The threat of a full-blown war between Pakistan and India following the barbaric terrorist attack in Pahalgam in the District of Anantnag in the Indian Administered Kashmir on April 22, 2025 seems to have been dissipated, at least for the time being, following the timely counsel of the U.N. secretary general and allies of both countries, in particular China, Russia, the U.S., U.K., Türkiye and Saudi Arabia urging Pakistan and India to exercise restraint.
Although Indian media, retired Indian military and intelligence officers, and political leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other political parties blamed Pakistan within minutes of the incident, India could not present any concrete evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in the terrorist attack to convince the international community that a retaliatory strike by India on the so-called terrorist camps inside Pakistan was justified.
Pakistan also did not take the threat lightly. While expressing concern about the incident and conveying condolences to the families of the victims of the attack, Islamabad said that Pakistan’s armed forces were fully prepared to respond to any Indian attack.
The relations between India and Pakistan went down sharply after the incident and stand at their lowest ebb as of writing, with little scope for normalization in the immediate future. The two countries have not exchanged ambassadors since 2019, and diplomatic relations are at the bare minimum. Now the two countries have imposed additional restrictions on each other, cut off trade, severed cultural links, stopped issuing visit visas, expelled each other’s nationals, closed YouTube TV channels and other social media apps to its public from the other side, and shut their air space to each other’s air traffic.
The terrorist attack was condemned globally. Reacting to the situation, India blamed Pakistan for masterminding and carrying out the attack with the help of local militants. Denying any involvement in Pahalgam, Pakistan described the terrorist attack as an organic backlash of the local Kashmiri resistance to decades of Indian state repression in the only Muslim majority state of the Indian Union, which until 2019 enjoyed a special disputed status in the Indian Constitution. It was also said that India’s intelligence agency, RAW, covertly authorized this false flag operation in Pahalgam to boost the position of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party with Hindu voters in the upcoming Indian state elections.
The most serious fallout of the Pahalgam attack was India’s decision to suspend the implementation of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan. The treaty took nine years to negotiate under the auspices of the World Bank and was signed in 1960. India regards this treaty as the main obstacle to its growing water needs, which limit its ability to build dams in India for irrigation and hydroelectricity on the western rivers of the Himalayas, which are designated for the use of Pakistan. Under the treaty, India is allowed full use of the three eastern rivers, on which Pakistan has no rights.
Pakistan has said that any breach of the treaty obligation by India will be tantamount to an act of war. Pakistan has also said that it will take the matter to the U.N. and other international bodies to seek India’s compliance with the treaty, as water is a precious commodity for the two South Asian nations and is a matter of life and death for each of them. At the time of the Partition in 1947, Pakistan lost the Gurdaspur water headworks to India in the Ratcliffe Award, and as such, the Indus Water Treaty is central to its water security as a lower riparian state.
In response to India's action on the water treaty, which India cleverly camouflaged in the legal jargon of change of circumstances, Pakistan also announced that it was holding in abeyance all bilateral agreements with India, including the Simla Agreement of 1972, which dealt extensively with Kashmir. Under the agreement, the two countries agreed to bilaterally engage with each other on Kashmir.
The history of both countries accusing each other of sponsoring cross-border terrorism in their respective jurisdictions goes back a long way, with each country suffering from heavy casualties of their military personnel and civilians in deadly terrorist attacks. These include, inter alia, for India the Mumbai attack of 2008, the Pulwama attack of 2019 and the present attack in Pahalgam. For Pakistan, it was, inter alia, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) air base attack in Karachi in 2011, the attack on the Army Public School in 2014, and the Jaffar Express Train attack in Quetta recently. Chinese personnel working on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects in Pakistan have also been killed by terrorists in several terrorist attacks.
For decades, the Pakistan army has been preoccupied with counterterrorism operations against the Afghan-based Pakistani Taliban, who want the imposition of Sharia law in Pakistan, and the Balochistan Liberation Army, an entity that calls for the independence of Pakistani and Iranian Balochistan. India, on the other hand, has deployed armed personnel in Jammu and Kashmir for decades to fight Kashmiri militants. Indian security personnel are also engaged in fighting separatists in the Indian states of Assam and Nagaland.
In the aftermath of the Pahalgam incident, Pakistan’s military establishment presented evidence of the Indian military’s involvement in directing their surrogates in Pakistan to blow up improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the convoys of the Pakistan army and causing cross-border terrorism inside Pakistan. Last year, Indian intelligence officers posted in Indian diplomatic missions in Canada and the U.S. were found by the host governments to have been involved in conceiving and directing extrajudicial and extraterritorial assassination plots against the leaders of the Indian expatriate Sikh community who led the local cells of the separatist Khalistan movement in India.
The most important intervention in bringing down the temperature between the two countries came from the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week after the Pakistan information minister made a public announcement on the eve of April 30 that an imminent Indian attack on Pakistan was expected within hours. The U.S. secretary of state called the foreign minister of India and condemned the terrorist attack, urging India to avoid military action and work with Pakistan to reduce tensions. He also called the prime minister of Pakistan and urged Pakistani officials’ cooperation in investigating this unconscionable attack. He asked both countries to work together to de-escalate, reestablish direct communications, and maintain peace and security in South Asia. But he did not spell out how India and Pakistan should work together when their relationship has reached its lowest ebb.
The second track diplomacy, which in the past had been a useful tool of direct contact for confidence-building, is also suspended between the two countries. The present crisis presented a timely opportunity for the U.S. to invite the foreign ministers of Pakistan and India to Washington, while U.S. President Donald Trump is busy negotiating the restoration of peace in Ukraine, to discuss everything on the table, with the U.S. facilitating the way forward for the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute, as well as the issues of tackling terrorism and water security. The time is still right for the U.S. to mediate a truce between these two nuclear nations.
It is a sad reality that when big powers intervene to decide historical territorial disputes between small countries, they put a lid on the difficult issues and allow them to simmer under the surface in return for a quick restoration of order. The incomplete unification of the two Koreas, the Arab-Israeli problem, the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, and the status of the occupied territories in Ukraine are live examples of this unfortunate phenomenon.
This gives credence to the theory that the U.N. and the big powers are indeed helpful in restoring peace in conflict situations, but they do so without undertaking the painstaking work of addressing the root causes of the conflict which erupts again after some years of calm and allows the same powers to energize their military industrial complex and sell their weapons to these countries before restarting the cycle of reconstruction and development again.
It is earnestly hoped that, just as the U.S. secretary of state prevented a deadly war in South Asia, helped by other world leaders, also talking to India and Pakistan in the same language, under President Trump’s new world order, the present system of international peace and security will undergo an overhaul. Old swords will be turned into ploughshares for the good of all nations.
