What’s 50 Times More Dangerous Than Afghanistan?

Byker

2021-08-25 15:37:17 UTC

What’s 50 Times More Dangerous Than Afghanistan?
By Sadanand Dhume, 8/19/21, Wall St. Journal
“Pakistan is a country-sized suicide bomber,” Ms. Chayes says. “The
message Islamabad sends is that if you get too close to us we’re going to
blow ourselves up.”
The same holds true in Pakistani society at large. If music-hating,
anti-Western, anti-Shiite misogynists can seize power in Kabul, why can’t
they do the same in Islamabad?

<snip>

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-withdrawal-afghanistan-pakistan-nuclear-lashkar-e-taiba-tehreek-e-taliban-islamist-11629402468

They will. Let the asslifters and curry-munchers nuke it out. Their
fecundity will replace the lost population in a few years. The following
scenario is the best I've seen yet. I archived the text a few years ago so
it wouldn't be lost forever if the link went dead (it's still good).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Armageddon: the India-Pakistan War of 2019

A tale of the not-too-distant future

Background:

January 2019. The right-wing, Hindu nationalist led Indian government of
Prime Minister Narendrabhai

Modi is in serious trouble. Steadily rising prices, widespread unemployment,
and economic stagnation have seriously hurt the government’s image. The
nation has yet to recover from the devastating drought of 2017, which badly
hit agriculture and brought millions to the brink of starvation. A series of
corruption scandals in the top echelons of the prime minister’s own
Bharatiya Janata Party have also badly tarnished Modi’s own image as a clean
politician.

With elections due in May, the government is on the ropes. Sensing blood,
the opposition parties - hitherto in disarray - have started to put together
a ramshackle alliance. The political scene is in turmoil.

Meanwhile, internationally, the scene in South Asia has changed drastically.
After the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan in late 2017,
with the last troops literally pulling out in the middle of the night
without prior warning, the government in Kabul quickly imploded. The country
fairly rapidly split into two, with a Taliban-dominated government taking
over the southern, Pashtun-settled area. In the north, a Russian-aligned
rump state clings on to the Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik majority zones, but for
all practical purposes the main part of Afghanistan is again controlled by
the Taliban.

The US, which until recently controlled the entire land mass between the
Central Asian ‘stans and the Arabian Sea, has lost interest in the area
completely following its withdrawal. The Great Depression of 2016-17 has hit
it hard, and made it concentrate on more profitable sections of its global
empire. For the moment, it’s a non-player in South Asia.

For Pakistan, the Taliban victory in Afghanistan has proved to be a mixed
blessing. While the defense establishment still thinks that the Taliban
Afghan state is an ally which provides strategic depth to Pakistan, the
defeat of the US at the hands of the Afghan Taliban has encouraged the
Pakistani Pashtuns to demand re-integration with their brethren in
Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban has launched several offensives, and in
mid-2018 briefly took over Peshawar before being driven back. Meanwhile, the
long-standing Balochistan rebellion against the Islamabad government is
still simmering, and several military bases have been attacked in recent
months.

As far as the Indian intelligence agency, RAW, is concerned, the temptation
to meddle and bleed Pakistan has proved irresistible. While it has been
arming and funding the Balochi insurgents for many years, it has recently
sent a limited number of weapons to the Pakistani Taliban as well, on their
pledge that they would only attack Pakistani installations and not turn
their guns on Indian interests. The Pakistani government has retaliated by
stepping up support to the flagging Kashmir insurgency, and by training and
funding the Islamic Mujahideen, Student’s Islamic Movement of India, and
other domestic Muslim terror groups in India.

Politically, too, the Pakistani government of Nawaz Sharif, which only just
retained power in a deeply controversial election, is in trouble. Pakistan’s
economy, without the injection of American funds, is in even worse shape
than India’s, and public frustration is growing.

Prominent young liberal opposition politician Arsalan Ghumman has called for
a rolling series of protests to drive Sharif from power. Large
demonstrations have taken place in the streets of Lahore and Karachi, and
many of these have been targeted by gunmen and bombs; most Pakistanis, who
believe Nawaz Sharif “stole” the last election, think that these attacks
have been orchestrated by the government to crush dissent. Arsalan Ghumman
and several of his supporters are arrested and spirited away to an unknown
destination; all this does is provoke more demonstrations demanding his
immediate release.

For both India and Pakistan, then, January 2019 is a time of steeply
escalating internal tensions, with deeply unpopular governments looking for
a way to survive.

The Provocation:

9.30 a.m., 26 January: As India celebrates its Republic Day with a massive
military parade marching through the center of Delhi, a number of
coordinated car bombs – thirteen in all – go off in Ahmedabad, Jaipur and
Nagpur, killing at least 700 people and injuring well over 2000. The news of
the bomb explosions reaches Prime Minister Modi (who also holds the Defense
portfolio) as he is watching the parade in the company of President Lal
Krishna Advani and the Chief Guest, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa of Sri
Lanka. Modi immediately leaves the venue for his office, and calls a crisis
committee meeting, attended by top government ministers and bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, the private TV channels interrupt the telecast of the parade for
breaking-news footage of the blasts, including gory images of victims lying
in pools of their own blood. By mid-morning, shrill-voiced commentators on
the TV screens have begun openly blaming Pakistan for the bombs and
demanding immediate retaliatory action, including bombing “terrorist
training camps”. In the late afternoon, the first demonstrators are on the
streets of Delhi, waving placards and assaulting any Muslims they can find.
The police seem unwilling to hold them back.

