Who really won the war between India and Pakistan?

THE FOG of war can make it difficult to understand what is happening during a conflict. Sometimes that murkiness can persist long after the guns have fallen silent. That is proving true of the four-day skirmish between India and Pakistan that took place last May. This writer recently spoke to a wide range of Indian military and security officials on the lessons that the country took from Operation Sindoor, as the Indians dubbed their part in the conflict. They differ dramatically from those drawn by Pakistan. That greatly raises the risk of miscalculations when the two countries next come to blows.

Last year’s crisis began when terrorists with links to Pakistan massacred 26 people in Indian-administered Kashmir. Two weeks later, on May 7th, India bombed nine sites in Pakistan associated with jihadist groups, including some in Punjab, the country’s most populous province. That was a step up from the strikes India launched during a previous confrontation in 2019, which hit only one location. The two sides exchanged drone and missile strikes before declaring a ceasefire on May 10th.

Both sides have claimed a victory of sorts. India appears to have hit all the targets it originally set out to destroy (in 2019 India is believed to have missed). A “complex, innovative attack” with missiles that it launched on May 10th “appears largely to have overcome Pakistani air defences”, writes Christopher Clary, an expert at the University of Albany, in a detailed paper for the Stimson Centre, a think-tank in Washington. By contrast, he says, many or perhaps all Pakistani ballistic missiles fired that day either missed or were intercepted, judging by the lack of satellite images proving that they caused much harm.

Yet Pakistan can reasonably claim to have exacted a high price for all this. On May 7th, the first day of the conflict, it downed several Indian jets—probably five. More important, it snatched a diplomatic victory from the jaws of a military defeat. Indians remain furious at Donald Trump’s repeated claims to have ended the crisis by threatening both sides with tariffs. They were angered, too, by Mr Trump’s public embrace of Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief, who in the wake of the conflict elevated himself to the rank of field-marshal, consolidated power at home and shrewdly nominated Mr Trump for a Nobel peace prize.

One might guess that India will tread a bit more cautiously next time. Its relationship with America has soured since the conflict because of disputes over tariffs, India’s purchase of Russian oil and Mr Trump’s gloating over the ceasefire. During the same period, Pakistan has deepened its own ties with America and signed an ambitious defence pact with Saudi Arabia. On the day of the ceasefire Western governments were “hours away” from advising their citizens against travel to India, says one official. That would have panicked Indian businesses.

Yet Banyan’s conversations in Delhi suggest that many Indians see things very differently. Indian officials believe that Pakistan was on the ropes by May 10th. The fact that Pakistan could not get its Fatah ballistic missiles through Indian defences that day is evidence, some argue, that its options were limited. “This time we agreed to a halt,” says one Indian military official. “Next time, our desired end state may be much more.”

Indian officials do not dismiss the risk that a future conflict turns nuclear. But they insist they have a good grasp of where the limits lie. India has an “escalation matrix”, explains one official, spelling out in detail which targets might prompt what sort of response, and which might cross a red line. “One thing we take as an important lesson” from those days of fighting, says another senior official, “is that there is space between conventional and nuclear. Plenty of margin to play with.”

Some of this might be bravado, of course. In any war, each side has an incentive to play up its successes and play down its losses, if only to bolster deterrence. But the chasm between Indian and Pakistani perceptions of their skirmish is gaping. Pakistan may have come away with the view that India is likely to blink first in another conflict, that America will quickly step in and that post-war diplomacy will once again settle in Pakistan’s favour. Some Indians believe that the country erred in agreeing to a ceasefire on May 10th, and that it should have pressed on. All this suggests the next showdown could be more unpredictable—and a lot more dangerous. ■

Correction (January 23rd): An earlier version incorrectly described the location of India’s strikes in 2019.