On Monday, in his first public comments on the conflict, Modi said India’s operation last week “has drawn a new line in the fight against terrorism. It has set a new benchmark – a new normal."
The fragility of the current calm appeared not to register in Pakistan, where newspaper editorials and politicians remained jubilant through the weekend. During a military news conference on Sunday night, Air Vice Marshal Aurangzeb Ahmed said that by “reestablishing deterrence”, Pakistan had prevented India from “setting a new normal”.
Officials in Islamabad have continued to trumpet the downing of Indian warplanes on Wednesday as a win for Pakistan’s Chinese technology over India’s more expensive Western equipment. A Washington Post visual analysis showed that at least two French-made Indian jets appear to have crashed during the initial wave of strikes. Pakistan says it shot down five fighter planes, a claim India has neither confirmed nor denied. New Delhi has said it achieved its military objectives and that it killed “100 terrorists”.
India miscalculated on Wednesday when it “launched a missile attack on a nuclear-armed state without considering the consequences, without climbing the escalation ladder carefully”, said Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s former foreign minister.
“It lacked the capability to defend itself against retaliation and misjudged Pakistan’s will and capacity to respond,” Khar said, adding that “for us, the belief in India’s conventional superiority has collapsed. More weapons do not equate to superiority – it’s about how effectively you use them."
Najam Sethi, a prominent Pakistani journalist, believes the triumphalism is premature and potentially dangerous: “The Pakistanis are rejoicing in their success and are not getting ready to face the next onslaught. … I’m scared, to be honest.”
Absent from the celebrations is a recognition of how serious the fighting became in its final stages, particularly early on Saturday, when India struck several military bases in Pakistan, including one in Rawalpindi, where the country’s armed forces are headquartered. The strikes prompted a large-scale Pakistani retaliation on military targets inside India.
At one point, the government body that oversees Pakistan’s nuclear and other strategic weapons was summoned for discussions with the Prime Minister, according to officials in Islamabad, alarming US officials.
“We conveyed to the US that this is now very serious,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “The US itself saw that the attack on the air base in Rawalpindi was just too close for comfort. …It was edging towards an all-out war.”
Later on Saturday, President Donald Trump announced a US-brokered ceasefire. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X that India and Pakistan had also agreed “to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site”, raising hopes that the countries might be willing to broach more fundamental disputes – including the status of Kashmir.
But India and Pakistan have described upcoming talks this week as low-level and technical.
“There’s no indication that the talks the US wants to have, which we would welcome, will happen anytime soon,” Lodhi said, blaming “Indian reluctance”. Indian officials have not directly addressed the possibility of broader talks.
India waited until Monday to announce the reopening of 32 civilian airports that were closed last week. Srinagar, the largest city in Indian-administered Kashmir, was still reeling from last week’s wave of drone attacks and loud explosions. The city’s popular gardens, usually full of tourists looking to escape the summer heat, were deserted.
In the town of Surankote, in Poonch district, where multiple camps were set up for families displaced from border areas, scepticism about the ceasefire runs deep. “The dilemma is whether to go back or wait,” said resident Saima Choudhary.
In New Delhi, analysts and commentators said the Indian leadership appeared far from deterred by Pakistan’s military response.
India has made clear that major militant acts will now prompt increasingly forceful military responses, said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi.
“I think the nature of the operations and the depth of the strikes is going to result in significant adaptations by terrorist groups and their sponsors in Pakistan in the sense that it will no longer be possible for them to operate with impunity,” he said, potentially driving some of them underground.
Pakistan has denied any links to last month’s rampage by gunmen in a tourist area in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which killed 26 people – the deadliest assault on Indian civilians in more than 15 years. While India said its initial strikes inside Pakistan on Wednesday targeted militant sites in retaliation for the Pahalgam attack, Pakistan said the victims were civilians.
Over the past decade, each conflict that revolved around Kashmir has been bloodier – and has veered ever-closer to all-out war, said Christopher Clary, an associate professor of political science at the University at Albany and a former South Asia expert for the Defence Department.
In 2019, after a suicide bombing in Indian-administered Kashmir killed more than 40 Indian paramilitary police, India launched an airstrike on a remote stretch of forest about 65km into Pakistani territory. Wednesday’s aerial assault extended into populous parts of Punjab for the first time in decades, and the Saturday strike in Rawalpindi was just a stone’s throw from the Pakistani capital.
Bisaria, the former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, said last week’s Indian strikes hit Pakistan “more decisively, more visibly” and established “a new equilibrium”.
The next time India feels compelled to enforce this new equilibrium, some experts worry its military may rely even more on missiles to avoid any further missteps by the air force.
“There is this very real danger that another attack will come, and we will be back into a near war,” said Clary. “We just don’t have that many wars between nuclear-armed powers to know how dangerous this deadly game can be.”
- Masih reported from New Delhi. Shams Irfan in Srinagar and Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.
