‘We had seconds to decide if India's missile was nuclear'

Times

7 hours ago

As President Trump deliberated over whether to enter Israel's war with Iran, there was another potential conflict taking his attention last week.
His unexpected guest on Wednesday was Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan's army chief, for a closed-door lunch in the cabinet room, the first time a US president had hosted a Pakistan military chief who was not also the head of state.
With Trump was Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, and Steve Witkoff, the former property developer turned special representative for the Middle East. Munir was accompanied only by Lieutenant General Asim Malik, the national security adviser. There were no civilian officials, perhaps reflecting whom Trump sees as holding power in Pakistan.
'The reason I had him here was that I wanted to thank him for not going into the war [with India],' said Trump. 'And I want to thank PM [Narendra] Modi as well, who just left a few days ago.'
Pakistan has said that although all-out war between the two nuclear powers was narrowly averted by US intervention last month after the deadliest fighting in decades, the conflict in a region that is home to 1.6 billion people is far from resolved.
As a result Pakistan and India were now closer to nuclear war than at any previous point, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the former foreign minister, told The Sunday Times.
• No ceasefire will let India and Pakistan escape their history
On the final day of clashes, he said, India had deployed a dual-use cruise missile capable of holding a nuclear warhead and Pakistan had had to make an immediate decision about whether it was under nuclear attack. 'In that atmosphere you've got only a few seconds to decide looking at an image: is this missile going to be used within the nuclear connotation or not? And in those split seconds decisions are made.'
'The escalation ladder was rising so fast,' Bhutto Zardari said. The situation in the region remained 'incredibly perilous'. He said: 'We've achieved a ceasefire but we haven't achieved peace. And that's problematic because following this recent conflict we have lowered the threshold for full-blown military conflict to the lowest it has ever been, to what I believe are dangerously low levels.'
Bhutto Zardari was speaking while visiting London as head of a nine-member delegation of MPs sent by Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister, to 'pitch for peace' and call for international talks to resolve the problem of Kashmir over which the two nations have fought three wars. He said Pakistan had agreed to the ceasefire because it was promised such a summit, which has not materialised.
India has sent a rival delegation of politicians and diplomats led by the Congress MP Shashi Tharoor to London, Washington and elsewhere to argue that Pakistan is a sponsor of cross-border terrorism and a threat to global stability.
The fighting between the two broke out last month after an April terrorist attack in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, which India blamed on Pakistan. Twenty-six people were shot dead in a meadow in the tourist resort of Pahalgam.
• How the Kashmir massacre unfolded
Islamabad denied responsibility but India launched strikes deep in Pakistan against what it claimed were terrorist training camps. Pakistan claimed that it shot down six Indian fighter planes before a US-brokered ceasefire came into force on May 10.
Bhutto Zardari, 36, is leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), which is in coalition with the ruling party, and the son of the president. His mother, Benazir Bhutto, was Pakistan's first female prime minister –— an office she held twice, the first time in 1988 just two months after giving birth to him.
He insists that Pakistan had nothing to do with the Pahalgam attack, which was initially claimed by a little-known organisation called the Resistance Front that India says is an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba (L-e-T), a Pakistani terrorist group long linked to Pakistan's military intelligence. The Resistance Front later retracted the claim.
MUZAMMIL AHMED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
'To this day, they [the Indian government] haven't provided the Indian public, their allies, or us, or the media, with names of the individuals involved in this attack,' Zardari said. 'If they did indeed come from Pakistan, who are they? Where did they come from? What border crossing points did they use? Who facilitated them? One of the largest and supposedly most efficient intelligence agencies in the world should be able to share this information.'
Groups that Delhi claims are proxies for Pakistan have a long history of attacks in India — most notably the Mumbai massacre in 2008 in which terrorists laid siege to five-star hotels, going door to door shooting guests, murdering 166 people. The only attacker captured alive said the terrorists were members of L-e-T.
Bhutto Zardari admits Pakistan has 'a credibility problem', adding: 'I'm not denying Pakistan has a complicated past.' That past is personal for him. He was thrust into frontline politics in 2007, when he was 19 and his mother was assassinated by terrorists. His grandfather, who founded the PPP, was executed by the military. Both his uncles met mysterious ends.
For years Pakistan's military differentiated between militant groups, using some for their own purposes while pursuing others. He argues things have changed. 'This credibility and perception problem is rooted in deep biases, tainted by Islamophobia, and obfuscates from our actual effort to combat terrorism.
'I grew up during 9/11. My mother championed the fight against terrorism — she warned the world then. She gave her life doing that. Ever since she was assassinated, I at every point have opposed appeasement with any groups. We took the fight to these guys and my generation living in Pakistan now has nothing to do with it.
'I don't believe we should punish the children of Pakistan today for whatever happened in the past, particularly when we've fought against these groups and continue to as we've proven before international forums and under extreme scrutiny. We can't be condemned for past mistakes.'
Bhutto Zardari accused the West of worsening Pakistan's security situation by abandoning Afghanistan and 'leaving a vacuum' there. Pakistan's military intelligence historically had close links to the Taliban but since the group took power in 2021 it has turned against its former backers.
'The rest of the world may have moved on from Afghanistan and exited Kabul, but we're fighting terrorism from there,' Bhutto Zardari said. 'The single largest number of terrorist attacks anywhere in the world is Pakistan.'
At a meeting in London with Hamish Falconer, the Middle East minister, the Speaker and MPs, Bhutto Zardari raised the subject of an international conference on Kashmir. Pakistan sees the UK as having a particular responsibility, given that the conflict dates back to the British partition of India in 1947.
Bhutto Zardari said: 'At a time where the Pakistani army believes that we had a military upper hand in the conflict, we agreed to a ceasefire because we believed there was a commitment from the United States that we'd go on to have a dialogue in a neutral location on all friction points.
'Now that isn't happening. We don't want the international community to get a false sense of ease as a result of the ceasefire. There's still a very real threat.'