Pahalgam terror attack: Focus now on Pakistan’s reply to India’s punitive measures

A meeting of the NSC chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and attended by the top military leadership will give shape to Pakistan’s response to India’s measures

New Delhi: With India announcing a slew of punitive measures against Pakistan, including suspending the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 and further downgrading of diplomatic ties, over “cross-border linkages” to the Pahalgam terror attack, the focus shifted on Thursday to Islamabad’s response to the steps.

Indian Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers at the entrance of the India-Pakistan Wagah border post. (AFP)

A meeting of the National Security Committee (NSC) chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and attended by the top military leadership will give shape to Pakistan’s response to India’s measures, which took fraught bilateral relations to another fresh low.

Ahead of the meeting, Pakistan’s deputy prime minister Ishaq Dar said the National Security Committee will frame a “comprehensive reply”. Dar, a close aide of the prime minister and also the foreign minister, told Geo News channel that the steps taken by India were “inappropriate and lacking seriousness”. He also contended India hasn’t provided any evidence linking Pakistan to the terror attack.

A day after the terror attack on tourists at a scenic meadow close to Pahalgam town that left 26 people dead, India on Wednesday suspended the landmark water-sharing treaty brokered by the World Bank in 1960, closed the only active land border crossing at Attari, expelled Pakistan’s three military attaches, and asked Pakistan to downsize its mission in New Delhi to from 55 to 30 by May 1.

India also asked all Pakistanis who crossed via the Attari land border to leave the country by May 1 and said Pakistani citizens will no longer be eligible for the SAARC Visa Exemption Scheme (SVES). Foreign secretary Vikram Misri said the measures were taken because of “cross-border linkages” to the terror attack in Pahalgam.

Pakistan’s response to the Indian measures is expected to be formally announced at a media briefing by the foreign ministry in Islamabad on Thursday afternoon. Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif said the response would be “considered” and that India couldn’t unilaterally abandon the Indus Waters Treaty.

Asif said Pakistan has a contingency plan to cope with the situation. “We want the situation to be defused. Terrorism anywhere, in India or elsewhere, should be strongly condemned. No country has been targeted by terrorism like Pakistan,” he said.

Murtaza Solangi, a former interim information minister, told HT from Islamabad that he didn’t expect a knee-jerk reaction from Pakistan’s administration. However, he said most people in Pakistan believe matters will not end with the measures announced by India on Wednesday as further steps by New Delhi are being anticipated in Islamabad.

“Both sides need to tone down things, this is not the right road to take. All options will be on the table for Pakistan. Both sides are looking at the chessboard to see what moves they can make,” he said.

Solangi also noted that the global landscape had changed with the return of Donald Trump as the US president. “We are in a new world. Trump 2.0 is different from Trump 1.0 and he is extremely transactional, with no illusions of loyalty or strategic partnerships. Every country is on its own,” he said.

More than any of the other steps taken by India, the move to keep the Indus Waters Treaty – the most durable pact between the two countries and one of the most long-lasting water-sharing agreements anywhere in the world – could have significant implications for Pakistan.

Hassaan F Khan, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Tufts University, wrote in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper that the absence of treaty constraints could start to be felt more acutely in the dry season, when the flows across the Indus basin are lower, storage matters more, and timing becomes more critical.

“If India chooses to act outside the treaty framework, it opens the door to developing new infrastructure that would give it greater control over the timing and volume of flows into Pakistan,” Khan argued.

The erosion of treaty protections matters because the “system it supports was never built for uncertainty”, Khan said. “The flows of the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab are the backbone of our agriculture, our cities, our energy system. At this moment, we simply do not have a substitute for these waters,” he said.

Khan added: “For Pakistan, the impact of India’s disruption (if manifested) could be far-reaching. Pakistan’s irrigation system is one of the largest in the world, and it depends almost entirely on the predictable timing of flows from the western rivers.”