The Free Press
The recent exchange of fire between India and Pakistan following an Islamist massacre of Indian tourists in the disputed territory of Kashmir has had the world holding its breath. And for very good reason: The countries have been rivals since they both became independent in 1947. And both possess nuclear weapons.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced his administration had negotiated a “FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE.” But the truce remains fragile, with both India and Pakistan reporting drone attacks by the other in Kashmir. The two countries have pulled back from the brink of all-out war, although there’s no way of knowing when or if the conflict could resume.
This is a subject that feels far away but is critically important given that both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and a long history of conflict. So we decided to call two people who know the region and its dangers quite well. Matthew Rosenberg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who spent nearly a decade as a foreign correspondent in South Asia. Rupa Subramanya is originally from India and spent a decade in the country writing about it for various international publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, and she’s currently a writer for The Free Press based in Ottawa. Together, they’ll dig in to how we arrived here and what’s next in this fast-moving story.
On what just happened:
Rupa: Last week, India launched strikes on multiple sites in Pakistan’s heartland, Punjab, and in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. This came in response to the deadly April 22 attack, in which Islamist terrorists killed 26 civilians, mostly Indian tourists, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. (Pakistan has denied any involvement in the attacks.)
India attacked deeply into Pakistan and destroyed what India described as critical terrorist infrastructure. India lost several advanced aircraft in the attack, but claimed to have killed roughly “100 terrorists” in response, according to the nation’s defense minister.
This began an air war between India and Pakistan late last week, a relentless back-and-forth that marked the most intense fighting since the two nations fought an all-out war in 1971. India said it had “neutralized” Pakistan’s efforts to attack its military installations using drones and missiles, including an attempt on the Golden Temple, the most sacred site in Sikhism. India also destroyed air defenses around Lahore, which analysts believe could be a prelude to a much larger war.
Matt: India and Pakistan have been here before, and they have managed to back down more times than not. That’s been especially true since both countries detonated nuclear weapons in 1998. There was the Kargil War in 1999 fought over a remote district in Ladakh on the eastern edge of Kashmir near the Chinese border. There was the 2001 terror attack on India’s Parliament by Pakistani militants and the ensuing military standoff that saw tens of thousands of soldiers mobilized along each side of the border. There were border skirmishes in Kashmir in 2019 that followed another attack by Pakistani militants, in that case on India’s paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force.
There also have been scores of attacks inside India by Pakistani militants over the past two decades that did not bring the countries anywhere near war. And some of the attacks were big and grabbed headlines around the world—I’m thinking about the 2005 bombings in Delhi on Diwali that killed 62 people; the 2006 train bombings in Mumbai in which seven bombs hidden in pressure cookers were set off in 11 minutes, killing 209 people; the 2008 assault on Mumbai during which 10 Pakistani militants sowed death and destruction across the city for three days, overwhelming Indian security forces and killing 175 people. The list goes on and on.
I was living in India during all three of those attacks and many more; there were so many that I cannot recall them all without googling and looking up my old clips. But cooler heads prevailed throughout, especially in India. Part of that was the result of India’s very real emergence as a global economic power. It simply had too much to lose from a shooting war. India’s leaders at the time, from the Congress Party, wanted to “decouple” their country from Pakistan—they wanted the country to be talked about for its growing prosperity and not as the larger, more populous half of a perennially unstable subcontinent.
India’s Hindu-national current government is far more belligerent and far more willing to press Delhi’s claims to Kashmir—it revoked the region’s semiautonomous status in 2019 and made it just like any other part of the country, for instance. India has also significantly upgraded its military, especially over the past five or six years. It acquired new equipment, like fighter jets from France and high-end Russian mobile antiaircraft batteries. Pakistan has done the same, buying top Chinese gear. So we’ve now got a better armed subcontinent than we’ve seen in a generation or two.
On the origins of the conflict:
Rupa: The roots of the current conflict go back to the partition of British India in 1947, when the British divided the country by religion into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Pakistan’s founder Muhammed Ali Jinnah argued that Muslims needed their own state, and they wouldn’t be safe in a Hindu-dominated India.
What complicated the partition were princely states, run by former Mughal Empire royals. They were asked to pick which country they wished to join. The ruler of Kashmir, despite having a Muslim majority, decided to join India. The two nations have since fought several wars over the territory.
Both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmir. The de facto border, known as the Line of Control, is not internationally recognized because the United Nations still views the territory as disputed. But the Line of Control separates the areas of Kashmir under Indian jurisdiction and the areas controlled by Pakistan.
Matt: To be clear, this is not one of those situations where two countries claim some divided territory but are content to live with the status quo. India and Pakistan take Kashmir very seriously, even in the smallest of ways. Back when I was living in India, if a publication like, say, The Economist featured a map that showed the Line of Control—the de facto border that divides the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of the territory—the issue would arrive a few days late because Indian customs authorities insisted on going through every single magazine and hand-stamping the map in each one with big, black text that said the image did not reflect the real border, which of course, in their view, included all of Kashmir in India.
A Brit I knew, I think he worked for Reuters, had to beg Indian customs to let his shipment of household goods into the country because they found his son’s globe, which of course showed Kashmir divided. The customs agent resolved the problem by taking a Sharpie to the thing and blacking out the Line of Control.
Comical, yes, and I realize I am dating myself here by talking about print magazines and globes.
But the point holds: Kashmir is something both countries remain very willing to fight over.
