India and Pakistan aren’t hitting each other hard yet, but they are definitely exchanging real cross-border blows:
Powerful explosions lit up the night sky over Pakistan shortly after midnight as India launched strikes on nine separate sites in response to last month’s Islamist terror attack in Pahalgam, in Indian-controlled Kashmir, which left 26 civilians dead.
Shocking footage circulating on social media showed massive fireballs erupting as missiles struck targets across Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Delhi was quick to stress that its attacks – named Operation Sindoor, after the red pigment traditionally worn by the wives of Hindu men – targeted ‘terrorist infrastructure’ and did not strike Pakistani military assets, describing them as ‘focused, measured, and non-escalatory in nature’.
But Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif claimed the strikes hit civilian areas and described them as an ‘act of war’ as Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif warned that India’s ‘heinous act of aggression will not go unpunished,’ erasing hopes that a dangerous escalation might still be avoided.
Just hours later, Pakistani missiles reportedly brought down five Indian fighter jets before pounding Indian positions across the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border separating Indian- and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, with mortar and artillery.
Earlier today Pakistan’s armed forces were authorised to respond to India’s strikes. A statement from the National Security Council said: ‘The Armed Forces of Pakistan have duly been authorised to undertake corresponding actions in this regard.’
So now we’ve got war on the Asian-European frontier, in the Middle East, and on the subcontinent. It’s interesting to see that neither Africa nor the Americas are engaged in it yet. President Trump would do very well to extricate the USA from involvement in either the Ukrainian war or the Israeli wars, but unfortunately, he has no shortage of advisors encouraging him to entangle the USA in both.