The armies of Pakistan and India are on high alert since Delhi said it would search for the terrorists involved in the Pahalgam attack, the Indian news agency PTI reported.
The attack in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir on April 22 killed 25 Indian tourists and a Nepali citizen, and injured about 20 people. It was the deadliest attack on civilians in the troubled region in years.
Escalation of tensions
India last week announced a series of punitive measures against Pakistan, including terminating the Indus Waters Treaty, closing the only functioning land border post at Attari, and downgrading bilateral diplomatic ties with Islamabad. India has also canceled all visas issued to Pakistani citizens, launched massive anti-terror operations in Kashmir, and held military exercises. In recent days, there have been frequent clashes along the India-Pakistan border.
In response, Pakistan closed its airspace to Indian aircraft and suspended trade with India, including through third countries. Pakistan has also rejected India's termination of the Indus Waters Treaty and said any move to stop the flow of water would be seen as an "act of war".
Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif last week warned that the world should be "worried" about the prospect of a full-scale conflict between two nuclear powers like India and Pakistan. "If there is an all-out attack or something like that, then obviously a full-scale war will follow," Asif said in an interview with Sky News. He stressed that the Pakistani military was "prepared for all scenarios", but also expressed hope that the dispute could be resolved through negotiations.
The minister also suggested that India may have "staged" the The attack was part of a false flag operation.
A little-known armed group, the Kashmir Resistance, claimed responsibility for the attack in Kashmir. According to Indian security services, the group, also known as the Resistance Front, is part of the Pakistan-based terrorist organizations Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen.
Lashkar-e-Taiba was founded in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan war with funding from then-Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Lashkar-e-Taiba is based in Pakistan and is said to be supported by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and the Pakistani military, writes Manjari Chatterjee Miller, an expert at the American think tank "Council on Foreign Relations". "Lashkar e Taiba" is believed to have been behind many other attacks on Indian soil, including the 2008 Mumbai attack and the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.
Asif himself told the "New York Times" that the "Lashkar e Taiba" group "does not exist" and could not have planned or carried out attacks from Pakistani-controlled territory. Pakistan's defence minister has called for an international investigation into the Pahalgam attack.
A brief history of the conflict between Delhi and Islamabad
India and Pakistan govern separate parts of Kashmir, but both countries claim the entire territory.
The conflict between India and Pakistan arose as a result of the partition of British India in 1947, as enshrined in the Indian Independence Act. Pakistan, whose population is predominantly Muslim, was then created, and the various regions of Jammu and Kashmir were given the opportunity to choose whether to join India or Pakistan. The then maharaja (monarch) of Kashmir initially tried to declare independence for the territory, but eventually agreed to join India, which promised him help against raids by local Pakistani tribes. This decision led to the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947, which ended with the Karachi Agreement of 1949.
The 1965 Indo-Pakistani War was the second major conflict over the status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The war ended the following year with negotiations brokered by the USSR. Ultimately, India and Pakistan renounced territorial claims to Kashmir and withdrew their armies from the disputed territory.
In 1971, India and Pakistan fought another short war over East Pakistan (3–16 December), which broke out on 3 December during the East Pakistan War of Independence. The conflict ended with the Simla Agreement, signed on 16 December 1972, which established a temporary military line of control dividing Kashmir into two administrative divisions.
In 1974, India tested its first nuclear weapon. Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in 1998.
In 1999, Pakistani troops crossed the Line of Control, triggering the Kargil War. Pakistan suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Indian army.
Since 2003, the two countries have maintained a fragile ceasefire, but skirmishes often break out along the disputed border.
In February 2019, an Indian paramilitary convoy was attacked in Pulwama, in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir. At least 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers were killed. The Pakistani group "JeM" claimed responsibility for the attack. India responded with air strikes on terrorist training camps on Pakistani territory. Subsequently, the Pakistani Air Force attacked Indian-administered Kashmir, and in the course of the air battles, Pakistan shot down two Indian military aircraft and captured an Indian pilot, who was released two days later.
