India and Pakistan’s on-again/off-again conflict over Kashmir is on again:
Pakistan says India launched an airstrike on its territory early Tuesday that caused no casualties, while India said it targeted a terrorist training camp in a pre-emptive strike that killed a “very large number” of militants.
The overnight raid was the latest escalation between the nuclear-armed rivals since a deadly militant attack in the disputed Kashmir region earlier this month killed more than 40 Indian soldiers. Pakistan has denied involvement in the attack but has vowed to respond to any Indian military operation against it.
The Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad claimed responsibility. The bomber, who made a video before the attack, was a resident of Indian Kashmir.
Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen Asif Ghafoor, said the Indian “aircrafts” crossed into the Muzafarabad sector of Kashmir, which is split between the two countries but claimed by each in its entirety. He said Pakistan scrambled fighters and the Indian jets “released payload in haste” near Balakot, on the edge of Pakistani-ruled Kashmir.
India’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, told reporters in New Delhi that Indian fighter aircraft targeted Jaish-e-Mohammad camps in a pre-emptive strike after intelligence indicated another attack was being planned.
“Acting on intelligence, India early today stuck the biggest training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed in Balakot,” he said. “In this operation a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and Jehadis being trained were eliminated.”
The best working assumption here is that everyone involved is lying, which is to assume that Pakistan is backing and funding Jaish-e-Mohammad (probably, like the Taliban, through the ISI), and that Indian planes did hit their targets, but have no way of knowing how much damage they actually inflicted.
The Indian Air Force used Sukhoi-30MKIs and Mirage 2000s with laser-guided bombs in the strike. Neither of those is state-of-the-art. Sukhoi-30MKI is a local build of a Russian F-15 clone introduced in the 1990s. The French Mirage 2000 was first introduced in the 1970s, though the Indian version has been considerably upgraded. None of those are remotely close to state-of-the-art. Fortunately for Indian, Pakistan’s air force is not much more modern, with American F-16s and the Pakistani/Chinese co-built F-17 Thunder being their top of the line.
Three of India and Pakistan’s four wars have been fought over Kashmir, mostly recently in the Kargil War of 1999, when Pakistani troops infiltrated into Kashmir over the “line of control” and got their asses kicked. The biggest difference between 1999 and now, of course, is that both India and Pakistan have considerably expanded their nuclear arsenals, both thought to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 nukes each.
Now there are reports of both countries mobilizing, of sporadic gunfire across the border, and Pakistan stating it will strike back “at a time of its choosing.
Making things even more unpredictable is that both Pakistan and India are ruled by weird religious-ethnoationalist populist parties, Imran Khan’s Islamist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf and Narendra Modi’s Hindu Bharatiya Janata. It’s hard to know just how far either will take things if push comes to shove. Probably well short of letting the nukes fly, but who knows?
It would be nice if our media would focus on things like “possible nuclear war” rather than, say, the beliefs of Trump’s pastry chef, but that’s not the media we have…