Pakistan, April 13 -- Operation Ghazab Lil Haq will likely be remembered less for a single strike and more for what it changed in the psychology of the western front: Pakistan stopped treating cross-border pressure as an "acceptable level of pain" that must be absorbed quietly while the country tries to fix everything else. For years, raids, fire assaults on posts, militant movement, and the sense that violence could be switched on and off from across the line acted like a steady tax on security, on investor confidence, and on diplomacy. The operation's first and biggest success is that it signalled a ceiling to that tolerance, and it did so in a way that looked organised rather than emotional.

A key difference this time was consistency....