At seven that evening, Modi makes a televised statement to the nation,
appealing for calm, and claiming that the government will hold those
responsible “accountable”. This fails to satisfy the demonstrators, who burn
Modi in effigy alongside Nawaz Sharif. An abortive attempt is made to storm
the Pakistan High Commission.

The Pakistani government, in the person of the foreign minister, issues a
statement condemning the blasts and denying responsibility; it further
offers a joint probe with India to investigate the bombings. Indian media
immediately denounce the offer as “a thief offering to investigate his own
burglary.” The Indian government ignores the offer completely.

At midnight, Modi, in his capacity as Defense Minister, holds a second
meeting, this one attended by the military top brass as well as civilian
officials. The Prime Minister says that some kind of military measures will
have to be taken against Pakistan, in order to cool down public anger. In
private, he and the Cabinet have already decided that a short war against
Pakistan will not only satisfy the hawks but also regain public popularity
and help win the coming election.

In order to lull Pakistani suspicions, the government decides not to break
off diplomatic relations. The attack will be launched as soon as possible,
to catch the Pakistanis by surprise.

The military position:

Ever since the military fiasco of 2001-2, when India had taken a full four
weeks to mobilize forces after the terrorist attack on the Indian
parliament, the Indian armed forces had decided on a so-called Cold Start
doctrine. Though, officially, the Cold Start doctrine did not exist, it
called for rapid mobilization and concentration of strike forces at the
border so as to be able to launch a short-duration invasion of Pakistan
within 48 hours of receiving orders. The idea is to attack, hit the enemy
hard and get out before any international intervention can be organized.

On paper, the Indians are overwhelmingly stronger than the Pakistanis, but
this is rather diluted by the facts on the ground. While the common soldiers
on both sides are well-trained and highly professional, the two armies are
both completely dependent on their officers for leadership, and actively
discourage initiative. Both sides have made efforts to modernize, but
shortage of funds and jockeying for favor between the services means that
neither has managed to do so with great success. Besides, India has a much
larger land mass to protect, and a great part of its forces are permanently
deployed against China. On the other hand, the Pakistani officer corps is
tainted by politics and Islamification, while India's is both apolitical in
the junior ranks, and strictly secular.

In a short war, both sides will have virtual parity, and it will come down
to tactics and innovation to decide who wins.

The military plan involves air strikes against training camps in the
Pakistani occupied part of Kashmir, and also on the Pakistani air force’s
bases to keep it off balance and unable to retaliate. Meanwhile, the army’s
strike formations will launch armored thrusts across the international
border in Punjab and Rajasthan. The attack across the Rajasthan frontier,
directed at Multan, will be a diversion, intended to distract the Pakistanis
from the main assault, which will be across the Punjab border and against
Lahore. The plans call for the capture of Lahore within 48 hours, followed
by a speedy withdrawal. A suggestion for a secondary thrust against the twin
cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad is turned down as being too provocative
and ambitious.

The plans make it clear that the entire war is to be concluded within six
days, beyond which – according to the Indian army – the Pakistanis are
liable to be tempted to use nuclear weapons. The navy, in the meantime, will
launch attacks on the port of Karachi, using Harrier VTOL jets from the
aircraft carrier Viraat. The second aircraft carrier, Vikramaditya, is at
the moment in the port of Visakhapatnam, on the other side of the India, and
will take too long to reach the war zone. The third carrier, Vikrant, is
still fitting out at Cochin and months from being ready for combat.

On the government side, the advantage of a short war is that it is the only
sort of military engagement which can be concluded with a minimum of
economic pain. With each tank shell costing as much as a working-class
family earns in a month, a longer conflict means economic disaster. Besides,
a short war can be presented as a victory, and by the time the effects are
noticed the elections will be over.

After swearing all present to the strictest of secrecy, the government
issues the necessary orders.

The Pakistani preparation:

The Pakistani armed forces are far from unaware of the existence of Cold
Start, and have gone into high alert as soon as they received news of the
bomb blasts in India. Though the Pakistani armed forces are much smaller
than the Indian, they have lesser territory to defend, and can concentrate
faster owing to the lesser distance of Pakistani communications centers from
the border; in addition, the Indian swift assault plan means that only a
small, highly mobile part of the Indian armed forces will be used.

Also, the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, is much more efficient
than the Indian. Before dawn on the 27th, it has already picked up news of
the midnight meeting in Delhi. Although it doesn’t know what happened at the
meeting, the Pakistani army high command decides to put its troops on combat
alert, without waiting for permission from Nawaz Sharif.

By late afternoon on the 27th, ISI agents – some of them disguised as tea
sellers and labourers in and around Indian cantonments – begin sending in
coded messages that Indian strike corps have begun making preparations for
immediate movement. As soon as darkness falls, long lines of tanks and
armoured personnel carriers rattle down the highways towards the Pakistan
border. Their plan is to be in position to attack before dawn on the 29th.

Quietly but with desperate speed, the Pakistani army command begins making
its own preparations. As yet, the civilian Pakistani government is out of
the loop. Only when the troop movements are too far advanced to be
reversible, the generals decide, will Nawaz Sharif be informed.

