Izzat Maxing

Q contends that no India–Pakistan war will ever last more than a few days, because neither side wants the destruction a long one brings. The region, he says, will get “bouts of clashes every few years”, and he called it izzat maxing.

Four days

Kargil, 1999, ran two months, and India kept its aircraft on its own side of the Line of Control the whole time. Balakot, 2019, was a day and a dogfight. Sindoor, May 2025, was four days, and on the fourth Washington and Riyadh were on the phone to both capitals. Each side claims it stopped when it chose to, and each side stopped.

The stopgaps are nuclear, then American, then Gulf: Washington does not want a nuclear crisis, and the Gulf pays Pakistan’s bills and buys Desi labour. Q’s model of the next war, days of strikes and then a ceasefire, is also how India’s deputy army chief described Sindoor afterwards: staying ahead on the escalation ladder while preventing a full-scale war.

Q claims the alliances shone through in Sindoor, that Turkey and China stood up and accordingly there was pressure to deescalate? Nobody needs an ally for four days however one seems to need them for the fifth.

1971: the ally that turned up and the one that didn’t

Did Pakistan have no real allies in 1971? What about the US carrier group (the Seventh Fleet), Jordan’s Starfighters, Iran’s help, SEATO, CENTO and well the most allied ally?

A US carrier group built around the Enterprise entered the Bay of Bengal in the war’s second week. Nine Jordanian F-104s reached Karachi’s Masroor base, and an Indian MiG-21 shot one down. Iran’s help was conditional. On 8 December the Shah told the Americans he would not send Iranian aircraft or pilots, because of the treaty India had signed with Moscow; he would not risk the Soviets.

He offered instead to cover Jordan with two Iranian squadrons so that Jordan could lend Pakistan its Starfighters, and Nixon and Kissinger agreed, one step away. China did nothing.

Did any of this save Pakistan from dismemberment? The war lasted thirteen days, and Dacca fell before any of it could matter. The Enterprise arrived and did not fire. The 1965 embargo had hit both sides, and it hurt the side flying American aircraft more.

India had one treaty, signed with Moscow in August 1971, four months before the war. It bought three Soviet vetoes in the Security Council, on 4, 5 and 13 December, a shadow on the Enterprise, and the Shah’s aircraft staying at home. That is the whole case for allies in a short war: they buy time at the UN and keep the other side’s friends at sea.

Pakistan’s partners sent aircraft and a fleet that changed nothing; India’s one treaty changed the Security Council and kept Iran out. Only one kind mattered, and it mattered for thirteen days.

The proof is in the (Pakistani) pudding

Q’s strongest case is the year Pakistan has had. In February the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. Pakistan stayed neutral, condemned the strikes and the Iranian answer alike, and by April Iran’s ambassador was saying Tehran would talk in Pakistan and nowhere else. The ceasefire of 8 April was Islamabad’s. The talks of 11 and 12 April were in Islamabad’s Serena Hotel, ran twenty-one hours and failed; the memorandum that came out of them is, this week, back on the table. Trump called Munir and Sharif extraordinary men.

The Saudi agreement of September 2025 said aggression against one is aggression against both. In August, in Mecca, Turkey signed on: attack on one, attack on all. The text has not been published, no mechanism for a military response has been announced, and neither the Turkish nor the Pakistani parliament has ratified it.

Then the Houthis, who now hold Mokha and islands in the Red Sea, began hitting Saudi Arabia. On 10 September Islamabad said no immediate response was under consideration. On 26 September the three countries’ military chiefs met in Riyadh. On 29 September, in Rome, Asif said Pakistan would defend Saudi Arabia by whatever means were available, that any enemy of Saudi Arabia is an enemy of Pakistan, that a secretariat is being set up, and he would not say whether Pakistani jets had already flown. Behind the words there are already several thousand Pakistani troops, a fighter squadron, drones and an air-defence system on Saudi soil, sent by mid-year, and Riyadh put three billion dollars into Pakistan’s reserves in April. Pakistan reinforced Saudi Arabia and did not cross into the war against Iran. That is the line the pact is now being asked to move.

And Pakistan is already fighting a war, with a neighbour barely mentioned in the earlier BP thread. Kabul was bombed on 27 February and the defence minister said open war; Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar brokered an Eid truce; Khost was struck again on 24 September. There are two exceptions to Pakistan’s good neighbourhood, the two states that essentially border it. One of them is a live front with a 2,640-kilometre border.

India’s shelves

Is it true that in a long war nobody would sell India anything, not even Russia? SIPRI’s March report says India bought 40 per cent of its arms from Russia over 2021 to 2025, down from 72 per cent a decade earlier, with France at 29 per cent and Israel at 15. Imports fell 4 per cent; domestic output reached ₹1.78 lakh crore in the year to March, and the defence minister said most of what flew in Sindoor was Indian-made. Pakistan, by the same report, is the fifth-largest importer in the world, and 80 per cent of what it imports is Chinese. “Nobody sells” cuts both ways. One side has three suppliers who answer to nobody in common. The other has one.

The Indian army is short about 1.8 lakh soldiers, the first Agnipath batch walks out this winter, and the services are asking to keep half of them instead of a quarter. The air force flies about thirty fighter squadrons against a sanctioned forty-two. SIPRI itself lists India’s pending orders, up to 140 combat aircraft from France and six submarines from Germany, and calls that a probably increasing reliance on foreign suppliers.

And on the northern border India has, in its own deputy chief’s phrase, two adversaries on one border: during the DGMO calls in May, he said, Pakistan was getting live inputs on Indian deployments from China. Beijing’s foreign ministry said it did not know how that allegation came about. Beijing also reopened three trade passes with India in August after six years, and Indian politicians said the same month that the PLA had walked into Arunachal. Both are true. China would rather use Pakistan to cause pain, the general said, than fight on its own frontier. Which is Q’s point in an Indian uniform. China has no need to mobilise while it can inform.

The broader Global Contours

Can the Gulf roll Pakistan’s loans forever? Has China gone quiet on CPEC, and might it hand Gwadar back? India’s equivalent, possibly, is a trade deal with Washington that has been a framework since February and is still unsigned, with Goyal in Milwaukee this week calling it almost done; an EU agreement concluded in January and now before the Council for signature; a BRICS presidency; and a border trade with Beijing that reopened while Beijing’s soldiers moved.

In a sense Pakistan remains the region’s Israel: an ideological nation, an outlier among neighbours whose borders imperial powers drew. However, Israel and Pakistan drew, and demanded, their own borders.