India-Pakistan War Could Be “Catastrophic”

By
M Dowling
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3
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According to the sometimes reliable Wall Street Journal, Pakistan threatened to hit back after strikes overnight by India, as the two nuclear-armed neighbors faced off in the wake of a deadly attack on tourists last month that New Delhi blamed on Islamabad.

Tourists, including honeymooners, were forced to strip and recite Islamic prayers to prove they were Muslim. If they couldn’t, they were slaughtered on the spot.

India has said the militants were associated with a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group behind the Mumbai attacks in 2008.

Both nations are nuclear.

The Two Nations Are Calibrating Their Moves

The WSJ thinks that “Despite the uptick in violence, and cross-border shelling Wednesday, both sides appeared to be calibrating their moves to avoid a descent into full-blown conflict after decades of relative peace between the rivals.”

India said Wednesday that retaliatory strikes on nine locations across Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir were “focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature” and were also based in part on intelligence that further attacks, like the one which killed 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir in April, were imminent.

Kashmir is on the border and is controlled by both nations. There is Pakistani Kashmir and Indian Kashmir.

Islamabad said that 26 civilians were killed in the strikes and that it brought down five Indian jets during the attacks. India hasn’t commented on that claim, for which Pakistan didn’t provide evidence. Locals in some parts of Kashmir reported seeing planes crash overnight.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s office on Wednesday called India’s actions an unprovoked and unlawful act of war and said that the country’s army has been authorized to “undertake corresponding actions.”

Pakistan denies involvement in the attack by militants last month.

“The Indians are turning to the United States to restrain and limit Pakistani action it seems,” said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, but, “U.S. influence on Pakistan in this moment may be limited.”

The US has good relations with India, but ties with Pakistan have waned in recent years. There has been peace between Pakistan and India for years.

A Climate for War

“Our intelligence monitoring of Pakistan-based terror modules indicated that further attacks against India were impending,” said Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, in a news conference Wednesday. “There was thus a compulsion both to deter and to pre-empt.”

The escalating tensions come at a time when both countries had been largely focused on domestic concerns. Pakistan has been dealing with a deepening political and economic crisis in recent years, while India has been focused on expanding its manufacturing base to take advantage of the U.S. pivot away from dependence on Chinese goods, the WSJ reports.

The current Pakistani army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, is seen as taking a harder line on India. In a speech the military leader gave to an event involving the Pakistan diaspora just days before the attack in Indian Kashmir, he portrayed the India-Pakistan conflict as a war of religions with no common ground, and called Kashmir “our jugular vein.”

“We will not forget it,” he said.

Some believe China is stirring up tensions because businesses like Apple iPhone are moving to India.

Amy Mek, who is a responsible independent reporter, has a detailed report, and it is clear she is correct in saying that India only hit terror camps.

Should the US Get Involved?


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