The ISI also quickly evacuates the terrorist training camps in the Kashmir
mountains. If the Indians strike the camps, they will be bombing little more
than empty tents and abandoned firing ranges.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military’s Nuclear Command Authority begins moving
part of its atomic weaponry out of its fortified bases and integrating
warheads with their delivery systems. The generals will not inform Nawaz
Sharif of this at all.

Meanwhile, in India:

Since the plans to attack Pakistan are top secret, the government has kept
insisting that it will punish those responsible. Public anger, stoked by
private TV channels competing with each other for ratings, is boiling over.
Large demonstrations have taken place in several cities across North and
West India. Several violent incidents, targeting Muslims, have taken place.
Curfew has been imposed in Delhi, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad, where the worst
riots occurred.

On the evening of the 28th, Modi again goes on TV to declare that decisive
action will soon be taken against “those responsible” for the bombings, and
that he will make another statement in the morning. Though his comments are
meant to assuage domestic anger, the Pakistanis decide that this is final
proof that an Indian attack will be launched during the course of the night.
Their own armored corps move out of their bases and begin to deploy to meet
the threat.

The Indian troop concentration has not gone completely according to plan.
Some brigades equipped with the Arjun main battle tank have been unable to
reach their jumping off points because the tanks are too heavy to use most
bridges and too wide to fit railway flatbeds. Meanwhile, many of the aging
T-72s have broken down in the Rajasthan desert, so that the armored
formations are seriously under-strength. The army’s commanders hold another
meeting with Modi just after midnight, and suggest a day’s delay. However,
the Russian ambassador has already sent in a message asking about Indian
troop movements and warning about hasty actions, and it’s obvious that the
preparations can’t be kept secret any longer. A day’s delay might be too
late, Modi says, and orders the attack to go ahead as planned.

The name of the operation is decided at this meeting. It will be called
Operation Badla – Operation Revenge.

The Attack:

At half past four in the morning of 29th January, Indian Air Force Mirage
2000, Rafale and Sukhoi 30 MKI aircraft take off from forward airbases and
fly at treetop height over the frontier. By five, air raid sirens are going
off in Islamabad and Lahore, while the flashes of bomb explosions light up
the horizon and startled residents blink awake in the freezing cold.
Pakistani anti-aircraft guns and surface to air missiles attempt to counter
the Indian attack with only partial success; just four planes are brought
down. However, the Indian attack fails to damage the PAF substantially,
since the Pakistanis had moved their aircraft away to satellite airbases and
underground shelters. A second wave of strikes, against the already
evacuated terrorist training camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, achieves
precisely nothing.

Just as the first Indian Air Force planes return from their strikes, Indian
155mm Bofors artillery guns and multi-barreled rocket launchers open up a
withering barrage on known Pakistani positions across the frontier. As lines
of T-90 and T-72 tanks roll forward, the barrage lifts ahead of them,
hitting roads and railway junctions in an effort to stop the Pakistanis
either withdrawing or reinforcing their positions. By dawn, the first line
of Pakistani defenses have been overrun at relatively little cost, and
columns of prisoners are being sent to the rear, to be photographed by
hastily organized TV crews from pro-government channels. By the time Modi
goes on TV at eight in the morning, the news has already gone out: the
nation is at war, and to all appearances it is winning.

The Indian thrusts towards Lahore and Multan. The border of Kashmir in this
map is the de facto one, not as claimed by either of the two countries.

But the prisoners the Indians have taken are Rangers – border guards – not
regular army, and the air strikes have caused far less damage than
anticipated. By mid-morning, Pakistan’s J-10 and F-16 fighters are engaging
Indian MiG-29s over Lahore and Kashmir. The armor has begun to get bogged
down too. A huge dust storm reduces visibility to almost zero, causing hours
of delay to the southern flank of the Indian assault, which is aimed across
the desert at Multan. Meanwhile, the northern arm of the attack, against
Lahore, runs into hastily laid minefields, which disable many of the tanks.
Others are tied down by small but determined teams of anti-tank missile
operators in camouflaged trenches in the middle of the minefields. Artillery
has to be brought up to destroy these positions one by one before the mines
can be cleared.

The plan goes awry:

By the evening of the 29th, it’s already evident that the Indian timetable
has gone awry, and that Lahore can’t be captured on schedule – the armored
spearheads still have to break through the main lines of Pakistani defenses
east of the Icchogil Canal protecting the city. The capture of Lahore is
essential to the rationale of Operation Badla, however, because having
committed to the attack, India can’t withdraw at this point without handing
Pakistan a propaganda victory. Nor will the frenzied crowds now dancing in
the streets of Indian cities, who imagine that this will be a final war
against Pakistan, be satisfied with anything less than a demonstrable
victory.

At the same time, Pakistani defenses are becoming increasingly effective,
taking a steadily rising toll of Indian armor. Helicopter gunships race at
head height over the battlefield, rocketing tanks, while heavy artillery
barrages are tying down the infantry. Without reinforcement, the Indian
strike corps will find it more and more difficult to reach their targets.
The whole attack plan is in jeopardy.

The Pakistani High Command has accurately identified the Lahore attack as
the real danger, and deployed its forces accordingly. The well-dug-in
Pakistan Army regulars, supported by heavy artillery firing from positions
east of Walton Cantonment, will prove extremely difficult to dislodge. Any
Indian units which do manage to break through will find themselves
threatened with encirclement by attacks from the flanks.

