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I don't mean to be a conspiracy theorist, but it looks to me like the powers that be in India are deliberately angling for a nuclear war with Pakistan because they see it as inevitable in the long term but think that the results will be more favorable for them the sooner it happens. Moreover, they're also angling for Pakistan to launch the first (nuclear) strike because they expect the rest of the world will be more sympathetic to them in that case.
This makes zero sense. No nation, even Pakistan wouldn't want Nukes involved. Kargil was fought post nukes where Pakistan clearly lost and nukes or civilian areas weren't targeted.
Pakistan needs to keep stirring things in India so that it's army can justify its existence. No one wants nukes involved. No one ever did and there had been a war that Pakistan lost, like every war they ever fought, neither side used anything beyond guns at the border, mostly.
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I wouldn't say they're angling for nuclear war, exactly, but I do think they believe they'd win one if it came to it. The political situation in both countries makes it very unlikely that either will back down, not this early in the conflict at any rate. India's Hindu-nationalist government absolutely cannot be seen to take a targeted anti-Hindu terror attack lying down, and has been putting out a lot of rhetoric about national strength (think of the "India superpower by 20XX" memes). At the same time, their chosen method of retaliation was quite restrained, and optimized for the appearance of strength: it was flashy and geographically-expansive but does not appear to have actually caused much damage. So it can satisfy the voters' need for blood while also giving Pakistan every opportunity to still back down. The Pakistani government, for its part, has been through a lot of internal turmoil in recent years and, on top of the general autocratic impulse/need to look strong for the audience at home, would surely appreciate a chance to rally the public against their hated foreign enemy as a simple distraction. It is possible that Pakistani intelligence encouraged, or even orchestrated, the Kashmir terrorist attack as a deniable means of starting a conflict -- but even if they didn't the government will not be too broken up about the situation.
It is difficult for me to see either side backing down absent some sort of externally-brokered peace talks (which don't look very likely, at least not yet). But it doesn't need a conspiracy to cause a larger war, just good old-fashioned power politics, and there are many steps of escalation for the two sides to go through without resorting to nuclear weapons. Both sides seem confident that they can beat the other in a conventional, limited war. If that confidence holds on both sides then escalation is likely, since both sides know the other is willing to fight without breaking out the nukes.
Hindutva isn't the marauding ideology that people think it is. Both sides serve people porpoganda that helps their cause. Pakistan casually avoids telling its people how badly it lost every war it ever fought whilst Indian media currently is refusing to talk about the civilian deaths in Poonch.
Anyone who thinks Hindutva is pro Hindu or competent is unaware of what's beaneth the surface.
Pakistan can't beat India in a war, as of now. Despite the air casualties, the difference between spending, equipment, people, geography make this a terrible deal for them. China, which actually has a good military doesn't care about wars as much because the Chinese would rather sell things to India and be happy. Pakistan needs skirmishes as India being the mythical anti Muslim boogeyman is the only way to justify it's own existence.
Wars are bad, I don't want Indian causalities. The government should let the soldiers do as they see fit with Kashmiri Muslims, their stupidity should not cause a war.
All of these lowlifes get training inside Pakistan. In my original post about this, I stated that the bulk of the blame should go to Kashmiri Muslims, the remaining is with Pakistan. To them any Hindu lives lost is good. Low borns of the worst kind.
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Uh, doesn’t India have gigantic conventional superiority? Why would Pakistan think they can win a conventional war?
India does have conventional superiority through sheer force of numbers, yes, but I wouldn't call the margin gigantic necessarily -- a significant amount of Indian forces are located away from the Pakistani border, and Pakistan does have some technological advantages with modern Chinese and semi-modern American missiles and radars that can outrange Indian kit, at least under certain circumstances. This appears to have come into play already -- French intelligence has confirmed that one Rafale fighter was indeed shot down, and it's looking increasingly credible that at least one or two other Indian jets were shot down during the Indian strike mission and/or in air-to-air fighting over Kashmir, as well. Relatedly there is strong evidence that Pakistan deployed Chinese-made PL-15 missiles as part of their counter-air operation, the first use of the type in combat -- these are more or less state-of-the-art missiles, at least comparable to the American AMRAAM and quite possibly superior, including modern radar/seeker tech that is supposed to be more effective against countermeasures than older weapons. They are likely superior to anything India can field and, at least on paper, represent a qualitative jump from Pakistani capabilities in past conflicts.
