Technics 1210
Test Debutant
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2019
- Runs
- 15,317
Interesting article in The Sunday Times.
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India and Pakistan have stepped back from the brink but doubts over shifting red lines mean nuclear war is still a risk.
The conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has continued for more than 70 years, with neither side appearing willing to alter its position. When a military flare-up occurs, as happened on Tuesday, the threat of two nuclear powers going to war sets the world on edge.
The scope for catastrophe as a result of accidental escalation is certainly ever present, and the anger displayed on television and social media is undeniable, but the relationship between India and Pakistan is calibrated. The two sides comprehend each other.
Last week I was in New Delhi and Gujarat, where the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, started his political career, and in neither place did there seem to be much street-level anxiety about either war or Pakistan.
It was business as usual, with people going about their daily lives. This is partly because of the longevity of this frozen conflict, but also because of a shared language and culture dating from before 1947, when both nations were part of undivided India. There are, however, reasons for believing that new “red lines” are being set around the conflict, which make the outcome of future military encounters a lot less certain.
The latest outbreak of violence began when a suicide bomb in Jammu and Kashmir killed 40 members of an Indian paramilitary police force. Although Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, expressed doubt, it is highly likely that the attack was orchestrated by the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).
India hit back early on Tuesday with airstrikes, an escalation from previous forms of retaliation to terrorist attacks originating in Pakistan. India’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, said the bombing near Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province had eliminated “a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and groups of jihadis who were being trained for fidayeen [suicide] action”.
However, satellite imagery suggested that the thickly wooded pine forest contained few damaged buildings, and local people said the training camp run by JeM was no longer operational.
Pakistan responded with an air attack just across the “line of control” between the two countries, with its planes turning back quickly in a move that may have been intended to lure Indian fighter jets into an ambush.
An Indian pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, survived being shot down and was rescued by a Pakistani captain from being beaten by a mob. He was released in what Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, described as a “gesture of peace” towards India. The pilot was praised for his sang-froid, in particular for refusing to disclose anything more than his name, rank and religion when interrogated, and saying his Pakistani army captors “were thorough gentlemen”.
Modi, who has a general election coming up in a few months, operated on the risk-driven expectation that the two sides could engage in rhetorical war and a border conflict using air power, without further escalation.
The complication is that, although India has shown it will now strike back across the border at Pakistan-based jihadists if they launch big operations, there is no agreed determination at government-to-government level of where the threshold lies between conventional and nuclear conflict. Either side could believe the other is bluffing in the event of a standoff, or that they will not escalate.
Pakistan, in turn, knows that the asymmetric advantage it gained from possessing nuclear weapons is now under threat.
According to a retired senior Indian official who was closely involved in the relationship between the two countries in earlier decades, “each side’s motives and actions are clearly understood by professionals on both sides. But this clarity of mutual perception may be being eroded gradually on both sides by a very powerful public and media narrative that is totally self-contained and does not permit introduction of nuances.
“There is a good level of understanding on both sides, but the people with the understanding are not necessarily the ones taking decisions in crisis times.
“This is especially true of Pakistan. The good thing is that both militaries have a healthy respect for each other. I don’t think the system is ending so much as India is lowering its threshold. We don’t know yet how Pakistan is going to adjust to this without going up the escalatory ladder, which very clearly they don’t want.”
During previous phases of India-Pakistan conflict, the situation played out in a significantly different way. In 1999, after Pakistani troops had occupied Indian-controlled territory, India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, asked the US president, Bill Clinton, to put pressure on Pakistan to pull back, which he did successfully.
In 2001, after a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, India came close to launching an air attack but stepped back at the last moment. Again, after the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, prime minister Manmohan Singh decided that India, as the larger and more prosperous power, should absorb the blow. His government concentrated on using international diplomacy and the UN to limit Pakistan’s room for deniability over future attacks.
Today, the global equation is changing. President Donald Trump is disengaged from issues such as Kashmir. Modi’s nationalist rhetoric is combined with an effort to seek unexpected new strategic partners for India around the world.
Khan is also looking for new international allies and is reluctant to take direction from America. His handling of the crisis, setting up Pakistan as a peacemaker, drew on personal experience of India’s political, media and social elite. In each case, the assumptions that could be made in an earlier diplomatic and strategic era are in flux.
The principal danger now is not the present situation, but mutual uncertainty during a future crisis. The ability of a terrorist group to provoke international conflict has been raised. The temptation for India to hit back by air inside Pakistani territory, rather than by lobbing mortars across the line of control as has happened in the past, has increased. Crucially nobody knows where, precisely, the new red lines have been drawn.
As the Indian international relations scholar Srinath Raghavan observed last week: “The metaphor of escalation reminds us that once you climb on to an escalator, you can only get out at the top.”
Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/kashmirs-deadliest-threat-confusion-mvlhdwct0
-------------
India and Pakistan have stepped back from the brink but doubts over shifting red lines mean nuclear war is still a risk.
The conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has continued for more than 70 years, with neither side appearing willing to alter its position. When a military flare-up occurs, as happened on Tuesday, the threat of two nuclear powers going to war sets the world on edge.
The scope for catastrophe as a result of accidental escalation is certainly ever present, and the anger displayed on television and social media is undeniable, but the relationship between India and Pakistan is calibrated. The two sides comprehend each other.
Last week I was in New Delhi and Gujarat, where the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, started his political career, and in neither place did there seem to be much street-level anxiety about either war or Pakistan.
It was business as usual, with people going about their daily lives. This is partly because of the longevity of this frozen conflict, but also because of a shared language and culture dating from before 1947, when both nations were part of undivided India. There are, however, reasons for believing that new “red lines” are being set around the conflict, which make the outcome of future military encounters a lot less certain.
The latest outbreak of violence began when a suicide bomb in Jammu and Kashmir killed 40 members of an Indian paramilitary police force. Although Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, expressed doubt, it is highly likely that the attack was orchestrated by the Pakistan-based terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).
India hit back early on Tuesday with airstrikes, an escalation from previous forms of retaliation to terrorist attacks originating in Pakistan. India’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, said the bombing near Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province had eliminated “a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and groups of jihadis who were being trained for fidayeen [suicide] action”.
However, satellite imagery suggested that the thickly wooded pine forest contained few damaged buildings, and local people said the training camp run by JeM was no longer operational.
Pakistan responded with an air attack just across the “line of control” between the two countries, with its planes turning back quickly in a move that may have been intended to lure Indian fighter jets into an ambush.
An Indian pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, survived being shot down and was rescued by a Pakistani captain from being beaten by a mob. He was released in what Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, described as a “gesture of peace” towards India. The pilot was praised for his sang-froid, in particular for refusing to disclose anything more than his name, rank and religion when interrogated, and saying his Pakistani army captors “were thorough gentlemen”.
Modi, who has a general election coming up in a few months, operated on the risk-driven expectation that the two sides could engage in rhetorical war and a border conflict using air power, without further escalation.
The complication is that, although India has shown it will now strike back across the border at Pakistan-based jihadists if they launch big operations, there is no agreed determination at government-to-government level of where the threshold lies between conventional and nuclear conflict. Either side could believe the other is bluffing in the event of a standoff, or that they will not escalate.
Pakistan, in turn, knows that the asymmetric advantage it gained from possessing nuclear weapons is now under threat.
According to a retired senior Indian official who was closely involved in the relationship between the two countries in earlier decades, “each side’s motives and actions are clearly understood by professionals on both sides. But this clarity of mutual perception may be being eroded gradually on both sides by a very powerful public and media narrative that is totally self-contained and does not permit introduction of nuances.
“There is a good level of understanding on both sides, but the people with the understanding are not necessarily the ones taking decisions in crisis times.
“This is especially true of Pakistan. The good thing is that both militaries have a healthy respect for each other. I don’t think the system is ending so much as India is lowering its threshold. We don’t know yet how Pakistan is going to adjust to this without going up the escalatory ladder, which very clearly they don’t want.”
During previous phases of India-Pakistan conflict, the situation played out in a significantly different way. In 1999, after Pakistani troops had occupied Indian-controlled territory, India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, asked the US president, Bill Clinton, to put pressure on Pakistan to pull back, which he did successfully.
In 2001, after a terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, India came close to launching an air attack but stepped back at the last moment. Again, after the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, prime minister Manmohan Singh decided that India, as the larger and more prosperous power, should absorb the blow. His government concentrated on using international diplomacy and the UN to limit Pakistan’s room for deniability over future attacks.
Today, the global equation is changing. President Donald Trump is disengaged from issues such as Kashmir. Modi’s nationalist rhetoric is combined with an effort to seek unexpected new strategic partners for India around the world.
Khan is also looking for new international allies and is reluctant to take direction from America. His handling of the crisis, setting up Pakistan as a peacemaker, drew on personal experience of India’s political, media and social elite. In each case, the assumptions that could be made in an earlier diplomatic and strategic era are in flux.
The principal danger now is not the present situation, but mutual uncertainty during a future crisis. The ability of a terrorist group to provoke international conflict has been raised. The temptation for India to hit back by air inside Pakistani territory, rather than by lobbing mortars across the line of control as has happened in the past, has increased. Crucially nobody knows where, precisely, the new red lines have been drawn.
As the Indian international relations scholar Srinath Raghavan observed last week: “The metaphor of escalation reminds us that once you climb on to an escalator, you can only get out at the top.”
Patrick French is the author of India: A Portrait
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/kashmirs-deadliest-threat-confusion-mvlhdwct0