The terror attack that led to the standoff:
Rupa: On April 22, while Vice President J.D. Vance was visiting India with his family, five armed Islamic militants dressed in military-style uniforms and carrying AK-47s opened fire on civilians in Anantnag, a well-known tourist spot in Indian-administered Kashmir, killing 26 people. The group that claimed responsibility for the attack, The Resistance Front, is widely believed to be a proxy for the better-known Lashkar-e-Taiba, or LeT, which carried out the infamous 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.
The April 22 attack was the deadliest since that strike in Mumbai. In April, the attackers specifically targeted Hindu men, demanding identification, forcing some to strip from the waist down to check for circumcision, and in other cases, ordering them to recite the Islamic Kalima, a declaration of faith, to determine their religion. Those identified as Hindus were executed on the spot. Several of the victims were newlywed men, gunned down at point-blank range in front of their wives.
Matt: You will notice a through line in nearly all the cross-border incidents we’ve mentioned: They were all set off by Pakistani Islamist militants launching terror attacks in India. That’s not a coincidence.
Pakistan first used Islamist militants to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. We all know how that kind of thing tends to go. Surprise! The militant groups, like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, soon enough decided to start striking other parts of India and blowing up civilians, too.
Pakistan, of course, denies all of this. It’s maybe the worst-kept secret in South Asia, and yet Pakistani officials will tell you with a straight face that they don’t know nuttin’ about no militants. And then the leader of one group or another will appear publicly at some Pakistani government or military event. Brazen is the polite way of putting it.
But we’re seeing the consequences today. Two nuclear-armed powers, home to roughly 20 percent of the world’s population, are deploying jets and drones and firing missiles at each other in large part because Pakistan’s military has been playing footsie with Islamist terror groups for decades, empowering and protecting them.
If this all sounds familiar, it is: Pakistan played the same game with the Taliban and, to an extent, al-Qaeda during the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan was officially a U.S. ally, yet parts of military and spy service were actively supporting the very same militants fighting American and allied forces. It didn’t end so well for us.
The risks and odds of this becoming an all-out war:
Rupa: There is a risk given that Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, is a noted India-hater, and he is the real power in Pakistan, not the prime minister. A few days before the terrorist attacks in Anantnag, Munir gave a speech in Islamabad when he said, “We are different from Hindus in every possible aspect,” and referred to Kashmir as Pakistan’s “jugular vein,” and “we will not forget it.” Meanwhile, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is hawkish, and many Indians would love nothing better than to eradicate any threat posed by Pakistan. A former foreign minister of India has proposed redrawing the de facto border, and “teach Pakistan a lesson for all times.”
I was living in Mumbai during the 2008 attacks, and it was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life, as the violence unfolded not far from where I lived. For many of us, it felt like our own 9/11. At the time, India held back from a major response, but it’s clear, those days of India turning the other cheek are gone.
Matt: It may be true that the U.S. has limited power to control the conflict, but a war between the two is everyone’s business because of the risk of a nuclear exchange. Each country is believed to have about 170 weapons apiece, more than enough to inflict massive carnage and risk nuclear fallout spreading far beyond the subcontinent.
There’s also another factor here: the war in the Middle East. Indian hawks have definitely noticed Israel’s successes against Hezbollah, and that the rest of the world is not baying for Israel to stop fighting in Gaza. I have to imagine at least a few of them are thinking now is the right moment to teach Pakistan a lesson and, as strategists like to say in their antiseptic way, “reestablish deterrence.”
Rupa: In the event of a full-blown ground war, India has overwhelming military superiority in ground forces both technologically and logistically. The two countries have fought numerous wars, with India winning all of them. But if it’s an air war, Pakistan now has advanced Chinese missiles that apparently knocked several Indian advanced fighter jets out of the air.
And both countries are nuclear armed. India has a “no first strike” policy, whereas Pakistan has been more equivocal and does not have an explicit “no first strike” policy, which raises the stakes.
There’s also a war of perceptions. The two countries, which co-emerged from undivided British India in 1947, couldn’t be more different today. After partition, India opted to become a secular multiparty democracy, while Pakistan, which started off as a democracy, quickly degenerated into an Islamic state ruled either officially or unofficially by the military, with frequent coups and assassinations. India is the world’s fastest economy—its economy is ten times the size of Pakistan’s—whereas Pakistan’s economy has atrophied and has been kept afloat by IMF bailouts. On Friday, the IMF approved the first release of its $7 billion bailout package for Pakistan.
Pakistan, over the decades, has given sanctuary to well-known terrorists. Most notably for Americans, it’s where Osama bin Laden was living before he was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.
For India, it’s important that the world realizes that this is an unequal conflict, fought between a democratic state and one that can only be called a fragile state, which harbors terrorists and has a history of using terrorists to advance its goals.
Matt: Not to sound like a bleeding heart, but does anyone really win a war? Sure, assuming a conflict does not turn nuclear, India would probably dominate. But India has a far more robust economy and is a far larger part of the global economy. Is a war going to help grow India’s prosperity or set back what has been a remarkable transformation in the past quarter century?
I am not sure I would call Pakistan an “Islamist state.” It still has elections, and its politics can be as raucous as India’s. Its media, too—all the chyrons and graphics and shouting on Indian and Pakistani TV news channels are enough to make you think you might have a stroke. They may be enemies, but they were born in the same South Asian culture.
That said, Pakistan’s most successful politicians are very real nationalists, and they know that the real power resides with the military. The old saw about Pakistan being a military that happens to have a country still holds true. If Pakistan managed to hold its own in war, it would probably result in the military having an even firmer grip over the country. That would most definitely not be a win for the hundreds of millions of ordinary Pakistanis who mostly just want the kind of peace and prosperity that everyone else in the world does, and that many more of their Indian neighbors enjoy.
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