Full Text | India, Pakistan, What Happened and How Things Will Be

Last week, India targeted nine terrorist camps in Pakistan and destroyed them. Events followed that led to an escalation of violence and tension between the two countries. The Wire's founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan, Caravan's contributing editor Sushant Singh and former Pentagon official Christopher Clary spoke in a live conversation on the India-Pakistan front.

This is the full text of the discussion, which can put the events that followed in perspective.

Siddharth Varadarajan: Hi and welcome to The Wire. I'm Siddharth Varadarajan and today we will be discussing the Indian military action against targets in Pakistan and in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. This action was taken by the government of India early this morning as a response to the terrorist attack on tourists in Pahalgam on April 22nd.

Joining me for this discussion, which I hope will shed light on what's been happening, what will happen, and what could happen in the days and weeks ahead, are Sushant Singh, who is a lecturer in political science at Yale University and a former army officer and journalist with a long track record in covering defense and security issues. He is also consulting editor of The Caravan and a colleague of mine. We work together for the India Cable newsletter. So Sushant, thank you very much for joining us.

And our second guest today is Professor Christopher Clary, who is also a political scientist, teaches at University of Albany, and has earlier served in the Department of Defense in the US as the country director for South Asia. That's a Pentagon position, and he's somebody who has closely followed Pakistan and India-Pakistan relations. We hope he will bring some perspective as a person outside the region for this discussion, which as you can imagine is a very heated, charged, emotional topic.

What I hope to do in the next 45 minutes or so, gentlemen, is to provide our viewers with a calm, collected assessment of what exactly happened early today with these attacks on nine different sites in Pakistan, form some kind of assessment of what happened—the military aspect, the diplomatic aspect—and then of course focus on the road that lies ahead. What might Pakistan's response be? What would the short, medium, and long-term impacts of this be? These are all questions that require cool-headed, level-headed analysis, something which sadly the bulk of Indian television does not provide viewers because it's more a kind of political theater that we see on air.

Initial assessment of the military operation

Siddharth Varadarajan: Sushant, I want to start with you. Early this morning, events began in the form of a press release by the Ministry of Defense, which spoke in rather telegraphic, cryptic terms of having targeted nine different locations. India made two or three important points in its press release: first, that these targets were linked to the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan; secondly, that no military target, no military infrastructure, or military forces were targeted and hit; and the reason India chose to conduct its operations in this way was because it was conscious of the need to not escalate matters and to keep things within the confines of manageable conflict against the stated yardstick that the army and the MOD mentioned—of targeting terrorist infrastructure, not provoking, being careful not to provoke the Pakistani

military directly by targeting them, and hoping to contain any future escalation. It's now been nearly 12-15 hours since these attacks. How would you rate the outcome so far?

Sushant Singh: Firstly, thank you Siddharth. It's wonderful to be here with you and with Chris, whom I've known for some time. About the operation per se, I would divide it into two parts. One is the domestic part—the military operation is targeted primarily at a political audience in India. It has a political component to it, and then of course it has a military strategic component, an international relations component which is targeted towards Pakistan.

As far as the political side domestically is concerned, I think the nomenclature, the use of the spokesperson, the use of the language—the government in India has mastered this technique over many years, refined it by using television channels, social media handles, and newspapers as you just spoke about.

As far as the strategic aspect of these operations is concerned, the fundamental question is: what is the aim of these operations? Is the aim to create deterrence so that the next such strike does not happen, the next such terror attack does not happen which comes out of Pakistan or from Pakistan-based, Pakistan-backed militants whether in Kashmir or elsewhere? If that is the aim, then these strikes definitely would fall short.

But if the aim is to demonstrate that India has done something big, has punished Pakistan, has avenged the terrorist killings in Pahalgam, then it is perfectly fine. It has probably achieved that because it targeted many places including in Punjab, including Muridke near Lahore, which is clearly much more than what has ever been attempted. Going into Pakistani Punjab, going close to Lahore would be seen as crossing a red line, a violation of sovereignty.

So strategically in the larger gamut of things, does it allow you to deter Pakistan from future action? No. Does it achieve the aim of showing demonstrable success to the Indian population and create this jingoistic narrative about what you have done? Yes.

At the military level, are these operations successful in terms of hitting their target? How many losses has India had? How many losses has Pakistan had? Are there major collateral losses? To me it seems collateral damage has been very limited. About losses suffered by India, there's been a lot of buzz and rumours about the number of aircraft or fighter jets India has lost in this operation. But we really don't know what those numbers are, and I would want to hear from you and from Chris what you make of those reports by Reuters and AP and the report by The Hindu which was taken down.

So at the military level, at a very smaller professional level, I think the mission is six or seven out of 10, depending on how many aircraft India has lost in the bargain. If no aircraft is lost, then it is

9.5 out of 10, but if a few aircraft are lost, then it is not as successful a mission as it would seem on the outside. So politically successful, strategically very limited, militarily depends on how much the Indian losses are. This is how I would characterize this mission.

