After the Crisis: Three Futures for India and Pakistan

This is the closing report in the series, and it turns from what has happened to what comes next. It asks where the India-Pakistan relationship is heading a year after the April-May 2025 crisis, now that the relationship has been stripped to almost nothing, with no trade, a suspended Indus Waters Treaty, downgraded missions, and severed people-to-people ties.
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This is the closing report in the series, and it turns from what has happened to what comes next. It asks where the India-Pakistan relationship is heading a year after the April-May 2025 crisis, now that the relationship has been stripped to almost nothing, with no trade, a suspended Indus Waters Treaty, downgraded missions, and severed people-to-people ties. It works through the forces most likely to shape the next phase: the water dispute, terror attacks as crisis triggers, both sides’ growing appetite for escalation, the offense-defense spiral in air defenses, and the surprisingly durable May 10 ceasefire. It then lays out three scenarios that follow from Munir’s concentration of power: renewed conflict, a Musharraf-style push for peace, or a preference for the status quo, and closes by weighing the second-order risks for India, from Pakistan’s rising standing in the Gulf to the warming of US-Pakistan ties.

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