{"id":138081,"date":"2025-05-20T03:38:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T03:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/why-theres-no-battlefield-solution-to-indias-perpetual-pakistan-problem-the-new-york-times\/"},"modified":"2025-05-20T03:38:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T03:38:13","slug":"why-theres-no-battlefield-solution-to-indias-perpetual-pakistan-problem-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/why-theres-no-battlefield-solution-to-indias-perpetual-pakistan-problem-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Why There\u2019s No Battlefield Solution to India\u2019s Perpetual Pakistan Problem – The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

News Analysis
This month\u2019s violent escalation reminded the world how India\u2019s gradual rise can be hindered by the troublesome country next door.
A house damaged in a Pakistani artillery shelling in Poonch, in the India-controlled part of Kashmir, on Wednesday.<\/span>Credit…<\/span>Atul Loke for The New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/span>
Supported by
By <\/span>Mujib Mashal<\/a> and Alex Travelli<\/a>
Reporting from New Delhi
Militarily, India fought Pakistan to little more than a draw this month during their most expansive combat in half a century.
Indian forces managed to punch holes in hangars at sensitive Pakistani air bases and leave craters on runways, although only after losing aircraft in aerial face-offs with its longtime adversary.
But strategically, the battlefield tossup was a clear setback for India. An aspiring diplomatic and economic power, it now finds itself equated with Pakistan, a smaller, weaker country that Indian officials call a rogue sponsor of terrorism.
The four-day clash reminded the world of <\/span>India\u2019s powerlessness to resolve 78 years of conflict with the troubled nation next door. Any act of confrontation plays into the hands of Pakistan, where friction with India has long been a lifeblood. Outright military victory is nearly impossible, given the threat from both countries\u2019 nuclear arsenals.
\u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate that we in India have to waste so much of our time and effort on what is actually a strategic distraction: terror from Pakistan,\u201d said Shivshankar Menon, a former national security adviser in India. \u201cBut it\u2019s a fact of life and we might as well manage the problem.\u201d
Just how to do that has perplexed Indian leaders ever since Pakistan and India were cleaved apart in 1947.
Interviews with more than a dozen diplomats, analysts and officials paint a stark picture of India\u2019s perpetual dilemma. After multiple wars and several failed attempts at solving their disputes, the problem has only grown in complexity.
India struck Pakistan this month after blaming it for a deadly terrorist attack. The risk of rapid escalation has increased as both sides deploy<\/a> drones and other cutting-edge weapons on a large scale for the first time. And superpower politics have entered the equation<\/a> in new ways, as the United States offers growing diplomatic and military support to India, and China does so for Pakistan.
At the same time, the leadership in each country has embraced religious nationalism, and each has hardened its views of the other, making any conciliatory gesture all but impossible.
The Pakistan Army, <\/span>which has long warped the country\u2019s politics, has taken this ideological turn as it has extended its de facto rule. In India, the shift to strongman, Hindu-nationalist rule has left it boxed in whenever tensions rise, as the right-wing base of Prime Minister Narendra Modi often calls for blood.
That makes it harder for India to show the kind of restraint that it displayed in 2008, when terrorists killed more than 160 people in Mumbai. Then, awareness of how war could set back India\u2019s ascent took precedence over domestic pressure to retaliate.
The Indian government, with Mr. Menon then as its highest-ranking diplomat, decided against striking Pakistan after the Mumbai attack. It wanted to keep the global focus on the terrorist attack and to isolate Pakistan for supporting terrorism, rather than elevate it as a battlefield equal.
Seventeen years later, terrorists again attacked innocent people, killing more than two dozen Hindu tourists on April 22 in a scenic Kashmir meadow. This time, India responded by striking Pakistan militarily, and the two sides stepped to the brink of all-out war.
Indian officials say that they had to send a message that there is a cost to Pakistan\u2019s policy of proxy warfare, and that the strikes were part of a larger strategy to squeeze their adversary, including by threatening to disrupt the flow of crucial cross-border rivers.
Even critics like Mr. Menon say they can see why India had little other choice.
For years, India and Pakistan have been on vastly different trajectories.
As India has grown to become the world\u2019s fourth-largest economy, it has been courted by the United States and its allies as a geopolitical partner in counterbalancing China and as an investment destination. American and Indian leaders prefer to talk about an enlarged \u201cIndo-Pacific\u201d region, including the advanced economies of East Asia, rather than old \u201cIndo-Pakistan\u201d problems.
Today, in India\u2019s hierarchy of concerns, \u201cChina looks much larger than Pakistan does,\u201d Jon Finer, a former deputy national security adviser at the White House, said on a panel<\/a> recently.
With Chinese incursions along the countries\u2019 Himalayan border and increased competition for regional dominance, the last thing India wants \u201cis to be bogged down in a conflict with Pakistan while they are figuring things out with China,\u201d he said.
But Pakistan \u2014 from its birth dominated by its army, which defined India as the forever enemy to justify its size and influence \u2014 always looms in the background.
In 1998, years after the Indian economy started pulling ahead of Pakistan\u2019s, India made an earthshaking step toward joining the ranks of world powers by staging underground nuclear blasts.
