This does not make sense. When France attacked Daesh in 2015 after the terrorist attacks in Paris or when the US attacked Afghanistan after 9/11, the objective wasn't to target the exact people who carried out the attacks, but the organization behind the attacks. People can always be found as long as the organization remains.
The goal of the attacks would be to make any future terrorist attack an expensive option for the Pakistani military as opposed to something which can be done routinely. There was a sharp drop in the terrorist attacks in Kashmir after the 2019 confrontation.
2) The putative organization is in Pakistan, and likely supported by the military.
The biggest threat India is doing (IMO) is threatening the water supply. That is getting everyone in Pakistan’s attention.
These strikes are more about managing the local political situation in India, which requires some degree of obvious violent retribution.
Importantly, even once built, it selects the wrong targets, not terrorists or military bases - but regular people who will be faced with scarcity of water and food, as the crops use Indus water. This would be something highly unethical, and also not something sustainable - once visuals of hunger start reaching screens across the world, the force to restart the supply would be strong.
Even if it were to translate to sanctions, I'm not so sure BJP wouldn't welcome it. "The Fatherland is besieged, let's unite together around Dear Leader and fight back like one" tends to be a very popular take in authoritarian countries for a reason, and it's that much easier to pull off when you can actually point at some way in which your country is targeted.
As far as US, under Trump, I'd actually expect it to back Modi.
Attacking Pakistan over this also strengthens BJP’s hand and distracts everyone from the complaints that have been eroding their support, like ongoing corruption, high taxes with lower quality of life, etc. etc.
Don’t expect the gulf countries to come to Pakistan’s aid over this, especially if it comes to money. Muslim countries in general like to pretend to be friends, and they certainly talk a big game.
When it comes to actually doing anything though, they just use anything going on as a chance to stab each other in the back. Even when there is a chance for going after ‘the common enemy’ like Israel.
India hasn’t even been close to interesting to any of them since the Mughals. The minority Muslim population in India (about 20%) is also just a little less than Pakistans entire population, and almost half of the entire Middle East’s population, so it’s not like it would be a clean ‘attack the Hindu’s’ type situation anyway.
Also, Indians in general are not particularly warmongering, but this is about as righteous a cause as anyone has been able to come up with for awhile to ‘make someone pay’, is total rage bait for the hardliners/Hindutva contingent and is a good distraction for BJP.
As long as it doesn’t get too expensive, or look like it will escalate to Nuclear war, I’d expect it to go on awhile.
India in general loves to get all worked up about Pakistan (and to a lesser extent Bangladesh, though in that case it’s often about illegal immigrants).
It’s a trope like getting worked up about Cartels and/or ‘the illegals’ from down South in the US.
Source: westerner living in India for awhile now. मैं हिंदी नहीं बोल सकता, but I still get around eh?
This won't last long, though. BJP lost the elections after Kargil War.
While this was going on, it even seemed to distract folks in the office from the US H1B situation, which is something.
I suspect both sides will milk this for awhile.
India and Pakistan came to an agreement to stop firings. But pakistan breached it.
I don't think India wants to continue this for much longer.
There were fewer terrorist attacks, certainly. I'm sure the Indian government would like to believe that the 2019 strike had an effect, but far more likely causes are
- Money. Pakistan's economy has stagnated and the country has lurched from one IMF bailout to the next (2019, 2023, 2024). It got so bad at one point that politicians were asking people to drink less tea so they could conserve foreign currency.
- Covid. Affected everything, but certainly harder to think about waging conflict when such a massive problem is affecting the country.
- Internal political instability, especially when Imran Khan took on the military and lost. The military was actually in danger of losing their primacy for the first time in decades.
- Conflict with the Taliban and Pakistani Taliban. The ISI had nurtured the Taliban to be tame pets and it turned out not to be the case. Crushing these was the highest priority, not least because it made their policy of nurturing terrorists look idiotic.
All of these factors meant Pakistan wasn't and isn't in the best shape to wage war overtly or covertly with India. India's economy has continued to grow, in contrast to Pakistan. The official Indian policy of "benign neglect" towards Pakistan appeared to work well.
