On March 18, with the Iran war consuming most of Washington's attention, Tulsi Gabbard presented the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee. The document named Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran as nations developing missiles capable of striking the American homeland — then added Pakistan. Pakistan, whose prime minister had met Trump in Washington just weeks earlier and called him a “man of peace,” is not at war, not under sanctions, and had not previously featured on lists of countries Washington treats as nuclear threats.
Islamabad was offended. New Delhi read it with quiet interest, for reasons that had nothing to do with ICBMs.
What Gabbard Actually Said
Gabbard told the committee: “Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan have been researching and developing an array of novel, advanced, or traditional missile delivery systems with nuclear and conventional payloads, that put our Homeland within range.”
On Pakistan specifically, she added: “Pakistan's long-range ballistic missile development potentially could include ICBMs with the range capable of striking the Homeland.”
Strip the headline away and what remains is a hedged projection about a possible future trajectory, not a present-tense threat. “Potentially could include” is doing most of the work in that sentence. Gabbard is not saying Pakistan has ICBMs, or is actively building them. She is saying the programme, if it continues on its current path, could eventually produce systems with intercontinental reach — a distinction that most of the coverage in South Asia did not survive long enough to explain.
What is harder to wave away is the accompanying projection. According to US intelligence estimates in the same assessment, the total number of missiles capable of reaching American territory is expected to rise from roughly 3,000 today to over 16,000 by 2035. Pakistan is part of that growth calculation, which is at least partly why it appeared in the document alongside the others.
Why Experts Are Pushing Back
Former Pakistani ambassador to Washington Jalil Abbas Jilani rejected Gabbard's framing as “not grounded in strategic reality,” arguing Pakistan's nuclear posture has always been calibrated against India, not designed for global reach. Former High Commissioner to India Abdul Basit described the Russia-China comparison as “self-serving and groundless.”
On geography alone, they have a case. Reaching the continental United States from Pakistani territory means covering more than 11,200 kilometres. That range is currently achievable only by five countries with confirmed ICBM programmes: the US, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom. India is still years away from that threshold with the Agni-VI. Pakistan has no equivalent in testing. A January 2025 US government briefing cited by the Arms Control Association put Pakistan's path to genuinely long-range ballistic missiles at “several years to a decade away,” and nothing in Gabbard's testimony suggests that estimate has moved.
So the pushback holds up — technically, for now. What it does not answer is why the trajectory is being watched closely enough to land Pakistan in a formal threat assessment at all.
The ARFC: Pakistan's Real Missile Story
On August 13, 2025, three months after a four-day military conflict with India, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced the Army Rocket Force Command — the ARFC — at a ceremony in Islamabad. The framing was deliberate: Pakistan had identified operational gaps in May, and this was how it intended to close them.
Modelled on China's PLA Rocket Force, the ARFC consolidates Pakistan's conventional missile and rocket assets under a single unified command. Analysts and officials have not been coy about who it is aimed at. Current systems include the Fatah-1 guided rocket at 140 km, the Fatah-2 at 400 km, and the Fatah-4 cruise missile, which recorded 750 km in its first post-ARFC test in September 2025, per Pakistani military statements. These are conventional weapons with no intercontinental reach.
May 2025 made the need for all of this visible. India struck Mushaf airbase in Sargodha and Noor Khan in Rawalpindi — two of Pakistan's most significant military installations. Pakistan's ability to respond with comparable precision at that depth was limited, and both sides understood the implication. The ARFC was built to fill that gap: a dedicated conventional precision-strike command occupying the space between short-range tactical rockets and the nuclear threshold, which neither side had any interest in crossing.
Gabbard's concern, seen in that context, is not without basis. A country that fights a four-day war, identifies its vulnerabilities in real time, and within ninety days stands up a new military command with Chinese institutional support is doing something intelligence agencies are paid to notice. The question is not whether that warrants attention. It is whether it warrants placing Islamabad beside Moscow in the same sentence.
What This Means for India
India's interest in this testimony runs deeper than the ICBM framing. A formal US threat assessment that names Pakistan alongside adversarial powers gives New Delhi something it has pursued diplomatically for years: an American document positioning Pakistan's missile expansion as a concern that extends beyond South Asia. India has had to make that argument on its own for a long time. Now it has a citation.
The more immediate calculation, though, involves the ARFC itself. May 2025 confirmed what planners had long theorised: conventional missile exchanges between two nuclear-armed neighbours can happen, do happen, and leave a trail of satellite-verified crater evidence on both sides. Pakistan institutionalising that capability under a dedicated command — with Chinese backing, growing range, and a recent war as its design brief — changes what India needs to account for in its force posture. Its Integrated Battle Groups now face a more capable conventional strike threat from the west. The Agni-VI programme and the multi-layered national defence architecture announced after May are, in part, calibrated responses to exactly this kind of pressure.
Editorial View · Santhosh Vishwamitra
The Headline Was About ICBMs. The Real Story Is What Pakistan Built After May 2025.
Putting Pakistan in a list with Russia, China, and North Korea has diplomatic consequences that go well beyond what the hedged language in the assessment actually supports. Islamabad knows it — senior former ambassadors do not go on record with foreign media within hours of a US intelligence release unless someone in the foreign ministry made a phone call. That is not a news response. That is a communications operation, and the speed of it reflects how damaging the framing is regardless of what the footnotes say.
What is getting buried in the argument about ICBMs is the more uncomfortable point. Pakistan built the ARFC ninety days after a war that exposed real gaps in its ability to strike back with precision. It did this fast, with Chinese help, driven by a very specific operational lesson from a conflict that actually happened. That is not a hypothetical programme for intelligence analysts to speculate about. That is a government responding to a military failure with institutional urgency — and that is exactly what a threat assessment should flag.
Whether Pakistan can ever hit the American mainland is, honestly, not the point. The point is what a better-armed, more capable Pakistani rocket force does to a region where two nuclear states have already exchanged conventional missile strikes once and where the margin between a precision hit and a signal that gets misread as something nuclear is not as wide as anyone would like. Gabbard's document pointed at that. Most people read the wrong line.
The Bottom Line
Pakistan does not have ICBMs. It has something more immediately relevant: a new dedicated missile command, built after a real war, growing fast, and pointed squarely at a neighbour with its own expanding arsenal. The US homeland is not the target. South Asian stability is the variable.
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Santhosh Vishwamitra
Founder of
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