AGENCIES

Eleven days after gunmen shot 26 people dead in the scenic valley of Baisaran in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam, India and Pakistan stand on the brink of a military standoff.

The nuclear-armed neighbours have each announced a series of tit-for-tat steps against the other since the attack on April 22, which India has implicitly blamed Pakistan for, even as Islamabad has denied any role in the killings.

To understand how Pakistani strategists who have worked on ties with India view what might happen next, Al Jazeera spoke with Moeed Yusuf, who served as Pakistan’s national security adviser (NSA) between May 2021 and April 2022 under former prime minister Imran Khan.

Yusuf said India and Pakistan have for long struggled in terms of crisis management. They don’t have a bilateral crisis management mechanism, which is the fundamental concern, reports Al Jazeera online.

“This time, I feel the problem India has run into is that they followed the old playbook, but the leader of the most important third party, the United States, didn’t show up to support India,” Yusuf said.

“It appears that they have so far taken a neutral and a hands-off position, as indicated by President Donald Trump few days ago. (Trump said that he knew the leaders of both India and Pakistan, and believed that they could resolve the crisis on their own.)”

Pakistan’s response is directly linked to the Indian response, and that is historically how it has been, with both countries going tit-for-tat with each other. This time too, a number of punitive steps have been announced, he said.

“Pakistan naturally has to show commitment to prepare for any eventuality. You don’t know what will come next, so you have to be ready. Having said that, I don’t think we are going to see a major war, but in these circumstances, you can never predict, and one little misunderstanding or miscalculation can lead to something major.”