Comparing with previous military actions

Siddharth Varadarajan: Before I come to you, Chris, to get your assessment and in particular your sense of how Pakistan is going to read what exactly has happened today and how Pakistan is likely to react, Sushant, I wanted to throw one more question or observation at you. It's tempting to compare the nine attacks today with what happened at Balakot.

The Balakot attack in 2019 followed closely on the heels of the Pulwama attack on a CRPF convoy that killed more than 40 jawans, and again there was a lot of anger in the country which the BJP and Mr. Modi wanted to satiate in some way, perhaps even ride that tiger. And so you had Balakot. The government made many claims about what was accomplished, but it did not provide any additional information or evidence, and in fact questions or requests for evidence of the damage caused and terrorists killed was met with almost official anger—who are you to question what the government says, who are you to question what the army says or the air force says? Where is a question of evidence, you have to trust us, and so on. The Pakistanis of course said that nothing of any consequence was hit.

Compared to Balakot, this time the Pakistanis themselves have admitted to losses. I think the figure mentioned by the DG ISPR, who is the top military spokesman, is 26 killed and 30-40 people injured. And we have the statement by the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief, Masood Azhar, who admits that 10 members of his family and four close associates were killed in the Indian attack. So 14 out of 26 of those killed appear to be people linked in some way to

Jaish-e-Mohammad and Masood Azhar. I'm not going into the morality or illegality of women and children who are related to a terrorist getting killed – that's a separate issue – but certainly the Pakistanis and terrorists like Masood Azhar are more forthcoming about what the strike accomplished in concrete terms.

So would you say that compared to Balakot's deterrent effect, which clearly didn't last more than 5 or 6 years – that's as long as it took for the Lashkar-e-Taiba or the so-called resistance front to mount this awful attack at Pahalgam – do you think given the kind of effect these strikes have had, particularly in Bahawalpur, that the deterrent effect may be slightly longer-lasting? The reason I put this to you is because I've been following analysts who are very thrilled with what's happened today, and their response to the argument that you have made – that there's no long-term deterrence – is that we have to keep working on deterring Pakistan, so one attack is not going to deter. They're talking in terms of continuous deterrence. So do you think from that logic there is something to commend what has happened today from a military strategic point of view?

Sushant Singh: Compared to 2019, Siddharth, this is definitely a military success. The 2019 Balakot operation, as I wrote in the Caravan cover story for March, was a definite military failure although it was a big political success for Mr. Modi. Not only did India not hit the targets at Balakot – and that's the reason no evidence was provided – it also lost a MiG-21, a pilot was taken captive by Pakistan, it shot down its own helicopter. It actually came out second best in terms of the military engagement in 2019.

Compared to that, this is definitely a much better, much more successful military operation, and as I said, if India has not lost any fighter jets, then it is a 9.5 out of 10 in terms of the military success.

But as far as deterrence is concerned, deterrence cannot be constructed by targeting only Jaish-e-Mohammad or Lashkar-e-Taiba. At the end of the day, we must realize that

Jaish-e-Mohammad or Lashkar-e-Taiba or any other militant group operating out of Pakistan, any other jihadi group operating out of Pakistan, is essentially acting at the behest of the Pakistani army, the ISI, or the security infrastructure, the security intelligence establishment that operates within Pakistan.

Unless that establishment is targeted, unless the Pakistan army, the ISI, those people at the top of the hierarchy are targeted, deterrence would not be established. You know, Mr. Modi, when the killings happened, said that "we would go and hit the hands behind these killers, we would target the enablers of these killers." So the enablers of those people who carried out the horrendous killings in Pahalgam are not just the JeM and LeT and their family members. It is essentially a certain component of the Pakistani state, including a section of the Pakistani army and the ISI which has promoted them.

So if you are talking about constructing and building that kind of deterrence, you would probably have to go and hit the Pakistan army and not say that "we don't want to hit military targets and we have not hit any military targets and all that we have done is non-escalatory in nature." That doesn't seem to meet the yardstick of what you want to achieve in the long run.

International perspective on the situation

Siddharth Varadarajan: Chris, if I can pull you in at this point now. You've heard Sushant's assessment from an Indian point of view of what may have been accomplished with these attacks. We've compared it to Balakot. But given your insights into Pakistan, the Pakistani military, the Pakistani establishment, what is your sense of how Pakistan is reacting to what India has done?

We've seen in the buildup to what happened this morning, there was anxiety about a week or 10 days ago in the immediate aftermath of Pahalgam. Then at the civil society level, people were making jokes about the danger of war and mocking what they said were warmongering elements in India. Then the establishment itself kind of—I got the sense that they got lulled into a belief that maybe an attack is going to come but it won't be imminent.

