Two wins, two losses: What India, Pakistan have learned a year after war 

Islamabad, Pakistan – In Pakistan, May began with streets in major cities dotted with banners and posters honouring the military leadership that, in the official telling, guided the country’s defences and led the nation to victory in the four-day aerial war with India last year.

At the Nur Khan Auditorium in the city of Rawalpindi on Thursday, the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) held a ceremony marking its “achievements” in downing Indian jets. In Lahore on Friday evening, a government-organised concert at the city’s Liberty Chowk celebrated the conflict’s success in what Pakistan calls the “Day of the Battle of Truth”.

But across the border, India, too, is celebrating what its government and military insist was a victory for them. On Thursday, May 7, Prime Minister Narendra Modi changed his profile picture on X to the official logo of Operation Sindoor, India’s name for the May 2025 military operation against Pakistan, and urged every Indian to do the same. “A year ago, our armed forces displayed unparalleled courage, precision and resolve,” Modi wrote on X. “Today, we remain as steadfast as ever in our resolve to defeat terrorism and destroy its enabling ecosystem.”

Both governments put their militaries before the cameras. At a news conference lasting more than two hours in New Delhi, Air Marshal Awadhesh Kumar Bharti said India had “destroyed 13 Pakistani aircraft” and “struck 11 airfields”.

Meanwhile, in Rawalpindi, Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, director general of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media arm of Pakistan’s armed forces, told reporters that the country had defeated an enemy “five times larger than itself” and had shown only “10 percent” of its military potential. “We are prepared,” he said. “If anyone wants to test us, they are welcome to do so.”

Analysts, however, say that behind the public claims of victory and the celebrations in both countries, key questions remain about whether the South Asian neighbours have drawn lessons, both from their respective gains in the conflict and from the weaknesses exposed during and after the fighting.

The ‘wins’ India, Pakistan are celebrating

On April 22, 2025, gunmen attacked tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam, killing 26 civilians. India blamed the attack on Pakistan, an accusation Islamabad rejected.

India launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, 2025, striking multiple sites deep inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. It insisted it was targeting “terrorist” infrastructure, but Pakistani officials said civilians bore the brunt of the assault. Pakistan retaliated with Operation Bunyan al-Marsoos.

Contrary to official narratives on both sides, the four-day conflict that followed did not end in a neat victory for either nation.

Pakistan can point to the aerial exchange on the night of May 6-7. Its Chinese-built J-10C jets shot down Indian aircraft, including Rafales, during the opening phase of the conflict.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June 2025, India’s second chief of defence staff, General Anil Chauhan, admitted to jet losses on the first day of the fighting. Air Marshal Bharti had framed it more plainly days earlier: “Losses are a part of combat.”

Pakistan also emerged with what many analysts saw as a diplomatic and narrative advantage. It accepted US President Donald Trump’s assertion that he had brought about the ceasefire that ended the war on May 10, nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, and has, over the past year, emerged as a significant diplomatic force, acting as the main mediator of a ceasefire in the US war on Iran.

For its part, India can also point to significant military outcomes. Its BrahMos long-range missiles struck multiple Pakistani airbases, including Nur Khan in Rawalpindi and Bholari in the Sindh province.

India also used Israeli-made drones that penetrated as far as Karachi and Lahore, and it suspended the Indus Waters Treaty on April 23, 2025, a pact that governs river-water sharing between the neighbours. The decision carries consequences far beyond the military exchange.

While commercial satellite imagery released by Western companies extensively documented damage at Pakistani military installations, the same companies, Maxar, now renamed Vantor, and Planet Labs, released no imagery of the Indian military sites allegedly struck by Pakistan during or after the conflict.

Meanwhile, Pakistani losses were subjected to open-source scrutiny, while Indian losses were not. Both readings of the conflict contain elements of truth. Yet, neither is complete.

The gap between the two narratives is not merely rhetorical, say analysts. It has consequences for how honestly each side is absorbing what the conflict actually revealed, and how seriously the task of addressing genuine vulnerabilities is being taken.

Pakistan’s unresolved gaps

At Thursday’s news conference in Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s military offered its most detailed public account yet of what it has done to bolster its capabilities over the past year.

Lieutenant General Chaudhry announced the formal operationalisation of Army Rocket Force Command (ARFC), which the military described as being “equipped with modern technology and capable of targeting the enemy with high precision from every direction”.

The presentation unveiled a series of newly inducted systems in the last 12 months: the Fatah-III supersonic cruise missile; the Fatah-IV, with a stated range of 750km (466 miles); and the Fatah-V, described as a 1,000km (621-mile) deep-strike rocket system.

“The Rocket Force was not created specifically to ‘solve’ the BrahMos problem,” said Tughral Yamin, a defence analyst and former brigadier in the Pakistani army.

“Its purpose was institutional and doctrinal: to streamline and accelerate conventional missile decision-making while maintaining a clear separation from Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent architecture.”