So, I do think India would win pretty decisively in a truly full-scale war, but Pakistan may think they can bleed India enough on the way up the escalation ladder that India will get off the ladder before the war reaches the scale where India's numerical advantage comes fully into play. This is not a gamble I personally would bet my country on, but Pakistan's government is notably a dysfunctional autocracy and the public appears to be swept up in nationalistic war fever (and the same applies to India, albeit a bit less dysfunctional and a bit less autocratic); these are not conditions that lead to cautious decision making.
Notably, as of now Pakistan is still publicly vowing to retaliate for the Indian retaliation -- if they choose to escalate with a more deadly counterattack it is very hard for me to see India backing down absent a concerted effort from foreign countries (or perhaps the UN) to bring the two sides to the table. The US has halfheartedly warned India to "exercise restraint" but has been generally staying out of it; the UN has issued boilerplate calls for restraint and negotiation but nothing more; Chinese officials have been meeting with the Pakistani government in Islamabad, but it is not clear what they were discussing and China has not made overt public declarations of any formal stance on the war.
Edit: actually, while the majority of Pakistani statements have continued to vow further revenge, the defense minister did at one point make a statement saying essentially that Pakistan was ready to cease hostilities if India was. It is not clear, at least to me, if this is supposed to imply they will be ready for a ceasefire after a retaliatory strike against India or instead of such a strike; I am also not sufficiently keyed-in to Pakistani media to be confident if this implies some kind of disagreement within the Pakistani government or if it is entirely compatible with their otherwise-bellicose posture. But there does seem to be some hope of cooler heads prevailing in Pakistan.
India has the Meteor, which I believe should be [contingent on public figures being ~true] comparable to if not superior than an export PL-15 in range (Pakistan gets downgraded stuff, I believe) unless the Indian Meteor is also downgraded. The Meteor's ramjet should give it an edge in certain circumstances, but I don't think the Meteor has an AESA seekerhead, and I believe the PL-15 does, so that definitely gives the PL-15 an edge of its own.
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Why would it be more favorable sooner? Do you think they expect Pakistan's arsenal to get considerably stronger? Wouldn't India's BMD benefit from more development and deployment time, or do you think it's already capable of meaningfully blunting a Pakistani attack?
I don't know much about India/Pakistan so I don't have a strong opinion, very curious!
That is my assumption, yeah. At the moment, nuclear war between Pakistan and India wouldn't actually be an MAD scenario; Pakistan would be completely destroyed (and you can't get any more destroyed than that) while India would "merely" suffer the worst disaster in memory. Pakistan and India have similar-sized nuclear arsenals (in terms of number of bombs - India's bombs are much stronger), but India is of course much larger, and they also have much more sophisticated nuclear delivery systems; Pakistan's arsenal is dangerous but it's currently one of the easier nuclear powers in the world to foil an attack from. In the future they'll most likely be more evenly-matched and a nuclear war would actually spell the end of both India and Pakistan.
Do we know India has a sufficient amount of deployed thermonuclear warheads to actually destroy Pakistan?
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Hypothetically, if India were to blow its hot nuclear load on Pakistan—in which case, as you mentioned, it would likely suffer the worst disaster in history—would India then have the (nuclear or conventional) wherewithal to prevent, say, a Chinese invasion of the contested northeastern borderlands? Or other violations of its territorial integrity?
If not, this may be reason enough for India not to pursue escalation to nuclear war, even if a nuclear exchange with Pakistan would technically be survivable.
The northeastern front isn't easy to conquer. The Himalayas act as a barrier that is pretty hard to breach, though I'd rather not think about a future where there is much Hindu blood lost.
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Interesting, thanks! Looks like Pakistan has mostly SRBMs and MRBMs and cruise missiles? Pakistan definitely doesn't have the strategic depth that the US/USSR have but I don't know enough about ABMs and in particular India's ballistic missile defense program to know if that gives India much of an edge there.
Definitely makes striking the launchers prior to launch easier though!
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Nothing ever happens ¯\_(ツ)__/¯
More seriously, I would like to believe that everyone has enough skin in the game to recognize that the use of nuclear weapons is a bad thing for the globe. Beyond the direct human suffering of New Delhi getting turned into radioactive slag, the memes are at least partially true, nobody wants a trillion Indian/Pakistani refugees so the rest of the world et al. will do their damnedest to prevent nukes from flying. But maybe the interest of everyone else in the world isn't enough and Modi lets fly. Historical Events seem to be occurring more and more often.
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