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The eternal India-Pakistan conflict is heating up, again. A car bomb at a tourist attraction in Delhi killed 14 people yesterday. Today a car bomb in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad killed 12 people. India and Pakistan are both blaming each other for the respective attacks, and credible open-source intel accounts on Twitter are reporting large mobilizations of troops heading towards the border.
To me it seems that relations between the countries have been on a downward slide for the last ten years. While I’m not certain that this particular incident will be the big one, the increasing regularity and intensity of the skirmishes is on a worrying trend down.
This doesn’t come at a good time for Pakistan, which is increasingly having a hard time holding its western mountain territories against the Taliban. India has recently been cultivating ties with the Taliban, seeking their own proxies of militant crazies to counterbalance the ones Pakistan has in Kashmir. In the event of a war Pakistan could find itself sandwiched between the Indian army and the Taliban forces in the mountain regions.
Counterintuitively, this kind of lousy poker hand could make Pakistan more likely to seek a major conflict. There are many, many conflicts throughout history that were instigated by a party that was in a bad situation, because it’s better to roll the dice now before your position gets even worse.
And of course there are probably 400 or so fission weapons between the two, in the several-hundred kiloton range. I believe the subcontinent is the single likeliest place on earth to see a nuclear conflict start, more than Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
I'm Indian, so obviously biased. But, is there credible evidence that India funds terrorists within Pakistan ?
India's beef is with the Pakistani military, first and foremost. An unstable Pakistan is one that needs more military, and therefore such a state is of no benefit to India. India craves a quiet Pakistan. One that does its own thing and leaves India alone. The Pakistani army holds a uniquely self-destructive ideology. A hot border, self-destructiveness and nukes are a trifecta that India wants no part of.
I wish it was different. But, Asim Munir, Pakistan's new leader is a hard-line
self-destructionist.-Field Marshall for life, Asim Munir.
Looks like the attackers were armed by Afghanistan, but Pakistan wants to drag India in with it. After all, that's the only narrative that works to the army's benefit. The Pakistani Taliban (who took ownership) takes direct inspiration from the Afghan Taliban who were directly trained by Pakistani military (ISI specifically). Reminds me of Hillary's infamous banger : "You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors".
In the absence of evidence, I'm going to disregard Pakistani claims about 'India funded terrorists'.
This one is more interesting. From the looks of it, a dozen or so attacks were planned and this was the only one that succeeded. Thankfully, most of the plans were intercepted early and the contraband was seized. India has the benefit of catching many of the culprits alive, so more evidence should come out with time.
In Indian media, the story is being sold as a case of Indian success (at stopping 90+% of the planned attacks) rather than one of Pakistani terror. My read is that India does not want another war at this moment. There are no major state elections coming, so increased nationalism at the expense of economy is worthless to Modi. Op Sindoor was forced on Modi because of the performative cruelty of the attackers. This attack's significance was more intellectual than emotional. The attackers were muslim doctors, a bad look for educated muslims. The attack took place outside Kashmir, violating a long held understanding between the Indian and Pakistani intelligence services of keeping the proxy war limited to Kashmir.
In Pakistan, Munir has been saber-rattling since the day of the ceasefire. His posturing has gotten more and more aggressive with every day. I'm worried that he thinks he has to force another war to flip the narrative around Op Sindhoor. Pakistani military has a history of aggressive leaders. But, Munir feels kooky in a way that's different from Musharraf or Bajwa. He has some of Zia's insanity, and that scares me.
I think this occasion will be a nothing burger. That being said, it indicates a steady increase in the likelihood of a hot war with Pakistan sometime in the next few years.
They'd be fools not to pay the Pakistanis in their own coin. The more resources tied down in counterinsurgency, the less manpower Pakistan has to point at India. The terrorists in Pakistan are, of themselves, Afghans who the Pakistanis paid to cause trouble. Now that the Americans are out, they go back into Pakistan to cause trouble. How wonderfully shortsighted of their government.
Given Pakistan's cross-border support of terrorism in Kashmir, there's really no reason for the Indians not to do the same. (Well, there are plenty of reasons. Moral ones. But we're talking geopolitics.) Let's just say that it would be a surprise if India wasn't supporting them.
Breaching the gentlemans agreement is more ruinous for India. The balochis and pashtuns are restless enough without Indian aid, but the Indian muslims are currently peacable. Supercharging the deobandi movement with external agitation is at minimum politically destabilizing and at worst secessionist. As it stands India has some breathing room with their naxalite campaign coming to an end, but Pakistan prodding of deobandi or even khalistani domestic terrorism will be bad for india.
Though frankly the greater risk for India is the Bangladesh Pakistan rapprochement. The fall of the Awami league has put Indias eastern flank back in play and if any secessionist movements in Assam gain local traction then India has a headache that will not be worth any amount of joy that can be gained from kicking in Pakistan.
Bangladesh's military is rather impotent. Sure, they could supply rebels and insurgents in Assam and the NE, but they're highly unlikely to divert a significant portion of Indian resources from a western front.
Even with recent political changes, I very much doubt that Bangladesh has the appetite for conflict. They're a small country, mostly surrounded by India, with little strategic depth and extremely susceptible to naval blockade.
