Tag: military

Open Thread – “Open War” breaks out between Pakistan and Afghanistan

February 27, 2026 41 Comments filed under Open Thread, RecoveringNewsJunkie

This is a quote from Pakistan’s ‘defence minister’ from a couple of hours ago. There is a shooting war on the Durand line, and the PAF has bombed Kabul and Kandahar, including the airport, Taliban ministry buildings and other non-military targets.

This round of AfPak hostilities kicked off with a ‘surgical airstrike’ by Pakistan into Afghanistan that resulted in multiple civilian deaths. The Taliban retaliated by attacking Pakistani border outposts on the Durand Line, and claim to have captured more than a dozen of them, with Pakistani POWs and KIA. In response, the PAF has now bombed Kabul and Kandahar.

The Taliban, the erstwhile creation of the ISI, is now at war with Pakistan. Where does this go from here?

She Parked a Car With Her Husband. Fifty Years Later, She Is Still Waiting.

February 22, 2026 69 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

Before anything about this blog, its standards, or its arguments, I want to begin with a story; because sometimes a single human life cuts through every debate and reminds us what any of this is actually for.

Damayanti Tambay was 21 years old, a three-time national badminton champion, when she married Flight Lieutenant Vijay Tambay in April 1970. Twenty months later, war broke out. On 3 December 1971, they drove together to a garage in Ambala cantonment to park their bottle-green Fiat. That was the last time she saw him.

On 5 December, flying a strike mission over Shorkot Airbase in West Pakistan, Vijay was hit by anti-aircraft fire and ejected. Radio Pakistan later broadcast his name among those captured. Damayanti heard it alone. She felt relief. A prisoner of war comes home eventually, she thought.

He never did.

A Loving Wife’s Unending Search Continue reading She Parked a Car With Her Husband. Fifty Years Later, She Is Still Waiting.

Report on Op-Sindoor

January 27, 2026 21 Comments filed under Nachiketa

Link to the entire report.

Nevertheless, sufficient elements appear to indicate that, by the morning of 10 May 2025, the Indian Air Force had succeeded in achieving air superiority over a significant portion of Pakistan’s airspace. This in turn enabled it to continue long-range strikes against enemy infrastructure at will, at least for as long as it retained sufficient stocks of munitions such as BrahMos or SCALP-EG. At the same time, the Pakistan Air Force had lost the ability to repeat the operations it had conducted so successfully on 7 May 2025, owing to the loss of its forward air-surveillance radars and the threat posed by S-400 systems to its AWACS standoff weapons delivery platforms, while its own strikes conducted between 7 and
10 May 2025 had been largely thwarted by Indian defences.

Meanwhile, Islamabad demonstrated its manifest superiority in strategic communication, which notably benefitted from support within Chinese, and to some extent Western, information spheres. The destruction of one or more Rafales, for example, effectively masked the defeat of the adversary air force, which had reportedly suffered at least equivalent losses but had also proven incapable of defending its most important air bases or of delivering comparable, documented strikes against its adversary.

Operation Sindoor marked a significant evolution in Indian counter-terrorism doctrine, which now equates a terrorist attack to an act of war warranting a decisive response. It also eliminates the distinction between terrorist groups and their state sponsors, with the latter automatically becoming legitimate targets in the event of a renewed attack. Finally, it reaffirms New Delhi’s resolve, in such a case, not to be deterred by Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal. The potential for escalation on the Indian subcontinent therefore remains higher than ever, while developments since 1999 have constantly illustrated the stability/instability paradox

TL;DR take:
IAF won in air and the land after sustaining initial losses whereas PAF won in the media (which is not as trivial as it sounds).

 

The growing Pakistan-Afghan Conflict. What next?

November 3, 2025 No Comments filed under RecoveringNewsJunkie

Most of us keeping up with news from the sub-continent are aware by now of the recent escalation in the long-simmering friction between Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The historical ‘divide’ regarding the Durand Line is something that never really went away as much as the Pakistani state attempted to pretend that its a fait accompli.  And now with the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan managing to to challenge the Pakistani state’s writ, and inflicting ever increasing costs on PakMil, the threats to punish Afghanistan further are flowing thick and fast from Islamabad.

Pakistan, obviously enjoys a military supremacy over Afghanistan in multiple orders of magnitude. But as we have seen in Ukraine, or even in Afghanistan over the last few decades, the underdog can inflict some serious costs. And keep it going.

Question is, where does Pakistan go from here? With the growing reported rapprochement between the Taliban and New Delhi, there’s every chance that the Afghan air defenses may be quickly ramped up from non-existent, to at least some level of deterrent.  Rumors are rife on the internet about Indian supply planes landing at Bagram.  And simply bombing Afghan border posts has diminishing returns.  The Taliban do not appear to be in any conciliatory mood.

In many ways, this has many parallels to India’s experience with Pakistan backed jihadi groups in the 30+ years starting from the late 1980s.  Its almost impossible to deter and defend against insurgency in mountainous terrain.  Especially when the insurgents find succor in the local populace.

So, what next for “Khyber Pakhtunkhwa” and Pakistan? How realistic is the possibility that the Pakistani military will be able to succeed “this time” when it has already ‘failed’ a few times post-9/11, and had to make repeated ‘peace’ deals with the TTP or its predecessors in the past?

The shooting war seems to have gone a bit quiet for now, but the war of words is quickly escalating.  It seems like the Taliban are being ‘good students’ of the ISI and have adopted the tactic of releasing catchy music videos to make propaganda points.