In an emergency meeting in Delhi, punctuated by the noise of firecrackers
from celebrating crowds in the streets, the military chiefs and Modi decide
that the original ultra-short duration war timetable will have to be
extended, but only by a maximum of forty-eight hours. Urgent reinforcements
will have to be sent to the Lahore front, with the strategy shifting from a
rapid sword thrust to a battle of attrition meant to wear down the Pakistani
forces. Meanwhile, the 1st Armoured Division, spearheading the thrust at
Multan, is ordered to move forward at top speed, in order to force the
Pakistanis to divert troops from the defense of Lahore.

The International Response:

At half past eleven in the evening of the 29th, Indian time, the UN Security
Council meets in New York to discuss an urgent Pakistani plea calling for an
immediate halt to the Indian invasion. China, which has had good relations
with Modi as well as its old friend Islamabad, moves a resolution demanding
India withdraw all forces and threatening military action. Although Russia
expresses its “deep disappointment” with the Indian government, it vetoes
the resolution, marking the first overt difference in opinion between the
two allies in the UN on any substantive issue since 2012. France, which has
major weapons sales contracts to both nations, also votes against it.
Britain abstains, as does the United States. Nobody is sure of Indian
intentions, and the meeting merely closes with a statement calling on both
sides to exercise maximum restraint.

The Indian government is ecstatic, and declares a diplomatic victory. On the
other hand, the Pakistani army, which has complete control over the military
direction of the war, decides that there will be no help from abroad, at
least in time to make a difference. It is on its own.

The Battle of Mirgarh:

The Indian First Armored Division has been moving north-west since crossing
the frontier, but has been delayed by severe dust storms during the day.
With darkness, though, the wind has died down, and the division finally
begins rolling across the desert, against only sporadic and largely
ineffective resistance. The biggest problem faced by the division are with
the Arjun tanks, which are too heavy to keep up in the soft sandy terrain,
and with the older T-72s, which are still breaking down in considerable
numbers. During the night, therefore, the division becomes strung out, but
by mid-morning of the 30th January the first squadrons of T-90 tanks are
approaching the town of Mirgarh.

Just after eleven in the morning, the lead Pakistani armored units, armed
with T-80 UD and Al Khalid tanks, counterattack from the south and
north-east, trying to catch the Indians in a pincer. At the same time, PAF
J-10 and F-16 aircraft race over the strung-out lines of Indian armour,
hitting them with cluster bombs and armor-piercing missiles. Indian SU 30s
and Mirage 2000s flying over the battlefield counterattack, and a confused
dogfight develops, during the course of which an Indian Rafale flight
attempting to strike the Pakistanis mistakenly bombs an Indian tank squadron
instead. The two sides break off combat temporarily in the late afternoon,
with Pakistani forces disengaging to the north-east while the Indians fall
back a short distance to consolidate before renewing the advance. About
forty tanks have been lost on both sides, along with between ten and fifteen
aircraft.

The Indians resume their advance after dark, with a change of direction to
the north. Unknown to them, the Pakistanis are returning along the same
route, and the two sides meet head-on at about nine in the evening. In the
darkness of the desert night, lit only by occasional flares, the two
armored forces begin a grinding battle of attrition. Units soon lose
cohesion and become inextricably tangled, with tanks fighting at point-blank
range and occasionally ramming each other like Soviet T-34s and German PzKw
IVs on the Eastern Front in World War II. Both sides are completely unable
to use either artillery or air support because of the darkness and the
confusion.

When morning arrives, the battle is still in progress, but neither side is
able to use its air power or artillery, because the entire battlefield is by
now covered by a gigantic dust cloud from the tank treads. However, the
superior numbers, training, and equipment of the Indian forces have finally
begun to tell. Also, some of the Arjuns have just arrived, and by good
fortune outflank and destroy a Pakistani reinforcement column driving up
from the south-west. Throughout the day, the Indians manage to isolate and
wipe out pockets of Pakistani armor, and succeed in blocking all attempts
by the desperate enemy tankmen to either concentrate together or reinforce.
When darkness falls on the 31st evening, the remaining Pakistani forces
disengage and withdraw as best they can. They have managed to delay the
Indian advance, but have lost almost two hundred tanks and armored
personnel carriers, and are hors de combat for the moment.

The Battle of Mirgarh is over, and has resulted in a decisive Indian
victory. The way to the Sutlej River, beyond which lies Multan, is open.

The Indian Navy has sat out most of India’s conflicts with Pakistan, having
participated only in a limited way in the 1971 war, when Seahawk jets from
the carrier Vikrant bombed Chittagong and missile boats launched a seaborne
assault on Karachi. In the context of a cold start war, the navy has no real
role to play; but the government is determined to show that it is using all
available means to fight Pakistan. So the navy’s ancient light aircraft
carrier, the INS Viraat – which, as the HMS Hermes, had fought in the
Falklands War in 1982 – slowly steams northwards across the Arabian Sea, and
on the early evening of the 30th launches an air strike by eight Sea
Harriers against Karachi harbor. The raid is a disaster; six of the eight
Harriers are shot down, in return for limited damage to two corvettes and a
couple of shore installations.

