The last time India and Pakistan faced each other in a military confrontation in 2019, U.S. officials found the movement in the nuclear arsenals of both countries was shocking enough. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is awakened late at night. “His cell phone” convinced neither side to prepare for the nuclear war. ”
After the initial skirmish, this conflict quickly cooled down. But six years later, the two South Asian rivals suffered another military conflict after a deadly terrorist attack on tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir. This time there is a new element of uncertainty as the region’s most important military alliance has been re-demarcated.
The changing patterns of weapons flow illustrate the new consistency in this particularly turbulent corner of Asia, where three nuclear powers (India, Pakistan and China) are at a restless distance.
India is a traditionally non-aligned country that has been hesitating about the United States and has been buying billions of dollars in equipment from the United States and other Western suppliers. Meanwhile, India has significantly reduced the purchase of low-cost weapons from Russia, its Cold War-era ally.
Pakistan's correlation with the United States has been weakening since the end of the Afghan war, and he no longer buys American equipment that the United States once encouraged it to acquire. Pakistan has turned to China, with the vast majority of military purchases.
These links inject superpower politics into South Asia’s longest and most difficult conflict.
The United States has cultivated India as a partner against China, while Beijing has deepened its investment in advocacy and sponsorship in Pakistan as India gets closer to the United States.
Meanwhile, in recent years, relations between India and China have deteriorated in claims on competing territories, and conflicts occurred between the two armies. Relations between the world's two largest powers, between the United States and China, attacked Nadir as President Trump launched a trade war against Beijing.
This combustible mixture shows how complex and chaotic the alliance became as the global order broke down after World War II. The history of frequent military confrontations in South Asia has complicated the fluctuations, and the armed forces on both sides are prone to making mistakes, increasing the risk of escalation that may be out of control.
“The United States is now at the heart of India’s security interests, and China increasingly plays a comparable role in Pakistan,” said former diplomat Ashley Tellis, a former senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.
With India now taking military action against Pakistan, it has stood in the United States more powerfully than ever in recent years.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the first few days after the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir. Many New Delhi officials believe strong support from Trump administration officials is the green light for India's plan to retaliate against Pakistan, even as U.S. officials urge restraint.
The obvious absence of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin suggests that the Russian president has answered calls from more than a dozen world leaders within days after the terrorist attack. Officials said the Russian Foreign Minister spoke with his Indian counterparts a week after the attack, and Mr. Modi and Mr. Putin finally spoke this week.
On one hand, China has led public support for Pakistan and described it as “a friend of Ironclad and a strategic partner of all-weather”.
These trends are increasingly reflected in military conflicts.
“If you consider the future conflict between India and Pakistan, it looks increasingly like India is fighting the U.S. and European platforms and Pakistan against China,” said Lindesi Ford, a former senior defense official who is currently a senior fellow at the U.S. Observer Research Foundation. “The close security partners of both countries have developed significantly over the past decade.”
Until recent years, Cold War calculations have shaped South Asian alliances.
India, even as it played a leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, was getting closer to the Soviet Union. Weapons and ammunition from Moscow account for nearly two-thirds of Indian military equipment.
On the other hand, Pakistan has a firm alliance with the United States and becomes a front-line partner to help defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, Pakistan's military exploited arsenal-related relationships, including the acquisition of dozens of coveted F-16 fighters, which helped to free the air superiority that India enjoyed from its air dominance.
After the Cold War, the two countries tested nuclear weapons in the 1990s. For more than a decade, Pakistan has been denied delivery of dozens of F-16s.
But the fate of the country changed again after the attacks in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as it once again became a frontline partner of the United States, this time in the war on terrorism.
Even as Pakistan is accused of playing two games, bringing the Taliban leaders to the soil while helping the U.S. military seat in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has poured in hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid. The United States has become Pakistan's highest arms supplier, and China is still ranked second.
As Pakistan’s importance to the United States declined, it has turned to China, which has long provided an open embrace.
According to the Stockholm International Research Institute, Beijing provided only 38% of Pakistan’s weapons in the mid-2000s, and about 80% of them in the past four years.
Meanwhile, India has reduced its dependence on Russian weapons by more than half. Between 2006 and 2010, about 80% of India's main weapons came from Russia. That figure has dropped to about 38% over the past four years, with more than half of Indian imports coming from allies such as the United States and France and Israel.
One area of the exception of frost in Pakistan and the United States is the F-16 program. Over the past two decades, Pakistan has expanded its F-16 Arsenal, while the Biden administration has launched nearly $400 million in contracts to serve and maintain fighter jets.
In 2019, Pakistan used the F-16 to shoot down a Russian-made Indian jet. New Delhi protested that the operation constituted a breach of the U.S. sales agreement with Pakistan, believing that this only allows for counter-terrorism missions.
Some U.S. officials seem to try to appease India by suggesting that they warn Pakistanis. However, the U.S. diplomatic cable has long made it clear that they know the intention of Pakistan to establish an air force: for potential use in conflict with India.
The 2019 conflict (one of India’s own helicopters was also shot down, killing six people) exposed the troubles of the army. In the years since, India has been pouring billions of dollars into modernizing its forces. As India is facing Pakistan now, a bigger threat, China is not only watching, but also assisting its opponents.
For many U.S. officials who closely observe the development of 2019, human errors clarify how this situation escalates.
U.S. officials fear that in India and Pakistan’s excessive nationalism, two well-stocked armies operate in a tight air corridor and mutual suspicion, even the smallest mistake or exceeding the order could lead to a catastrophic escalation.
“As we saw in 2019, your cross-border air strikes and the crisis of air struggle presents a huge escalation risk,” Ford, a former U.S. defense official. “When it involves two nuclear-weapon neighbors, that's even more problematic.”
Salman Masood and Hari Kumar Contribution report.