And then you have this attack, and it's an attack that goes beyond the post-Uri surgical strikes which were just across the Line of Control. It goes beyond what was done at Balakot because even though that was deep inside Pakistan, it was the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This time you have significant targets in Punjab—one in Muridke right next to Lahore and Bahawalpur, which is pretty deep, a sort of heartland area.

So how do you assess the net effect of what India has done, and of course then we will come to the question that Sushant posed, which is something we don't know about exactly—whether planes were shot down or not—but just in terms of your first-order reaction to what has happened in Pakistan and how you think they are likely to move ahead now.

Christopher Clary: Thanks for having me, though I think the circumstances could be better because I still think we have another dangerous period ahead. Pakistan is contemplating how they will retaliate to last night's strikes. I believe there will be additional retaliations. I don't think they'll be satisfied with the potential downing of Indian aircraft in the immediate aftermath of the strikes, nor do I think they'll be satisfied with the firing along the Line of Control which has become quite intense in some sectors.

Sushant and I are in agreement. The best available evidence that we have as open-source researchers relying on journalists and commercial satellite imagery is that the 2019 strike missed. It got very close to the Jaish-e-Mohammad compound, but it hit the trees and did not appear to hit the structure. We don't know that for sure—access to the site was limited in 2019. But I actually think the images that we are seeing now indicate how good social media is at ventilating clips and images in the event of a successful strike.

So I think for those analysts that said the 2019 strikes were right on the money and that India had achieved all of its goals in 2019, they should maybe reflect about what a strike that actually does hit a target with the sort of signatures that generates, and we're all witnessing those now on social media.

India hit a number of targets. I don't think we have a full sense of the casualties at all of them. I should note that the Pakistani state had ordered a lot of these facilities that might have been targeted—madrasas and other things—to send students home to try to reduce the number of personnel that would be at the sites. I think that's consistent with the casualty numbers the Pakistani state is sharing. I think striking in the middle of the night is another way to reduce the number of people at these compounds. I think that was a choice India made to avoid a lot of body bags on TV.

I anticipate that Pakistan will probably retaliate quickly. The National Security Council of Pakistan issued a statement in a very common South Asian tradition that they reserve the right to retaliate at a time and place and manner of their choosing. But I suspect the Pakistan military will want to get this crisis over with if they're able to do so.

So now the question is what comes next? I think on the Indian side at least, we've now demonstrated that India has enough weapons, enough types of weapons that it can deliver high explosive onto a target in a way that's very difficult for defenses to defeat because it doesn't require Indian aircraft ever to cross over into Pakistani airspace. So the window of vulnerability for those aircraft is limited, and the vulnerability may entirely be on the Indian side of the border or the Line of Control.

We'll have a better sense of the vulnerability of those aircraft in the hours and days ahead once we figure out whether one, two, or more aircraft were downed or conceivably no Indian aircraft. The early reports seem to indicate at least one if not more, but we are all operating in a haze, and from what I can tell, that haze is somewhat being encouraged by the Indian state that's trying to complicate the ability of Pakistan to do battle damage assessment on those air-to-air engagements.

Now what we're going to see is whether Pakistan similarly has standoff weapons that are able to accurately reach Indian targets without exposing Pakistani aircraft to danger. We know they have those things in the inventory, but some of them are Turkish and other types of munitions that have not been used widely.

Pakistan also has a choice about what sort of targets to hit. My suspicion is, because there's not the BLA (Baloch Liberation Army) or the TTP (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) – they don't have training camps in India for Pakistan to reach out and try to hit – I suspect that Pakistan will likely go against Indian military targets. I think that's a way to try to reduce perhaps down to zero the number of Indian civilians that are killed in the next round, if there is indeed a next round as I anticipate. And ideally India can absorb that and we can move on. If the retaliation is very successful of course, it'll be hard for India to just stop with one round each.

Potential Pakistani response

Siddharth Varadarajan: There is a school of thought that we encountered today when we were speaking. I think Zahid Hussain, one of the editors at Dawn, gave an interview to Karan Thapar, my colleague, and Zahid was suggesting that, taking the Pakistani claim of having downed five Indian fighter aircraft at face value, he took the view that Pakistan has already retaliated. I saw a quote or a bite of the Pakistani Defense Minister in an interview to Bloomberg where he seemed to be speaking in a similar sort of way—that as long as India doesn't escalate further, we have done what we wanted to do by way of retaliation and there's no need for us to do anything further.

The statement coming out of the NSC, however, makes it clear that even if Indian aircraft have been downed as Pakistan claims, they reserve the right to attack targets in India. This seems to be what the NSC appears to have decided, and certainly the stage is set in my view—and I think that's the way any rational person in India will react – that the Pakistani military will be looking to go after some sort of target on the Indian side in the next few days.

At one level, let's assume for a second that Pakistan is fairly confident of its claim that it's downed Indian aircraft. A lot of this operates at the realm of what you can convince your public about, right? We still don't know the absolute truth of what happened in Balakot, but the government of India was able to sell a position, sell a line to its people; the government of Pakistan was able to sell a line to its people; and those claims that each side made, in a funny

sort of way, provided a kind of off-ramp, an easy off-ramp for India and Pakistan to walk away from a potentially destabilizing conflict with relative ease.

