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Nothing is safe in Pakistan now... Pakistani experts afraid of India's..., scared of 'bunker buster' power of this Indian missile, not Brahmos

Nothing is safe in Pakistan now... Pakistani experts afraid of India's..., scared of 'bunker buster' power of this Indian missile, not Brahmos

India.com18 hours ago
Nothing is safe in Pakistan now... Pakistani experts afraid of India's..., scared of 'bunker buster' power of this Indian missile, not Brahmos
Following Operation Sindoor, Pakistan and the rest of the world saw the might of India's military power. India launched Operation Sindoor with missile strikes on terrorism-related infrastructure facilities of Pakistan-based militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and PoK. For the first time India used Brahmos missile. How is Pakistan viewing Indian ballistic missiles? If Pakistan sees it as an existential threat and turns to nuclear weapons, such a response will be suicidal for both countries.
With India's Agni-V ballistic missiles and high-power conventional bunker-buster missiles, Pakistan is now more scared. Pakistani experts are saying that now neither the army will be safe in their country nor any underground hideout.
What is Pakistan scared of?
Pakistan's Dawn newspaper has said in its report that India's Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) is modifying the Agni-V intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to carry a huge conventional warhead of 7,500 kg instead of a nuclear payload. This warhead can go up to 80-100 meters inside the ground before exploding. This will enable it to destroy deeply buried targets.
Will work like a bunker buster bomb?
The ability to penetrate its target underground will increase the power of the Agni missile manifold. Its ability to penetrate the ground is similar to America's GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) i.e. bunker buster bomb . This missile allows India to attack strong targets located at long distances quickly and without any warning.
India's new Agni-5 version can neutralise command centres, missile silos and other vital installations buried deep underground in countries like Pakistan and China. India is clearly developing a conventional weapon that can threaten the nuclear command bunkers and missile storage sites of its regional rivals, Dawn's report says.
Will there be violation of the atomic principle?
Pakistan is also concerned that the use of this weapon would not violate India's no first use (NFU) principle of nuclear weapons. The conventional Agni-5 bunker-buster could be argued to allow India to attack Pakistani nuclear assets without breaking its nuclear-freedom (NFU) pledge.
With a smaller and geographically limited arsenal than India, Pakistan has not adopted a no first use policy. Its nuclear policy leaves open the option of first use, conditionally linked to existential threats, including an overwhelming conventional attack by India.
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Will Team India Boycott Pakistan In World Cup After WCL Snub? Salman Butt Dares BCCI
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  • India.com

Will Team India Boycott Pakistan In World Cup After WCL Snub? Salman Butt Dares BCCI

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A Rebel within
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Quads, triads and India's South Asia paranoia
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Quads, triads and India's South Asia paranoia

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There are reasons for this and all of them, to India's mind, are collectively a clear and present – and future – danger. A dominant narrative in India is predicated on the South Asian ring of fire that its neighbours would be naïve to discount. Equally, India needs to accept that, while its regional strategic flex remains, its presumptuous South Asian zamindari, driven by sheer size and the geographic reality that no other South Asian country shares a land border with any other South Asian country but India, is over. Let us pan this out. Repeated calls for 'destroying' Pakistan – mainly by India's establishment-fed media and ruling party bots – is akin to Fool's Gold. This goes beyond the silliness of Indian government officials claiming that turning off the tap of the Indus will bring Pakistan to its knees. A fractured Pakistan will be a nightmare for India even though there are those among establishment hawks who see in such an eventuality the reclamation of all Kashmir. 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(Besides, Pakistan needs to get its act together in its massively restive and deliberately under-developed Balochistan province, among other regions.) Over at the eastern arc, India's goodwill had already begun to take a hit in Bangladesh, as public opinion saw India as standing with an increasingly corrupt, electorally wayward, and essentially dictatorial Awami League government led by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, especially during the past decade. India massively depleted its goodwill in a post-Hasina Bangladesh by standing with a belligerent Sheikh Hasina throughout the political upheaval over July and August 2024. And then, by presenting to outraged Bangladeshi citizenry the diplomatic horror of having India's national security advisor welcome an ejected Hasina at Hindon air force base near Delhi on August 5 – on live television. It was an optics disaster of epic proportion in both the mind's eye of Bangladeshi citizenry and to the emotionally charged and mission-oriented housecleaners of Bangladesh's interim government. It's a disaster from which India is yet to fully recover. It has made India's strategic and economic interests in Bangladesh, transhipment to its entire northeastern region, and India's strategic Siliguri Corridor deeply vulnerable to Bangladeshi policy squeeze. The risk of a squeeze by proxy makes matters worse for India: that slim corridor, the so-called Chicken's Neck, is a short hop for a China nestled in the hotly contested Doklam region just to the north. And for all of Bangladesh's justified moral lament for the democratic dislocation of the Hasina years and the atrocities perpetrated against students and innocent citizens over July-August 2024 – which this columnist observed first-hand – its interim government isn't blameless in adding to the tension. For his part, the head of the interim government of Bangladesh, no slouch when it comes to a networking opportunity polished by a lifetime of limelight, put several words out of place during an official visit to China this past March. Among other things, he publicly marketed Bangladesh to Chinese officials and businesses as being China's entrepôt for a 'landlocked' northeastern India. That too was an optics disaster – an observation which several senior South Asian diplomats have shared with me. With India's ongoing border spat with China, and repeated announcements by various Bangladesh entities to offer Chinese interests a deal to develop the Teesta River basin in northern Bangladesh – close to the strategic hotspot of the Siliguri Corridor – it was akin to waving a red flag to a bull in a China shop. This came in addition to the visible thaw in Bangladesh-Pakistan relations in the post-Hasina era, another huge red flag for India, among several other factors, including the release from jail of several people India views as inimical to its security. Bangladesh's interim government walked back the China-in-Northeastern India talk, but the damage was done. I've heard career-officials gripe about how the interim government should realise its interim nature, scale back knee-jerk pronouncements and Goebbelsian spin, and permit regime-agnostic professionals to go about their business in Bangladesh's national interest. In a tit-for-tat response that one could term Pakistanesque – or Indiaesque, depending on the lens – India has begun to squeeze Bangladesh by withdrawing some trading and transhipment benefits. Citing quite legitimate security reasons India has also refrained from expanding visa issuance for Bangladeshi visitors to the peak-Hasina level of a staggering 1.6 million visas a year – the figure for 2023. There are other indications of this avoidable freeze. With its heightened threat perception and what it perceives as necessary maritime deterrence, enhanced Indian naval and security activity in both the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea has become the new constant. There is the west-to-east arc of Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar – where China has displayed deft management to secure its energy, mineral, and territorial interests. From a regional-and-maritime perspective, Sri Lanka is of course another competitive geography for India and China and which, much like its southern co-location with neighbouring Maldives, completes the ring of encirclement for India. 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Or to be a bit more provocative, perhaps the China-Pakistan-Bangladesh-Sri Lanka 'quadrilateral' – that would, ironically, run counter to the Quad or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between India, Japan, Australia, and the United States that is commonly perceived as a strategy to contain China in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region. But for all that, there is monumental work to be done to mend the India-Bangladesh bilateral, a rent in which could – with or without China – ruin Eastern South Asia.

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