India, Pakistan: Signs of a Coming War: Stratfor

Several major signs of a coming Indian-Pakistani war surfaced Dec. 24.

Indian troops reportedly have deployed to the Barmer district of southwest Rajasthan state along the Indian-Pakistani border. Furthermore, the state government of Rajasthan has ordered residents of its border villages to be prepared for relocation. The decision reportedly came after a meeting among the state’s director-general of police, home secretary and an official from the central government. Stratfor confirmed the report with an Indian army officer.
According to India’s ZeeNews, the Pakistani army replaced the Pakistan Rangers that regularly patrol the border with India. The Pakistani troop movements were later confirmed by U.K. Bansal, the additional director-general of India’s Border Security Force (BSF) in Barmer, Rajasthan.

As Stratfor reported Dec. 22, there is a high probability of India using military force against Pakistan after Dec. 26, when a deadline expires for Pakistan to deliver on Indian demands to crack down on Islamist militant proxies that threaten India. With low expectations that Pakistan has the will or capability to deliver on these demands, India has spent the past month preparing for military action against Pakistan. Pressure is now ratcheting up on both sides of the border, with Indian Air Marshal P.K. Barbora, air officer commanding-in-chief of the Western Air Command, telling reporters Dec. 24 that as many as 5,000 targets in Pakistan have thus far been identified, while saying that many of the militants hiding out in camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir have already fled.

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Is India getting ready to strike Pakistan?: Donklephant

As the luxury Taj and Trident hotels prepared to reopen for the first time since the November 26th terrorist attacks in Mumbai, The Times of India reported that India is “keeping the military option alive and kicking in face of Pakistan doublespeak on the crackdown on terror.” According to the report, “a top-level meeting was held on Saturday evening to review the security situation in the region and the state of defence preparedness of the armed forces.” Similar accounts of high-level security meetings have appeared elsewhere in the nation’s press over the past couple of days. More ominously, another leading newspaper, The Telegraph, quoted “top government sources” saying that the Mumbai attacks were “the direct handiwork of Pakistan’s military that trained and armed the militants and planned the strike in detail.”

Meanwhile, on both sides of the Indo-Pakistan border, stories about apparent border incursions by air continue to appear, including an Indian report of “massive practice by Indian Air Force planes in Jamnagar” a city in western India a short jet hop from Pakistan.
This should not come as a surprise. Since the Mumbai attacks, Pakistani authorities have gone through the motions of rounding up the usual suspects associated with the Kashmiri terrorist outfits, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, that U.S. intelligence officials believe were responsible for the attacks. But Pakistan resolutely refuses even to concede that Pakistanis were involved in the attacks, much less crack down hard on the Kashmiri groups it has long sponsored and supported.
The Mumbai attacks shook Indian society and the Indian leadership to the core. Unless it gets some hard concessions from Pakistan that are politically difficult or impossible for any Pakistani government to make, India’s governing Congress Party government simply cannot afford to kick up a little dust and hope the matter will go away. It will likely lose the next national election.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Is India getting ready to strike Pakistan?: Donklephant