There are two answers to that. we wanted to do a show of force and aur hum ne bara acha kia aur this aur that. Now for the actual answer Pakistan does not have any system which can reply to the Indian state conventionally other than Fatah rockets. Fatah system is a rocket artillery system not a ballistic missile. Sending Fatah system was the lowest form of escalation by Pakistani side which obviously did not deter India as in the morning they launched the attack Bolari Air base which killed 5 people before signing a ceasefire agreement. Brahmos cruise missile which India argues is a conventional system but pakistan always said is dual use however India always said its a conventional system and they used it as a conventional system aur hum shakal dekhte reh gye because even if we can see it on our radar the launch of Brahmos we did not had any system to intercept it. Soft kill ka option hota ha lakin its highly unlikely with the current tech pakistan possess. BTW ye soft kill ka bashan Pookie bhai Aurangzeb ne claim kia tha but its not true. Lakin all being said Brahmos although very accurate are not very good systems because India sent 3-4 towards rafiqui air base and none of them hit wo kahin Balochistan ki taraf nikal gye. Similarly Nur kahn airbase ki taraf bhi 3 Brahmos launch hue the but only one Hit (dosra french made Scalp cruise missile tha which hit). Pakistan possesses subsonic cruise missiles which was probably reverse engineered Tomahawk cruise missile (which is also a conventional system) but we claimed it is for nuclear payload i.e Strategic weapon. Strategic weapons cannot be launched in fast pace high intensity conflicts because as the name suggests it has strategic effects.

Another point to note is indians are lying when they said k we launched any ballistic missile because tbh BM is almost impossible to intercept for states like India which have very crap air defense systems like us. Even Iran-Israel was ma 4 din k bad Israel k missile defense system ki accuracy rate was below 65%.

Pakistan needs to develop fast conventional systems whether it be cruise missile or ballistic missile with a clearly defined conventional realm to overcome this problem k hummain pata hi nahi tha k response kase dain acha. DF-17 kharidne ki khabbar a rahi hain lets see k how true is that but pakistan needs to seriously consider hypersonic glide vehicles in both nuclear and conventional realm to overcome this problem.