The West won’t persuade India to share its view on Russian aggression if it continues to engage in false equivalencies between Pakistan’s terror attacks and India’s reprisals.
India, in the early hours of May 7, destroyed nine terrorist training facilities in Pakistan in response to a terror attack on April 22, killing twenty-six tourists in Pahalgam in India’s Jammu and Kashmir union territory. Subsequently, the two nations engaged in drone and missile exchanges with divergent claims of damage inflicted on the other. On May 10, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed a ceasefire agreement between the two nations.
On May 12, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation and asserted, “If there is a terrorist attack on India, a fitting reply will be given…on our terms.” The hopefully short-lived conflict holds important lessons for India’s relations with the United States, the Quad, and the growing Indo-Mediterranean trade network.
Concerns of uncontrolled escalation between two nuclear-armed nations are real and sobering. However, an all-out war appears unlikely as India does not want it, and Pakistan cannot afford it. Much depends on Pakistan’s internal politics, which couples a weak and unpopular prime minister (Shehbaz Sharif) and a powerful chief of army staff (General Asim Munir), both of whom allegedly conspired to imprison former prime minister Imran Khan and prevent him from contesting the 2024 election. Pakistan’s economy is in the doldrums and received another IMF loan on May 9—its twenty-fifth, making it one of the organization’s largest debtors.
India and Pakistan fought three wars in 1947, 1965, and 1971 and have engaged in several border skirmishes since. The Third Indo-Pakistani War in 1971—also called the Bangladesh Liberation War—demonstrated India’s conventional military superiority over Pakistan. Braced with this reality, Pakistan resorted to proxy-war tactics by harboring and training in cross-border terrorist activities, which continue today and resulted in the April terror attack.
The two primary Pakistan-sponsored groups—Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)—are responsible for the most brazen terrorist attacks, including those on the Indian Parliament and Jammu and Kashmir State Legislative Assembly in 2001, Mumbai in 2008, Pathankot Airbase in 2016, and Pulwama in 2019. LeT and JeM are designated foreign terrorist organizations by the United States and the United Nations, and they operate with the backing of Pakistani intelligence.
Since Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014—in a break from the past—India has launched increasingly kinetic responses to Pakistan-backed terror attacks. The most recent reprisal constituted the most significant Indian retribution yet, targeting nine cross-border terror training facilities. The operation was named “Sindoor”—a customary marital adornment among married Hindu women—in response to male members of honeymoon couples slaughtered on April 22. In effect, it was Operation “Widow’s Retribution.”
Two female Indian military officers delivered the government’s war briefings: Colonel Sofiya Qureshi (a Muslim) in Hindi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh (a Hindu) in English. The news outlets and over a billion Indians were caught up in nationalist fervor. However, Prime Minister Modi and his cabinet restrained from any chest-thumping or grandstanding. After a strong first impression, subsequent uncritical and incomplete assessments diminished the credibility of later briefings, which failed to address widely reported instances of Indian fighter jets being shot down. Furthermore, the exaggerated accounts of bringing Pakistani forces to heel undercut India’s concession to a ceasefire among some corners of strident nationalism.
U.S.-India relations stand to grow stronger in the wake of the recent Indo-Pakistan conflict. India may have relied in some measure on U.S. intelligence-sharing to pinpoint the locations of terror training facilities.
India and Israel’s strategic partnership has also flourished under Modi, with strong and deepening joint ventures in defense, digital, and trade. Israeli drones and missiles featured prominently in India’s arsenal in the recent conflict. Jerusalem also offered unequivocal and strong support for India’s counter-terror actions.
India enjoys unprecedented strong and deepening relations not only with Israel but also with Gulf nations, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which are its third and fourth-largest trading partners, respectively. The Gulf nations’ positioning on the recent conflict is telling. It is more measured than before—to a degree more than its evolving posture on the Palestinian issue.
The converging commercial and security interests of India, the Gulf, and Israel are set to transform the Middle East. The resilience of the growing Indo-Mediterranean trade—with the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor as one of its manifestations—buoyed by the expanding Indian economy and Gulf economies looking to diversify are well set and undeterred by the Indo-Pakistan or Israel-Palestine conflicts. The local conflicts may slow but cannot displace the momentous convergent of interests across the Indo-Mediterranean geography.
The India-Pakistan conflict also presents a testing ground for the efficacy of Western and Chinese weapons systems. India is seeking to diminish its defense imports from Russia and establish a more diversified and indigenous arsenal. In contrast, more than 80 percent of Pakistan’s defense imports are of Chinese origin. Pakistan also appeared to use Turkish-manufactured drones to swarm Indian border posts and settlements. In the coming weeks, Indian armed forces will closely scrutinize advanced fighter jets that fell in dog-fights with Pakistan and determine whether operational deficiencies or technological disadvantages caused their loss.
Just like Russia in Ukraine, the conflict made clear that Pakistan cannot sustain its military activities without Chinese backing. It also puts India’s predilection for shunning closer military alliances to the test. During the conflict, China reaffirmed its “ironclad” relationship with Pakistan. President Xi Jinping visited Moscow to shore up the China-Russia “no-limits partnership,” celebrating the “true friends of steel…[bound]…by a hundred trials of fire.” Pakistani and Russian subservience to and defense cooperation with China should give India cause for severe concern.
The conflict should intensify U.S. disenchantment with Pakistan, too. The partnership was initially premised on keeping communism out of South Asia and later, under President Richard Nixon, on opening up Maoist China. It reached its apogee between 1979 and 1989 when the Carter and Reagan administrations worked with Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq to fund the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion.
Counterterrorism concerns ascended after 9/11. During the nearly two-decade-long U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan, allied forces consistently confronted insurgents and terrorists flowing over the border from Pakistan. The terrorist havens in Pakistan allowed the Taliban to reconstitute and eventually reconquer the country. Without Islamabad’s support for cross-border terrorists and insurgents, Afghanistan may have had a different future, and fewer American and allied lives would have been lost.
To American ears, Pakistan’s loud pleas of ignorance regarding terror activities directed against India sound as plausible as those made after Seal Team Six raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011, thirty miles from the capital. Pakistan’s social contract suffers from elite control of military, political, and economic power unshared with all Pakistanis. The devil’s bargain of shielding elite capture through Islamic extremism and fundamentalism at home and abroad is increasingly untenable.
The United States and Quad nations should welcome a more muscular India that is not shy about exerting power across its borders to protect its interests. It opens greater opportunities to coordinate collective capabilities and protect shared interests across the Indian Ocean littoral region. India confronts a wide spectrum of threats from Pakistan and China, coordinating across its land border from the Thar Desert to the Himalayas to the monsoon jungles of its Northeast.
India’s strategic autonomy and national security would be bolstered with closer security alliances with Quad members, including Japan, Australia, and the United States. The national interest-driven rationale for collective security arrangements in the Indo-Pacific is similar to the one in Europe. The present conflict highlights the urgency to act upon it.
The over-arching lessons from this episode are several: India will maintain a zero-tolerance approach to Pakistan-backed terror; Pakistan is dependent on Chinese backing; the Indo-Pacific needs a more robust security arrangement parallel to the North Atlantic; the United States and its allies must work to help India to grow and indigenize its arsenal; undeterred economic and security convergence among India, the Gulf, and Israel can transform the Middle East for good. This all calls for the United States and India to double down on their emerging Great Power Partnership.
About the Authors: Kaush Arha and James Himberger
Kaush Arha is President of the Free & Open Indo-Pacific Forum and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue.
James Himberger is the Managing Editor of The National Interest. Follow him on X: @Beaconsfieldist.
Image: Jayakumar / Shutterstock.com.