The Viraat has no chance to launch a second raid with its few remaining
Harriers. The Pakistani Navy’s Agosta 90B class submarine PNS Hamza left
Karachi on a routine training mission on 26th January; with the outbreak of
war, it was ordered to patrol the approaches to the port to prevent a
1971-like Indian bombardment. Shortly before midnight, at the very moment
that Indian and Pakistani tanks are crashing into each other in the desert
sands south of Mirgarh, the Hamza’s passive sonar detects the noise of the
engines of the Viraat and its escort of two frigates and a destroyer. The
submarine shadows the ships for an hour, working up to attack position. At
approximately ten minutes past one in the morning, it fires three SM 39
Exocet anti-ship missiles. All three strike the carrier at the waterline.
Given its slow speed and inability to maneuver, they could scarcely have
missed.

The Viraat is mortally wounded. On fire and taking on water, the ancient
carrier slows to a stop. At four in the morning, the captain issues orders
to abandon ship. Blazing fiercely and listing badly, the old vessel hangs on
for several hours more. At just before eight in the morning, almost seven
hours after being hit, it turns turtle and sinks, taking over two hundred of
the crew with it down to the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

The Hamza has gone deep and stayed silent after firing the missiles. After
evading several sticks of Indian depth charges, it heads north-west towards
the Pakistan coast. Its part in the war is over.

In Delhi, the news of the Viraat’s sinking is delivered to the Prime
Minister by the Navy Chief in person. Modi immediately orders that it be
kept completely secret until the conclusion of the war, in order to maintain
public morale. In real terms, the destruction of the doddering old carrier
is of no importance anyway. The immediate effect of the sinking, however, is
to remove the Indian Navy from further involvement in the hostilities. The
war will henceforth be fought by the two other services.

The Hatf Option:

The Pakistani top brass, keenly aware of its relative military inferiority,
has prepared several options to counter an Indian offensive. One option is
to launch fidayeen strikes in Kashmir, using small teams of suicide
attackers to infiltrate and attack army bases in order to tie troops down.
However, since India hasn’t struck across the frontier in Kashmir, such
strikes will be of no value. Another option is to fall back, abandon most
territory east of the Indus river, and counterattack when Indian lines are
overstretched. But this will be possible only in case of a longer war, with
India planning to clear and hold territory; it’s useless in the case of a
short-duration thrust meant to defeat and humiliate Pakistan and withdraw.

Nor can Pakistan take the risk of trying to absorb a defeat; it knows that
this will disastrously weaken the state, and render it unable to resist the
various rebellions, from the Balochis to the west to the Pashtuns in the
north. If the army loses the battle, the country will collapse and
disintegrate. Defeat, therefore, is not an option Pakistan can afford.

It then falls back to its third option – the Bomb.

As part of its arsenal meant to halt an Indian invasion, Pakistan has
several mobile batteries of Hatf IX (Nasr) tactical nuclear missiles, with a
sixty-kilometer range. These sub-kiloton missiles are battlefield nukes,
meant to knock out armored thrusts; Pakistani strategists think the risk
involved in their use within Pakistan’s own territory is acceptable given
the alternative.

Two of these batteries – each of four missiles – are ready at Multan
Cantonment. By the afternoon of the 31st, by which time it’s clear that the
battle of Mirgarh is lost, the two batteries are ordered to move to the
south-east. In the early hours of the 1st February, the
transporter-erector-launchers and their support vehicles are lying in wait
for the Indian armor.

At around the same time, near Lahore, the Indian spearheads finally fight
their way to the Icchogil Canal. Engineer outfits quickly span the waterway
with bridges, but the offensive across the canal will have to wait until
Pakistani forces still hanging on to the east of it are neutralized. The
Pakistani army still has defensive positions determinedly holding on to the
western bank, but once the Indian armored brigades break loose from their
bridgeheads, the fall of the city will be only a matter of time.

In a bunker somewhere near Rawalpindi, the exact position of which is known
to the Pakistani army general staff alone, there is a meeting in which the
orders are issued: the fall of Lahore can’t be delayed longer than two days
at the most. The final battle is at hand.

The Hatf batteries will launch the first counter-blow. The Pakistani High
Command hopes the Indians will get the message that Pakistan is willing to
nuke its own territory if required, and withdraw, so that it will also be
the last. In case India doesn't, though, the Pakistanis prepare other
options.

At about one in the morning of 1st February, the newly-reinforced Indian
armor resumes its thrust northwards towards the Sutlej, the tanks rolling
past wrecked and abandoned Pakistani vehicles. The soldiers are well aware
that they have broken the enemy’s forces for the moment, and serious
resistance is unlikely before they reach the river. Also, after the past two
days’ constant fighting, the soldiers are exhausted; despite their own
efforts, their energies are flagging and it’s impossible to maintain the
same level of alertness as they had managed so far.

At exactly sixteen minutes after two in the morning, the first Hatf battery
shoots off its four missiles, and drives away from its firing position as
fast as possible to avoid retaliatory fire. Seconds later, the second
battery follows suit.

The Indian soldiers, riding in their tanks and armored personnel carriers
with open hatches, savoring the cold night air, don’t have a chance. The
warheads, being low-yield sub-kiloton devices, only produce brief flashes of
searing light as they explode in the air over the lines of advancing Indian
armor, not spectacular mushroom clouds; but they are more than enough. Most
of the division is cremated in its tracks, the crew reduced to charred
skeletons inside the white-hot hulls of their tanks.

