Akhilesh Pillalamarri
India and Pakistan engaged in a military conflict between May 7-10 following a terrorist attack in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir on April 22, which killed 25 tourists and a local pony handler. India subsequently suspended the India-Pakistan Indus Waters Treaty, which governs the sharing of waters of the Indus River between the countries. It then launched strikes on Pakistan on May 7 in order to target terrorist infrastructure it believed was responsible for the April 22 Pahalgam attack.
While the precise nature of the link between the terrorist attack and the Pakistani state are not known, a report from the Brookings Institution states that “the Pakistani military has allowed a welter of militant and terrorist groups to operate largely unimpeded on its soil…the patterns of state cooperation with these groups are strikingly visible, but the details of any single operational partnership are often difficult to trace.”
After four days of fighting, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire — which the United States claimed to have brokered — on May 10. Much ink has been spilled about what the conflict reveals about India’s and Pakistan’s military capabilities, though much of what happened is still opaque, clouded by the fog of war, or misinformation and disinformation.
What is known is that India demonstrated clear, but not overwhelming, military superiority over Pakistan, as would be expected on the basis of its size, military spending, and economy. In particular, India demonstrated it had the technological capability to strike targets all over Pakistan with precision and to defeat Pakistani missiles and drones.
On the other hand, Pakistan performed better than expected, particularly on the diplomatic and military fronts: it shot down several Indian aircraft, while preventing any country from taking India’s line in condemning it. Even countries that India has cultivated close ties with, such as the United States and Japan, took balanced stances. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump equated India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, despite the long, warm relationship between Modi and Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment