A year after Operation Sindoor, where do India and Pakistan stand? Did India militarily achieve what it set out to via the operation? Is its first anniversary occasioning any commentary and analysis in Pakistan? Has the diplomatic sweet spot Islamabad is in now made it even harder for India to convince the world of its position? What of the impact, on both sides of the border, that Sindoor has had on civil society, civil liberties and freedom of the press – is it a legacy of the operation that will not go away?

To discuss these questions and more, and to draw up a balance sheet – military, political and diplomatic – of sorts, Siddharth Varadarajan was joined by Sushant Singh in Delhi and Khurram Husain in Karachi. Here is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

Siddharth Varadarajan: Hello and welcome to this discussion on The Wire. We are going to be looking at a balance sheet of Operation Sindoor one year on. As the media has been reporting and as people know, May 7 marks exactly one year from the time that the Indian military announced that it had launched strikes on nine targets across the Line of Control and the international border in Pakistan.

The Indian foreign secretary held a press conference later, soon after the military action, where he described India’s military action as “measured, non-escalatory, proportionate and responsible”, action that he said was focused on dismantling the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and neutralising terrorists who were about to launch further attacks in India.

The military action in Operation Sindoor was of course India’s response to the terrorist attack at Pahalgam on April 22nd in which 26 civilians were killed – 25 Indians and one Nepali national – and soon after Pahalgam the government of India announced a number of diplomatic measures, coercive measures, including suspension of the Indus Water Treaty. And there was a lot of speculation that some kind of military action, some kind of kinetic action, would be taken.

That decision finally was implemented on May 7. The Indian Air Force attacked nine targets across the Line of Control and the border in Pakistan, and we then had a conflict of sorts between India and Pakistan that lasted three days. It essentially came to an end – the ceasefire was announced on May 10, but interestingly the first intimation or first announcement of the ceasefire came in a tweet at 5:25 pm IST – a tweet by the US president, and this was followed by a tweet a few minutes later by US secretary of state Marco Rubio.

Both Rubio and Trump spoke about how US mediation had essentially brokered this ceasefire and Rubio’s tweet added another twist when he said that both the governments of India and Pakistan had agreed to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site. Of course, the government of India later denied that there was any such understanding.

But essentially this conflict lasted three days and in some ways we are still coming to grips with its consequences. But the purpose of today’s discussion is really to analyse the sort of balance sheet – military, diplomatic, political – and we are joined by two specialists, two experts on strategic and political matters, one from India, one from Pakistan. We have Sushant Singh in Delhi. He is a lecturer at Yale University and somebody who writes widely on military and strategic affairs. And we are joined from Karachi by Khurram Husain, who is a political analyst, a journalist, a columnist who formerly was associated with Dawn newspaper, which is Pakistan’s leading English language daily, and the BBC.

Khurram, you’ve been a guest on our show immediately after Sindoor and we welcome you back, and Sushant, it’s great to have you also for this. We had done a sort of rough and ready postmortem soon after the hostilities ended; we now have the luxury of a year having elapsed, and I want to engage both of you in this broad discussion on what we’re calling a sort of balance sheet.

So I want to start with you Sushant. Let’s try to sort of do this sequentially, looking at the military aspects, diplomatic aspects and then maybe political-psychological aspects a little bit later. But in broad military-security terms, what is it that the government of India thought it accomplished as a result of Operation Sindoor? And how does that belief or those claims of the government of India measure up one year later?

Sushant Singh: Firstly, thank you Siddharth. It’s wonderful to be in this conversation with you and Khurram. Khurram is a very dear and old friend. We go a long way.

As far as the first anniversary of the military conflict between India and Pakistan is concerned, I think the aims as laid out by India were to dismantle, as you said, the terror infrastructure and to kind of establish a kind of deterrence, so that such kind of attacks do not happen again, whether in Indian-administered Kashmir or elsewhere. If you were to look at the outcomes, clearly the outcomes really don’t match what was set out upfront.