Barely two weeks later, Pakistan conducted its own nuclear tests. Suddenly, nuclear deterrence negated India\u2019s military advantage.
President Bill Clinton soon branded the region \u201cthe most dangerous place in the world.\u201d It was hardly what India had set out to achieve. Instead of being clubbed with China, Russia and the Western powers, India was in a terrifying new quagmire.
The nuclear stalemate did not bring peace. Pakistan used its experience of running American-funded jihadist militias against the Soviets in Afghanistan to expand <\/span>its fight against India.
Like other Indian leaders before him, Mr. Modi, the country\u2019s Hindu-nationalist prime minister, once tried his hand at peace.
Still high on his sweeping election victory in 2014, he made a surprise visit to Pakistan the following year, the first by an Indian prime minister in a decade. He had vowed to turn India into a developed country and wanted to see whether he could find a solution on a front that was squandering resources.
Nine months later, militants attacked an Indian military base. India blamed groups nurtured by Pakistan. Any talk of peace quickly ended.
India\u2019s response to that assault began an escalatory pattern of military retaliation that repeated after a similar attack on Indian forces in 2019 and last month\u2019s terrorist ambush of civilians. India also entrenched a strategy of punishing Pakistan \u2014 freezing talks, isolating the country diplomatically, increasing border security and working covertly to aggravate its domestic vulnerabilities.
Ajit Doval, the architect of Mr. Modi\u2019s national security doctrine, has said that India\u2019s previous governments grew too defensive under the threat of nuclear confrontation. In such a mode, he said, shortly before becoming national security adviser in 2014, \u201cI can never win \u2014 because either I lose, or there is a stalemate.\u201d
He proposed a \u201cdefensive offense\u201d approach, essentially mimicking Pakistan\u2019s own asymmetric tactics.
In recent years, according to analysts and officials, India has waged assassination campaigns to try to take out many of the militants focused on operations against India. The Indian government has also been accused of having a hand in insurgencies that have drained Pakistan\u2019s military, particularly the separatist movement in Balochistan Province, bordering Iran and Afghanistan.
\u201cYou do one Mumbai, you may lose Balochistan,\u201d Mr. Doval said in 2014. \u201cThere is no nuclear war involved in that. There is no engagement of troops. If you know the tricks, we know the trick better than you.\u201d
After the latest hostilities, India has threatened more overt action, saying that any future terrorist attacks will be seen as an act of war \u2014 potentially setting up frequent military confrontation as the new norm.
But with the specter of nuclear war, what India can achieve through military force is limited.
\u201cDeterrence is subjective and in the eye of the beholder, a mind-reading game,\u201d said Mr. Menon, the former national security adviser. The more practical question, he said, is whether India can reset the incentives that drive the Pakistan Army.
The four days of unpredictable escalation with Pakistan this month became the latest reminder of the gap between India\u2019s aspirations and its constraints. It has built sufficient diplomatic power, and integrated itself enough into the global economy, to emerge without a major blow to its reputation, Western diplomats in New Delhi said.
But \u201cat some point, India\u2019s leaders have to recognize that they can\u2019t free themselves of their neighbor and move on and become a global power,\u201d said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington. \u201cYou have to have some modus vivendi with each of your neighbors \u2014 whether they are your enemies, whether they\u2019re your friends, whether they\u2019re just there.\u201d
Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
Anniversary of the Vietnam War: <\/strong>Photography from Vietnam changed how the world saw the war, and\u00a0how Americans saw their own country<\/a>\u00a0and the war itself, which ended 50 years ago. The buildings abandoned by Americans in Vietnam show how the country has changed<\/a>.
Shakespeare\u2019s Bad Marriage: <\/strong>New research undermines the traditional view that Shakespeare was a distant, neglectful husband<\/a>\u00a0to his wife, Anne.
A Holocaust Apology: <\/strong>Eighty years since the end of World War II, Amsterdam\u2019s mayor apologized for the city\u2019s role<\/a>\u00a0in the persecution of its Jewish residents during the Holocaust, in a rare acknowledgment of a collective moral failure by a city leader.
A Shrine to Old Hong Kong: <\/strong>At a formerly grand hotel where Bruce Lee once stayed, a group of collectors is trying to preserve vestiges of the city\u2019s past<\/a>\u00a0as its political identity changes.
Britain\u2019s Magic Circle: <\/strong>Last year, the Magic Circle began searching for Sophie Lloyd, who disguised herself as a man in 1991 to gain membership and was then ousted<\/a>. Now, she has returned.
A Seminal Asian Leader: <\/strong>In his first, 22-year stretch as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad transformed Malaysia\u2019s economy. But he was also accused of being a strongman and antisemite. In an interview<\/a>, he offers a self-assessment.
Advertisement<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News AnalysisThis month\u2019s violent escalation reminded the world how India\u2019s gradual rise can be hindered by the troublesome country next door.A house damaged in a Pakistani artillery shelling in Poonch, in the India-controlled part of Kashmir, on Wednesday.Credit…Atul Loke for The New York TimesSupported byBy Mujib Mashal and Alex TravelliReporting from New DelhiMilitarily, India fought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":138082,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}