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You can't fight Pakistan for the same reason you don't pick fights with a pig. Pakistan doesn't point a gun towards you. Pakistan points a gun and its own head and threatens to shoot. Every Indo-Pakistani war was started by Pakistan, because India has nothing to gain from it.
War doesn't work, because war creates unpopular deaths for India while creating martyrs in Pakistan.
Economic retaliation doesn't work because Pakistan has no economy to speak of. Resource bottlenecking doesn't work because they are already on the verge of famine. Anything more will mean civilian deaths.
Full decoupling does not work because we have long borders. The US can't enforce a border with Mexico, and that's all flat land. Imagine trying to maintain a border up in the Himalayas. Don't even get me started on their nukes.
The failed state of Pakistan is a nuisance past redemption.
If Pakistani leadership stopped to think for a second, they'd realize that India is their natural trading partner. Afterall, these trade routes go back millennia. Karachi is clearly aching for maritime trade with India's west coast. Lahore is 30 miles from Amritsar. Faisalabad is 100 miles from Amritsar.
Geographically, Pakistan's urban areas hug India in the same way Canada's hug the USA. Can you imagine if Canada arbitrarily decided to have zero trade ties with India. Yes, Pakistan is client state to China and could trade with them. But China is too far. Beijing is closer to Anchorage than it is Islamabad. After 100 years of poisoning the well, I am aware that India-Pakistan peace is broken for good. But, what a waste.
Agree with everything 100 percent. Will add that Pakistan as a nation that is so much worse than India. They take the worst parts of their neighbors and mix in enough resentment that they would pick a fight at all costs.
Even if it means that they get their teeth kicked in, they would take that deal if it means chipping their neighbors nail. My main gripe is not Pakistan, though. At some point, India and the upper castes in particular have to come to terms with demographic shifts. You simply cannot let electoral democracy play out in a place that has always been a minority rule.
Pakistan is beyond one's abilities, but with Kashmir is effectively Pakistan for most Indians. These issues will spring up as ghetto dwellers get to bear weapons, while people living in gated societies do not. India needs to actually own Kashmir, and that cannot happen if the apparatus and values running it are Indian.
The Indian army is a big unit and it's fairly competent despite the occasional scandals and bureaucratic red tape. Kashmir takes up more resources than any part of India, and people who join the armed forces get stationed there at least once in their lives. That place needs to be truly reclaimed and that requires interventions that go against the beliefs of 1947.
And for a while they were doing good. India was a languishing in socialist democracy (hindu rate of growth) and a Bangladesh was still finding its feet as fledgling nation. In the 20th century, Pakistan was in a better place than India or Bangladesh. In the 90s, they nearly doubled India in GDP-PPP/Capita terms.
Even as a badly run but stable nation, Pakistan has a lot to offer. It has tons of rare earths. Pakistani-Kashmir is heaven on earth. Punjabi river systems are well-suited for industrialized agriculture. I would much prefer for Pakistan to thrive as nation of 250 million people, than this clown show they've been running.
Before 1990, their marginal economy was possibly propped up by the US against soviet afghanistan and soviet ally india.
With the china trade war and the war in ukraine, everyone’s talking about rare earths these days, but imo they are insignificant. The entire global market is 12 billion dollars, that’s like 20 times less than the copper market, 250 times less than the oil market. People have a strategy game view of resources, where if you don’t have them in your territory in the beginning, you’re screwed. In reality, if their price rose to significance, everyone would dig in their garden and find rare earths.
FYI, your link doesn’t work in “It's so overt that Pakistan's defense minister almost let the mask slip off. “
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