Kargil

November 2, 2025 No Comments filed under Omar Ali

Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict

Peter R.   ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

[Reviewed by Teresita Schaffer; Survival 52, 5 (2010): 219-20]

This volume is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand Pakistan’s military decision-making or the half-war in Kargil in 1999, just a year after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. Peter Lavoy, long a scholar of South Asian military affairs, assembled a first-rate team from Pakistan, India and the United States to examine the causes, conduct and impact of the Kargil conflict, based in part on an astonishing number of interviews with high-level participants from both sides.

 

The resulting book does not change the basic ‘storyline’ of Kargil that has been generally accepted for a decade: that Pakistan’s tactical victory in crossing the Line of Control with India ended in tactical defeat, and that the nuclear shadow under which the fighting took place had effectively frozen the territorial status quo. But it does offer numerous surprising and important insights below that macro level. Lavoy’s introduction directs a spotlight on, among other things, the implications of Kargil for nuclear deterrence theory, noting that one of its key postulates – that a nuclear environment fosters arms control – is contradicted by Kargil; and two others – that nuclear powers do not fight and that they do not initiate or escalate crises – are at least partly refuted.

In my view, two other conclusions in this book have special importance. The first has to do with the dynamics of Pakistan’s decision-making. Several authors note that, in Pakistan’s view, the Kargil operation was intended to create a ‘fait accompli’ that would change the status quo in Kashmir, and also to avenge decades of what Pakistanis consider India’s taking advantage of them (most importantly the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh War, but also India’s occupation of the Siachen Glacier in 1984). Together with a long history of military pre-eminence in Pakistan’s decision-making and the Pakistan Army’s institutional distaste for self-criticism after its military reverses, this genesis of Kargil led the Pakistani military leadership to assume, in ways that seem quite remarkable to outside observers, that India would not mount much of a defence.

This streak of self-delusion in a military organisation that is in other respects highly professional has important consequences for the region, not to speak of Pakistan’s relations with the United States.

A second arresting analysis is the discussion of the role of surprise in military operations. James Wirtz and Surinder Rana review the literature and conclude that surprise is most valued by military leaders who face a stronger adversary and who believe that surprise can neutralise the power imbalance. They also conclude, after looking at the results of a number of surprise operations, that the result is often tactical victory but strategic failure. This is of course how Kargil turned out. It also raises questions about how both analysts and especially military leaders do and do not absorb lessons from history.

As happens in nearly every edited volume, there is a certain amount of repetition, and one chapter, by Bruce Riedel, basically condenses and reviews material he has already published elsewhere. But these are minor flaws in a book that combines many important insights and a welcome readability.

Book Review: In their own words by C.Christine Fair

November 2, 2025 No Comments filed under Archived Authors

“In Their Own Words informs contemporary discussions and analysis of this organization by mobilizing the vast corpus of LeT’s own writing…. I draw from these materials to advance two key claims about the organization. First, as is generally accepted, I argue that LeT’s ability to conduct complex terroattacks in India and Afghanistan-coupled with its loyalty to the Pakistani security establishment-render it incredibly useful as a reliable and obedient proxy. In fact, it is the state’s most duteous and governable agent. While it has long been appreciated that LeT is useful to the Pakistani state for its loyalty and lethality in conducting its militant operations in India and, more recently, in Afghanistan, analysts have overlooked its domestic utility to the state. This forms the second principal focus of my study. LeT/JuD stands in stark opposition to Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the various Deobandi militant groups savaging the Pakistani state and its citizenry because it vigorously opposes violence within Pakistan. This stance puts LeT/JuD at odds with other Salafi and Deobandi organisations in Pakistan that propound the doctrine of takfiri[sic](excommunication and often murder) for Muslims who ‘misbehave’ by failing to live their lives as these organizations demand and expect and for those Muslim leaders who fail to impose shariat when they have the opportunity to do so. Not only does it argue against violence against minorities. This yields a surprising paradox: while LeT decries Hindus and Christians outside of Pakistan as the worst polythiests and worthy objects of militarized Jihad, within Pakistan it argues for their conversion through compassion, preaching and proselytization. LeT is one of the state’s most important partners in helping it manage the aftershocks of its long-term policy of using Islamist militants as state proxies.” (Page 3)

 

“The Pakistani state long ago developed two dangerous tools to reverse these purported crimes of Partition (“imagined” loss of parts of Punjab and Kashmir). One is the ever-expanding fleet of Islamist militant groups, as well as non-Islamist groups, that Pakistan deploys in India as well as Afghanistan. The second is a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons which makes it virtually impossible for India or any other state for that matter to punish Pakistan for using terrorism as a tool of statecraft or compel it to cease doing so. Pakistan acquired a crude nuclear device around 1983-4, after which Pakistan became evermore emboldened in its strategy of sub-conventional warfare as it continued making progress in developing its nuclear deterrant. Under this expanding nuclear umbrella, Pakistan became increasingly confident that India would not risk responding militarily to Pakistan’s various terrorist outrages in Kashmir and the rest of India. Equally important, Pakistan became steadily assured that the United States and the international community would intervene to prevent any conflict from escalating to an all-out war, with the always lingering possibility for inadverent or deliberate escalation to nuclear use.” (page 23)

“Several developments in Kashmir influcened Singh’s course of action.  Perhaps the most important event that conditioned Singh’s options was an invasion of his state by Pakistanis. Troubles for the maharaja began when some 60,000 veterans of WWII returned to their homes in Poonch (Westen Jammu) to find that they had become subjects of Hari singh of Kashmir, whom they disliked because of his imposition of onerous taxes. These mostly muslim Poonchis, annoyed with becoming  Singh’s subjects and outraged by the communally-motivated murders of muslims, ongoing through India, declared their preferance of joining Pakistan during a public assembly during August 1947.”  (Page 29)

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