The last time India and Pakistan clashed in a military confrontation in 2019, US officials detected a sufficient movement in nuclear arsenals of the two nations to be alarmed. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was awakened in the middle of the night. He worked on the phone “to convince each side that the other did not prepare for the nuclear war,” he wrote in his memories.
This confrontation quickly cooled after the initial skirmish. But six years later, the two South Asian rivals were again engaged in military conflicts after a deadly terrorist attack against tourists in cashmere controlled by India. And this time, there is a new element of uncertainty, because the most important military alliances in the region have been redesigned.
The changing models in the flow of weapons illustrate the new alignments in this particularly volatile corner of Asia, where three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – are held uncomfortable.
India, a traditionally unlined country that has lost its history of hesitation towards the United States, bought billions of dollars in equipment from the United States and other Western suppliers. At the same time, India has greatly reduced the purchases of low -cost weapons from Russia, its ally of the era of the Cold War.
Pakistan, whose relevance for the United States has decreased since the end of the war in Afghanistan, no longer buys American equipment that the United States once encouraged it to acquire. Pakistan has rather turned to China for the vast majority of its military purchases.
These connections have injected a superpower policy into the oldest and most insoluble conflict in South Asia.
The United States has cultivated India as a partner to counter China, while Beijing has deepened its investment in its advocacy and its patronage in Pakistan while India got closer to the United States.
At the same time, relations between India and China have deteriorated in recent years on competing territorial affirmations, the confrontations burst between the two soldiers sometimes. And relations between the two largest powers in the world, the United States and China, struck Nadir while President Trump launched a trade war against Beijing.
This fuel mixture shows how complex and disorderly alliances have become when the World Order of the World War II has fractured. Volatility is aggravated by the history of frequent military confrontations in South Asia, with armed forces on both sides which are subject to errors, increasing the risk that an escalation can become uncontrollable.
“The United States is now at the heart of India’s security interests, while China is increasingly playing a comparable role in Pakistan,” said Ashley Tellis, a former diplomat who is a principal researcher at the Endowment for International Peace.
While India is now taking military measures against Pakistan, it has had the United States for its part more with force than ever in recent years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India spoke with Mr. Trump and Vice-President JD Vance in the first days after the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir. The solid support expressed by Trump administration officials was considered by many New Delhi officials as a green light for India plan to retaliate against Pakistan, even if US officials have urged restraint.
An indication of the evolution of the dynamics was the remarkable absence of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia while Mr. Modi took calls of more than a dozen world leaders in the days following the terrorist attack. The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs spoke with his Indian counterpart a week after the attack, and Mr. Modi and Mr. Putin finally spoke this week, officials said.
For its part, China has led public support to Pakistan, describing it as a “friend at all times and a strategic cooperative partner”.
These trends could increasingly reflect in military conflicts.
“If you think of what a future conflict could look like between India and Pakistan, it would be more and more like fights in India with American and European platforms and Pakistan fights with Chinese platforms,” ​​said Lyndsey Ford, former US defense senior Defense who is currently a senior member of it. “The close security partners of the two countries have evolved considerably over the past decade.”
Until recent years, calculations of the Cold War have shaped alliances in South Asia.
India, even if it played a leading role in the non -aligned movement, approached the Soviet Union. The weapons and ammunition of Moscow constituted almost two thirds of the military equipment of India.
Pakistan, on the other hand, has firmly combined in the United States, becoming its front line partner to help defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, Pakistan soldiers attracted this relationship to strengthen its arsenal, in particular by acquiring dozens of fired F-16 fighter planes, which helped to remove the air dominance that India had appreciated.
After the Cold War, the two nations were faced with American sanctions to test nuclear weapons in the 1990s. For more than a decade, Pakistan was denied the delivery of dozens of F-16s for which it had paid.
But the country’s fortune changed again after September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, because it again became a front line partner in the United States, this time in the war against terrorism.
Even if Pakistan was accused of having played a double match, hosting the Taliban leaders on its soil while helping the US military presence in Afghanistan, the US military has paid tens of billions of dollars in military aid. The United States has become the best provider of weapons in Pakistan, China remaining second.
As the importance of Pakistan for the United States has decreased, it turned to China, which has long offered an open embrace.
Beijing, which was at the origin of only 38% of Pakistani weapons in the mid -2000s, has provided approximately 80% in the past four years, according to the International Stockholm Peace Research Institute, which closely studies the world’s flows in arms.
At the same time, India has reduced its dependence on Russian weapons by more than half. Between 2006 and 2010, around 80% of India’s main weapons came from Russia. Over the past four years, this figure has fallen at around 38%, with more than half of Indian imports from the United States and allies like France and Israel.
The only exceptional area for Pakistan freeze with the United States is the F-16 program. Pakistan has expanded its Arsenal F-16 in the past two decades, and the Biden administration has brought a contract worth almost $ 400 million for the service and maintenance of fighter aircraft.
In 2019, Pakistan used an F-16 to reduce an Indian Russian manufacturing jet. New Delhi protested that the action was a violation of the sales agreement in the United States with Pakistan, arguing that it only allowed missions to combat terrorism.
Some US officials seemed to try to appease India by suggesting that they had urged the Pakistanis. But American diplomatic cables have long shown that they knew Pakistan’s intention in the construction of its air force: for potential use in conflicts with India.
The 2019 confrontation – in which one of the own helicopters in India was also shot, killing half a dozen staff – revealed the problems of its soldiers. In the years that followed, India has paid billions of dollars to modernize its forces. While India is now confronting Pakistan, a greater threat, China, is not only looking at but also helping its opponent.
For many American officials who have observed the 2019 developments closely, human errors have clearly indicated how the situation could worse out of control.
US officials fear that with hyper-nationalism in India and Pakistan, where two well-supplied soldiers operate in a tight aerial corridor and in the midst of mutual suspicions, even the smallest errors or exceeding orders could lead to catastrophic climbs.
“A crisis where you have cross -border air strikes and an air fight, as we saw in 2019, has significant risks of climbing,” said Ford, the former American defense official. “And it is all the more problematic when it involves two neighbors of nuclear weapons.”
Salman Masood And Kumar Day Contributed reports.
