India Strikes Pakistan, Which Vows to Respond

On 24 October 1746, on the estuary of the Adyar River, Mahfuz Khan tried to block the passage of 700 French sepoy reinforcements under Paradis. The French beat off an attack by the 10,000 Mughal troopers with the help of sustained musketry, their infantry drawn up in ranks, file-firing and using grapeshot at close quarters in a way that had never b

The Mughals, mostly during Babur’s four years in India, had developed a fearsome reputation for themselves. There was no army in India that thought about fighting the Mughals without some trepidation. Sometime before Humayun found himself in that predicament, he had gone in pursuit of the Sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, who had besieged Chittor. T

The courage of the sepoys invariably impressed their old officers; their tactics did not. The massed bodies of troops certainly looked magnificent when seen from the city walls—Zahir Dehlavi thought the contest was “a strange and fascinating war which one had never heard of or seen before, for both the armies belonged to the British government, and

the lack of a clear and recognised figure of executive authority—also wrecked their attempts at fighting coherently or effectively.

As is the case with the Middle East and the Israel-Arab and Israel-Palestinian disputes, it is possible to speak of the region’s modern history in a shorthand of wars—1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999—and periodic near wars. Kashmir was at the center of many of these, although the 1971 conflict was triggered by widespread repression in East Pakistan that

South Asia is also increasingly an important region in the context of China. The United States, Japan, Australia, and France are building stronger relationships with India partly to balance China. India is modernizing its military and has the world’s fourth-largest military budget, strengthening itself so that it can project power into the Indian O