Here I see the Pakistani claim of having shot planes down—a claim that India will never accept even if it were to be true—but as I said, there's no concrete information in any case. I saw this claim as again the possibility of both sides walking away quite cleanly—Pakistan saying "look, we've had our retaliation" and India saying "look, Pakistan doesn't have the stomach for a fight and so we have prevailed"—and both sides could sort of convince, could sell that line to the public.

But it seems that the dynamics in Pakistan, maybe because of the fractured nature of its polity with Imran Khan sitting in jail begging for blood and the very tense and dodgy relationship between the army chief and the so-called civilian government, it does seem as if the possibility of an easy off-ramp is not something that GHQ Rawalpindi is looking at.

Christopher Clary: I would be happy if you're right. I've been doing this for a while now, and I've been peppering my Pakistani colleagues for decades into these hypotheticals: What if there's bombing? What if the Indian Air Force comes in? What can happen that would make it easier for you not to retaliate and keep the escalatory spiral in play?

And it is the case that I remember quite distinctly an old, very senior retired Pakistani officer telling me "the more Indian aircraft we take down, the easier it is for us to avoid responding." The challenge is twofold here. One is Pakistan has a stated doctrine of "quid pro quo plus." Now you don't want to be tied into your doctrine, but that doctrine doesn't suggest that you can shoot down some aircraft and call it a day when they're bombing Muridke and Bahawalpur.

So I would think it would be an expansive interpretation of that doctrine that downing Indian aircraft and firing along the Line of Control would be adequate. I think especially in the context of the political and economic levers that India pulled in the immediate aftermath of the crisis – the Indus Waters Treaty cut-off is a big deal. The Pakistanis feel that very emotively, and cutting off the lifeline of Pakistani rivers reminds many Pakistanis of an ingrained belief they have that India is not reconciled to Pakistan's existence.

And so if India is not reconciled to Pakistan's existence, Pakistan's going to have to fight for it. If not, you're giving permission to India to do this whenever it feels aggrieved. You're giving them a blank slip that says, "Hey, if there's another terrorist attack, you just come on in here, you mow the grass, it's not our problem anymore." I don't think that's how the Pakistan military is wired.

And secondly and relatedly, I don't think that's how General Munir is wired. Everyone that meets him suggests he doesn't have the personality to just turn the other cheek in a situation like this. And I would underscore, when I talk to Pakistanis, they believe that General Bajwa bent over backwards to try to improve relations with India, and they say what did he get for it? You have a ceasefire that makes India's life easier, and you got nothing. You didn't get a political process.

You didn't get a dialogue with India.

In their minds—it's difficult to know how sincere they are—but certainly in their statements publicly and privately, they say India just keeps turning up the temperature here with the BLA, they keep turning up the temperature with the TTP, they keep turning up the temperature with targeted killings.

So it's difficult in that context for military men who have enormous sway within Pakistani deliberations to say, "Well, we'll just call this a day. We had a pretty good night with air defence and that ends the crisis."

With that said, Pakistan has real struggles. Its economy is in a mess. It's got insurgencies. I don't think it wants to be bogged down in a long slugfest with India. So I anticipate they're going to try to find targets that allow them to preserve national honor and preserve some semblance of deterrence while returning back to being able to focus resources, time, and capabilities on these other very serious challenges that Pakistan has to face right now.

Controversy over downed aircraft

Siddharth Varadarajan: Now turning to the $50 million question of these fighter aircraft that Pakistan claims to have downed—I've been up since early morning since the news broke, and as you mentioned, social media becomes a primary source of a lot of information. As soon as word emerged that Bahawalpur had been hit, one looked for handles from Bahawalpur in order to access footage of possible damage and so on. Of course, social media can also be a source of enormous disinformation, and we saw literally within the first hour actually, claims being put out of Indian aircraft being shot down.

I think the reason why so many people are perhaps still skeptical of Pakistan's claim is that the initial tweets and so on that emerged on social media used pretty crappy old stock photos of a MiG-21 crash and a Bulgarian photograph and things that had nothing to do with an

India-Pakistan skirmish. This got pretty quickly exposed, and then you had Pakistan's official media PTV making statements and then retracting them, talking of several Indian soldiers having been captured when it was very clear that there was no ground operation this time and India didn't even cross the International Border or the Line of Control.

But starting around 2:30 or 3 in the morning, news began to emerge of aircraft crashing at initially two locations – in Pampore north of Srinagar and then in Akhnoor in the Jammu region – and footage emerged from the Indian side taken by Indian villagers of clearly some sort of aircraft wreckage.