The Indian response:

It has been a night of feverish activity in Delhi. The war is already in its
fourth day, and it will have to be concluded, even according to the extended
timetable, in three days more. While intense international pressure on the
government is growing, it has so far successfully managed to withstand it.
The fact that so far not a single Pakistani air raid or missile strike has
taken place on Indian soil has also allowed the government to keep public
opinion on its side. To be sure, the Pakistanis have been shelling Indian
troops in Kashmir, especially in the Kargil sector, and have launched
small-scale attacks on the Siachen glacier; but these are mere pinpricks,
easily shrugged off. And though PAF planes have made short dashes across the
border, they’ve invariably turned tail at the first sight of Indian
aircraft.

To the people, therefore, India seems to be obviously winning; already, the
TV channels are calling for Pakistan to be completely defeated and at least
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, if not Lahore as well, annexed.

Modi realizes that he will have to play a delicate balancing act between
what can be achieved and what the public now expects. At all costs, India
can’t be seen to have lost the war – not only must Lahore be captured, but
it must be made clear that India will withdraw at its own initiative, not in
the face of a Pakistani counterattack. He is in the middle of a pre-dawn
meeting with defense ministry officials and army generals on the plans for
the next days when an urgent message arrives. The armored thrust towards
Multan has been destroyed by Pakistani nuclear missiles.

What exactly followed in the meeting isn’t known, since no records seem to
be extant, and the participants are not available for questioning. But from
Indian actions afterwards, and knowledge of Modi’s persona and the dilemma
he’s faced with, one can make some inferences.

If India retreats in the face of the missile strikes, it will hand the
Pakistanis a victory. Obviously, the advance on Multan can’t be resumed
within the time left to India; and Lahore is still at least a day away from
falling, after which it will take more time to wipe out remaining pockets of
resistance. Besides, Indian military doctrine – repeated publicly and
often – has been to nuke Pakistani population centers in response even to
tactical nuclear use. India can’t back out of that without the government
losing an unacceptable amount of face. Also, Modi’s own vengeful psychology
won’t allow for withdrawal without first exacting retribution. There is,
therefore, no way out for him but to order nuclear strikes against Pakistan.

It’s known that the director of the Indian spy agency, the Research and
Analysis Wing, was ordered to join the meeting after the news of the
Pakistani nuclear bombs. He will have been asked about the likelihood of
Pakistan’s retaliating to an Indian nuclear strike with one of its own. RAW,
though, is an agency of historically staggering incompetence, an agency
which has repeatedly bent over backwards to please the political leadership
while at the same time pursuing mindless initiatives of its own – as when
it, most recently, began arming the Pakistani Taliban. The RAW Director will
have said what everyone wants to hear – that the Pakistanis will not dare to
strike back against an Indian nuclear attack.

The top military officials, whatever their personal feelings, will not have
demurred either. Like all Indian generals, they owe their position to
political reliability more than anything else, and are also conditioned to
unquestioning obedience of the political leadership. The RAW statement will
also have let them off the hook, since if things go wrong, it will be the
spy agency’s fault, not theirs.

There’s one definite fact to go on – satellite images, taken the previous
afternoon, don’t show Pakistani medium and long-range missiles readied for
immediate firing. If the enemy does decide on a counter-strike, there should
be enough time to detect it and prepare. Delhi is surrounded by batteries of
anti-ballistic missiles anyway.

It only remains to choose the timing of the strike, and the target. It’s
crucial to hit back as quickly as possible, before international pressure to
desist grows so overwhelming that a nuclear strike becomes impossible. As
for the target, it’s not realistic to mount an attack on a purely military
objective, since the Pakistani forces are concentrated in a mass only before
Lahore, too close to the Indians to hit at. Therefore, India will have to
nuke a Pakistani city. There are three candidates – Karachi, Multan and
Rawalpindi.

The reason Multan is chosen as a target is interesting. Rawalpindi, though
the seat of the Pakistani army’s top leadership, is too close to Lahore;
fallout from the nuclear explosion might well endanger Indian troops.
Besides, the destruction of the city – along with the enemy’s top brass –
might disrupt the command system, with officers further down the chain of
command hitting back on their own initiative. Karachi is ruled out because,
as Pakistan’s largest and most important city, its destruction is almost
certain to make it difficult to impossible for the enemy to resist hitting
back. Besides, Karachi is far away from the battle front and there’s no way
India can justify nuking it to the international community in military
terms. That leaves Multan.

Situated in the rough geographical center of Pakistan, Multan sits astride
major communication routes between the north and south of the country, so
its destruction will cut Pakistan in two. It’s also home to a large
cantonment, a legitimate military target. And, most importantly to Modi, the
Pakistanis have used nuclear weapons against Indian forces advancing on
Multan, so destroying it will constitute revenge.

Once the strike goes through, and Multan is confirmed destroyed, Modi will
go on TV to announce that the Pakistanis have used the Bomb on Indian
forces, and justify the destruction of the city; he will also warn Pakistan
of total annihilation if they use nuclear weapons again. He orders a speech
to be prepared accordingly.

An Indian Prithvi missile carrying a 20-kiloton nuclear warhead – about a
third more destructive than the bomb used on Hiroshima – roars into the sky,
heading west across the desert.

Dawn is touching the eastern sky. In a few minutes, a second dawn will
briefly light up the west.

Multan dies a few minutes after seven, Indian time. The fireball is visible
to Indian troops south of Mirgarh, including the tankers who have survived
the tactical nuking and are retreating back towards the border. It’s not
recorded what they felt.

