Bilateral confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan have often failed to prevent escalation. Critically evaluate with recent examples.

Confidence-building measures (CBMs) such as the India–Pakistan Agreement on Advance Notice on Military Exercises, Manoeuvres and Troop Movements (April 1991) were meant to stop accidents from becoming wars [1]. The record shows they limit damage, but rarely deter provocation.

Evidence of failure

• Rules breached in practice: On 15 September 2026, PNS Hunain's dangerous overtaking manoeuvre caused a collision with INS Kolkata in the North Arabian Sea — termed by India a gross violation of Article 10, which bars naval units from closing within three nautical miles in international waters [1][3].
• No verification machinery: the pact provides no joint inquiry, arbitration or third-party check. India's only recourse was summoning Pakistan's Chargé d'Affaires the next day [3]. Each navy thus judges its own case, and the fact is never settled.
• Narrow scope: Article 10 fixes distance, not give-way and overtaking duties, which rest on the IMO's COLREGs, 1972 [4]. The pact was built for announced exercises, not the near-permanent deployments that now keep both navies in the same waters.
• Failure at the strategic level: this architecture did not avert the 2025 escalation culminating in Operation Sindoor [5].

The other side of the ledger

• Armed warships of hostile neighbours collided, yet no shots were fired; within a day the dispute moved to the Ministry of External Affairs, not to the guns [3].
• A written rule gave India an agreed standard to invoke; absent Article 10, the episode is merely an insult [1].
• Sister pacts, including the 1991 Agreement on Prevention of Air Space Violations, remain operative three decades on [2].

CBMs of this vintage do not prevent incidents; they convert incidents into protests — a modest but real firebreak. The sharper conclusion is therefore not that CBMs failed, but that they lack verification. Modernising rather than abandoning them — a direct navy-to-navy hotline usable while ships are still in contact, a protocol extending advance notice to routine patrol areas, and explicit mutual acceptance of COLREGs [4] — would give both states what protest alone cannot: a shared test to apply before the next collision.