The conflict of May 7-10, 2025 between India and Pakistan represents the sixth major crisis between the two countries since both declared their nuclear weapon capabilities in 1998. The year 1999 featured a limited war in Kargil following a Pakistani incursion; 2001-02 witnessed a large-scale military mobilization by India in response to a terrorist attack on its parliament; 2008 saw India not responding militarily to a terrorist assault on Mumbai; in 2016, India launched ground assaults on terrorist staging grounds following the Uri attack; and in 2019, India launched air strikes against a training camp following a major terrorist incident at Pulwama.
The latest events were sparked by the deliberate targeting of Indian civilians at a tourist site in Jammu and Kashmir, marking a departure from a decade-long focus by terrorists on military or security targets. India’s military response on May 7 was direct missile strikes on nine Pakistani terrorist targets. Over the next three days, Pakistan retaliated with heavy artillery firing (killing further civilians) and drone swarms into Indian air space, which eventually escalated into a heavy air assault on Indian air defense and radar systems. India retaliated in kind through artillery and drone strikes and, following Pakistan’s escalation, a larger-scale assault on Pakistani air force and air defense assets. This ended with a truce (which India has termed only an “understanding”), which followed frenetic communication through a variety of diplomatic interlocutors. There are many lessons to be derived from this episode, but it is worth highlighting three ways in which this crisis differed from past incidents.
First, there were some important military and operational differences from past conflicts. Much as the recent Azerbaijan-Armenia war and Israel-Iran attacks have proved instructive, the latest India-Pakistan conflagration demonstrated the crucial importance of robust and integrated air defense systems. The incident also proved a testing ground for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — both armed and unarmed (such as for intelligence gathering) — and counter-unmanned aerial systems (CUAS). Long-range artillery and precision-guided munitions also proved their worth. Important lessons and intelligence can be derived concerning air-to-air systems and counter-measures, including from wreckage and debris. All of this, and more, will be examined over the coming years, not just in India and Pakistan, but by various interested parties globally.
Second, the role of the United States was also different in several ways. Washington initially expressed little interest in the conflict, with U.S. vice president J.D. Vance calling it “fundamentally none of our business." The United States also broadly supported India’s right to respond to terrorism, with no condemnation of its May 7 missile strikes. But in contrast to past crises, the United States was hardly alone in talking actively to India and Pakistan, with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and United Arab Emirates among many others able and willing to communicate with both. That did not stop the United States from quickly claiming credit for a ‘ceasefire.’ Moreover, the terms detailed in its announcement were far more wide-ranging than what one participant — India — appears to have understood. This discrepancy and urgency was most likely part of an attempt to give U.S. president Donald Trump a quick and easy diplomatic ‘win’ by appealing to his sense of being a ‘peacemaker’. But in doing so, the Trump administration may have made a rookie mistake, not fully appreciating Pakistan’s longstanding quest for third-party mediation and its historic exaggeration of nuclear escalation. This fumble risks diminishing the appetite in New Delhi for more productive cooperation with Washington on a variety of other issues, including trade, defense, technology, and energy.
Third, the events of this month will change India’s approach to Pakistan moving forward, in some possibly permanent ways. The appetite for any major concessions on the Indus Waters Treaty, which India has now held in abeyance, has dissipated. India will be less willing to distinguish between individual terrorist actions and groups, on the one hand, and the larger sponsors or enablers of such activity, on the other. And New Delhi will be more willing to explore the space between retributive military action against Pakistan-based targets and the nuclear threshold. Relations between India and Pakistan had been in deep freeze since 2019: there will now be fewer constituencies than ever in India in favor of normalization.
Dhruva Jaishankar is Executive Director at ORF America.