Khan calls for calm on Kashmir border crisis
Fears that Kashmir conflict could escalate after Delhi and Islamabad trade blows and shoot down aircraft
Imran Khan, the Pakistani president, has called on India to meet for talks to defuse the crisis in Kashmir, where Pakistan shot down an Indian jet and captured a pilot. Escalating tension between the nuclear powers is worrying the West.
‘History tells us that wars are full of miscalculation. Given the weapons we have can we afford that? We should sit down and talk’
IMRAN KHAN has called for talks to avert further conflict between India and Pakistan after their air forces fought a dogfight over Kashmir and Islamabad said it had shot down two jets and captured a pilot.
Escalating tensions between the neighbours flared into aerial combat, as both sides confirmed their jets had clashed and Pakistan broadcast footage of its prisoner.
The dogfight occurred as Pakistani jets launched their own airstrikes inside Indian territory following a raid by India the day before.
Pakistan said it had shot down two Indian jets and had symbolically dropped bombs in open spaces inside Indian-controlled territory to demonstrate its right to self-defence.
India’s military said it had lost only one MIG-21 fighter, but sources admitted another had been damaged and limped back to base. India also said a Pakistani F-16 had been shot down, although this was denied by Islamabad.
International alarm at the quickly escalating dispute between the nuclear adversaries saw countries including the United States, Britain and Germany appeal for restraint.
Mr Khan, the president of Pakistan, said he hoped “better sense” would prevail so that both sides could refrain from further action.
“History tells us that wars are full of miscalculation,” he said. “My question is that given the weapons we have, can we afford miscalculation? We should sit down and talk.”
Video of the captured Indian airman, the son of a retired air marshal, was broadcast on state media, firstly bloodied and blindfolded and secondly cleaned, drinking tea and saying he was being well treated.
India first launched airstrikes inside Pakistan territory on Tuesday, claiming it had struck a training camp for the Jaish-e-mohammad militant movement it blames for a suicide bombing on Indian police. Pakistan denies involvement in the attack earlier this month and says India’s jets hit only uninhabited forest and farmland.
As the two sides traded tit-for-tat retaliation, analysts said the crisis was the worst in the region for two decades. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, said Britain was “deeply concerned about the rising tensions between India and Pakistan” and called for restraint “on both sides to avoid further escalation”.
The US joined the international chorus calling for restraint. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, said he had spoken to the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan and urged them to talk rather than stoke tension.
“I expressed to both ministers that we encourage India and Pakistan to exercise restraint and avoid escalation at any cost,” he said in a statement.
“I also encouraged both ministers to prioritise direct communication and avoid further military activity.”
Analysts said relations were so bad between Delhi and Islamabad that the situation was unlikely to improve without international mediation.
As the situation worsened, eight airports north of Delhi, including those in Jammu and Kashmir, and in Punjab and adjoining Himachal Pradesh, which both border Pakistan, cancelled all commercial flights for the next three months. Pakistan temporarily closed its airspace yesterday. Indian and Pakistani troops also “exchanged” heavy mortar and small arms fire along the militarised line of control (LOC), which is the de facto border in Kashmir.
The residents of the border area of Rajouri woke up to the sound of mortar shelling late in the night, while many said they had witnessed Pakistani jets drop bombs inside Indian territory.
Ayaz Khan, a resident of the border area of Balakote, in Poonch, said bombs had hit a forested area. “I saw smoke rise up and the administration has asked the people to stay indoors to avoid casualties,” he said. In the evening, he added, Indian troops started firing towards the Pakistani side, which lies 400-500 yards from his house.
With more shelling expected across the LOC, locals had been told to stock up on food and schools had been closed. Dr Kunzes Dolma, a senior doctor in Srinagar, said leave for medical staff had been cancelled and they were “geared up to meet any eventuality”.
There is a popular theory in foreign policy circles that democracy is a cure for warmongering. It encourages compromise and sidelines extremism, students of international relations are told, and therefore makes war between two democracies highly unlikely. India and Pakistan seem on course not just to tear up this received wisdom but to incinerate it with their arsenals on the Kashmiri border, where the two countries are facing off.
In each country, popular pressure is working to prevent compromise between two leaders who each fear seeming weak in the eyes of their voters. As a consequence, India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed powers, are sliding closer to the brink than Washington and Moscow ever did.
Pakistan developed effective atomic weapons, giving it nuclear parity with India, soon after their last conflict over Kashmir in 1999. Everyone assumed that mutually assured destruction would teach New Delhi and Islamabad the need for détente in the way it had for the Americans and Russians. But on the ground, nationalist and religious fundamentalist forces were gaining support in each country.
Narendra Modi has come to dominate India’s politics by playing up Hindu identity – Hindutva – at the expense of the vast country’s minorities, especially Muslims. Before he became prime minister in 2014, he was widely accused of fostering sectarian divisions in his home state of Gujarat. This legacy has also poisoned India’s relations with Muslim Pakistan. Having stirred up such feelings, Modi cannot now ignore them.
Imran Khan’s decades at the top of international cricket and his contacts in the West give him a sophistication unmatched by his Indian counterpart. But he has since become more obviously religious and his political career is largely based on appealing to traditionalist voters. More worryingly, within the coalition on which he relies are hard-line Islamists who back groups such as the Jaish-e-mohammed militants responsible for the suicide bomb attack two weeks ago that killed 44 Indian troops and triggered the current standoff.
In India, where elections are looming, the chance to look tough has been an electoral gift for the populist prime minister who was already beating the nationalist drum and playing to a strong strain of domestic anti-muslim sentiment. Public opinion in both countries supports assertive action, one of the reasons why the situation has escalated so quickly. Historic antipathies going back even before the bloodletting of partition in 1947 make bellicose behaviour a surefire vote winner.
But there are modern sources of tension, too. Modi’s New Delhi feels like the capital of an emerging superpower, a status which has given India the self-confidence to take a tougher line on Pakistan. In Islamabad, Pakistan’s generals fear that being the first to blink will destroy the credibility of their nuclear deterrent, their only point of parity with their neighbour. There are concerns that Khan, who has made some conciliatory noises, has little control over the military.
It is all a sharp contrast with how a dictator such as Kim Jong-un wields the total power necessary to be able to ratchet up tension and dial it down again. In the run up to his second summit with Donald Trump, Kim is reported to have removed, even executed, up to 70 “hardliners” who opposed his conciliatory gestures to the Americans.
As the world watches the events in Hanoi and Kashmir on its split-screens, dialogue seems much easier between an imperious President Trump and a tyrant such as Kim than between democrats in Delhi and Islamabad. Whatever the horrors of any renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula, they would pale by comparison with the scale of casualties in an all-out war between India and Pakistan.
“There goes the people,” the founder of independent India, Mahatma Gandhi, once remarked, “I am their leader, I must follow them.” It’s not such a straightforward decision for his successors who may now find that their jingoistic electorates prevent them from making the compromises needed to de-escalate a confrontation that risks national annihilation.