What is the long-term implication of India’s attack on Pakistan? One of them might be that there is another war between us, which would make it officially the third war, if it is long, or the fifth, if it is short. We fought first in 1947-48 when Jinnah sent an army of Pathans to conquer Kashmir, and seized what we call today PoK and Pakistanis call Azad Kashmir. Then Ayub Khan was instigated by his foreign minister Bhutto to send intruders into Kashmir again in 1965. Lal Bahadur Shastri responded by sending tanks towards Lahore. That war ended with a peace brokered by the Soviet Union at Tashkent. It also ended partly because both countries ran out of fighter spares.
Fighter planes are high performance machines which use very expensive parts. For this reason, poor nations cannot afford to fight wars beyond 10 days. Today India is much more powerful and richer than Pakistan and so this situation has changed. But then we both have weapons of mass destruction now which we did not in Shastri’s time. Only six years after the Tashkent peace we divided Pakistan in the 1971 war to create Bangladesh. In 1999, we cleared Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry jawans from Kargil. Though about 1,000 soldiers died, 500 on each side, the Kargil conflict is not classified as a war. This time, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered retaliation, the conflict seems to be contained. India used very cautious language when announcing the surgical strike. We also assured Pakistan and the world we were not planning further action. However, since we have already fought them so many times there is always a possibility that we will go to war again.
The problem with war is that populations get bored soon. I do not mean they get tired of war, in the sense that their sons are dying. I mean they actually get bored. The First World War was fought in trenches. Long and unmoving lines began in Belgium (a nation that wanted no fighting but became a battlefield because it was located between the combatants) and ended at Switzerland. These long lines remained for years. Between 1914 and 1918, the Germans were facing off against the French and British in trenches 150 metres apart. What was going on behind them? For four years, a couple of kilometres from thousands of French and Belgian towns and villages, millions were shooting and bombing one another.
How many people were killed? More than one and a half crore. What was the result? The borders remained more or less the same, all the economies were gutted. Some regimes changed. The Russian empire died and the Communists took power. The Austro Hungarian empire ended and so did the German empire. But all of these were changed from within. No country benefited from all the killing. Will this surgical strike of ours put an end to Pakistani terror? What will we do when the next terror strike happens? How big does it have to be to get Pakistan to totally stop? Will they learn it if we cut them in half again? Will we continue with our lives when after a while, there is nothing “new” in the news? I think so because that is the nature of humans.