Initial speculation – the Pakistanis immediately said this is clearly an Indian aircraft, and then you had Indian analysts saying this is a JF-17 that Indian air defenses shot down. We now know 10-12 hours later that the Indian side did not cross into Pakistan. Indian aircraft did not cross into Pakistan – the Indians have said so, the Pakistanis have also said so. The Pakistanis have said that their aircraft did not cross over into India, and I have not seen any statement by the Indian side – they've been pretty sparse.

Today's press conference – the Foreign Secretary begged the indulgence of journalists in not asking questions. He said "this is still ongoing operations and we can't handle questions right now." Maybe that's a fair point, but the Indians have not said very much, but they certainly have not made the allegation that Pakistani aircraft crossed over to the Indian side and that there was a dogfight. Compare this to Balakot, when the government of India was quite prompt in acknowledging that enemy aircraft came into the country, there was a dogfight, they were chased out, and so on and so forth this time there's been no public messaging of that kind at all. And this leaves us with a kind of conundrum that if indeed the debris that people have seen at Pampur, at Aknur and we now know in Batinda and possibly also in Ramban, four locations on the Indian side – if this debris is indeed of fighter aircraft, this does sort of beg the question what is this aircraft? What aircraft are these? How did it come to fall out of the skies? And when you correlate that with the Pakistani claim of having shot down four or five aircraft and then the Indian silence on this, India is not refuting or denying the Pakistani claim. This has opened up a whole bunch of questions in people's minds. So Sushant, do you think there will be any light or clarity on these questions or do you think this is one of those issues that's simply never going to get addressed and cleared up?

Sushant Singh: Yeah, Siddharth, my sense is that we should not expect much from the Indian government on this. This was their strategy even in 2019 with the blue-on-blue helicopter shooting etc. Even if we were to get some statements at a later stage, they would be rather sparse. The Indian MiG-21 which went down in Pakistan and in which Abhinandan was captured in 2019 went down in Pakistan and the Pakistanis were claiming it, there were video footage etc. If as many people claim the wreckage that we are finding in various places in India are of Indian aircraft then India doesn't have to – the government of India doesn't have to acknowledge it.

In fact if you saw today's briefing which you referred to, there was no mention of the aircraft or an aerial dogfight or something happening in the air at all. It was essentially only limited to "these were the targets, these were hit, this was the name of the mission, this is what these targets were about." So the narrative is pretty clear – just stay fixated to that we have hit those targets. That's it. That's where the story gets over.

I don't expect much clarity from India anytime soon or maybe even never. We are unlikely to hear the government of India come out because by the time the briefing was held, DG ISPR from Pakistani side had been making these outrageous claims, and that was a great opportunity for India to say that we have lost no soldiers, we have lost no aircraft, we have lost nothing whatsoever. This is what they had done in 2016 after the so-called surgical strikes, the trans Line of Control operation by special forces, and I believe even in 2019 when they claimed the Balakot strikes – that nothing was lost. That's a standard procedure for most militaries to claim if there have been no losses.

Not making that claim raises these questions as you said, and these questions till the time we are going live on this recording remain unanswered. It's very hard to say whether any Indian aircraft has been lost and if an Indian aircraft has been lost, how many of them have been lost and in what circumstances – were they crashes, were they shot down, or were they something else? We really don't know anything. It's very hard to say anything for sure at this point in time.

Siddharth Varadarajan: Right, and there's bound to be global curiosity about Pakistan's claims because what Pakistan is essentially suggesting is a combination of F-16s and JF-7s taking on a very advanced complement of Russian and French aircraft. Is this something which the international community would have ways of finding out or is it an issue that they will be quite indifferent to and will allow it to simply get buried under the carpet – this claim of Pakistan?

Christopher Clary: I think we're already seeing the curiosity. Your colleagues in the Indian media are doing difficult work but it is notable this morning that the outlets more willing to go on the record with claims of downed Indian aircraft are Reuters and the AP and other international journalists that are reporting in many cases from Indian soil, and I'm thankful that the Indian state gives them the ability to do that.

I think we'll get some granularity on what happened just like we came to know of the fratricidal loss of an Indian helicopter in the 2019 crisis. You can keep these things under the rug for a bit but after a little, there's enough oversight and journalistic scrutiny in India that I think we'll have some sense if aircraft are lost. After all, these aircraft are quite expensive. But it may take a few days for that to occur.

The outside world will be interested. If those aircraft were lost, they're brought down by something and it is more likely than not that those systems were Chinese in origin. Pakistan air force and the Pakistan military's public relations wing went out of their way to talk about certain systems – both ground-based surface-to-air missile systems as well as long-range missiles that are capable of striking Indian aircraft from very far away, in some cases 100 kilometers conceivably. If that's the case then those may be the first time those weapons have ever been used in anger, and for the US community, it would be quite interested in the capabilities of those systems to bring down conceivably advanced French fighter aircraft that came off the line not that many months ago.

