Umer Farooq
There are three reasons Indian belligerence should not be discounted as empty threats. Indians have been amassing modern weaponry from at least three main sources, First, it bought $20 billion worth of weapons from the United States in the past five years. Its other sources of weapons are France and Israel. The weapon-buying spree is so massive that it might have fed the notion of decisive conventional military superiority over Pakistan into the heads of Indian military planners. This is what had happened with Pakistani military planners before the 1965 war: They were convinced of the notion that American military weapons that Pakistan started getting after entering the military alliance with Washington in the early 1950s gave them a slight edge over the Indian military. And they considered it a small window of opportunity that would close after Indians would also started getting weapons from multiple sources including Washington and Moscow. We can safely assume that Indians would be suffering from the same syndrome of military superiority after procuring American and Israeli weapons that we had suffered before 1965.
The second reason we should not discount Indian theatrics as empty threats is the fact that the international taboo against the use of force by militarily powerful states against relatively militarily weaker states has evaporated into thin air after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. In these terms, Pakistan is not militarily a weak state. But when international military experts compare India in conventional military terms they always give India a decisive edge. In the post-Cold War era, this taboo was repeatedly broken by powerful countries like the United States, Russia, and Israel. It’s only that Pakistan assisted the United States in the invasion of one military non-entity, Afghanistan, and came close to sending its troops to Iraq—another militarily weak country that Washington invaded recently. Now that invading militarily weak countries has almost become a norm in international politics, Pakistan should not take the developing political and military situation lightly. It is not difficult for us to see that India has been in a deep embrace of Washington, Tele Viv, and Paris—its three main arms suppliers. These are not simply arms suppliers for India, they are providing political support to New Delhi when it sees itself as the bulwark against Islamic terrorism, which it sees emanating from across its western borders.
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