I'm sure these attacks will be spun as a success in the future. Safe to say a Bollywood movie dramatising the events is already in the works. But Pakistan's own economic and political problems are far more likely to influence its decisions to engage in this sort of behaviour.
What happens to the incentives of terror groups in response to such a policy?
---
The role of money only becomes an issue when conducting a terrorist attack becomes expensive. Missiles and jets consume much more money in comparison to training recruits via an intermediary organization like LeT and sending them across the border to carry out attacks.
A regime in which a terror attack leads to a high pressure, expensive situation for the Pakistani military is completely different from regularly scheduled, train and deploy terror attacks from militants which used to happen earlier.
In that situation, the military has to respond to economic pressure, pressure from allies and pressure from its own people.
Support for the Pakistani military was at its nadir during the era of benign neglect because there wasn't an Indian boogeyman to justify their interference in politics and economic exploitation. But now that India has attacked Pakistani targets this will quiet any internal criticism of the Pakistani Army.
In other words, the military absolutely loves it when India engages in so-called deterrence. No Pakistani army soldier died (according to both sides). Pakistani people support the Pakistani Army more strongly than ever. It's absolutely perfect for the Army. I fully expect that they'll fund more terrorists, leading to a constant cycle of violence.
Yes, that's the defining characteristic of all terrorist organizations. Get money, not through politics or production or economy, but by damaging others. Then get paid for not doing quite as much damage. This model has spread quite a bit in the past 5 years.
If say, India were to let this slide, the default outcome is another such attack. Given the above motivation of the military to create a conflict and the ideological bent seen in Gen.Munir's speech, the expected outcome would be to repeat till this they get a conflict.
Yes, the deterrence won't be perfect. The Pakistan Army might end up repeating an attack whenever there is a relief from economic constraints(it doesn't have money for frequent purchases of expensive weapons) or from pressure from its allies (who dont want their oil trade or pipelines to suffer). But this means that what India has to do to minimize the number of attacks is to not let an attack slide by with low cost for the army.
The best case scenario would be a peace deal, as was arrived in Vajpayee and Sharif's time, but it was sabotaged by the Kargil operation, for exactly the reason you mentioned - a peace deal marginalises the army.
This action guarantees another attack, because it has paid of in the actual PR dividends the ruling forces of both sides desired.
This has zip to do with the citizens, and everything to do with party / power bloc legitimacy.
Winning on economics and good governance is hard.
Why do you think Pakistan orchestrated the last attack? Do you think those reasons had anything to do with the expectation of retaliation from India?
The default is that Pakistan's motivations do not change and they keep doing what they've been doing. Ergo, another attack.
Yes this is stupid and worse for both sides, but it only takes one party to start a fight.
The structure was designed for being disavowed.
I expect it was more the army looked away, over condoned.
And yes, the expectations are to generate a response from the BJP.
By this rubric there are 4 actors on the stage.
- The people of Pakistan, the Pakistani army,
- The people of India, the BJP.
I’ve had this discussion with friends who are Pakistani and they concur that this makes the most sense.
The opinions of the Pakistani army have dramatically changed as per their interactions, having been at a nadir due to their domestic handling of events, and now these actions have reinvigorated public opinion.
The BJP has had its military credentials burnished.
I’d go a step deeper and suspect that there was a traditional response from India planned, and then at some point in the past 72 hours, a functionary on the BJP side raised the potential of a massive PR coup and the old guard got sidelined.
This has worked. This means this behavior will be repeated.
> I expect it was more the army looked away, over condoned.
Right, in the exact same way they "looked away" while OBL lived half a mile away from the most prestigious military academy in Pakistan and the same way they "over condoned" the Taj hotel shootings. You are not disagreeing with me here.
> The opinions of the Pakistani army have dramatically changed as per their interactions, having been at a nadir due to their domestic handling of events, and now these actions have reinvigorated public opinion.
This line describes Hamas just as well as the Pakistani state, unfortunately.
> The BJP has had its military credentials burnished.
Indian media always has been and always will be jingoistic and no matter how the government responded, it would gleefully report on the power of the Indian military.
