This is the laziest thing to do, disregard nuance and just do ‘both sides!’.
Lol Modi let this play out just like he did for 2019, it’s even likely that he induced the attack himself, whether through Pakistan or directly. Imran Khan even predicted there’d be another Pulwama in 5 years, and he was right.
Are you insane? He had NO incentive to initiate such an attack, even if he could do so in a muslim majority state full of separatist sentiment people who would notice and report on suspicious movement not instigated by themselves. Any elections of any concequence are a year away and his popularity was again at an all time high in comparison to all the opposition people.
Where as Munir was facing a country angry at the military for imprisoning the most popular politician up until now. So a good old standard Indian slaughter was very convenient indeed.
The wave of drones and ballistic missiles did practically minimal damage to both sides,
Minimal damage? India spanked Pakistan’s most prized fighting arm by going into the country and rendering their bases inoperable. Their air defence was neutralised and the PAF couldn’t do the one thing an air force is supposed to do, defend their air space. The only reason destruction stopped at that level was because India did not escalate further than ‘We can get to you’.
The only real damage was the aircraft in the air. I think Modi had this planned out with Munir as a stunt, but he wasn’t expecting PAF to function autonomously.
No, their retd. general confirmed on their own podcast that one PAF AeWACS was destroyed and it’s crew killed inside their hanger. Then there are the images of C130s burning. HQ9’s blowing up are quite an embarrassing damage to have.
IAF lost aircrafts like the Rafale and that one Mirage.
He seemed pretty pissed about the ceasefire probably because he wasn’t expecting to lose several jets.*
Everyone knows, specially Mr. “lost a Mig 21 and nothing to show for it in 2019”, that there are losses in any skirmish. Doubt he wasn’t expecting losses. Yes, I’d be pissed too if I didn’t just bash someone’s head in after taking damage, but this was the plan all along. Show Pakistan how far India would go and you can’t catch up. Deterrence. Not wanton destruction.
Internationally, everyone is reporting on the initial air fight, but in Pakistan its Munir’s face plastered on every wall and tv channel, and in India it’s Modi’s.
Yeah, I don’t know what that’s about. They are pretending that west doesn’t lose fighters, even though they haven’t fought a near-peer in 50 years, therefore it must a great shame for Indians to have lost a fighter, nevermind what the actual military objectives were.
Modi and Munir are going to milk this for all it’s worth, one of them even promoted themselves to Field Marshal. So much for Deterrence.
*I’m not the only one who shares this idea BTW, several analysts have claimed that the IAF was caught quite off guard because they were under the assumption PAF wouldn’t engage with BVRs across the border. They think it was a political failure in planning the operation, and not the lack of capabilities of pilots and/or aircraft (as much as I like to think it is lol).
I’m pretty sure it was more that they knew this could happen, but they had no choice. Rafale is not magic, it can and has been brought down with fire. IAF knew there was a good chance of retaliatory fire. Normally you would kill their AeWCS and anti-air missile systems before a strike, but that means damaging their army, and that means unwanted escalation.
You HAVE to hit targets inside another country.
You HAVE to avoid hitting their army in a first strike.
So what do you do? Use a lot of decoys, jamming, carefulness and prayers. None of the IAF pilots died, so that’s mostly a win.
How much worth this is going to be for India, even after they bloody Pakistan’s nose? Will this stop terrorism? Who knows, probably not. But you tried the nice approach, it didn’t work, so you try the not so nice approach.
But that’s the only and first statement in the article summary box.