I hope I am not biased but it really does not seem comparable to the border situation in Kashmir where both sides are showing aggression towards each other and weighing the costs of going to an all out war.
The Western consensus about the outcome of the invasion that of a rout.
> both sides are showing aggression towards each other and weighing the costs of going to an all out war
Outside an Indo-Chinese land war, the only paths for industrial war emerge from New Delhi. Either in reacting to a miscalculation by Islamabad. Or because India's going imperial. The latter would be shockingly like Russia invading China in both scale and capacity to get drawn out by outside backers.
Indian leadership hasn't been going on TV prior to the Pahalgam attack and putting out bellicose statements like Hindus and Muslims can't live together - Pakistan did. Also India isn't stupid to invade a nuclear armed country with a first-use policy.
The above incursions are the usual dance we see with India and Pakistan (and China), that we see every few years. Except this time, Pakistan triggered it by attacking civilians, just like 26/11, while even Indian support of Pakistani terrorists such as the Balochistan Liberation Army has never led to a large-scale slaughter of civilians in Pakistan.
Pakistan messed up big time, they'll chalk up the L, it will be a few tense words for some time, and then things will get back to where they were before.
Underlaying this line of reasoning is an assumption that Pakistan makes coordinated, coherent, and more or less rational decisions. But Pakistan is run by the military with civilian leadership being a farcical fig leaf. They routinely fall into prolonged periods of martial law, and arresting former prime ministers is the norm. What's more, Pakistan's military is divided into numerous factions which are operationally independent and have their own internal politics going on.
Therefore, any analysis of the form "[hypothesis] is unlikely because it would be irrational and uncoordinated" is extremely dubious.
On a side note, the Gulf states being involved in negotiations pretty much means the end of the US as a diplomatic hegemon for the region.
It was such a great coincidence they had a huge army trained and armed by the west at the same time.
Then leading up to the actual invasion (Which US intelligence called weeks in advance, don't know why everyone is insisting that it wasn't expected, maybe they should reconsider who they pay attention to) the US was convinced it would be a steamroll fight and then Ukraine would run an insurgency, so they provided thousands more anti-tank missile launchers.
It wasn't until Ukraine had mostly stopped the invasion convoy that the west took them seriously, and it took even longer for the west to start providing supplies.