> This has worked. This means this behavior will be repeated.
WHO has this worked for? The BJP isn't more popular because of this. Pakistan hasn't achieved any strategic goals beyond the continuing destabilization of J&K - which is already well on the way to integration.
Probably, yes. Military responses to terrorism are almost always counterproductive. I don't know which specific attacks you're talking about, but the ones I can think of the US did far more damage to itself with the blowback than the original attack ever achieved.
You're imagining these people to be some sort of loyalists, rather than something closer to anarchists. Triggering military responses is going to be viewed as a bonus.
I'll note people rather frequently claimed Bin Laden wanted the US to be tied up in the military quagmire that their terror attacks produced. There's certainly some logic to that idea. His organization was too small to do much direct damage.
The mission in Afghanistan was very much to find Bin Laden. It was changed after he escaped.
If by terrorists, we mean the planners of the operation, that trail leads directly to Pakistan. Musharraf, the ex-army chief, is on record saying that the military has funded several militant organizations in Kashmir including LeT. (Osama's haveli in Abbotabad was incidentally also very close to the Pakistan Military Academy). The permission for the operations probably came all the way from the top as the attack came right after a strong statement on Kashmir by the army chief.
They have nukes. They don't need to be rich to do massive damage. Sure doing so would have terrible consequences, but cooler heads sometimes don't prevail. Or only prevail after much suffering and pain.
https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/pakistan/nytimes0...
This is why I'm comparing nuclear trade to high cholesterol. It's a long-term issue.
The "knife fight" comparison is that they just got hit. The military needs are "literally, not metaphorically, yesterday".
I always wonder at the people who have this idea that states are going to use nukes on a whim. The taboo against the use of nukes is very strong, so strong that I believe nuclear armed nations would rather wage conventional warfare even at great cost, and consider nukes only in the extreme situation where the very survival of the state is seriously threatened (and even then I'm doubtful nukes would be used). The only other realistic situation where nukes are used is in an accidental scenario.
That is why conventional military strength is still very much important in the world now. The Europeans are finding this out a bit late.
It's also why Putin is a great actor and bluffer. Trust me, he's the last person who would think of using nukes, despite appearances to the contrary. Now, if he were to somehow use nukes on an actual populated area, I believe the western powers would NOT use nukes in retaliation, so it seems like he would have a found a way out of MAD. But, the conventional response (likely a containment rather than an attack on Russia, e.g., a no fly zone and destruction of military assets, with the threat of nuclear retaliation backing it up) would be so strong that the Russia would be effectively neutralized. If they persist in nuking, then all bets are off, WW3 begins, and civilization could end.
Anyway, the real concern wrt nukes is that they require people in government who are at least marginally sane and care about self-preservation. The problem with countries like Russia and Pakistan is that it's one coup away from being run by people who genuinely believe that they are fighting a holy war against some kind of worldwide Satanic conspiracy. Such people are unlikely to hold power for long, but with nukes, they don't have to.
I'm not sure about that.
Also note his island has a full on Egyptian Temple on it, and no-one has any idea what's underground.
None of these things are disputed. Sounds pretty Satanic and International to me.
That's why there was no sense for Ukraine to keep nukes. They should have kept strategic bombers, though.
Pakistan has nothing to lose. So there are lots of incentives for Pakistan army to go rogue.
> After the war, Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan during the Kargil conflict, claimed that he was unaware of the plans, and that he first learned about the situation when he received an urgent phone call from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his counterpart in India. Sharif attributed the plan to Musharraf and "just two or three of his cronies", a view shared by some Pakistani writers who have stated that only four generals, including Musharraf, knew of the plan.
Possible he was lying. But this is an accepted view even in the Pakistan.
Military action is only going to lead to India being less willing to give them an even supply. They are totally dependent on keeping India happy, and now of course, they've failed to do that by allowing these recent murders.
I also thought the Ukraine war wasn't "really" going to happen. Humans will human.