Muhammad Faisal, a Sydney-based defence and foreign policy analyst, agreed with that distinction but pointed to the practical implications.

“Pakistan now has credible and usable conventional strike options,” he told Al Jazeera. “It will not stop India’s high-speed standoff strikes. But in the next round, India could expect Pakistan’s conventional cruise missile retaliation.”

However, Adil Sultan, a former Pakistan Air Force commodore, cautioned that the ARFC remained a work in progress.

“The rocket force seems to be still in its evolution phase,” he said, adding that newer systems, such as the Fatah-III, appear to provide “a credible response against BrahMos and other high-speed projectiles”.

Pakistan’s broader military procurement has continued in parallel. Islamabad raised its budget by 20 percent, allocating 2.55 trillion Pakistani rupees ($9bn) for military expenditure, according to budget documents presented by Minister of Finance Muhammad Aurangzeb in June last year.

That included 704 billion rupees ($2.5bn) for equipment and physical assets.

A 2025 report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted that Beijing had offered to sell Pakistan up to 40 J-35A fifth-generation fighter jets, although no deliveries have yet taken place.

In December 2025, Washington notified Congress of a proposed $686m package to upgrade Pakistan’s F-16 fleet, extending its operational life to 2040.

Christopher Clary, a political scientist at the University at Albany, cautioned against interpreting the upgrades as a straightforward shift in capability.

“We don’t know whether this will be just a ‘Red Queen’s race,’ where both sides race as fast as possible just to stay in the same relative position against one another”, he told Al Jazeera, “or if one party will pull away the next time around”.

Beyond the hardware

Despite these upgrades, Pakistan’s air defence posture remains its most exposed vulnerability, analysts point out.

Its Chinese-supplied HQ-9B surface-to-air missile system failed to intercept the BrahMos missiles during the May 2025 conflict.

Islamabad, according to Pakistani defence analyst Yamin, is now pursuing the longer-range HQ-19 ballistic missile defence system, with induction anticipated later in 2026.

Faisal, the Sydney-based analyst, described the Pakistani Air Force’s (PAF) opening performance on May 7, 2025, as impressive, but said that the later stages of the conflict exposed significant weaknesses.

“The PAF’s performance in the first phase of the conflict was genuinely remarkable,” he said. “It displayed both coherence and escalation discipline. However, later BrahMos strikes on airbases depicted gaps in ground air defences.”

New weapons systems alone, Faisal argued, would not be enough.

“Pakistan will have to meet this challenge through hardened shelters, dispersals, and urgent runway repair capacities to avoid being incapacitated in the next conflict,” he said.

The University at Albany’s Clary noted that the BrahMos missile’s combat debut had altered the strategic calculations for both sides.

“The BrahMos had never been used before in combat”, he said, “and so its use in 2025 will have given Pakistani air defence planners, and the Chinese manufacturers that make many of the Pakistani systems, a look at the technology”.

Whether there are straightforward countermeasures, or whether dealing with a hypersonic cruise missile like BrahMos remains beyond Pakistan’s current technological reach, is still unclear.

Yamin argued that the conflict also underscored the diminishing value of geography as strategic depth.

Strikes reached Nur Khan, Bholari and installations as far south as Sukkur.

“The conflict demonstrated that geography alone no longer provides strategic depth in the age of long-range precision weapons, drones, cyber capabilities, and satellite-guided systems,” he said.

Faisal put the doctrinal implications more directly.

“Deep strikes into Lahore, Karachi, and Rawalpindi demonstrate that ‘geographic immunity’ has eroded,” he said. “Doctrinally, Pakistan’s military is indicating preparation for conventional strikes from both ground and sea-based platforms to strike the Indian heartland, even at its southern shores, far from Pakistan.”

But that assessment is complicated by fiscal realities. Islamabad increased defence spending even as it cut overall federal expenditure by 7 percent to comply with its International Monetary Fund loan programme.

Meanwhile, India’s defence budget for 2025-26, according to Indian budget documents, stands at approximately $78.7bn, nearly nine times Pakistan’s official allocation.

India’s quieter reckoning

India’s official posture since the conflict has largely been one of vindication.

Praveen Donthi, a New Delhi-based analyst at the International Crisis Group, described it as an “opaque conflict” between two nuclear-armed nations.

Alongside the military exchange, he said, a parallel war of misinformation was fought online.

“Such misinformation had surprisingly allowed for an interesting end, as both sides could claim victory,” he told Al Jazeera. “Neither side wants to concede its losses.”

Second Chief of Defence Staff Chauhan’s remarks in Singapore remain the closest India has come to accountability on its aircraft losses. He said India had lost aircraft, “rectified tactics” and returned “in large numbers” to strike Pakistani airbases. But he had declined to specify how many aircraft were lost.

