Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 23

Indian Politics & Policy
tic security measures, rather than on
military action or on coercive threats
aimed at Pakistan .... The Indians took
no rhetorical or military steps to threaten
to attack Pakistan as they did during
the 2001–2002 crisis.” 148
Still, tension lingered into
mid-December and beyond. Islamabad
claimed that Indian fighter jets violated
Pakistani airspace on December 13. 149
Alongside media reports that “Indian
air force units were placed on alert for
possible strikes on suspected terrorist
camps inside Pakistan,” 150 this heightened
the tension among Pakistani decision
makers. The Pakistan Air Force
(PAF) carried out exercises over major
northern cities and Kashmir on December
22, and on December 23, the head
of India’s Western Air Command, Air
Marshal P.K. Barbora, said that India
had “earmarked” 5,000 Pakistani targets
for air strikes. 151 At the same time, Pakistani
COAS Kayani warned that Pakistani
military forces would “retaliate
within minutes” if India carried out a
surgical strike within Pakistan. 152 In late
December, the Indian Army extended
the presence of two brigades in Rajasthan
after scheduled seasonal exercises.
153 In response, Islamabad moved
some 5,000–7,000 troops from the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA), bordering Afghanistan, eastward
to positions along the LOC and
the Punjab frontier. 154 Senior Pakistani
officials asked the Indian side to pull its
forces back from the border area, and
repeated that Pakistan would meet any
Indian aggression, even surgical strikes,
with quick retaliation. Still, the two
sides continued to communicate directly
in an effort to ease the tension. On
December 26, for example, the Indian
High Commissioner in Islamabad told
the Pakistani foreign secretary “that India
had no plans to go to war.” 155 With
the arrival of the new year, hostilities
gradually abated. India had once again
chosen not to retaliate militarily in the
face of egregious provocation by Pakistan-based
terrorists.
The Uri Attack and Indian
“Surgical Strikes”
In the pre-dawn hours of September
18, 2016, four guerrillas from Pakistan
attacked an Indian army encampment
roughly 6 kilometers from
the LOC. The attackers, armed with
grenades and assault rifles, slaughtered
19 Indian soldiers and wounded 20, before
themselves being killed in a 3-hour
gun battle. The scene of the carnage, a
brigade headquarters, was unusually
crowded at the time with two battalions
of soldiers rotating in and out. Many of
the casualties had been sleeping in tents
and other temporary shelters, which
quickly caught fire when the attackers
used incendiary ammunition. The assault
at Uri was India’s largest mass-casualty
attack since Mumbai in 2008 and
the deadliest raid on an Indian base in
Kashmir since 2002. It was carried out
in the context of a rapidly deteriorating
security situation in Indian Kashmir
since the July 8 killing of a Hizbul Mujahideen
commander, Burhan Wani, in
a shootout with security forces. Since
Wani’s death, more than 80 people
had been killed and thousands more
wounded in hostilities between protest-
20