I think the past 30 years have demonstrated enough that Pakistan is only paying lip service when they denounce attacks like this
At best they don't care, and at worst they sponsor the terrorists directly, but they definitely are not trying to help anyone stop attacks like this or root out their extremists
India's attack on Pakistan are counterproductive. It will fuel the fire and the crazies will kill more Indians and Pakistanis as a result.
The water threats are the real leverage, but without some obvious military action they’d be skinned alive by the Hindu hardliners (Hindutvas).
Bad terrorists are of course that attack Pakistani Army (e.g. Baloch Liberation Army).
Notable is how Osama was protected by Pakistan army as he was a useful indirect source of income (war on terror)
Indias attack was aimed at the Good Terrorists of Pakistan. The hope is to reduce their capabilities. Not sure how much successful they have been though.
Do you have any evidence of any of these claims or are you parroting what you heard someone else say?
Pakistanis themselves are subject to numerous terror incidents. I'm not sure what causes folks to automatically assume Muslim nations support "extremists" as a policy. Sure, there may be power brokers who do, but that's the case for any country, democratic or not.
On 16 December 2014, six gunmen affiliated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan [attacked] the Army Public School in Peshawar. The terrorists ... [a Chechen, 3 Arabs and 2 Afghans] opened fire ... killing 149 people including 132 school children, making it the world's fifth deadliest school massacre ... led to Pakistan establishing the National Action Plan to crack down on terrorism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Peshawar_school_massacreHow they caught him was crazy in and of itself, and required fake vaccination drives, another thing no military can do to its own people to catch terrorists.
I really don't think they are blameless at all, at all, but this kind of stuff feels conspiracy-level to me. This was the most wanted guy in the world, no country, no army could plausibly have concealed him and coordinated that effort to keep him hidden. Someone along the chain would have given him up
„Counterterrorism officials told Logan that there is no way the Pakistanis didn't know about this.“
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/did-pakistan-know-where-bin-lad...
I also don't get what Pakistan gains from sheltering him. Turning him into the US aids them tremendously, and Al Qaeda was not a valuable or useful asset for years before Bin Laden was found. New groups were forming at the time as well, so they could have easily turned him and handed the money over to those groups which had beef with him anyways. Again, it's all assuming they were sheltering him knowingly.
Like I said before. He was very close by, but he was locked down in a compound. How many people here on HN know anything about the people or activities going on in the house 2 blocks away from them? The army also cannot just search everyone's house randomly.
Consider India, they equally have pretty poor competence with catching terrorists. Many of the biggest terrorist attacks in India were not caught and evaded detection. Even the latest terrorists seem to have evaded detection. Pakistan doesn't have a far more advanced security service. Isn't it far more likely they are incompetent? Idk, the harboring Bin Laden claim never made much sense and Occam's Razor always told me the most likely option is probably the real one, in the absence of any hard evidence.
It may very well be that some people in ISI were sheltering Bin Laden for no reason other than that he was a genuine hero to them.
It is also possible, that he just was able to hide from the entire world close to an army base in a compound he never exited from, never approached a window near, and never accessed internet from.
Everything is possible, there's no proof either way. And I don't see what the govt or army or ISI would gain from harboring him as a policy matter. If someone is crazy and personally helped out, that's not what most people are even implying is it? That's much more reasonable and doesn't really have much to do with the current conflict and the claim that the latest terror attack was sponsored by Pakistan (again, possible but not proven)
Why are you sure that Pakistan is not supporting terrorists now, after decades and decades of evidence otherwise?
As for evidence, there isn't hard evidence that Pakistan supported Bin Laden. And I'd expect that after he was caught. The US, where many ministers and army personnel and intelligence chiefs were skeptical when he was found, eventually said there was no hard evidence linking Pakistan secret services to Bin Laden. They were so skeptical of this link that they didn't tell them the nature of the raid which found him, for fear of tipping him off.
I think it's just what it looks like on the surface. It looks suspicious, so that's why everyone was suspicious. But when we looked into it, it wasn't what it looked like.
