The last time India and Pakistan faced off in a military confrontation, in 2019, U.S. officials detected enough movement in the nuclear arsenals of both nations to be alarmed. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was awakened in the middle of the night. He worked the phone “to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war,” he wrote in his memoir.
That clash quickly cooled after initial skirmishing. But six years later, the two South Asian rivals are again engaged in military conflict after a deadly terrorist attack against tourists in Indian-controlled Kashmir. And this time there is a new element of uncertainty as the region’s most important military alliances have been redrawn.
Changing patterns in the flow of arms illustrate the new alignments in this particularly volatile corner of Asia, where three nuclear powers — India, Pakistan and China — stand in uneasy proximity.
India, a traditionally nonaligned country that has shed its history of hesitance toward the United States, has been buying billions of dollars in equipment from the United States and other Western suppliers. At the same time, India has sharply reduced purchases of low-cost arms from Russia, its Cold War-era ally.
Pakistan, whose relevance to the United States has waned since the end of the war in Afghanistan, is no longer buying the American equipment that the United States once encouraged it to acquire. Pakistan has instead turned to China for the vast majority of its military purchases.
These connections have injected superpower politics into South Asia’s longest-running and most intractable conflict.
The United States has cultivated India as a partner in countering China, while Beijing has deepened its investment in its advocacy and patronage of Pakistan as India has grown closer to the United States.
At the same time, relations between India and China have deteriorated in recent years over competing territorial claims, with clashes breaking out between the two militaries at times. And relations between the world’s two biggest powers, the United States and China, have hit a nadir as President Trump has launched a trade war against Beijing.
This combustible mix shows how complex and messy alliances have become as the post-World War II global order has fractured. The volatility is compounded by South Asia’s history of frequent military confrontations, with armed forces on both sides that are prone to mistakes, increasing the risk that an escalation could get out of hand.
“The U.S. is now central to India’s security interests, while China increasingly plays a comparable role in Pakistan,” said Ashley Tellis, a former diplomat who is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
As India now takes military action against Pakistan, it has had the United States on its side more forcefully than ever in recent years.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India spoke with both Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the initial days after the April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir. The strong backing voiced by Trump administration officials was seen by many officials in New Delhi as a green light for India’s plan to retaliate against Pakistan, even if U.S. officials urged restraint.
An indication of the changing dynamics was the conspicuous absence of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as Mr. Modi took calls from more than a dozen world leaders in the days after the terrorist attack. The Russian foreign minister spoke with his Indian counterpart a week after the attack, and Mr. Modi and Mr. Putin finally spoke this week, officials said.
For its part, China has led public support for Pakistan, describing it as an “ironclad friend and all-weather strategic cooperative partner.”
These trends could increasingly be reflected in military conflicts.
“If you think about what a future conflict between India and Pakistan might look like, it would increasingly look like India fighting with U.S. and European platforms and Pakistan fighting with Chinese platforms,” said Lyndsey Ford, a former senior U.S. defense official who is currently a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation America. “The close security partners of both countries have evolved significantly in the last decade.”
Until recent years, Cold War calculations had shaped alliances in South Asia.
India, even as it played a leading role in the nonaligned movement, grew close to the Soviet Union. Weapons and munitions from Moscow made up nearly two-thirds of India’s military equipment.
Pakistan, on the other hand, firmly allied itself with the United States, becoming its frontline partner in helping to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, Pakistan’s military leveraged that relationship to bolster its arsenal, including acquiring dozens of coveted F-16 fighter planes, which helped chip away at the air dominance that India had enjoyed.
After the Cold War, both nations faced American sanctions for testing nuclear weapons in the 1990s. For over a decade, Pakistan was denied delivery of dozens of F-16s it had paid for.
But the country’s fortunes changed again after Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as it once again became a frontline partner to the United States, this time in the war on terrorism.
Even as Pakistan was accused of playing a double game, harboring the Taliban’s leaders on its soil while aiding the American military presence in Afghanistan, the U.S. military poured in tens of billions of dollars in military assistance. The United States became Pakistan’s top supplier of weapons, with China remaining second.
As Pakistan’s importance to the United States has declined, it has turned to China, which has long offered an open embrace.
Beijing, which was the source of only 38 percent of Pakistan’s weapons in the mid-2000s, has provided about 80 percent over the past four years, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which closely studies global weapons flows.
At the same time, India has slashed its dependence on Russian weapons by more than half. Between 2006 and 2010, about 80 percent of India’s major weapons came from Russia. Over the past four years, that figure has fallen to about 38 percent, with more than half of Indian imports coming from the United States and allies like France and Israel.
The one area of exception for Pakistan’s frost with the United States is the F-16 program. Pakistan has expanded its F-16 arsenal over the past two decades, and the Biden administration pushed through a contract worth nearly $400 million for service and maintenance of the fighter jets.
In 2019, Pakistan used an F-16 to down a Russian-made Indian jet. New Delhi protested that the action constituted a breach of the U.S. sales agreement with Pakistan, arguing that it allowed only for counterterrorism missions.
Some American officials appeared to try to placate India by suggesting that they had admonished the Pakistanis. But U.S. diplomatic cables had long made clear that they knew Pakistan’s intention in building its air force: for potential use in conflicts with India.
The 2019 clash — in which one of India’s own helicopters was also shot down, killing half a dozen personnel — exposed the troubles of its military. In the years since, India has been pouring in billions of dollars to modernize its forces. As India now confronts Pakistan, a bigger threat, China, is not only watching but also aiding its adversary.
For many American officials who observed the 2019 developments closely, the human errors made clear how the situation could escalate out of control.
U.S. officials worry that with the hyper-nationalism in both India and Pakistan, where two well-stocked militaries operate in a tight air corridor and amid mutual suspicion, even the smallest of mistakes or exceeding of orders could lead to catastrophic escalations.
“A crisis where you have cross-border airstrikes and an aerial dogfight, like we saw in 2019, carries significant escalation risks,” said Ms. Ford, the former U.S. defense official. “And that’s all the more problematic when it involves two nuclear-armed neighbors.”
Salman Masood and Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
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