Across the Line of Control

In 2019, a group of scientists led by Owen Toon, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, modelled the climatic effects of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025. The hypothetical scenario was a militant attack on the Indian parliament, leading to mobilisation along the Line of Control. Skirmishes in Kashmir escalate and the Indian army crosses into Pakistan, prompting a nuclear war.

According to Toon’s model, the war would kill more than fifty million people in both countries. The firestorms would send megatonnes of black carbon into the stratosphere, triggering a nuclear winter. Global agriculture would be devastated. Surface sunlight would ‘decline by 20 to 35 per cent’. The Toon model, like other nuclear winter hypotheses, is open to dispute, but the estimated casualties from the nuclear exchange have not been challenged.

The short war between India and Pakistan earlier this month began with a militant attack in Pahalgam in Kashmir on 22 April which killed 26 people. The Indian government was convinced the attack was carried out by a group known as the Resistance Front, with links to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and that it was directed by Pakistani intelligence.

Early on 7 May, the Indian air force struck a series of sites in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and inside Pakistan itself. The operation was telegraphed well in advance. The Indian army released grainy footage of the strikes, and stressed that it hadn’t targeted Pakistan armed forces installations, only ‘terrorist camps’. Pakistan responded by launching artillery attacks across the Line of Control and striking Indian air defence installations in Kashmir. Both countries gave religious codenames to their operations: Sindoor and Bunyanun Marsoos.

The air forces engaged each other. Pakistan’s Chinese-made J-10 fighter jets appear to have more than held their own. Pakistan claims to have brought down five Indian fighters (US officials believe at least two French-made Indian Rafales were downed). India claims to have used loitering munitions to knock out some of Pakistan’s air defences.

By 10 May the conflict had expanded beyond the air skirmish. Indian missile attacks hit major airbases inside Pakistan and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Pakistan responded with missile attacks on India, though apparently with less effect.

The ceasefire announced later on 10 May has more or less held, despite some minor violations. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke by telephone with Pakistan’s army chief, General Syed Asim Munir. The US vice president, J.D. Vance, spoke to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. India disputes that the ceasefire was mediated by the US. Trump claims he ‘sure as hell helped settle the problem’. The US announced the ceasefire before India or Pakistan. Neither side appears to have been interested in a larger war, though that isn’t always a sure defence against one.

For Modi, the decision to attack Pakistan was a significant risk. Past Indian prime ministers handled similar episodes (such as the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 or the Mumbai bombings in 2008) more cautiously. India has acknowledged the deaths of five of its soldiers and twenty-one civilians in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The head of the Indian air force, Awadhesh Kumar Bharti, said only that ‘losses are part of combat’. The Pakistani army has reported the deaths of eleven soldiers and forty civilians.

A retired Pakistani general I spoke to was pleased with the outcome. He said the Pakistani air force had demonstrated its competence. Chinese military equipment had proved more than adequate. Munir’s position as army chief was strengthened. The net effect, the retired general said, was a revival of the army’s standing in Pakistan: Modi was owed a letter of thanks.

In India, the war was celebrated both by the government’s supporters and by most of the opposition. The media were full of nationalist fervour. The likely loss of fighter pilots has an emotional potency, but India showed it could threaten critical Pakistani airbases. On 13 May, Modi appeared at Adampur airbase (which Pakistan claimed to have attacked) wearing an Indian air force cap. Munir and Pakistan’s prime minister, Muhammad Shehbaz Sherif, gave a triumphant address standing on a tank.

With both sides claiming success, the conflict hasn’t made a larger scale war less likely. Samir Saran, the president of the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in Delhi, is advocating for a major rearmament programme in India, raising military spending to 5 per cent of GDP.

Pravin Sawhney, an Indian national security analyst, has said that what India really needs is an ‘evaluation of how Pakistan’s military, with a fifth of India’s defence budget, is able to strike a stalemate in operations’. According to Ajai Sahni, another Indian national security expert, the Indian air force may have had operational success in striking its targets, but at a strategic level Operation Sindoor joins a list of limited Indian military operations that have achieved very little.

The government of Pakistan is pushing for talks and there is much to resolve. The 1960 Indus Water Treaty remains suspended, as does the 1972 Simla Agreement, which nominally prevents the use of force in India-Pakistan relations. If there are direct talks, they will not broach a long-term settlement for Kashmir. Trump is correct that an international attempt at a settlement of the matter would be wise. It remains unlikely. In its absence, Kashmir will periodically generate opportunities for catastrophe.

India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, has said that Operation Sindoor ‘was just a trailer’. ‘When the right time comes,’ he said, ‘we will show the full picture to the world.’