I don't doubt Pakistan supports some proxy terrorists. That is what nearly every nation-state does these days. I just doubt they sheltered Bin Laden, worth far more to them in US hands than elsewhere, after seeing what they did in Afghanistan to the last group who sheltered him, way past his prime. That too while being good enough to scrub any evidence of the connection? I just don't think there's motive or proof of it
Like when America coordinated with Pakistan to grab Osama? Actually no, they didn't coordinate with Pakistan because the terrorist was being harboured by the Pakistani military. Coordinating would have had the same effect as tipping the terrorist off and letting him escape.
Your comment assumes that Pakistan doesn't view harbouring and training terrorists as a legitimate way to conduct their foreign policy.
I observe from time to time that Moscow appears to be under fire from the occasional US-sponsored attack for example. So far, so good. Most of the time things don't go terribly wrong, just the worst case scenarios here are quite grim. The India-Pakistan situation is probably a bit safer because anything catastrophic is likely to just kill millions/billions of people in India and Pakistan instead of an entire hemisphere of carnage.
Ok, you lost me there..
Proxy war between U.S. and China. We’re moving the naval assets that were bombing the Houthis. India seizing Pakistan-administered Kashmir cuts Islamabad off from China.
Thats how Us operates: exploits old conflicts for its own immediate benefit, like it did with Ukr-Rus war.
If some people die on both side it is acceptable for the Us, because these are not Us citizens dying
This is realpolitik 101, and every powerful society does it. Like, India didn't help sever Bangladesh f/k/a East Pakistan from Islamabad because it was being nice. (I'm not saying every society exploits every old conflict. Just that if you need to do something, you start with extant fault lines. Like, if you're going to war with Nazi Germany you don't sideline the Soviets and British because that's mean or whatnot.)
Also, the problem with Pakistan isn't that its ports could be used to import oil. It's that the ports are being configured for Chinese blue-water operations.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/defence/pakistans-defence-m...
With all due respect, what you and I support isn’t super relevant to what will happen over the coming weeks.
There's very little that happens in the world that does not touch or get touched by the United States. The USA doesn't have much choice in this.
India is negotiating trade deals and weapons purchases with the West. (Historically, Moscow was its security source.) Pakistan got some F-16s in 2022, but otherwise has been deepending ties with Beijing. It's wild to suggest America's cold war with China is orthogonal to this conflict.
Not how proxy wars work.
> India and Pakistan have enough reasons to hate each other. They don't need America or China's goading
Not how proxy wars work. The backers enable. The proxies fight.
> neither India nor Pakistan would accept their conflict being characterized as a US-China war
This is how proxy wars work. They literally don’t if the proxies realise they’re fighting a foreign war on their homeland.
Source: I am an Indian.
Nobody said as much. The original comment described how this can escalate.
India and pakistan have contested boundaries and their hostilities doesn't depend on foreign powers. Interestingly, when the hostilities between china and india flared up in 2021, and india moved many divisions from its pakistan border to its chinese border, pakistan didn't change its posturing to put pressure on india. This was acknowledged by indian army during a press briefing. Both so far have never fought against each other for foreign powers, but have fought against each other for their own reasons. So no proxy wars so far.
Yes? That’s what lends it proxy war potential. An endemic war. Like, there were actual conflicts in e.g. Vietnam and Afghanistan before they became proxy wars. Those same risk factors are present today.
There are countless ways to be stupid and destructive, especially when you're actively trying to destroy your own country's institutions.
but you dont want any of them to ally with russia or chinnese, ignoring problem also "problematic"
Sure, but one side offers clear benefits over the "ally from hell." (Islamabad, at the very least, has clearly picked a side.)
Also, I'm not arguing what I think will happen. I'm arguing how this could escalate. And the only way I see it doing so is (a) someone bombs the wrong thing or (b) Beijing or Washington see an opportunity to win chips.
"U.S. prestige was damaged in both nations, in Pakistan for failing to help prevent the loss of East Pakistan and in India for supporting the brutality of the Pakistani regime’s actions"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blood_Telegram:_Nixon,_K...
It was an active decision by the US.
By funding a known miliary dictator (Pervez Musharraf), for decades, helping strengthen the military rule in Pakistan.
So much for "spreading democracy"