You'd need them to host a significant Chinese presence to matter, and that isn't particularly on the cards for the foreseeable future. If it was a war with India vs China +- Pakistan, I can see it making a difference.
Geography dictates that Bangladesh is a fucking terrible place to fight because it is filled with rivers and crossings are exponentially more difficult now. Indian victory is not an assured fsit accompli.
Nevertheless the bigger issue is not a hot war but Bangladesh harbouring Bengali agitators in Assam and West Bengal who play up Bengali grievances in local language. Dehli had enough problems with Tamils during the Sri Lankan civil war, and Bengalis outnumber Tamils by a comical degree. The Indian Army may be able to prosecute a campaign to clamp down any active Bangladeshi military adventurism, the GoI definitely can't handle a renewed ethnic conflict.
I agree that Bangladesh is a terrible place to fight, but I think that cuts much more against Bangladesh than against India.
India does not need to occupy Bangladesh to win anything that matters to it. There is already a convenient water barrier and rough terrain in the north that makes a defensive line on the Indian side quite workable. If Dhaka tried serious military adventurism, the Indian objective would not be to hold Dhaka, it would be to smash the Bangladeshi military and government C2, then sit behind its own rivers and wait. From that perspective, NE India is not strategically vital enough to justify India throwing itself into the full nightmare of riverine counterinsurgency inside Bangladesh.
On the other hand, Bangladesh is almost encircled by India, has very little strategic depth, and is highly vulnerable to both air attack and blockade. The Bangladesh Air Force is small, made up mostly of elderly F-7s and a handful of MiG-29s, and their ground based air defence is basically point defence with a few modern Chinese SHORAD systems around key sites rather than a dense layered network. In a shooting war, IAF squadrons already stationed for China or Pakistan contingencies could be retasked to hit Bangladeshi C2, logistics and fuel pretty quickly, with relatively low risk. "Victory" for India in that scenario is simply degrading Bangladesh to the point where it cannot meaningfully project power across the border.
Which is why, as you say, the more plausible threat is not regular Bangladeshi forces crossing rivers in strength, but Dhaka tolerating or quietly supporting Bengali militants on the Indian side. Even there, I think the constraints are pretty tight. Bangladesh is small, poor, and extremely exposed to Indian economic pressure. Hosting insurgents that blow up Indian bridges or kick off serious ethnic cleansing in Assam would invite air strikes and land/sea blockade that the country is in no position to ride out, especially without explicit Chinese backing. They'd effectively be betting the survival of your regime on Beijing deciding you are worth a confrontation with Delhi. That's a... really poor bet IMO.
There are deep class, regional and religious cleavages, and Hindu Bengali attitudes toward Muslim Bengalis are often quite hostile. West Bengal is still roughly 70 percent Hindu and 27 percent Muslim overall, and even in Assam the picture is a mix of Assamese Hindus, Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims rather than some unified "Bengali front". There are obviously communal tensions and sporadic violence, but the modal pattern in Assam and West Bengal is low level background strife and political jockeying, not large, disciplined sectarian militias just waiting for a shipment of AKs.
And as far as Indian Muslims go, I think people outside the region often underestimate how boringly normal this is in practice. Even in actual Indo-Pak wars, we did not see large scale Hindu–Muslim bloodbaths outside specific flashpoints, and there weren't significant numbers of Indian Muslims defecting to Pakistan. Outside of J&K, the overwhelming revealed preference has been to treat "Indian" as the primary political identity, or at least not to act on any divided loyalties in a militarily relevant way.
Hell, Bengali Muslims hate Pakistan. You know, the whole. Independence war and genocide deal. That's particularly true in Bangladesh, for obvious reasons.
Bangladesh might be cooling previously cordial ties, but they're not suicidal. I can't see a plausible path to them taking direct action, or even enough indirect action to matter. It's in a similar ballpark to Mexico deciding to invade the US during a war over Taiwan.
Insurgencies dont succeed on the back of material support, they succeed on the back of domestic opposition to the ruling class. Muslims in India largely seem tolerant of even the rising hindutva because it is patently obvious to anyone with functioning neurons that Pakistans brand of islam just results in shitty outcomes for muslims than even within india. This means that the calculus can flip however and just because muslims in India have been relatively peacable compared to naxalite tamil khalistan assamese guju violence it doesn't mean they are eternally docile.
And hostility can manifest in ways potentially more disruptive than war. Indian politics outside the hindi core are already a fragmented mess of local parties who barely hate their local enemies more than whoever is in/outside of Dehli. Bangladesh hosting dissident west bengali assamese or bihari political intellectuals calling for political localism against whoever happens to be in delhi will foment more fracturing than any direct action. Bangladesh isn't going to be a new front, but a 60 second tiktok reel can destroy Delhis political grip more than 3000 black jets of Allah.
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Yeah, after the whole Afghanistan thing it's really hard to feel anything but schadenfreude about the Taliban causing trouble in Pakistan.
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I don’t necessarily take the Pakistani government’s claims at face value either. But to some extent it doesn’t matter what the truth is, just what the government thinks or claims is the truth. It certainly would not be the first time a country went to war on paper thin evidence.
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