Outside the Beltway

Kashmir Crisis Escalates

India and Pakistan are playing a dangerous game of tit for tat.

James Joyner · Wednesday, May 7, 2025 · 12 comments

The Economist (“India strikes Pakistan to avenge a terrorist attack“):

SHORTLY AFTER midnight on May 7th, exactly two weeks after a terrorist attack in Kashmir, Indian missiles streaked into Pakistan. India said it had hit “terrorist infrastructure” at nine sites in Pakistani-administered Kashmir and in Punjab. Images on social media showed burning buildings and mangled debris in a field. Pakistan said that India had struck six locations in those regions, killing 26 civilians. It denied they were sites used by terrorists and said it had shot down five Indian fighter jets, a claim not confirmed by India. It was the largest aerial attack on Pakistan in more than 50 years.

The question now is how Pakistan will retaliate. The Indian strikes were followed by heavy Pakistani shelling across the “line of control” dividing Kashmir, which is claimed wholly and ruled partly by both countries. India said the shelling killed three of its civilians. But that is almost certainly just the start of the nuclear-armed neighbours’ military confrontation. Pakistan said India’s targets included a hydropower dam and called the attack “an act of war”. Pakistan’s army said it would hit back “at a time and place of its own choosing”. It added: “The temporary pleasure of India will be replaced by enduring grief.”

India had already scheduled nationwide civil-defence drills for May 7th. Its government had hinted at military retaliation ever since accusing Pakistan-based militants of involvement in the attack in Kashmir on April 22nd, which killed 26 civilians. That was the bloodiest assault there since 2019 and the deadliest on Indian civilians since one on Mumbai in 2008. As part of the defence drills, air-raid sirens will blare in major cities, electricity will be cut and the air force will launch a two-day “mega military exercise” along the western border. They are the first such drills since the last full-scale war between India and Pakistan in 1971. A state of high alert was declared in border regions of the Indian state of Rajasthan, which abuts Pakistan, and several airports in northern India were closed.

Before its strikes, India had taken non-military action too. It wants to expand the number of ways it can respond to what it views as persistent Pakistani-backed terrorism. On April 23rd it suspended the 65-year-old Indus Waters Treaty, governing water sharing between India and Pakistan. Since then, India has begun sluicing silt from its reservoirs—reportedly disrupting water flows into Pakistan. Further Indian efforts to penalise Pakistan diplomatically and economically are possible. America and other foreign governments had urged both sides to de-escalate in recent days.

Nonetheless India’s leaders decided that a military response was essential. That is partly to re-establish deterrence. The country’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, said India had intelligence showing that further attacks against it by Pakistan-based terrorist cells were impending. But India’s response is also designed to satisfy an enraged public. Mr Modi has been under pressure to go beyond his response to the last big attacks in Kashmir. In 2016 he sent ground forces into the Pakistan-ruled part of the region, and in 2019 he ordered air strikes both there and just inside Pakistan proper. He also faces unusual domestic scrutiny over the failings of his policies and security forces, having claimed to have brought peace and prosperity to Kashmir since scrapping its semi-autonomous status in 2019.

The Indian strikes are notable for three reasons. One is that India appears to have fired missiles and guided bombs from its own territory. “This cowardly and shameful attack was carried out from within India’s airspace,” said Pakistan’s army. If that is true, India may have been trying to avoid a repeat of its experience in 2019, when an Indian fighter was shot down over Pakistan and its pilot captured. Several Indian news outlets reported that India had fired SCALP cruise missiles and dropped Hammer smart bombs from French-made Rafale fighter jets.

The relative success of those tactics may depend on the veracity of Pakistan’s claims to have shot down five Indian fighters and one aerial drone. Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, a Pakistani military spokesperson, said the aircraft included three Rafale jets, one SU-30, one MiG-29 and one Heron aerial drone. Indian authorities have not commented officially on the claim other than saying that images of aircraft debris circulating online are from an earlier incident. But Indian and foreign media reports suggest that some aircraft may have crashed overnight in Indian-ruled Kashmir and the Indian state of Punjab. Reuters reported that three Indian pilots involved were in hospital.

The second distinction is that, as in 2019, India attacked undisputed Pakistani territory as well as Pakistani-held Kashmir but this time it targeted four sites in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous, and politically and economically important province, including near the cities of Bahawalpur and Muridke. Video footage presented at a news conference showed what appeared to be precision strikes on individual buildings.

