{"id":397903,"date":"2019-03-03T05:48:14","date_gmt":"2019-03-03T04:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/india-and-pakistan-tobogganing-toward-a-catastrophic-war\/"},"modified":"2019-03-03T05:48:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-03T04:48:14","slug":"india-and-pakistan-tobogganing-toward-a-catastrophic-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/india-and-pakistan-tobogganing-toward-a-catastrophic-war\/","title":{"rendered":"India and Pakistan tobogganing toward a catastrophic war"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"content\">\n<h3 class=\"nomargin\">\u00a0<\/h3>\n<h2>India and Pakistan tobogganing toward a catastrophic war<\/h2>\n<h5>\n<p>    2 March 2019<\/p>\n<\/h5>\n<p>India and Pakistan, South Asia\u2019s rival nuclear-armed states, are teetering on the brink of a full-scale military conflict. Early Tuesday morning, Indian warplanes attacked Pakistan for the first time since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Striking deep inside Pakistan, they destroyed what New Delhi claims was the principal \u201cterror base\u201d of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, an Islamist group involved in the separatist insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir.<\/p>\n<p>After a brief period of confusion, as it assessed the damage and strategic implications of the Indian attack, Islamabad vowed a strong military response. Pakistan, it declared, would not allow India to \u201cnormalize\u201d illegal US or Israeli-style attacks inside Pakistan, whether mounted in the name of retaliation for, or preemptive strikes against, Kashmiri insurgent attacks.<\/p>\n<p>The next day, Indian and Pakistani war planes engaged in a dogfight over the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, after Islamabad launched what New Delhi claims was an unsuccessful strike on Indian military installations. Both sides are claiming to have shot down at least one enemy plane in Wednesday\u2019s encounter, with Islamabad presenting a captured Indian pilot as proof of its claim.<\/p>\n<p>The US, China, Russia and other world powers are now publicly scrambling to avert the eruption of all-out war\u2014a war they concede could quickly spiral into a catastrophic nuclear exchange, even were it to be \u201cconfined\u201d to the subcontinent. Yet even as they counsel restraint and make offers of mediation, the great powers\u2014themselves locked in, to use the Pentagon\u2019s term, \u201ca new era of strategic competition\u201d\u2014are trying to use the South Asian war crisis to advance their own geostrategic&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsws.org\/en\/articles\/2019\/03\/02\/iper-m02.html\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 India and Pakistan tobogganing toward a catastrophic war 2 March 2019 India and Pakistan, South Asia\u2019s rival nuclear-armed states, are teetering on the brink of a full-scale military conflict. Early Tuesday morning, Indian warplanes attacked Pakistan for the first time since the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Striking deep inside Pakistan, they destroyed what New Delhi [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2526,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-397903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2526"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}