Pakistan, India accuse each other of drone attacks as tensions mount
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – India and Pakistan accused each other Thursday of further hostile acts, including drone attacks, as the nuclear-armed neighbors edged closer to a head-on military confrontation.
Pakistan’s military said it shot down 16 drones inside the country on Thursday, while India’s Defense Ministry said it “neutralized” an air defense system in Lahore and took out Pakistani drones deployed in the contested region of Kashmir.
India’s military also claimed to have thwarted drone and missile attacks by Pakistan late Wednesday into Thursday on 15 sites; locals in the northwestern city of Amritsar reported explosions and bright flashes of light. Islamabad countered that India had attacked its own territory to stoke anti-Pakistan sentiment and create a “phantom defense.”
Since early Wednesday, when New Delhi launched its deepest and deadliest strikes inside Pakistan in more than half a century, the adversaries have been locked in an information war, with each touting its military achievements while portraying the other as the aggressor. The claims and counterclaims have often been hard to verify. Islamabad said Wednesday it had downed five Indian warplanes, which New Delhi has neither confirmed nor denied.
Equally difficult to discern Thursday was where the conflict would go next. Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif told Reuters that retaliation against India was “increasingly becoming certain,” but added that “I will still refrain from saying it is 100%.”
Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, meanwhile, said “there should be no doubt” that any Pakistani attack “will be met with a very, very firm response.”
Pakistan said drones were downed in or around Chakwal, Attock, Lahore, Gujranwala and Rawalpindi – the location of Pakistan’s military headquarters. One Indian drone near Lahore attacked a military target, according to the government, causing damage and injuring four soldiers.
Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, described the early-morning attacks as “yet another blatant military act of aggression” by India. One civilian was killed and another injured in rural Sindh province, Pakistani authorities said. India denied that any civilians had been killed in its strikes.
The U.S. Consulate in Lahore wrote in a security alert that it had directed all personnel to shelter in place because of “reports of drone explosions, downed drones, and possible airspace incursions.”
In India, there were growing signs of unease. At least 21 airports in the country’s north will remain closed until at least Saturday, officials told an Indian news agency. Eyewitnesses in several parts of northern and western India said their cities had no electricity Thursday night.
School was canceled in parts of Kashmir, the disputed territory that has been at the heart of multiple wars between India and Pakistan, and where the latest round of tensions began last month with a deadly militant attack on Indian tourists.
Late Thursday, India’s Defense Ministry posted on X that it had “neutralized” Pakistani drones and missiles targeting military stations in three cities in Jammu and Kashmir. It added that no casualties occurred. Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said Pakistan had not attacked any locations in the area.
“Kashmir has been through a lot in the last three decades, but I have never been this scared,” said Zahid, 45, a resident of Wuyan village in the district of Pulwama, where locals say a jet crashed Wednesday night during the Indian attack.
Zahid, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name for fear of reprisals, said he was sleeping at home when the jet crashed into a school building. “I had seen war footage only on television so far,” he said. “I never imagined it would be this scary in reality.”
Analysts said the popular mood in Pakistan was a key factor as the government weighs whether, and where, to retaliate against its larger, more powerful rival.
“There’s mounting public pressure in Pakistan to take some form of retaliatory action,” said Nishank Motwani, an analyst with the U.S. branch of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-funded think tank.
Pakistan’s military – long seen as the ultimate power broker in the country – saw its standing erode after the 2023 arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan and may see an opportunity to win back favor.
Many Pakistanis applauded the military’s response to the Indian strikes. Some took to the streets to celebrate. “We are happy that the planes were shot down,” said Adnan Shahid, 35, a teacher in Sialkot, one of the districts targeted by Indian strikes.
In Islamabad, authorities urged citizens Thursday to join the civil defense brigades.
