SO THE fifth Indian-Pakistani war has ended. Sort of.
They announced a ceasefire on May 10, only for both sides to accuse each other of breaking it.
I don’t know if peace will stick but if it doesn’t and war continues, I believe that the following scenarios will play out.
I think that the most likely outcome is that the ceasefire will continue, and both countries’ citizens will spend the next few years in internet fights over the Pahalgam attacks. I don’t think their leaders are brave enough to break the peace, or risk their larger strategic interests over tit for tats.
In the event peace fails, the new war will likely follow previous Indian-Pakistani conflicts, with both sides inflicting a certain level of damage on one another in a few months or even a year, before India and Pakistan agree to sit down on negotiating table again. That’s what I, and many others, see as the most likely scenario.
Maybe, it will be the international community (the United States, Russia, China) that convinces them to go to the negotiation table, or maybe, it’s because the devastation of the conflict will be enough to satisfy domestic demands on both sides to revisit to peace.
Either way, that is the most likely outcome, followed by years of tense peace along a perhaps newly altered Indian-Pakistani border. After all, this isn’t the first time India and Pakistan have had a war, and what had happened before is more likely to happen again.
The second most likely scenario is a prolonged war similar to the situation with Russia and Ukraine. In this situation, the ceasefire fails and the war continues. Pakistan will only be in the fight because China will support it with munitions and satellite data to keep the Indians at bay.
Like Russia, India will eventually win this war, but they will not be able to escalate the war past a certain point, and the situation will look like the one in East Ukraine.
The least likely, but still possible, scenario, is a spiraling escalation, with the possible use of heavier munitions. This very unlikely scenario becomes more likely as the conflict lengthens and more outside forces decide to play proxy war via either India or Pakistan (or both).
So far though, the ceasefire has held and it seems that both sides truly want peace, even if emotions remain high./PN
