India and Pakistan both claimed victory on Sunday after agreeing to a truce in a rapidly escalating conflict that was sparked by a deadly terrorist attack on the Indian side of Kashmir last month, raising concerns that the two nuclear powers could end up in all-out war.
India, blaming the April 22 attack on Pakistan’s history of sheltering terrorist groups, launched airstrikes across the border, with Pakistan responding in kind. The clashes quickly escalated, with both countries hitting deeper into each other’s territory than at any time in the last 50 years.
On Saturday, President Trump announced that the two sides had agreed to a cease-fire with the help of American mediators and, as the first full day of the fragile truce appeared to hold on Sunday, congratulated them for halting the aggression. While the damage will take weeks and months to tally, especially in a space of media blackouts and extreme disinformation, here is what we know about how the clashes played out.
The First Shots
In its opening round of airstrikes, before dawn on Wednesday, India struck targets deeper inside Pakistani territory than it had in decades, and by all accounts hit close enough to facilities associated with terrorist groups that it could claim victory.
It quickly became clear, though, that it had not been a clean strike but more of a protracted engagement between the two air forces — each side’s jets going at the other’s, with the boundary between them as a line that neither crossed. And India lost aircraft in the exchanges, including at least two of its most advanced fighter jets. Indian officials have declined to comment on the details of their aircraft loss, but they have not rejected reports that they lost jets.
The toll from the strikes was conflicting. India’s defense minister told a parliamentary briefing that they had killed “100 terrorists.” Pakistan put the death toll from India’s initial strikes around 30.
The Escalations
On the second day, as a diplomatic push for an off-ramp intensified, India said it had thwarted a Pakistani attempt overnight to hit military targets across a dozen border cities and towns. In response, it had taken the kind of action that analysts say almost always escalates a conflict: It struck sensitive military targets, particularly air defense systems in the Pakistani city of Lahore.
“A move like that is quite strident and would have concerned Pakistani forces, because in other contexts, taking out air defenses is a prelude to more serious action,” said Kim Heriot-Darragh, a strategic and defense analyst at the Australia India Institute. “You’d knock out defenses to open a corridor through which aircraft could fly and strike their actual target.”
Diplomats and analysts are uncertain about just how the events of early Thursday morning played out, but it is clear that something major had changed and was seen as an important shift in the pattern of escalation. Whether Pakistan was using a mass of drone incursions and missiles to actually try to hit India’s military sites or just to warn India and probe its air-defense systems for something bigger later is still unclear.
While attention was focused on the escalation in the skies, intense cross-border shelling inflicted heavy civilian casualties and forced tens of thousands of people to leave their homes in Kashmir.
Pakistan’s astonishing official response — a complete denial that it had done anything on the second night — left two explanations for the events: that it was just a probing mission, which Pakistan did not want to distract from the actual retaliation that was coming, or that it was an initial retaliation that had not succeeded.
But India nonetheless took the opportunity to damage crucial Pakistani military sites, and with that all bets were off. Pakistan vowed it would retaliate. The only way the escalation could be arrested was the way it had always been: with an outside power stepping in to tell both sides to knock it off.
Alarm Over Strategic Sites
On the nights of Friday and Saturday, the situation escalated rapidly to an air war with few holds barred, but in which ground forces had not been moved.
Pakistan launched an immense campaign of drone and missile strikes, targeting military bases across several Indian cities — this time with acknowledgment from the Indian side that, although its air defenses had thwarted much of the barrage, there was damage to equipment and loss of security personnel.
Indian officials on Monday said they had lost five members of the country’s security forces.
There was evidence, including satellite images shown by the Indian military, that India had also managed to cause damage on the Pakistani side, targeting airfields and more defense systems, and also striking near one of Pakistan’s crucial strategic headquarters. Pakistan’s military acknowledged for the first time on Tuesday that it had sustained casualties, confirming that 11 soldiers had been killed in the clashes, with 78 others wounded.
What alarmed the United States, and intensified the diplomatic push for the cease-fire that was announced late on Saturday, was not only that the two sides were increasing strikes to sensitive sites, but also just what the next step in a rapid escalation ladder for two alarmed nuclear powers could mean.
What Is Ahead
While the scores are still being tallied, and damage assessed, the four days may have fundamentally changed the reality of conflict in this part of the world toward noncontact warfare: barrages from a distance until the very last stages of battle, but still leading to escalation and the potential loss of restraint.
The abundance of new-generation technology, particularly cheap drones and loitering munitions, might initially suggest more precision targeting and less human cost. But in this latest India-Pakistan conflict, those technologies still prompted a rapid cycle of escalation that led to concerns that the use of nuclear weapons could be put on the table.
Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting from Karachi, Pakistan.
