I think we're in broad agreement on the more nuanced approach, but I personally assign far less relevance to the outcomes themselves from these perceptions which we're discussing. I think perhaps you might be inadvertently assigning too much blame on these perception of enemies and their expected reactions, in place of otherwise inexplicable behavior which you are right to point out. In simple words, you're asking why would Musharraf think this way of India's response, why had lessons not been learnt from previous conflicts, and therefore part of the equation as you rightly point out is sense of dominance of will over the enemy, I see it that too but I think that plays a very small part of the thought-process, there are other better explanations.
I also picked up something in this conversation, that if we allow some introspection, adds an important element. I believe you are perhaps inserting this superiority hypothesis, where other relevant explanations might actually fit better if we were aware of them. I already discussed the leadership issues that led to these decisions. On the question of why lessons hadn't been learnt by 99, I would argue that on top of what was discussed before, Musharraf also believed that an escalated war between two fully-fledged nuclear powers would not happen.
In both cases my explanation and your observations are pointing to Musharraf's faulty expectations and wrongly calling India's bluff, I assign the blame far more to leadership failure and incorrect assessment of the geopolitical and strategic situations. I think in your initial thoughts you perhaps did not know of the exact reasons why these faulty assumptions were made by our side, and are therefore inadvertently reading too much into the one thing which you have no doubt picked up from learning about Pakistanis, which are the aforementioned assumptions of superiority in will over the enemy. This is the thing which I picked up after some introspection, sometimes when we are unaware of the full picture our minds take what we know, and what also fits logically, and adds it to the picture to fill the gaps that we otherwise can't explain. Thus while I understand your points and don't dismiss them at all, they certainly have gravity, perhaps you and I are differently identifying their significance. To speak more simply but with more clarity, I might be saying that your hypothesis explains 5% of the observed outcomes, whereas you might be thinking it's 20%. But we broadly agree that it's a factor, it's there, and our lists of variables and observations are also the same.