The Bogey:

Modi is due to address the people of India at nine in the morning. By half
past eight, the television crews are ready and waiting, and speculation is
mounting. Rumors are rife; the commonest is that he will announce the fall
of Lahore. Others speculate that the Chinese have attacked India’s northern
borders to take the heat off their Pakistani allies. Either way, they all
say, whatever Modi will announce will be of extreme importance.

That announcement never takes place.

At seven minutes past the half-hour, Indian radar controllers detect a
single Pakistani aircraft approaching fast from the west, at a very low
altitude, virtually treetop height. It’s already well within Indian
territory when first seen, and is obviously protected by sophisticated
electronic jammers. The radar immediately alerts Indian Air Force
interceptors of the “bogey’s” course and heading, and MiG-29 pilots at
Hindon airbase are ordered to scramble. Just two minutes after the alert,
they’re in the air.

Well before they reach the “bogey”, though, the Pakistani pilot is already
trying to get away. Rising in a steep turning climb, he banks sharply and is
headed back home at nearly twice the speed of sound. The Indian pilots relax
slightly, though they keep in pursuit. It’s just another of the PAF’s
attempts to keep the Indian fighters off balance by making brief intrusions.
Nothing to worry about, really.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

The Pakistani aircraft is an F-16D Block 52+ of No 5 Falcons Squadron, flown
by Wing Commander Tauseef Ahmed, one of the PAF’s top pilots. In order to
evade detection, Ahmed took off not from his squadron's airbase at Shahbaz,
near Jacobabad, but from a highway west of Lahore, where he's been waiting
since the start of the war. He’s trained and prepared for years for this one
mission, and has already completed it successfully long before two Indian
air-to-air missiles explode near his tail and send him spiraling down in
flames near Amritsar in Indian Punjab. It was already too late to stop him
by the time he’d completed his climbing turn.

Slung below the belly of Ahmed’s F-16 was a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb.
He armed it just as he began his climb, and pressed the bomb release seconds
before he started to bank away. Even as he was rushing back westwards, the
bomb was climbing into the sky. As gravity began tugging at it, the weapon
slowed, then slowed further, until it finally stalled and began to fall.
Describing a perfect parabola, it began its descent over Delhi.

The Destruction of Delhi:

At exactly 0847, Tauseef Ahmed’s bomb reaches its pre-set altitude and
explodes low over Connaught Place in Delhi. A flash of actinic light
precedes a fireball, which reaches temperatures approaching those at the
centre of the sun. Expanding at terrific speed, the fireball strikes the
ground, and instantly vaporizes everything it touches – earth, concrete,
metal, human flesh, all is incinerated in an instant.

The fireball rushes across the city, consuming everything in its path, in a
rapidly expanding circle around Delhi’s commercial district. Hotels,
roadside stalls, elegant politicians’ residences, the pink sandstone edifice
of the Presidential Palace, all turn in a fraction of a second to
incandescent dust. A little further off, some of the thicker walls survive,
with people leaving shadows of themselves on them as they evaporate. The
fireball is preceded by a shock wave, a wall of air moving at the speed of a
supersonic jet, which knocks down buildings, people, trees and vehicles with
equal impartiality, and sends smashed concrete and glass whistling through
the air at lethal velocities, shattering bones and slicing through arteries.

As the fireball slows, the air above it, heated to solar temperatures,
rises, taking along with it the ashes of everything vaporized by the flash.
A column of superheated air ascends into the upper atmosphere, till it
finally begins to cool. As it does, the water vapor in it condenses, mixing
with the dust and ash, and spreads out in the cooler upper air, forming a
cloud. The rising column of air below, now stained with smoke and soot, as
well as vapor, is a tether connecting it to the ground. From a distance, it
looks like a titanic mushroom.

Like a gigantic, evil monster, writhing in torment, the mushroom cloud rears
its head over the destroyed city.

As the fireball dies out, the winds begin. Rushing back to fill the space
cleared by the column of superheated air and the shock wave, the winds fan
the thousands of fires now breaking out all over the shattered city, and
combine them together into a swirling wall of flame. Within twenty minutes
of the bomb’s explosion – when Ahmed and his fighter already occupy a
smoking crater in a wheat field near Amritsar – the fire has created its own
weather system, sucking in air from all directions. A firestorm roars across
the city, consuming everything in its path. By the time it burns itself out,
nothing will remain but a field of ashes and ruins.

Later in the day, as the fires finally begin to burn themselves out, the
irradiated dust from the first explosion begins to descend, in a plume over
north-west India. Those it touches will know of their misfortune only much
later, as their hair begins to fall out and their guts cramp in agonizing
spasms. By then, it will be much too late.

Delhi is dead, along with most of the Indian government and the top command
of the armed forces; but the horror is just beginning.

Armageddon:

Now that the war is over, and the governments on both sides which caused it
are history, it is probably of little benefit to go into the details of the
nuclear exchange which followed over the next two days, with detailed
description of each strike and counter-strike. Suffice it to say that both
governments and high commands ceased to exist early on the 1st February, and
after that it was left to lower-level officers to carry out attacks at their
own initiative. The destruction of Multan and Delhi was followed by nuclear
bombs over Karachi, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Quetta, Hyderabad and Gwadar in
Pakistan; and Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Surat, Agra and Kanpur in
India. Mumbai was destroyed too, though not directly – a long range nuclear
missile struck the Trombay atomic reactor, sending a cloud of lethal
radiation over the city. It was the last nuclear attack of the war.

