India vs. Pakistan (and China)

India strikes Pakistan: Last month, there was a terrorist attack in India-controlled Kashmir that killed 26 tourists. Yesterday, India conducted several airstrikes on Pakistan, saying the strikes were retribution for the attack.

The strikes may not have been as successful as the Indian military had hoped. “At least two aircraft were said to have gone down in India and the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, according to three officials, local news reports, and accounts of witnesses who had seen the debris of two,” reports The New York Times. “Pakistani military officials said that more than 20 people had been killed and dozens injured after six places were hit on the Pakistani side of Kashmir and in Punjab Province. Residents of the Indian side of Kashmir said at least 10 people had been killed in shelling from the Pakistani side since India carried out its strikes.”

Pakistan called the strikes “an unprovoked and blatant act of war.” India said the strikes were “measured, responsible and designed to be nonescalatory in nature” focused only on “known terror camps.”

“The scale of the strikes went far beyond New Delhi’s response to previous attacks in Kashmir it has blamed on Pakistan, including in 2019 and 2016, which some analysts said meant the risk of escalation was higher,” reports Reuters. But “the last time India and Pakistan faced off in a military confrontation, in 2019, U.S. officials detected enough movement in the nuclear arsenals of both nations to be alarmed,” reports The New York Times. 

There’s also, of course, the China factor: Pakistan now gets lots of its weapons from China, whereas India is more reliant on the West; relations between India and China have soured in recent years, while China and Pakistan have gotten much closer.

Conclave begins: Pope Francis, who died on April 21, expanded the number of cardinals. The conclave that appointed him a little more than a decade ago was comprised of 115 cardinals from 48 countries, whereas this conclave—which commences today—will have 133 voting-age cardinals (those under 80), from roughly 70 countries. In total, including those over 80, there are now 252 cardinals from more parts of the world than ever before.

Possible contenders for the next pope include Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who is basically the second-in-command and well-liked in the Vatican bureaucracy (but has come under scrutiny for dealmaking with China), and Cardinal Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle of the Philippines, who would be a Francis-like successor.

There’s also Cardinal Péter Erdő of Hungary, a more conservative and scholarly pick. There’s Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, a pick that would represent the Catholic Church’s growing presence in Africa (and possibly a more conservative shift). Or Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline, whose humble personal style is reminiscent of Francis and who has deep theological knowledge and a bridge-building background. Or Cardinal Fernando Filoni, a longtime diplomat for the Vatican, who was close with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, but not with Pope Francis.

Land acknowledgements were always bullshit: “The United States, like all nations, was created through territorial conquest. Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the U.S. came; the U.S. used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people. To the extent that land ‘ownership’ existed under the previous inhabitants, the land of the U.S. is stolen land,” writes Noah Smith at his Substack. “This was also true before the U.S. arrived. The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land.…The moral principle to which [land acknowledgements] appeal is ethnonationalism—it’s the idea that plots of land are the rightful property of ethnic groups.”

Land acknowledgements—which I see every time I go to an art museum anywhere within the five boroughs—were always predicated on the myth of the Noble Savage, that the tribes the European settlers encountered were a largely peaceable people living in glorious harmony with their surroundings. But Smith extends the logic out even further.

“Once the logic of land acknowledgements and ‘decolonization’ is followed,” Smith concludes, “it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice; it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.”

(Read on for Smith’s tale of Squamish YIMBYs trying to make bank.)

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Scenes from New York: “Every place where I had seen something or someone that provoked unease was deemed permanently suspect,” writes Lena Dunham of her much-hated hometown, New York City. “And, if you couldn’t return to the scene of some randomized chaos in pre-Giuliani Manhattan, you couldn’t do much at all. For so many people, New York seems to open a portal to the expansive lives they had always felt they should be living. For me, the city constricted until the only place I felt safe was in my loft bed at the back of our apartment, my head in a book, the faint sounds of the streets below my window like a white-noise machine that occasionally yelled, ‘Out of my way, motherfucker!’…All this may seem to imply some deeper judgment about the city—that I think it’s wanton and unregulated, a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ of Boschian perversion.”

The whole essay is kind of a delightful read if you can get over the byline.

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QUICK HITS

• “Newark has lost 20% of its air traffic controllers in recent weeks all on its own, with United CEO Scott Kirby claiming they simply ‘walked off the job,’ which seems to have followed malfunctions in radar and radio (what),” writes G.B. Rango at Pirate Wires. “Now, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is begging for hires, offering $5k bonuses while speaking ominously of ‘cracks in the system.’ Which would be terrifying if I wasn’t already doing everything humanly possible to avoid Newark Airport.” (“Five FAA employees—a supervisor, three controllers and one trainee—took 45 days of trauma leave after the [recent] outage, according to the air traffic controller,” per CNN.)
• The Trump administration plans to deport migrants—nationalities currently unclear—to Libya in lieu of El Salvador. “The Libya operation falls in line with the Trump administration’s effort to not only deter migrants from trying to enter the country illegally but also to send a strong message to those in the country illegally that they can be deported to countries where they could face brutal conditions,” per The New York Times.
• “Last week, the NJ district court in Mahmoud Khalil’s case issued a 108-page decision that hasn’t received adequate attention. The judge found that the Article III court has jurisdiction over Khalil’s habeas petition,” writes attorney Jenin Younes on X. “The judge found that Khalil is entitled to review of his petition in federal court. But arguably more crucially, the judge observed that Khalil raised a plausible claim he is being detained and deported in unlawful retaliation for exercising his First Amendment rights that warrant further examination, and has said additional orders will follow shortly.” Full decision here.

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/05/07/india-vs-pakistan-and-china/