Siddharth Varadarajan: Yeah, I should add both for your benefit and for our viewers that there is when it comes to the Indian media's reporting of this issue, a legal matter that's relatively new which is a sort of directive, I suppose a bit akin to the D-notice that the British government employs against its media, but there was a directive from the Information & Broadcasting Ministry that there should be no reporting of ongoing military operations attributable to unidentified sources and to publish only that information which comes from identified and presumably authorised sources. And I think that's the reason why the Hindu which ran a story eventually deleted it. That's what they've said.

I think that until the government comes on the record either way to say nothing happened or to say something did happen, it's going to be a little bit hard for the media to fully get involved in this.

But Chris, I want to ask you another question. The global reaction that we've seen – we've seen statements by President Trump and Marco Rubio who echoed his boss. We've seen statements by the Russians, by the Chinese, by the Japanese, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General. And there's been of course no condemnation of what India has done. Maybe I'm forgetting, maybe one or two places may have done that. As far as the big powers are concerned, they have focused on the need for restraint and President Trump said what happened is a shame and he then spoke of decades and even centuries of conflict but then he added that he hoped this matter would be resolved quickly.

What's your sense of the amount of political capital that the Trump administration may be willing to expend? First of all, does he even have that political capital and if it does, will President Trump want to expend it in ensuring that whatever reaction Pakistan has to what India did stays within certain confines and once it happens that India then doesn't use that to escalate further? What's your sense of how US will play this?

Christopher Clary: You know, the US does have some influence, probably asymmetrically, oddly enough against Pakistan because Pakistan is more dependent on IMF bailouts and other lines of international credit to keep its economy afloat.

My sense from Trump's remarks, from Rubio's statements, from statements from the State Department spokesperson is that there is a desire for this to go away – that this is not viewed in emotionally laden language in the US. Even Trump's remarks about it being a shame are that it's just sort of something outside of his control, something that he wishes would not occur. He doesn't appear to have any strong antagonism toward the people of India or the people of Pakistan in his commentary on this. He's said for years now that he has good relations with both countries.

So it doesn't strike me that he's going to weigh in very heavily one way or the other. Even with countries like Israel that the US feels closer to, we've seen in Trump's statements about operations against the Houthis in Yemen that he's kind of willing to let countries take care of their own business so long as it isn't too disruptive to US interests.

So I anticipate there are pressures on Pakistan today to make some prudent choices to try to get this crisis over soon. And I imagine there are encouraging statements to New Delhi to continue showing restraint going forward, but the US doesn't want to derail its relationship with India by carrying Pakistan's water, but it doesn't want a real war in South Asia either that would be quite injurious to US interests, so it's trying to thread that needle here.

Siddharth Varadarajan: Sushant, if Chris is correct – and I suspect he is and I think you probably concur with him – that the Pakistani NSC statement today is a clear indication that

Pakistan does intend to respond beyond its claims of having downed Indian aircraft, how easy or difficult will it be – and of course a lot depends on what target they choose and what kind of damage they cause – but did you get the sense that I got in listening to the press conference, the statement by Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and also Prime Minister Modi's reluctance or unwillingness today to publicly tom-tom what has happened? Normally, he is a person who lets these kinds of actions play out in the political arena for obvious electoral benefit. Today was a great moment for him to grandstand – in fact he had a public address of sorts but it was about satellite launches and so on.

The sense I got from that and from Vikram Misri's handling was that we really don't intend for this to escalate any further. So is there then a scenario you can envisage of a certain limited amount of damage that the Indian armed forces will take on the chin and then say okay fine, we now get back to business as usual? Or do you think there would be – because you foregrounded the political aspect of this action – do you think there would be uncontrollable political dynamics that might push us towards that next rung in the escalatory ladder?

Sushant Singh: That's the million-dollar question, Siddharth. I wish I knew the answer to what the Pakistani response will be. To add to what Chris said, and I completely agree with Chris, with Asim Munir being there and with the pressure from the core commanders that we have heard about, he would have to undertake some form of counter strike to the Indian strikes.

I would be very interested in what the geography of Pakistani counter strikes will be. If the geography is contained within Jammu and Kashmir, then I think there's a ramp-off which is easily available because Jammu and Kashmir, in a sense with artillery firing going on on the Line of Control and other kinetic engagements that are taking place there, it is very easy to write it off. And of course it depends on the nature of the targets that the Pakistan army chooses.

Unlike Chris, I am very wary if Indian military targets are chosen because if an Indian military target is chosen and let's say 15 or 20 or 30 Indian soldiers in a hypothetical situation are killed, then all bets are off. Then the Indian government would be forced to respond in a very aggressive manner.

If, as they did in 2019, they hit open grassy patches of land and say "we could have hit your brigade headquarters or your logistic dumps but we chose not to hit them," then they can claim victory in Pakistan and India can say Pakistan missed its target. So it is one-all. But let's not forget that in 2019 there was this ace of the Indian pilot being with Pakistan which Pakistan promised to release very promptly, and besides that you had General Bajwa who was very keen on establishing friendly ties with India. The back channels that India and Pakistan had at that time – so a lot of ways in which engagement was happening and ramp-offs were available.