All the Indian strikes on Pakistan are carried out by ballistic missiles.
Pakistan uses a mix of toss-bombing raids similar to Ahmed's attack on
Delhi, followed by missile strikes as they run out of pilots trained in the
technique. Not a single attack on either side is intercepted in time by the
respective defenses, as far as is known.

The skies over both nations are soon black with drifting smoke and dust, and
lethal radiation falls over the plains like malevolent, invisible, snow. The
loss of medical facilities, concentrated within cities in both nations,
dooms the people of the countryside to death by radiation poisoning and
cancer; what international aid there is arrives far too late to help anyone.

The legacy of Armageddon:

One of the most destructive features of the nuclear exchange was that the
weapons were almost all set as ground bursts, with the fireballs from the
explosions touching the ground. This limited the immediate area of damage,
but lifted enormous amounts of irradiated dust into the air, which later
came down in lethal fallout. To this day, the survivors of the carnage in
what remains of Northern India and Pakistan have extremely high levels of
cancer, and they have almost stopped reproducing owing to the enormous
levels of mutations among the children.

By the time Trombay was destroyed, late in the morning of 3rd February, the
war was already over in all but name. Lahore had fallen on the afternoon of
the 2nd, but nobody cared about it by then. The soldiers were no longer
shooting at each other – both sides were trying desperately to find shelter
from each other’s missiles.

How many people were killed in the nuclear exchange is impossible to
compute – guesses range from eighteen to twenty million Indians and eleven
to sixteen million Pakistanis by various estimates. The actual total will
never be known, because the death toll keeps rising to this day. To the
deaths from the bombs themselves and the radiation must be added the
millions of casualties from the famines which still sweep across northern
India and all of Pakistan, where agriculture has all but ceased; and since
medical facilities in South Asia are all concentrated in the cities,
millions more must have died, and are still dying, of otherwise treatable
diseases, including of the epidemics that afflict both nations owing to the
total breakdown of sanitation.

Nor is the dying confined to Indians and Pakistanis. Borne on high altitude
winds, the fallout covers South Asia, from eastern Iran, southern
Afghanistan, all of Nepal, till it touches western Bhutan and the fringes of
Bangladesh. Some of it crosses the Himalayas and taints the high plains of
western Tibet. Some of the dust and smoke particles are still in the
atmosphere now, and will be for many years to come.

The war wasn’t ended by surrender on either side, or by international
intervention. In fact, international intervention wouldn’t have done any
good, because by evening on 1st February there wasn’t any government on
either side to intervene with. The war burned itself out when neither side
was able to hit out at the other any longer.

So obvious it was that both sides had lost that there was no TV channel in
India which even tried to claim victory.

Aftermath:

Pakistan virtually ceased to exist. That it didn’t completely disintegrate
can be credited to one man. Arsalan Ghumman, whom Nawaz Sharif had
imprisoned early in January, was released from custody at the end of the
war, and took over the reins of what was left of the country. Over the next
months, he travelled over all of Pakistan, supervising relief efforts,
setting up local administrations, and coordinating the distribution of
international aid. He diverted the rump Pakistani army from the Indian front
to rescue and relief efforts, with combat operations restricted to putting
down jihadist outbreaks in the north and west. Even with all his efforts, he
was left with a ruined, devastated nation, which has to this day not begin
to recover from the war and probably never shall.

India, despite its much larger size, did little better. Most of its
industrial base had been wiped out with the destruction of Mumbai and
Ahmedabad, Kanpur and Ludhiana; and with the end of the central government,
the country rapidly began to unravel. State after state in the north-east of
the country declared independence, and had to be forcibly pacified by
military units stationed there, which massacred tens of thousands. Kashmir -
over which India and Pakistan had shed so much blood - was blanketed by
radiation raining down from both sides. Neither India nor Pakistan was any
longer either able to or interested in claiming it, so the people were left
to their fate.

As law and order collapsed, the nation began to disintegrate into a
conglomeration of city-states and mini-fiefdoms, each jealously hanging on
to its resources. Finally, a right-wing military dictatorship led by a junta
of colonels took over, with the southern Indian city of Hyderabad (not to be
confused with the destroyed Pakistani city of the same name) as its seat of
government. It still remains in power, though there isn’t much to rule over
any more; its authority runs only in the large cities, and that only during
the day. The night belongs to the criminal gangs.

Delhi, though it remains India's notional capital, has not, as of this
writing, been re-occupied. It remains a sea of ashes and charred ruins.
Mumbai is slowly picking itself up, though it's still a shadow of what it
once was. There's nothing left of the other destroyed cities.

The silence of the “international community” was deafening. Once the nuclear
exchange had started, it made not the slightest effort to do anything but
watch in horrified fascination as the two countries destroyed each other.
Only much later was a trickle of aid organized, and then it made little
difference because, with communications in the nuked areas utterly
destroyed, little of it ever reached the intended recipients anyway.

To this day nobody knows just who set off the car bombs which started off
the whole thing in the first place. There never was a proper investigation,
not that it really matters any longer.

http://bill-purkayastha.blogspot.com/2013/08/armageddon-india-pakistan-war-of-2019.html