Militarily, India fought Pakistan to little more than a draw this month during their most expansive combat in half a century. Indian forces managed to punch holes in hangars at sensitive Pakistani air bases and leave craters on runways, although only after losing aircraft in aerial face-offs with its longtime adversary.
But strategically, the battlefield tossup was a clear setback for India. An aspiring diplomatic and economic power, it now finds itself equated with Pakistan, a smaller, weaker country that Indian officials call a rogue sponsor of terrorism.
The four-day clash reminded the world about India’s powerlessness to resolve 78 years of conflict with the troubled nation next door. Any act of confrontation plays into the hands of Pakistan, where friction with India has long been a lifeblood. Outright military victory is nearly impossible, given the threat from both countries’ nuclear arsenals.
“It’s unfortunate that we in India have to waste so much of our time and effort on what is actually a strategic distraction: terror from Pakistan,” said Shivshankar Menon, a former national security adviser in India. “But it’s a fact of life and we might as well manage the problem.”
Just how to do that has perplexed Indian leaders from the beginning.
Interviews with more than a dozen diplomats, analysts and officials paint a stark picture of India’s perpetual dilemma. After multiple wars and several failed attempts at solving their disputes, which have shaped the subcontinent ever since Pakistan and India were cleaved apart in 1947, the problem has only grown in complexity.
The spark is now often asymmetric — India struck Pakistan this month after blaming it for a deadly terrorist attack. The risk of rapid escalation has increased as both sides deploy drones and other cutting-edge weapons on a large scale for the first time. And superpower politics have entered the equation in new ways, as the United States offers growing diplomatic and military support to India, and China does so for Pakistan.
At the same time, the two countries’ leaders have embraced religious nationalism and hardened their views of one another, making any conciliatory gesture all but impossible.
The Pakistan Army, the 800-pound gorilla that has long warped the country’s politics, has taken this ideological turn as it has extended its de facto rule. In India, the shift to strongman, Hindu-nationalist rule has left it boxed in whenever tensions rise, as the right-wing base of Prime Minister Narendra Modi often calls for blood.
That makes it harder to show the kind of restraint that India displayed in 2008, when terrorists killed more than 160 people in Mumbai — and to see that a war, beyond satisfying immediate political needs, could set back India’s ascent.
The Indian government at that time — Mr. Menon was its highest-ranking diplomat — decided against striking Pakistan. It wanted to keep the global focus on the terrorist attack and to isolate Pakistan for supporting terrorism, rather than elevate it as a battlefield equal.
Seventeen years later, terrorists again attacked innocent people, killing more than two dozen Hindu tourists on April 22 in a scenic Kashmir meadow. This time, India responded by striking Pakistan militarily, and the two sides stepped to the brink of all-out war.
Indian officials say that they had to send a message that there is a cost to Pakistan’s policy of proxy warfare, and that the strikes were part of a larger strategy to squeeze their adversary, including the threat of disrupting the flow of crucial cross-border rivers.
Even critics like Mr. Menon say they can see why India had little other choice.
An Unshakable Neighbor
For years, India and Pakistan have been on vastly different trajectories.
As India has grown to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, it has been courted by the United States and its allies as a geopolitical partner in counterbalancing China and as an investment destination. American and Indian leaders prefer to talk about an enlarged “Indo-Pacific” region, including the advanced economies of East Asia, rather than old “Indo-Pakistan” problems.
Today, in India’s hierarchy of concerns, “China looks much larger than Pakistan does,” Jon Finer, a former deputy national security adviser at the White House, said on a panel recently.
With Chinese incursions along the countries’ Himalayan border and increased competition for regional dominance, the last thing India wants “is to be bogged down in a conflict with Pakistan while they are figuring things out with China,” he said.
But Pakistan — from its birth dwarfed by an outsized army that defined India as the forever enemy to justify its size and influence — always looms in the background.
In 1998, years after the Indian economy started pulling ahead of Pakistan’s, India made an earthshaking step toward joining the ranks of world powers by staging underground nuclear blasts.
Barely two weeks later, Pakistan conducted its own nuclear tests. Suddenly, nuclear deterrence negated India’s military advantage.
President Bill Clinton soon branded the region “the most dangerous place in the world.” It was hardly what India had set out to achieve. Instead of being clubbed with China, Russia and the Western powers, India was in a terrifying new quagmire.
The nuclear stalemate did not bring peace. Pakistan used its experience of running American-funded Jihadist militias against the Soviets in Afghanistan to expand the asymmetric warfare in its perpetual fight against India.
A Tougher Approach
Like other Indian leaders before him, Mr. Modi, the country’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister, once tried his hand at peace.
Still high on his sweeping election victory in 2014, he made a surprise visit to Pakistan the following year, the first by an Indian prime minister in a decade. He had vowed to turn India into a developed country and wanted to see whether he could find a solution on a front that was squandering resources.
Nine months later, militants attacked an Indian military base. India blamed groups nurtured by Pakistan. Any talk of peace quickly ended.
India’s response to that assault began an escalatory pattern of military retaliation that repeated after a similar attack on Indian forces in 2019 and last month’s terrorist ambush of civilians. India also entrenched a strategy of punishing Pakistan — freezing talks, isolating the country diplomatically, increasing border security and working covertly to aggravate its domestic vulnerabilities.
Ajit Doval, the architect of Mr. Modi’s national security doctrine, has said that India’s previous governments grew too defensive under the threat of nuclear confrontation. In such a mode, he said, shortly before becoming national security adviser in 2014, “I can never win — because either I lose, or there is a stalemate.”
He proposed a “defensive offense” approach, essentially mimicking Pakistan’s own asymmetric tactics.
In recent years, according to analysts and officials, India has waged assassination campaigns to try to take out many of the militants focused on operations against India. The Indian government has also been accused of having a hand in insurgencies that have drained Pakistan’s military, particularly the separatist movement in Balochistan Province, bordering Iran and Afghanistan.
“You do one Mumbai, you may lose Balochistan,” Mr. Doval said in 2014. “There is no nuclear war involved in that. There is no engagement of troops. If you know the tricks, we know the trick better than you.”
After the latest hostilities, India has threatened more overt action, saying that any future terrorist attacks will be seen as an act of war — potentially setting up frequent military confrontation as the new norm.
But with the specter of nuclear war, what India can achieve through military force is limited.
“Deterrence is subjective and in the eye of the beholder, a mind-reading game,” said Mr. Menon, the former national security adviser. The more practical question, he said, is whether India can reset the incentives that drive the Pakistan Army.
The four days of uncontrolled escalation with Pakistan this month became the latest reality check between India’s aspirations and its constraints. It has built sufficient diplomatic power, and integrated itself enough into the global economy, to emerge without a major blow to its reputation, Western diplomats in New Delhi said.
But “at some point, India’s leaders have to recognize that they can’t free themselves of their neighbor and move on and become a global power,” said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington. “You have to have some modus vivendi with each of your neighbors — whether they are your enemies, whether they’re your friends, whether they’re just there.”
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
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