Usman Mujtaba, a 34-year-old who lives in southern Punjab, said many of his friends are eager to enlist. “Morale is high,” he said. A music video for a new war song was aired on Pakistani channels and went viral on social media, showing soldiers marching in formation and firing artillery, set to a thumping beat.
But striking back against India carries serious risks for Pakistan, a country struggling to find its economic footing and beset by its own violent insurgencies. Any attack on the Indian military or strategic infrastructure “could lead to massive escalation,” said Sushant Singh, a Yale University lecturer and former Indian military official.
The United States and China have called for a diplomatic solution, but it was unclear who would lead those efforts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke Thursday with both Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and with Jaishankar, his Indian counterpart.
“At this moment in time, there is one thing that has to stop, which is a back-and-forth and a continuation, and that is what we are focused on right now,” State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a news briefing Thursday.
Jaishankar also received Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, for an unannounced visit to Delhi on Thursday, and met with the Iranian foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi.
New Delhi has framed its strikes as retaliation for the April 22 rampage by gunmen in a tourist area in Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir, which killed 26 people – the deadliest assault on Indian civilians in more than 15 years.
India said the attack had “linkages” to Pakistan, which it has long accused of harboring violent Kashmiri separatists; Islamabad denied any involvement and has called for an international investigation.
The triumphal reaction in India to Wednesday’s cross-border strikes carried an undercurrent of Hindu nationalism. Some senior politicians fawned over the military’s code name – Operation Sindoor, named for the vermilion that adorns Hindu brides and a likely reference to images of Hindu women grieving over their husbands slain in Kashmir.
Pravin Sawhney, the editor of an Indian defense magazine and a former army official, said he was troubled by the religious connotations of the name, which local media said was chosen by the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
Sawhney said that politicizing India’s secular military would be harmful to unit cohesion. “A political message is being sent to the people of India,” he said, “that Hindus were killed there, so we have taken revenge.”
Others believe India’s aggressive military response was in service of long-term objectives. By showing it has the “capability to strike by air from within its own borders deep inside Pakistan,” New Delhi may be trying to “create a strategic space” for future operations and to “rewrite the deterrence playbook in South Asia,” said Motwani, the ASPI analyst.
But there was still confusion Thursday over how much India had gained by its strikes, and how much it had lost. New Delhi has still issued no official response to Pakistani claims that it shot down its warplanes. Singh, the former Indian military official, said the government’s silence makes it “very difficult to assess” the truth.
The Hindu, an Indian newspaper, deleted a social media post Wednesday that said three Indian jets had been downed because there was no “on-record official information,” fueling concerns among journalists that Modi’s administration might intensify its clampdown on the media.
The Global Government Affairs team at X, the social platform owned by Elon Musk, said late Thursday it had received orders from the Indian government to block more than 8,000 accounts in the country. For many accounts, X said, the government did not specify which posts violated local law; for others, it did not provide any evidence at all.
“To comply with the orders, we will withhold the specified accounts in India alone,” the post from X read, but “we disagree with the Indian government’s demands,” characterizing them as “contrary to the fundamental right of free speech.”
Across Kashmir – where Indian and Pakistani forces continued to exchange shells across their contested border – people braced for another long and nervous night.
In Jammu, a large Indian city next to Kashmir, two eyewitnesses said the sky above them was lit up by a volley of projectiles; the power was out, they said, and the cell network was down. Another Jammu resident reported hearing four explosions near the military airport down the road.
Nayaz Ahmed, 25, watched from his rooftop as four projectiles flew above his home in Jammu near a large garrison. Some time later, he heard loud sirens: “That is when people started to run and panic,” he said.
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Noack reported from Bangkok; Irfan from Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir; and Mehrotra from New Delhi.
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Video: Passengers were left stranded at airports on May 7, after India launched strikes against Pakistan in response to a militant attack in Kashmir last month.Special to The Washington Post
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Video: The Indian military said May 7 that it had launched strikes against Pakistan in retaliation for last month’s militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.Special to The Washington Post
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