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“Hostilities escalated rapidly [between India and Pakistan] following a suicide car bombing on Feb. 14 that killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary police in Indian-controlled Kashmir… Indian warplanes carried out air strikes on Tuesday inside northeast Pakistan’s Balakot… [and] Pakistan retaliated on Wednesday with its own aerial mission…
“The flare up appeared to be easing on Saturday after Pakistan handed back a captured Indian fighter pilot on Friday night.” Reuters
The left believes both countries share some responsibility for continued tensions in Kashmir, and urges them to reach a permanent peaceful resolution.
“What led that young Kashmiri man, Adil Ahmad Dar, to become a suicide bomber who brought South Asia to the brink of war?... Handlers from the Jaish-e-Muhammad, the Pakistani terrorist group behind the attack, exploited the young man raised in a pitiless war. But the structural violence and political repression in Kashmir are equally responsible for turning Mr. Dar into a weapon…
“His father told a reporter that he often spoke about the day a group of policemen stopped him on the way back from school and made him circle their vehicle while rubbing his nose on the ground. During mass protests in Kashmir in 2016, when Indian troops killed about 100 protesters and blinded several hundred, Mr. Dar was shot in his leg… India and Pakistan blame each other, each country obsessed with proving itself better than the other, but they share the responsibility for reducing Kashmir to a ruin and destroying generations of Kashmiri lives.”
Basharat Peer, New York Times
“Pakistani officials are unwilling or unable to challenge the violent sway of underground, anti-India groups… Jaish was banned in 2002 after it attempted to assassinate the country’s military ruler at the time, Pervez Musharraf. But prosecutors and judges have been reluctant to aggressively pursue or punish militant leaders because of their religious influence and military ties.”
Pamela Constable, Washington Post
Nevertheless, India’s use of air power inside Pakistan for the first time since 1971 “represents a major departure from existing norms of engagement between the two sides… The model of America's operation against Osama-bin-Laden — daring, precise, effective — was hard for Indian leaders to resist. Indeed, to do so given that America used it to such good effect against a similar adversary residing in the same country would have been an admission of impotence… [But] having now upped the ante, India is going to have a hard time dialing back its future response…
“Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan… has counseled calm and, in a show of maturity and goodwill, [returned] the Indian pilot captured from an attack plane that Pakistan downed. However, it is unclear if Khan or his successors will be able to maintain such composure if India makes a habit of encroaching on Pakistani sovereignty to hunt down terrorists.”
Shikha Dalmia, The Week
“The nuclear-armed rivals have been here before, many times, and the fact that they’re now in yet another conflict can mean only one thing: that their past actions haven’t worked for either country – and most definitely not for Kashmir. It is time for the two states to give up their intransigent positions.”
Mirza Waheed, The Guardian
The right criticizes Pakistan’s support for terrorists and worries about the potential for future escalation.
The right criticizes Pakistan’s support for terrorists and worries about the potential for future escalation.
“The underlying problem here is that Pakistan won't stop supporting terrorist attacks on Indian soil. Although recent former Pakistan army chief Raheel Sharif and the former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Naveed Mukhtar showed true leadership taking the fight to terrorists on their soil, powerful cabals of the mid-senior ranks of the security establishment are constantly acting to restrain these efforts.”
Tom Rogan, Washington Examiner
“The time has come to cut Islamabad loose and recognize Pakistan for what it is: a state sponsor of terrorism… Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, tips off jihadists in Afghanistan and elsewhere to help them avoid U.S. actions… [and] provided safe haven to the Taliban and other jihadists…
“India, in contrast, is the most natural of U.S. allies, and not only or even principally because of its robust democracy and increasingly global economy. The facts on the ground are this: India is a country with China on one side and a world of bloody-minded jihadists on the other; its two most consequential foreign-policy variables are also our own.”
Kevin Williamson, National Review
Some, however, point out that India’s “airstrikes are more likely to embolden Pakistan’s army than force its hand. The army’s credibility rests on a narrative that sees Pakistan as under permanent threat from its belligerent Hindu neighbor. This case fits the narrative like a glove: an oppressed Kashmiri Muslim kills 40 Indian occupying soldiers, and India wrongly blames Pakistan…
“The airstrikes’ intended audience, given their foreseeable limited costs on Pakistan’s military, was thus most likely commentators in Delhi and voters… [By that interpretation], the airstrikes were a success. In their aftermath, an editorial in the influential Times of India praised Modi for making it ‘amply clear to Pakistan that it will hit back quickly and impose costs,’ while Bollywood stars flooded Twitter with nationalist messages.”
Max Frost, American Enterprise Institute
Many predict that “the next India-Pakistan crisis will be worse… Having demonstrated they are comfortable engaging in increasingly provocative uses of military force under the nuclear umbrella, they will have an incentive in the future to go up a few more rungs on the escalatory ladder to try to achieve goals that couldn’t be achieved further down that ladder…
“If New Delhi wants to pressure Pakistan into rethinking its decision to provide support to India-focused terrorists, then it will need to turn to measures more muscular than a few airstrikes. Likewise, if Islamabad wants to pressure India into rethinking its policies in Kashmir, it too will need to turn to something more aggressive than a few airstrikes.”
Michael Kugelman, The National Interest
Spotted in British Columbia: Moose prancing on a roof (and it's not even Christmas)
CBC
