New Lessons Lead to New War Plans for India and Pakistan

Posted: July 24th, 2019

By Tim Willasey-Wilsey

Tim Willasey-Wilsey served for over 27 years in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and is now Visiting Professor of War Studies at King's College, London. His first overseas posting was in Angola during the Cold War followed by Central America during the instability of the late 1980s. He was also involved in the transition to majority rule in South Africa and in the Israel/Palestine issue. His late career was spent in Asia including a posting to Pakistan in the mid 1990s.

India believes it won the hostilities which followed the Pulwama attack in February 2019. According to New Delhi the attack on Balakot not only punished Pakistan for hosting terrorists on its soil but it set a new baseline for how to deal with future such events. Pakistan (which feels it prevailed in both the combat and diplomatic phases) faces a major reappraisal of its air defences. India’s new approach could lead Pakistan to draw some dangerous conclusions with potentially nuclear implications.

To the casual observer the Pulwama affair of February 2019 comprised a succession of small incidents between India and Pakistan over a period of 15 days; the sort of tectonic disturbances one might expect on the borders of two unfriendly powers. But, as more detail has trickled out over the subsequent five months, we can see that it was much more serious than realised at the time. It could have crucial and potentially disastrous implications for the inevitable next clash. The danger is that both countries could learn the wrong lessons from the experience.

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