The Indians did hit all the nine targets as you said: two of them by the air force, seven of them by the army using loitering munitions and artillery. But these are civilian targets, these are what Indians would like to call terror camps, which really are very rudimentary infrastructure, buildings, etc. which can be constructed very quickly again. The backbone from where these terror groups or where these armed militants come in, that has not been resolved in any way.

And I don’t think in any way or any manner, any of the military strikes that India did were able to establish some kind of deterrence or put a fear of military strikes in Pakistani generals’ mind or the Pakistan military’s mind. Contrary to that in fact, I think if you look at the balance sheet now, Pakistani military leadership has emerged stronger, both within Pakistan and outside, and I think they are far more emboldened to respond if something like this were to happen again, to respond even more aggressively.

So, to answer your question very simply: militarily, India wanted to attack these terror camps, what India calls terror camps, these nine of them, and destroy them. Yes, it did destroy them. Those attacks were successful. We’re not even talking about what India lost in the bargain. We still don’t know, because whether India lost five aircraft, six fighter jets or whatever India lost that night while trying to bring down those nine sites, that I think would itself count a lot against the balance sheet.

Thereafter, when the escalation takes place, I think it is more at the tactical level that the escalation is taking place, that the Pakistan Army is sending some drones and some UAVs, trying to fire some missiles, Indians are trying to fire some missiles, and by the last day Indians were firing BrahMos from deep inside; those BrahMos missiles were effective.

The point I’m trying to make is, a military has to be deployed for a purpose. It has to be used for a political aim or for a strategic aim. What was the strategic aim of those strikes? Otherwise militarily, it is just violence. It is just a showpiece thing, that I can inflict violence on another country or I can hit this target or that target. My fundamental problem with Operation Sindoor throughout has been that none of these strategic aims were clear and it was well known to us that those strategic aims would not be achieved by what was being done.

SV: If I just stop you for a second, just to play devil’s advocate here, don’t you think that targeting highly visible, highly symbolic sites like Muridke for example, or Bahawalpur, in a way sends a message to the leaders of terrorist groups in Pakistan that they cannot now, henceforth, assume that they will be able to get away with whatever they do, that perhaps they themselves will be the targets of assassination, targets of an airstrike, and that this may have some kind of a deterrent effect?

I’m not saying–I mean one year is too short a period of time, I mean it’s easy to conclude on the basis of the fact that there hasn’t been a major terror strike in the past year if we ignore the blast in a car outside Red Fort. But obviously, there may be very good reasons why they want to lie low but are not really deterred. But in terms of this ‘message’ – the Indian officialdom makes a lot about the fact that we sent a message, and this message has been understood by the chiefs of Laskhar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. How valid do you think is that claim?

SS: I think that that argument is has very limited validity. Because we also know that none of these non-state actors could be could be functioning without the backing of the Pakistani military. And if you have to deter someone, you have to deter the Pakistani military. If you have to deter someone, you have to deter Field Marshal Asim Munir. And that clearly would not have happened with these strikes.

The symbolic value of hitting Muridke or Bahawalpur – I think that symbolic value is more for the Indian audience, for your domestic audience. Politically, it sends a great signal to your domestic audience that you can hit there. In real terms, whether it is in terms of the kind of infrastructure that you have destroyed or in terms of deterring the Pakistani military, I think it has very limited value.

This is not to say that hitting those targets has no meaning or has nothing else. But it also has escalatory potential. And what did you lose in the bargain? If you lost six of your fighter jets or five of your fighter jets, including Rafales, while trying to bring down nine non-military targets that had nothing to do with the Pakistani military, and you lose your aircraft on your own side, I think that should call for a different kind of reckoning of what happened there.

SV: Before I go to Khurram, Sushant, how much concrete information do we have one year on about the losses? We’ve seen statements. There was a general statement by the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). If you join all the dots and connect everything that has been said officially, do you have a sense of what exactly Indian air losses were, for example?

SS: So nobody has ever officially confirmed the quantum of losses. A lot of people have confirmed losses: like I saw India’s defence secretary’s........

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