India and Pakistan's New War: A Military Stalemate with Strategic Concessions

Military, India battled Pakistan to less than a draw this month in their most extensive fighting in five decades. Indian troops were able to blast holes in hangars at vulnerable Pakistani air bases and crater runways, although only after having lost planes in air confrontations with its long-time rival.

But strategically, the battlefield tossup was an unambiguous loss for India. An emerging diplomatic and economic power, it is now compared to Pakistan, a weaker, smaller state Indian officials describe as a rogue patron of terrorism.

The four-day war was a reminder to the world of India's inability to put an end to 78 years of war with the crisis-ridden neighbor. Each act of belligerence benefits Pakistan, where hostility towards India has been life-giving for years. A direct military triumph is nearly unthinkable, given the threat from both countries' nuclear arsenals.

"It's a pity we Indians spend so much time and energy on something that is genuinely a strategic distraction: Pakistani terrorism," said Shivshankar Menon, an ex-Indian national security adviser. "But life is like that and we might as well contain the issue."

How precisely to do that has vexed Indian leaders since the beginning.

Discussions with more than a dozen officials, diplomats, and experts provide a stark presentation of India's age-old dilemma. After numerous wars and a series of fruitless attempts to settle their disputes, which have characterized the subcontinent ever since Pakistan and India were divided in 1947, the problem has evolved into a steadily more complex issue.

The flashpoint has become more asymmetrical — India bombed Pakistan this month after accusing it of carrying out a deadly terrorist attack. The risk of rapid escalation has risen as both countries send drones and other high-tech arms in huge numbers for the first time. And superpower politics are engaged in ways unprecedented, as the United States is offering growing diplomatic and military support to India, while China is offering it to Pakistan.

At the same time, religious nationalism has gained acceptance in the leadership of both the countries, and both have hardening their views about the other country, so that any conciliatory step becomes unfathomable.

The Pakistan Army, the 800-pound gorilla that has long distorted the politics of the country, has gone this ideological direction as it has prolonged its de facto governance. In India, the transition to Hindu-nationalist, strongman rule has put it in a corner every time tensions flare, as the right-wing support base of Prime Minister Narendra Modi frequently demands blood.

That makes it harder to prove the kind of restraint India showed in 2008, when terrorists struck over 160 people in Mumbai — and to see that a war, besides meeting immediate political needs, could slow India's ascension.

The Indian leadership at the time — Mr. Menon was its top diplomat — declined to strike Pakistan. It wanted to keep the world's attention focused on the terror attack and isolate Pakistan for accepting terror, rather than elevating it to the status of war equal.

Seventeen years later, terrorists again attacked innocent citizens, killing more than two dozen Hindu visitors on April 22 in a scenic Kashmir grassland. India retaliated this time by attacking Pakistan militarily and the two nations came to the brink of full-scale war.

Indian authorities hold that they had to convey a message that there is a cost to Pakistan's policy of proxy war, and that the strikes were a part of a broader strategy designed to wring out their enemy, including the threat of meddling with the flow of crucial cross-border rivers.

Even detractors like Mr. Menon acknowledge that they can understand why India did not have much other choice.

An Unshakable Neighbor

India and Pakistan have been on profoundly different trajectories for decades.

While the world's fourth-largest economy has emerged in India, it has been courted by the United States and its allies as a geopolitically valuable counterbalance to China and as an investment destination. American and Indian politicians would rather talk about an expanded "Indo-Pacific" space including the high-income economies of East Asia, than the old "Indo-Pakistan" issues.

Now, in India's hierarchy of concerns, "China looks much larger than Pakistan does," Jon Finer, a former White House deputy national security adviser, said on a panel recently.

As Chinese incursions along the countries' Himalayan border and more competition to overlord the region increase, the last thing India wants "is to be bogged down in a war with Pakistan while they deal with China," he added.

But Pakistan — overshadowed at birth by an oversized army that gave birth to India as the eternal foe to justify its existence and strength — is ever in the background.

Decades after the Indian economy started surpassing that of Pakistan, it was in 1998 that India made a history-altering move towards becoming one of the world powers by making underground nuclear tests.

Barely two weeks later, Pakistan conducted nuclear tests as well. Nuclear deterrence overnight nullified India's military advantage.

President Bill Clinton promptly declared the region "the most dangerous place in the world." It was hardly what India had hoped for. Instead of being bracketed with China, Russia, and the Western world, India found itself in a nightmarish new quagmire.

The nuclear standoff did not bring peace. Pakistan learned from the experience of running American-supported Jihadist militias against the Soviets in Afghanistan how to expand asymmetric warfare into its never-ending struggle with India.

A Harsher Approach

Like his predecessors, Indian leaders, Mr. Modi, the country's Hindu-nationalist prime minister, once tried his hand at peace.

Basking in the glory of his sweeping election victory in 2014, he made an impromptu visit to Pakistan the following year, the first such visit by an Indian prime minister in a decade. He had committed to taking India to developed nation status and wanted to find out whether he could settle on an arena that was hemorrhaging resources.

Nine months later, militants attacked a military base. Pakistan-backed groups were blamed by India. All peace negotiations went with the wind.

India's response to that assault began a cycle of military retaliation that was repeated in response to a similar assault on Indian forces in 2019 and last month's terrorist ambush of civilians. India also entrenched with a policy of retaliating against Pakistan — freezing talks, diplomatically isolating the country, increasing border security, and covertly working to compound its internal vulnerabilities.

Ajit Doval, the genesis of Mr. Modi's national security policy, has said India's previous governments became too cautious with the threat of nuclear war. Working in such a frame of mind, he testified some months before becoming national security adviser in 2014, "I can never win — because either I lose, or there is a stalemate."

He proposed a "defensive offense" strategy, essentially copying Pakistan's own asymmetrical strategy.

India has been running campaigns of assassination to try and kill many militants committed to activities against India, officials and analysts have said in the past few years. The Indian government has also been suspected to be involved in insurgencies that have depleted Pakistan's military, such as the Balochistan Province separatist movement, which borders Iran and Afghanistan.

"You do one Mumbai, you may lose Balochistan," said Mr. Doval in 2014. "There is no nuclear war involved in that. There is no deployment of troops. If you know the tricks, we know the trick better than you."

In the aftermath of the recent conflicts, India has threatened even more overt action, stating that any future terrorist attack will be seen as an act of war — potentially setting routine military conflict as the new normal.

With the specter of nuclear war hanging over its head, however, what India can achieve with military force is limited.

"Deterrence is a matter of eye of the beholder, a game of mind reading," said Mr. Menon, the former national security adviser. The more realistic question, he said, is whether India can realign the incentives that propel the Pakistan Army.

The four days of free-wheeling aggressiveness against Pakistan in the past month became the latest reality check between Indian ambitions and constraints. It has gained sufficient diplomatic clout and integrated itself sufficiently into the global economy to be left with no serious dent on its reputation, Western diplomats in New Delhi said.

But "at some point, India's leaders have to realize that they can't shake off their neighbor and go on and become a world power," said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador in Washington. "You have to have some modus vivendi with each of your neighbors — whether they're your enemies, whether they're your friends, whether they're just there.