Trump claims five jets were shot down in India-Pakistan skirmish

TOI correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump on Friday claimed that up to five fighter jets were shot down during the recent India-Pakistan conflict, triggering a social media dogfight between partisans over which country came up trumps in the brief war.

At a White House dinner with Republican lawmakers, Trump, who is under political siege domestically over the Epstein tapes, resorted to his oft-repeated claims about being a global peacemaker, citing his role in defusing the India-Pakistan clash.

"We stopped a lot of wars. And these were serious. India and Pakistan, that was going on. Planes were being shot out of there. I think four-five jets, maybe were shot down, actually, Trump said, without identifying which country lost the jets or the basis for his claims.

"... they were (going) back and forth, and it was getting bigger and bigger, and we got it solved through trade. We said.. We're not making a trade deal if you're going to be throwing around weapons, and maybe nuclear weapons," Trump asserted in claims that have been refuted by New Delhi.

Trump also gave a nuclear dimension to the conflict although most analysts say the spat came nowhere near breaching a nuclear threshold.

While Pakistanis gloated under the assumption that Trump meant five Indian jets were shot down, India partisans maintained that the US President did not specify which country the fighter planes belonged to and Pakistan too had lost jets in the skirmish.

However, top Indian military officials have acknowledged lately that they lost an unspecified number of jets in the initial skirmish, suggesting that they were operating below a certain political threshold before being given a free hand. This resulted in a broader response that put several Pakistani bases and airfields out of commission before the US stepped in to save it.

In a recent report, the Economist, citing unnamed foreign military officials, claimed five Indian aircraft were destroyed, including at least one Rafale. The report also said Indian military officials are starting to indicate that the losses may have stemmed from Indian errors rather than technological deficiencies.

"Early reports suggested that the decisive factor was the superiority of Pakistan’s Chinese-made j-10 fighters and its pl-15 air-to-air missiles. India does appear to have underestimated those. And China may have also tipped the balance by providing Pakistan with early warning and real-time targeting data," the report said.

But given India’s success later on in the fight, the journal added, the bigger problem might have been how India used its own fighters on the first night of the brief war. It cited an Indian defense attache in Jakarta who told a seminar earlier this month that India lost some aircraft only because its political leadership had ordered its air force not to hit Pakistan’s air defences. Instead, they targeted only militant sites on the first day.

“After the loss, we changed our tactics and we went for their military installations,” the attache, Captain Shiv Kumar, was quoted as saying. Most analysts now say that after adopting an initial posture of only hitting terrorist compounds in response to the Pahalgam attack, New Delhi turned it around by lifting the constraints on its military after the setback in the air.