Current Affairs
Every aspect of the current confrontation between India and Pakistan -- which, I fear, may not be over yet -- was avoidable. The initial attack on Indian paramilitary soldiers, in which 40 of them died, was claimed by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terrorist group which has been allowed to thrive by that country’s military establishment. The attack itself required sophisticated organisation and hundreds of kilograms of explosives. Not preventing it was an Indian intelligence failure for which nobody has yet been held accountable.After the attack, some form of retaliation was always on the cards, but the Indian government made the particularly risky choice of ordering airstrikes on a target within Pakistan proper. Although it claimed the strikes were a failure, Pakistan nevertheless chose to retaliate in turn. When it did, its front-line fighters had to be engaged by Indian warplanes that included the MiG-21, which many Indian aviation experts worry is too outdated for such duties. In the process, an Indian pilot was shot down and taken prisoner. While the pilot is being sent home, we in South Asia now live in a region in which two nuclear-armed adversaries send planes to bomb each other’s territory. This is a profoundly disturbing turn of events.
Pakistan is busy congratulating itself on how things have turned out so far. This is unwise and premature. Premature because there is no reason to suppose that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- who on Thursday called the airstrikes a “pilot project,” implying they would be scaled up in the future -- will be satisfied with anything other than the total rhetorical victory his camp followers in the Indian media have already promised voters. And it is unwise because the world’s reaction to the Indian airstrikes, unprecedented though they were, was notably unfriendly to Pakistan. Pakistani leaders -- or, more precisely, the generals in Rawalpindi that really run the country -- have few friends left. Even the People’s Republic of China urged only that “sovereignty should be respected” -- criticism, in its way, of both sides and not just India.grouping to rescind the invitation to Swaraj...Read More
