How Close Did India and Pakistan Come to War?

Pakistani Mountains
Air view of the Pakistani mountains along the way to Osaka,Nikon D3x

By Tim Willasey-Wilsey, Former Senior Member, British Foreign Office

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.

It needs no more than 4 bad decisions for India and Pakistan to go to war; and 5 for that war to go nuclear. So how did the Pulwama crisis measure up against this approximate yard-stick?

The 15-day crisis began with a suicide attack on an Indian paramilitary police convoy in Kashmir on February 14 and ended with the release of the Indian MiG-21 pilot on March 1.

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