What drew the US into India-Pakistan face-off, as per New York Times report

The US was initially reluctant about intervening in the Indo-Pakistan face-off, but the Donald Trump administration was drawn in as it feared it could “spiral out of control” and also because Islamabad apprehended that its “strategic plans division, which oversees and protects the country’s nuclear arsenal, could be decapacitated by India”.

A US newspaper, New York Times, has given details of what transpired in Washington DC as the two nuclear-armed neighbours – India and Pakistan – fought each other.

On Thursday, US Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that the conflict was “fundamentally none of our business”.  All the US could do was to counsel both sides to back off, he had suggested.

Within 24   hours, however, Vance and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the national security adviser, were asked do the ground work.

Almost 25 years ago, in 1999, then US President Bill Clinton had dealt with the Kargil conflict, fearing it might quickly “go nuclear”.

Vance and Rubio were called in to dial the phones as Pakistan and Indian Air Forces began to engage in serious fights. Pakistan had sent 300 to 400 drones (on May 9) into the Indian territory to probe its air defence. What probably dragged the US in was the explosion that hit the Nur Khan air base in Rawalpindi, Pakistan (Indian Air Force Wing Commander Vyomika Singh said on May 10 that they had hit the Nur Khan base).

The Nur Khan base is a key installation, one of the central transport hubs for the Pakistan’s military and the home to the air refueling capability that would keep Pakistani fighters aloft, the NYT report said. It was also just a short distance from the headquarters of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which oversees and protects the country’s nuclear arsenal, now believed to include about 170 or more warheads. The warheads themselves are presumed to be spread across the country.

The NYT cited an unnamed former American official long familiar with Pakistan’s nuclear programme, saying, “Pakistan’s deepest fear is of its nuclear command authority being decapitated. The missile strike on Nur Khan could have been interpreted, the former official said, as a warning that India could do just that.”

The newspaper said it was unclear whether there was American Intelligence pointing to a rapid and perhaps nuclear escalation of the conflict. It mentioned, in public, the only piece of obvious nuclear signaling came from Pakistan. Pakistan media reported that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had summoned a meeting of the National Command Authority — the small group that makes decisions about how and when to make use of nuclear weapons.

Established in 2000, the body is nominally chaired by the the Prime Minister and includes senior civilian ministers and military chiefs. In reality, the driving force behind the group is Army Chief  General Asim Munir.

But, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif denied that the group ever met. Speaking on Pakistani television on Saturday before the ‘ceasefire’ was announced, he acknowledged the existence of the nuclear option but said, “We should treat it as a very distant possibility; we shouldn’t even discuss it.”

By Friday morning (evening in India and Pakistan), the White House had clearly understood that a few public statements and some calls to officials in Islamabad and Delhi were not sufficient. Interventions by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had little effect on both.

The pace of strikes and counterstrikes was picking up. While India had initially focused on what it called “known terror camps” linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group blamed for the April attack, it was now targeting Pakistani military bases.

The Trump administration decided that Vance, who had returned a couple of weeks earlier from a trip to India with his Indian-origin wife, Usha,  should call Prime Minister Narendra Modi directly.

The NYT said, “His message was that the United States had assessed there was a high probability of a dramatic escalation of violence that could tip into a full-scale war.”

The NYT said, “By the American account, Vance pressed Mr. Modi to consider alternatives to continued strikes, including a potential off-ramp that US officials thought would prove acceptable to the Pakistanis. Modi listened but did not commit to any of the ideas.”

Meanwhile Rubio, according to the State Department, spoke to General Munir, a conversation made easier by his new role as the national security adviser.

The NYT said, “Over the past quarter-century, the White House has often served, if quietly, as a direct channel to the Pakistani army, the country’s most powerful institution.”

The US newspaper also cited an unnamed senior Pakistani Intelligence official “crediting the involvement of the Americans over the last 48 hours and, in particular, Rubio’s intervention for sealing the accord”.

The NYT further quoted the Pakistani Intelligence senior official as saying, “India was trying to bait Islamabad into going beyond a defensive response. India wanted Pakistan to use its own F-16 fighter jets in a retaliatory attack so they could try to shoot one down, the official said.”

The US sold the F-16 jets to Pakistan.

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