“What we can do is try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit,” Vice President J.D. Vance said on Fox News, “but we’re not going to get involved in the middle of a war that’s fundamentally none of our business and has nothing to do with America’s ability to control it.” This echoes an earlier comment from the president himself, “They’ve gotten tit for tat, so hopefully they can stop now. And if I can do anything to help, I will be there.”
One is tempted to pull a Vladimir Putin and start explaining this conflict with reference to the invasion of India by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1027 AD, but that is irrelevant. The current conflict is more strategic than religious. Pakistan, after losing conventional wars with India, encouraged Kashmiri separatism, which resulted in a simmering sub-conventional conflict that is now in its fifth decade. The proximate cause of this recent bout is, as always, a terrorist attack in the tourist hotspot of Kashmir that killed a lot of Indian tourists; men were targeted and women spared. The Indian initial operation was named as Operation Sindoor (“vermillion”), after…
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