This morning there are claims and counter claims. Pakistan claims it shot down two Indian jets. India is denying Pakistan’s allegations. Apparently there is video of an “angry mob” and some hapless pilot being rescued. ( I don’t put much stock in that type of ‘proof’ it’s too easy to fake)*9:00 am UPDATE: FAKE NEWS: Pakistan media's tweets about captured pilot is actually from Aero India show
"the video posted by him was not of the second IAF pilot flying in Pakistan airspace, but of an IAF pilot who was involved in a flight crash in Bengaluru last week while rehearsing for the Aero India 2019 air show."
What is interesting to me is a timely oped. A problem, reaction, solution type oped.Asking the question " Is Trump Needed to Keep Peace in Asia?"My response is emphatically: NO. Trump/USA isn’t needed to keep the peace. In fact quite the opposite is true. Asia needs less Trump/USA. But that wasn't going to be the case. The presence of Trump/ USA, embodied in their proxy Imran Khan, after a soft coup had taken place (2017), was inevitably going to lead to this very hornet’s nest getting all stirred up.Problem, Reaction, Solution.(Dialectics that rely on the evolution of ideas over longer time periods in the real world) We've had two years of unfolding.Evening Standard Oped
We now also need the White House’s speedy intervention to prevent the clashes over Kashmir getting dangerously out of hand.
Today Pakistan claims it has shot down two Indian jets over its territory.This was because India was apparently retaliating against the Pakistani retaliation that followed the Indian raid on Pakistan-based militants earlier this week, which itself was a retaliation after a bloody terrorist attack by those militants in India last month. Did you follow all that?
To add petrol to the flames, India is facing a looming election and passions are running high. The claims and counter-claims are not the real issue. The problem is that neither of these huge, populous nations has found a stable way of living next to each other.
This claim of neither nation being able to live next to each other is rubbish. Under the previous leadership of Pakistan (Sharif), India and Pakistan had stable relations- This fact was Covered in the 2017 post regarding the soft coup & again in the 2018 post
India believes with some force that elements of the Pakistan state give succour to terrorism. Pakistan believes, with some force, that India’s huge army exists to threaten it with invasion.
Both have acquired nuclear weapons which they aim at each other but lack the complex protocols and hotlines that emerged to prevent tragic miscalculation between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
We would hope that the rest of the world could broker a détente. But Britain, despite its ties to the subcontinent and large diaspora, is paralysed and diminished by Brexit; the EU lacks a robust foreign policy; Russia is a mischief maker; and China is not yet a mature enough player on the global stage to be a peace broker.
So it falls, once again, to the United States to be the world’s policeman.You may not want to hear it, but we need Donald Trump.
Additional background
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Indian Airstrikes Hit Pakistan- Islamic Bloc Meets on Kashmir
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Trajectory and The Geopolitics of Pulwama (M K Bhadrakhumar)
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Kashmir Attack: Prompt/Encourage a Crisis in South Asia