India said the site in Muridke, which is 30km from Lahore, Punjab’s capital, was a training camp for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Islamist militant group that Indian officials say was behind the latest Kashmir attack and has deep ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service. A video from the site posted on social media showed a fire raging around a damaged building. The site in Bahawalpur was the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed, according to India’s armed forces. Another jihadi outfit with ties to Pakistani spooks, it claimed responsibility for the last big attack in Kashmir, in 2019.

India’s decision to strike Punjab is an escalatory choice. But the third feature of the strikes is that everything else appears to have been calibrated to minimise the risk of a full-scale war. Pakistan said India’s attack had targeted civilian areas, damaging mosques and killing innocent men, women and children. But India said that its strikes were “focused, measured, and non-escalatory”. It noted that it had not struck military economic or civilian targets, but only “known terror camps” from which attacks on India had been planned and directed. This suggests that India is eager to provide an off-ramp to Pakistan.

Whether Pakistan will take it is another question. In 2019, Pakistan responded by conducting a retaliatory air strike. It has a large and diverse arsenal of conventional, cruise and ballistic missiles, which it could fire into India without requiring jets to cross the border. Despite the heated rhetoric, Pakistan is likely to choose the scale and nature of its response with care, doing enough to placate its populace and restore a modicum of deterrence without escalating the crisis further. That might involve strikes against symbolic targets which are unlikely to cause civilian or mass casualties.

NYT (“India Strikes Pakistan, Which Vows to Respond“) adds:

India said early Wednesday that it had conducted several airstrikes on Pakistan, hailing a victory in the name of vengeance for the terrorist attack that killed 26 civilians in Kashmir last month.

But evidence was also growing that the Indian forces may have taken heavy losses during the operation. At least two aircraft were said to have gone down in India and the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, according to three officials, local news reports, and accounts of witnesses who had seen the debris of two.

[…]

India said on Wednesday that it had struck Pakistan after gathering evidence “pointing towards the clear involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists” in last month’s attack on civilians in a tourist area in Kashmir. It said that its military actions had been “measured, responsible and designed to be nonescalatory in nature.” It added that it had targeted only “known terror camps.”

In its own statement on Wednesday, the Pakistani government called the Indian strikes “an unprovoked and blatant act of war” that had “violated Pakistan’s sovereignty.” Pakistani military officials said they had begun a “measured but forceful” response and claimed that they had struck five Indian aircraft — a claim that could not be fully verified.

[…]

A spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, called for restraint from the two sides, adding, “The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan.”

But the scale and nature of the attacks by India are likely to provoke a “significant retaliation” by Pakistan, said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow in the South Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

After attacks against Indian security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir in 2016 and 2019, India conducted more limited strikes in Pakistani-controlled territory. But this time, India “has crossed two significant thresholds in its military action” by hitting a large number of sites in Pakistan and striking the Pakistani heartland in Punjab, Mr. Mir said.

[…]

In the April 22 attack, gunmen opened fire on tourists in the Indian-administered region of Kashmir, killing 26 and injuring more than a dozen others.

The terrorist attack was one of the worst against Indian civilians in decades, and India was quick to suggest that Pakistan, its neighbor and archenemy, had been involved. The two countries have fought several wars over Kashmir, a region that they have split but that each claims in whole.

The Pakistani government has denied involvement in the attack, and India has presented little evidence to support its accusations. Still, soon after the onslaught, India announced a flurry of punitive measures against Pakistan, including threatening to disrupt the flow of a major river system that supplies it with water.

In Kashmir, Indian forces began a sweeping crackdown, arresting hundreds, as they continued their hunt for the attackers. And India and Pakistan have repeatedly exchanged small-arms fire along the border in the days after the attack.

Strategically, if in fact the initial attacks from the Pakistani side were indeed carried out by terrorist groups without backing from the government and if the Indian response indeed targeted only terrorist bases and spared Pakistani military sites, this should be the end of it. Politically, however, I don’t see how the Pakistani government avoids retaliation of sufficient intensity to avoid being seen as humiliated.

Needless to say, that’s not a great place for two nuclear-armed enemies to be in.