In this case, both sides will have to be very lucky and both sides will have to win over their domestic audience rather quickly before a ramp-off is available. If any of the things don't play out as per plan, then things could easily get out of hand and that remains my big fear in that sense.

Siddharth Varadarajan: There's a question I wanted to put to you again, Shant, based on your initial comments about the need to deter not just the foot soldiers, the terrorist groups, their leaders and so on by targeting places like Muridke or Bahawalpur or some of these camps, but actually their patrons, right? And so the question of how you deal with what kind of an incentive or what kind of a policy can you have towards the Pakistani military that would make them feel deterred.

But before I come to you on that, I know that Chris had mentioned something about a hard stop. We don't have too much more time with him. So I wanted to ask you, Chris, clearly – I think we can all think of scenarios where dire though the situation seems today, right? What kind of reaction will Pakistan come up with? How will India feel compelled to react? We can think of a scenario where a week from now this is likely to be behind us, and were that to be so – and I'm hoping that will indeed be so – the question that India raised today in the press conference and has been talking about is that we have all this information and evidence, we know and the whole world knows that Pakistan has been maintaining this permissive environment towards extremists of all kinds. If military or kinetic means is not the answer, targeting the Lashkar headquarters is not the answer, what combination of methods can India, working with the international community, working with sensible stakeholders in Pakistan, come up with that could put an end to this compact that the Pakistani establishment seems to have with an endless number of bad guys and bad groups?

Christopher Clary: It's really tragic. Every time an Indian civilian is killed in this terrorism – and it's understandable that India, that my Indian friends, that the Indian people are upset by the images they witnessed a little bit more than two weeks ago – these tourists trying to have a nice day, sometimes on the trip of their life, their honeymoon, and being struck down. So I can understand a democratic state refusing to live in that world.

The problem is the tools of statecraft are sometimes inadequate for the problems of statecraft. Look at Israel today. Israel has incredible conventional dominance over its neighbors, incredible intelligence penetration of its enemies. It has killed tens of thousands of them in the last few years, but the Israeli military cannot figure out a way out of this quagmire. It is deployed, it is wrecking Israeli society. So there is a danger here that even when there is incredible military and technological asymmetry, that militaries are of limited utility to fix some of these problems.

I think there needs to be a thorough investigation of what happened after the 2021 ceasefire in Kashmir. The Pakistanis thought that that ceasefire was going to set the stage for a political process and it didn't happen. Now maybe it didn't happen because India had very good evidence that Pakistan was continuing this multi-decade dance with terrorist and militant groups. I don't know. I don't think it's ever been explained why the ceasefire did not provide a foundation for something more.

But it is my belief that eventually India cannot achieve security against a nuclear-armed rival without some sort of political process. And I think the events of the last two and a half weeks have sadly taken us away from a political process rather than closer to one.

Siddharth Varadarajan: In fact if you look at events of the last I would say two or three years or maybe even five years – if you go back to 2019, India essentially – because there's two aspects to this political process, right? One is the internal track of managing the legitimate aspirations of the people of Jammu Kashmir, especially now when we say that we have fully integrated J&K into the union of India, although I believe they've always been integrated, but Mr. Modi's big point in 2019 was that "we have finally integrated you, the constitution finally applies" and yet we see that many of the rights that the constitution promises citizens of India clearly don't apply to the people of Jammu Kashmir.

Something so basic in a federal polity of a people being able to run their own affairs via a state – and India's federal structure, the union of India, that's the formal name of the country, is built around this idea that you're going to have strong states which have their own prerogatives – and statehood was snatched away from the people of Jammu and Kashmir in 2019. Promises were made of its restoration. Those promises have not been fulfilled and I suspect will not be fulfilled for a very long time to come, citing these kinds of problems.

And of course on the Pakistan front, there is no relationship of any kind. In fact it was funny to see how in the wake of Pulwama the government of India trying to find ways to lower the level of the relationship even further. I thought we had already hit rock bottom. Hardly anybody crosses the Wagah border, but now we're saying no one can cross. So those five people who crossed every day are not going to be able to cross.

So in a way we've chucked away the prospect of the kind of political process that you speak of, and we find ourselves in a situation – or we are likely to find ourselves in a situation – where this excessive reliance on the military option as the way to deter and to force Pakistan to deliver what India wants is likely to prove ineffective as well. Somewhere down the line, we're going to keep circling back and ending up in this loop and at some stage, this idea that you can contain things within a certain escalatory spiral – that idea may not hold good.

And I think what you have pointed to – the fact that even when you have asymmetric military force between a country and its rivals, military doesn't provide you political solutions – and that holds even more in the case where you have conventional symmetry to a large extent and of course nuclear weapons in the hands of both countries.

