A judicious strategy would be to restrict ourselves to nuclear risk reduction and confidence-building. More can be done, beginning perhaps with a formal pact on non-deployment. Nuclear war is ruled out. No rational policy-maker on either side can possibly conceive of political gain from nuclear conflict. We should limit our worries to the possibility of accidental war, e.g., war caused by malfunctioning computers.
Conventional war is equally unlikely.
The Pakistanis pretended not to be involved, while India threw everything into the fray, but only on its own territory. At Kargil, we were shockingly careless, a lapse we can avoid in future. More important, Pakistan was bound to fail in Kargil. Nawaz and his generals could not risk a full-scale conventional war and had to restrict themselves to a partial military effort. Fighting on its own territory, India was able to deploy massive force.