C Uday Bhaskar, a retired Indian Navy officer and director of the Society for Policy Studies in New Delhi, defended India’s reticence as operationally necessary, noting that Operation Sindoor still remains active, only on pause per the government, in India’s framing.

But, he said: “It would have been more appropriate for a democracy like India if this statement had been made in parliament by the defence minister,” he told Al Jazeera.

The diplomatic fallout has also proved uncomfortable for New Delhi.

India insisted that the ceasefire that ended the war was settled bilaterally, rejecting repeated claims by Trump that he deserved credit, even as Pakistan publicly thanked the US president and nominated him for the Nobel Prize.

The contrast shaped how the aftermath was interpreted internationally.

Pakistani Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir’s subsequent trajectory underscored the shift. In June last year, Trump hosted him for a White House lunch, the first time a US president had privately received a Pakistani military chief without civilian leadership present.

By April 2026, Munir’s global rise had taken him to Tehran as the first regional military leader to travel there since the US and Israel launched war on Iran on February 28. He played a central role in the April 8 ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, and has continued to play a prominent mediatory role since.

Meanwhile, India’s evolving doctrine, which treats major attacks as acts of war, carries risks of its own.

The International Crisis Group’s Donthi said that New Delhi believes it has “called Islamabad’s bluff over what it terms nuclear blackmail by engaging in a limited conflict below the nuclear threshold”.

India’s primary condition for diplomatic re-engagement, he said, is “the credible and verifiable enforcement of the prohibition on all anti-India militant groups”.

So, the inherent conditions that led to last year’s war remain unresolved.

“Due to mutual distrust and the absence of reliable communication channels, the likelihood of conflict reigniting is significant,” Donthi said.

The water front

Of all the vulnerabilities exposed by the conflict, the one that appears to be attracting the least concrete policy responses is the water issue, say analysts.

India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) on April 23 last year and has yet to reinstate it.

The treaty underpins one of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation systems, supplying more than 80 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural water, according to the World Bank, and sustaining the livelihoods of more than 240 million people.

Pakistan’s effective water storage capacity stands at roughly 30 days, compared with India’s – between 120 and 220 days.

Pakistani Minister for Planning Development Ahsan Iqbal, addressing a government meeting on water on April 30, said that India’s attempts to use water as an instrument of pressure highlighted “a serious external dimension to Pakistan’s water security.”

Experts caution against viewing the move as an immediate operational crisis.

Erum Sattar, a US-based independent water law and policy scholar, argued that India’s invocation of “abeyance” from the pact has no basis in the treaty’s legal framework.

Under the treaty’s terms, she said, India remains obligated to share data on water releases and river conditions.

“While not having this information certainly impacts Pakistan’s water security and needs to be catalogued and contested, its immediate effects are limited,” she told Al Jazeera.

Naseer Memon, an Islamabad-based environmental specialist, agreed.

“India’s suspension of the IWT is illegal and unethical, but it does not pose any imminent threat,” he said, arguing that internal failings, including poorly maintained canals, outdated farming practices and unsuitable cropping patterns, posed more immediate dangers.

Hassan Abbas, an Islamabad-based water and environment consultant, offered a sharper assessment.

“The worst outcome for Pakistan’s water security is not hypothetical,” he told Al Jazeera. “It already occurred and was legitimised by the Indus Waters Treaty.”

Abbas argued that the treaty had, from its inception, formalised rather than prevented Pakistan’s water insecurity. “In effect, the treaty let India take all the water that could be taken, and ‘gave’ Pakistan what couldn’t,” he said.

The longer-term outlook is less reassuring. Sattar argued that the infrastructure Pakistan is now rushing to build may offer diminishing returns as temperatures rise.

If global temperatures increase by 3-4 degrees Celsius (37-39F), she said, between one-third and half of the region’s glaciers could disappear.

“Pakistan will need to learn how to build an economy that delivers for its people with a drastically reduced amount of water,” she said. “That is the real threat to national security, not, per se, transboundary water challenges.”

Clary offered a more measured assessment. A collapse of the IWT cooperation would become “a major political and economic irritant in the India-Pakistan relationship for the indefinite future”, he said, but noted that “irritants are rarely triggers for conflict”.

India has said that the treaty will remain suspended until Pakistan takes what New Delhi describes as credible and irreversible steps against cross-border armed groups that target India and Indian-administered Kashmir.

But 12 months after the missile exchanges, no diplomatic resolution is in sight.

Faisal, the Sydney-based scholar, said the doctrinal logic on both sides was still playing out.

“Pakistan has to demonstrate long-range conventional missile strikes and drones flying… over major Indian cities during the next crisis,” he said. “Only then will this option be disavowed by both sides.”

Bhaskar, for his part, offered a warning that cut across both capitals.

“Both sides ought to invest in Plan B diplomacy and quiet channels to control the escalation,” he said. “For when it occurs, it will be very rapid.”