But Chris, you've been great. Thank you so much. I've kept you longer than I said I would, and we will definitely get you back under happier circumstances.

Christopher Clary: It's been a rich conversation and I look forward to seeing the remainder of what Shant has to say and we'll all learn a lot more about this crisis in the hours and days ahead. Thanks for having us.

Siddharth Varadarajan: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Chris. And Sushant, I wanted to kind of tease you out on this notion of deterring the Pakistani state military or incentivising or having a political process to use Christopher Clary's sort of formulation.

You know, if you look at the last 15 years, we had a major terrorist attack in Bombay, the 26/11 attack, November 2008. And it's interesting that in today's presentation by Vikram, the foreign secretary, they actually showed a video of attacks going all the way back to the attack on parliament in 2001, then Bombay and so on, suggesting that finally India is now answering.

But of course, India did attempt a pretty credible response after 26/11 when the Manmohan Singh government chose to accumulate intelligence and create these dossiers in order to build global public opinion and present Pakistan with a case that it simply couldn't refute and couldn't not take action on. So Pakistan felt itself kind of boxed into a corner and you had the FIA launching its own investigation under Tariq Khosa coming up with some information that perhaps even India didn't have about the perpetrators of 26/11 and things seem to be moving in a certain direction but then they came unstuck.

To say that the perpetrators of 26/11 were punished is simply not the case. Even someone like Hafiz Saeed – the Pakistanis put him under house arrest, attempted to file cases against him but nothing eventually came of that. So when we say that the Balakot type or this nine-target attack type of thing may not necessarily deliver the goods for India, we also have to reckon with the fact that this long drawn out, patient process that India attempted to pursue under Manmohan Singh – I would say even earlier under Vajpayee – and then under Manmohan Singh and I dare say in the first couple of years of the Modi regime, there was some sense of the need to engage and so on, but that entire process – clearly the Indian establishment feels never delivered what India wanted. Right?

So you're in the situation where the political process such as it was never really delivered what you wanted. The military process as you say and I think I agree with you is not going to give you the satisfaction you need. What then are India's options?

Sushant Singh: Siddharth, in any case, the problem is not with India. Let's be pretty clear – the problem is with Pakistan. It is that the Pakistani side, they have not taken credible actions as you said whether after 2001 or after 2008 to incentivise more peaceful, more rational, more diplomatic, political engagement kind of behavior from New Delhi. If they had rewarded that kind of behaviour, what India was doing, the steps that India was taking at that point in time, then this kind of very risky stuff that we see whether in Balakot or now would not have to take place.

In an ideal scenario, what you would want as a country as part of statecraft is a panoply of options. You would want diplomatic options, you would want economic options, you would want military options, you would want information options. You would want to have both carrot and sticks at the same time. You would want to incentivise Pakistan if it was doing something right.

You would want to punish Pakistan if it was doing something wrong and do it in various domains. That is how ideally statecraft works.

But what my worry is that the Indian government under Mr. Modi has boxed itself over a period of time into choosing only one option and only one option of military strikes against certain targets. So if it was Balakot, now it is nine [targets]. Let's say a couple of years down the line there's another spectacular terror attack. What then? 20 strikes, 21 strikes, 25 strikes? Where does it eventually end up? You are walking on an escalatory path even within terms of your response by boxing yourself in.

A mix of both carrot and stick and engagement in various domains or actions in various domains is what ideally statecraft would look like. Even though it may be extremely unpopular with the foot soldiers of the Hindutva regime and some of the ideologues, but you would want to generate options. You would want to have options which you can use at that point in time when the next crisis occurs.

Now that you have abrogated the Indus Treaty or kept it in abeyance, what do you do next time? There is no Indus Treaty left next time to be acted upon. So you are virtually constraining yourself, limiting yourself into an option where much greater escalation between two nuclear weapon states – the probability of it increases manyfold than what it was in Balakot or what it is today. So we need a richer set of options – statecraft not to be reduced to a uni-dimensional sort of pursuit.

Siddharth Varadarajan: And I suppose what you're also saying is that this kind of toxic relationship between the pursuit of a domestic political agenda and attempting to deal with a problem like Pakistan, your relationship with Pakistan – this toxicity also kind of ties India's hands in ways that are not very helpful.

So I think we'll have to leave it there. Shant, thank you very much for your insightful comments. Christopher Clary has left us but he was great too and I do hope in the next days and weeks as we get more information and even in case there is some kind of a Pakistan response that we will be able to sit again and have this kind of a calm discussion.

I do hope if you've been watching this show that you were enlightened in some way, you heard analysis and views that made you pause and think because that's the purpose of the work that we do at The Wire – to shine a light on what's happening, to get people to think and to analyze and to not simply respond to events in a knee-jerk or an emotional fashion. If you've been watching, thank you very much and do stay tuned to the Wire for more programming on what happened today and the ensuing consequences of this. Thank you for watching.

Transcribed by Parvani Baroi.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.