Quick roundup on the Indo-Pakistani conflict:
Facing a quick, widespread Indian military mobilization in Kashmir, Pakistan is saying they’re just going to hand the captured Indian pilot over as a gesture of goodwill. (Pakistan’s earlier airing footage of the captured pilot on TV was, in fact, a violation of the Geneva Convention.)
Another reason war may be averted in Kashmir is due to bad weather.
India supposedly shot down an Pakistani F-16, the pilot of which is MIA.
Reports of Pakistan shelling Indian positions. Indian news source, so take it with a grain or two of salt.
Evidently the Indian Air Force staged several mock runs to stress Pakistan’s air force before the actual strike.
Not buying all the points here, but the analysis of differing Pakistani and Indian nuclear strategy is interesting:
The Pakistani military’s fear is that the Indian army has an overwhelming advantage, in terms of men and tanks, so may mount a “Cold Start” conventional attack that quickly could seize the major Pakistani city of Lahore and effectively win a war without employing nuclear weapons. As a consequence, whereas India, initially at least, developed strategic nuclear weapons designed to reach all of Pakistan, the latter’s military switched to tactical nuclear weapons to stop dead any Cold Start Doctrine adventure.
But how easy would it be to halt Indian tank divisions pouring across the desert in the flat border region south of the mountainous terrain of Kashmir, where the current action is taking place? It may sound that I have strange friends, but I know people who have “run the numbers” on this. The answer is that it would take more than 20 Pakistani nuclear weapons to blunt an Indian attack.
The conventional wisdom is, or certainly was, that nuclear weapons create a balance of terror between rivals. That logic may have applied in the days of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, but it no longer is valid — at least between India and Pakistan.
“Britain, US and France ask UN to blacklist Jaish-e-Mohammad leader Masood Azhar.”
“Jaish-e-Mohammad head Masood Azhar, the real architect of the deadly Pulwama attack, receives the same military protection in Pakistan’s Punjab province as Osama bin Laden did in the military town of Abbottabad, India Today’s open-source investigation shows…India Today’s open-source intelligence team has pin-pointed the Jaish den in Bahawalpur, the 12th largest city of Pakistan’s Punjab.”
In both India and Pakistan, people are asking the important questions: Will the war interfere with the Cricket World Cup? In fact, Pakistan’s president Imran Khan is a former cricketer.
Tags: Bahawalpur, F-16, Imran Khan, India, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Kashmir, Masood Azhar, Military, Narendra Modi, nuclear weapons, Pakistan, Punjab
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2019 at 9:13 AM and is filed under Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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“Leg-Before Wicket” it is, then.
Dare I say “sticky wicket?”
…
Quite.