India, May 17 -- Even as a war reporter who cut my teeth in journalism with frontline coverage of the Kargil conflict in 1999, the scenes I witnessed on the ground during Operation Sindoor were unprecedented, surreal, and harbingers of what modern warfare will look like. Travelling by road through Punjab and Jammu - the airports were shut - one had to adjust to driving blind through precautionary blackouts. If I looked up, I would often see balls of orange fire light up the thick, black sky. Often this would be accompanied by the sound of explosions or the rat-a-tat of distant firing. When it was further away, you could only see the silent sliver of a red streak across the skyline. Of course, it soon became evident that this was India's fabulous integrated air defence system bringing down Pakistani drones, and in some cases, missiles, before they could hit any target, civilian or military in India. By now, there is enough satellite imagery coupled with the very granular and effective military briefing by India's armed forces to know the scale of damage India inflicted on Pakistan's air defence systems and air bases, including Nur Khan, Sargodha and Rahim Yar Khan. This was the tipping point that flipped the Pakistan military and left them with no option but to call India for a ceasefire. From burnt transport planes to destroyed hangars, from a hit on the entrance to a nuclear storage facility to depleting stocks, Pakistan could not withstand the precision strikes by India, despite China being a ghost in the battlefield with its supply of weapons. Notwithstanding US President Donald Trump's increasingly bizarre statements, it is obvious that without India's unambiguous military triumph in what was a four-day war, Operation Sindoor could have been much more protracted. Diplomacy would be leveraged on the back of these gains. On the morning of May 10, I ran out of my hotel in Jammu at 5 am to the sound of explosions. Pakistan was now shamelessly targeting civilian areas and places of worship. The roof of more than one house had been blown away. Through the rubble, one could see the Indian tricolour, hoisted on the top floor of the now destroyed house, standing tall. I spoke to the residents who had been shaken awake by the bombing. A distraught mother held onto her two small children and through tears thanked the armed forces that she was still alive. Several others were injured and shifted to hospital. Window panes had been blown out of their frames and there were shards of glass everywhere. In more than one home, there were craters in the walls. Ten minutes away, the roof of a house inside the temple complex of Aap Shambu Mandir, right near the main entrance, had been blown away. A resident told me that air raid sirens had saved lives; Saturday mornings are especially crowded with devotees walking down the very path on which projectiles had fallen. An Army veteran told me, "This is now an all-out war." A few hours later in a border village in Jammu, I was reporting on a giant Pakistani mortar shell that had landed right inside the home of a local farmer, when news came of a halt in hostilities (after the call from the Pakistan DGMO). It is important to underline that the word ceasefire has never been used by India. It is purely Trumpian nomenclature. The American president's self-aggrandising statements rooted in post-truth claims (such as a 1,000-year war between India and Pakistan) are grating. All they do is bust the myth that a Trump administration was going to be better for India than the one headed by his predecessor, Joe Biden. There is no American politician or media outlet that can explain the obvious: Why should the US taking out Osama bin Laden from under Pakistan's nose in Abbottabad be considered a heroic military act, but Operation Sindoor cast as an act of military aggression? India's new security doctrine has changed the rules of the game. But don't expect two things to change - Western hypocrisy and Pakistan's perfidy. I joined a show hosted by Piers Morgan, the UK broadcaster, to face off against Hina Rabbani Khar, former foreign minister of Pakistan. I asked her just two questions. One, did she consider the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad to be terrorist groups? Yes, or no? And if yes, why have they been operating in Pakistan with impunity? And two, if America's Operation Osama was kosher, why not accept Operation Sindoor - which started by targeting terror bases alone - for what it was? I said Pakistan should thank India for destroying the headquarters of Hafiz Saeed and Masood Azhar, provided Hina and her country were ready to concede what these groups stood for. She deflected, denied, whined and finally fled the show without once calling the LeT and Jaish terrorist outfits. To Morgan I said, as I do to colleagues and friends in Western television networks and media platforms, Indians are bored and infuriated by the bothsideism of your storytelling. This is not about the Kashmir 'dispute' as you go on calling it, falling back on lazy tropes from 30 years ago. If anything, after the devastated families of those killed by the terrorists, Kashmiris are the one hardest hit by what Pakistan did in Pahalgam. This is about India's right to respond to institutional State-backed, jihadist terrorism. At the very least, whatever rights you allow yourselves as nuclear-powered nations, you will need to concede to us. India has made it clear that the next terror attack could well trigger kinetic action again. And again. As we discovered this time, that fight will sometimes have to be fought alone. The strongest way to shut down naysayers is to accelerate growth, strengthen the economy and stay united. Become too powerful to even attempt to be lectured to; a better version of China because we are a democracy; a new version of America, without being America....