In August 2019, India deployed tens of thousands of military and paramilitary forces to the region and revoked Article 370 of its Constitution, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir. The constitutional change limits Kashmir's autonomy, which angers the residents of the disputed territory, and Pakistan perceives this move by the Indian authorities as a "grave injustice".
Violence along the Line of Control reached its peak in 2020, when more than four thousand cross-border shelling were recorded.
Delhi continues to insist on centralized control over the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, and violence along the India-Pakistan border does not subside.
Efforts to modernize the Indian army
The fighting in 2019 confronted India with an unpleasant fact - it turned out that the armament of its huge army was outdated and its forces were not sufficiently prepared for the immediate threats on India's borders, the newspaper writes. "New York Times".
A 2018 parliamentary report stated that 68% of India's military equipment is "obsolete", 24% is rated "up-to-date" and only 8% falls into the "modern" category.
The humiliation that India suffered in the air battles with Pakistan in 2019 made it clear that its military is in urgent need of modernization, the "New York Times" also wrote. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has allocated billions of dollars for new weapons and sought new international partners to buy modern military equipment. In addition, Delhi has increased its capacity for domestic weapons production.
A report presented to the Indian parliament in 2023 said that in five years the share of the most modern military equipment has almost doubled. However, the report's authors warn that this share is far from covering the needs of a modern army. More than half of India's military equipment is still too old.
Analysts believe that the challenges facing the modernization of the Indian army are numerous - bureaucratic and financial, but also geopolitical. India's economy is now the fifth largest in the world and is about 10 times larger than Pakistan's. But India's defense spending still amounts to less than 2% of its gross domestic product, which military experts describe as insufficient, the "New York Times" also writes.
India has demonstrated confidence that it can easily thwart the Pakistani army. If that claim is put to the test, another of India's neighbors will be watching it closely: China, the publication notes.
In recent years, Delhi has believed that China poses more pressing challenges on India's borders than Pakistan, especially after a deadly skirmish between their troops high in the Himalayas in 2020 and repeated incursions by Chinese forces into Indian territory. Indian military leaders have been forced to prepare for a possible two-front war, the "New York Times" commented.
"Triple Nuclear Knot"
Since the armies of India and China clashed in the Himalayas in 2020, relations between the Asian giants have improved, but they still keep large numbers of troops on their borders. Beijing also controls part of the Kashmir region, which Delhi says belongs to India, creating the world's only "triple nuclear hub" in the region, the Associated Press reported. Experts say a one-on-one military conflict between India and Pakistan is likely to involve their strategic partners, the agency noted.
In late August 2023, India said it had lodged a strong protest with China over a new map showing the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and the Aksai Chin plateau as its official territory. Aksai Chin is a disputed plateau in the western Himalayas that India claims but is controlled by China.
China claims Arunachal Pradesh, located in the eastern Himalayas, is part of southern Tibet and in April 2023 published a map in which 11 districts in the state were renamed "Zhannan", or South Tibet in Chinese, Reuters noted.
China is a key ally of Pakistan and has helped develop its missile programs, the AP added. India maintains strong defense ties with the United States, which has long sought to limit Beijing's growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Pakistan is a key link in Xi Jinping's massive "Belt and Road" initiative, which aims to build ports, railways and roads connecting a number of countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. Since 2013, Chinese investment and loans have been key to Pakistan's ailing economy, Reuters writes.
In February this year, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari visited China, and during his meetings the importance of Pakistan's Gwadar port was discussed. At that time, the two countries agreed to fully develop the port's potential as a "key hub for connectivity and trade."
There are thousands of Chinese workers in Pakistan who build infrastructure facilities, but they are often attacked by terrorist attacks by separatist militants in the southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan. In August last year, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif warned, quoted by Reuters, that extremists aim to thwart cooperation between Pakistan and China.