elevated to the post of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), Munir warned New Delhi against harbouring any “delusion” about Pakistan’s battle readiness, promising a “swifter, more severe, and more intense” response. Going a step further, he said he would target Indian infrastructure and dams along the Indus River.

In August, while delivering a speech at a US diaspora event, he reportedly said, “We are a nuclear nation. If we think we are going down, we'll take half the world down with us.”

Operation Sindoor was launched in response to the Pakistan-sponsored terror attack in Pahalgam in April last year. On May 7, India’s overnight strikes decimated nine terror camps in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

Then came Pakistan’s response and drone attacks. But by May 10, a day before Islamabad dialled Delhi for a ceasefire, India had brought Pakistan to its knees by conducting precision strikes on its military assets and infrastructure, including airbases and radar sites.

- Ends