India’s string of attacks on Pakistan overnight – a response, Delhi says, to the killing of 26 in a terror attack in Kashmir last month – comes at a time when warfare has become increasingly normalised internationally and the restraints of the global diplomatic system weakened.
Though flare-ups between the two south Asian powers are nothing new, India’s Operation Sindoor is already notably more aggressive than recent military actions launched by Delhi against its neighbour in 2016 and 2019, raising the stakes for Pakistan’s promised response to what it says was “an act of war”.
Nine locations were targeted in the operation, India said, and its military released video of what it said were “terrorist camps” being bombed in Pakistan. Four of the targets were in Pakistan’s populous Punjab region, which had not been attacked by India since the two countries fought a full-scale war in 1971.
Pakistan said that at least 26 civilians were killed. Although India’s aim was, according its foreign minister, Vikram Misri, to “deter and prevent” further terror attacks, Islamabad vowed to respond, raising the question of how long a tit-for-tat between the countries could last.
It is an uncomfortable moment, not least because India and Pakistan possess considerable stocks of nuclear weapons, each with about 170 warheads. Their armies and air forces are sizeable: India has 1.23 million troops and more than 500 combat jets, against 560,000 for Pakistan and more than 400 combat jets.
Though nobody seriously expects all-out fighting, changes to the global context suggest that violence between the two nuclear powers could escalate. Shelling has already been taking place across both sides of the line of control in Kashmir, with Pakistan reporting five dead on its side and India counting seven.
“Over the past three years, the idea that countries do not go to war has disappeared. It’s a daily reality and one that has expanded the realms of the imagination for hawkish planners in hotspots around the world,” said Samir Puri, from the Chatham House thinktank.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 and continues with daily missile and drone attacks amid unconvincing US mediation efforts. Israel is now planning to seize Gaza in its renewed offensive against Hamas, as Donald Trump appears to have lost interest in trying to end a war in which more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed.
Countries thousands of miles apart have attacked each other. Iran twice launched complex long-range attacks on Israel in 2024 – “we are in a world where rivals and enemies are increasingly willing to lob missiles at each other,” said Puri. North Korea has sent troops to fight along side Russia in Ukraine, though western powers will not send troops to help Kyiv.
Military responses are less carefully calibrated. A rocket fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels that injured four when it landed near Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport on Sunday morning led to an Israeli counterattack that caused $500m (£375m) in damage to Sana’a airport, levelled terminal buildings and destroyed six planes. The Houthis vowed to carry on attacking Israel.
Concepts of proportionality, designed to limit civilian casualties, have been strained to the point of obsolescence – giving cover to other countries on the attack. Overnight, Israeli strikes in Gaza killed 59 people, including an attack on a school sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinians that hospital officials say killed 27, including nine women and three children.
Where there is better news, such as the truce agreed on Tuesday between the US and the Houthis, it came after a seven-week bombing campaign in which the Trump administration said it had struck “over 1,000 targets” in Yemen. That included a strike on a detention centre for African migrants in Saada that killed 68 and a raid on Ras Isa port that killed 80, according to reports and conflict monitors.
As the conflicts have flared up, the US, the world’s dominant power, appears unwilling or unable to effectively restrain them. Trump appeared to view military exchanges between India and Pakistan as to some extent inevitable when the news broke overnight, saying: “They’ve been fighting for a long time.”
Pakistan, once considered a US ally in the “war on terror”, has largely been dropped by Washington after its withdrawal from Afghanistan. India, Puri says, may believe that “criticism of its actions from the US president isn’t coming, or if it is coming, it’s not particularly heartfelt”, giving it licence to be more aggressive than it otherwise would be.
On Thursday celebrations will take place to mark the anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe. Eighty years later, however, such is the breakdown in norms in state behaviour that not only is war no longer considered taboo, it could be argued that a new age of global conflict has begun.
