India and Pakistan began shelling one another on Wednesday, marking a dangerous escalation of hostilities between two adjacent nuclear powers. The hostilities commenced after India launched missile strikes at nine sites in Pakistan that it called “terrorist infrastructure.” In response, Pakistani military forces said they shot down five Indian jets and one Indian drone in “self-defense.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called India’s airstrike “an act of war” and vowed retaliation. Meanwhile, the casualties already number at least 26 killed and 46 wounded in Pakistan, and at least eight killed in India.

India launched the airstrike in response to an April 22 terror attack, in which Islamists killed 26 tourists in the secluded Kashmiri town of Pahalgam. India’s mountainous Kashmir region draws thousands of visitors daily, The Wall Street Journal explains, especially in summer when it provides relief from the intense heat further south. Counted by civilian casualties, this was the worst terror attack in India since the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

On April 23, the Islamist group Kashmir Resistance (a.k.a. The Resistance Front, or TRF) took credit for the Pahalgam attack. According to the Delhi-based South Asia Terrorism Portal, TRF is an offshoot of the Pakistani group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT). The U.S. government lists LT as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) and has sanctioned the group’s leaders. However, LT still received $200,000 in USAID subgrants in 2021 and 2023.

“The attack in Pahalgam was marked by extreme barbarity, with the victims mostly killed with head-shots from close range and in front of their families,” declared Indian Foreign Secretary Shri Vikram Misri. “Family members were deliberately traumatized through the manner of the killing, accompanied by the exhortation that they should take back the message.”

India codenamed the airstrike “Operation Sindoor” (referring to the dots of red powder Indian wives wear on their foreheads), in honor of those made widows by the Pahalgam terror attack.

Kashmir has been an explosive hotspot ever since India and Pakistan first gained their independence from Great Britain in 1947. British India was roughly divided along religious lines, with Pakistan receiving Muslim-dominated areas (Muslim-majority “East Pakistan” later broke away to become Bangladesh), and India receiving Hindu-dominated areas. But India and Pakistan have constantly feuded over Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region under predominantly Indian control. India and Pakistan went to war over the Kashmir territorial dispute in 1947, 1965, and 1971.

In 1974, India raised the stakes by acquiring nuclear weapons, and Pakistan also got nuclear weapons in 1998. The presence of nuclear weapons (164 for India and 170 for Pakistan) have made the Indian subcontinent more dangerous and more peaceful at the same time. On the one hand, the ever-present threat of nuclear attack keeps both adversaries on high alert throughout their 2,000-mile-long border. On the other hand, the ever-present threat of nuclear attack has prompted both nations to respond more cautiously and without unnecessary escalation to provocations in this century.

“We have seen this film play out before,” said Aparna Pande, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute. “Every few years, a terror attack takes place inside India, which is almost always linked to a Pakistan-based jihadi group. The two countries escalate tensions, and because they are nuclear-armed neighbors, the global community comes in to try and diffuse the crisis.” She mentioned attacks in 2019, 2016, 2008, and more, going back at least to 1989.

Accordingly, India insisted that its latest strikes were “focused, measured, and non-escalatory in nature.” Sharif divulged Indian intelligence indicating that “further attacks against India were impending. There was thus a compulsion both to deter and to pre-empt.”

Pakistan sees the Kashmir question in quite a different light. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari complained earlier this year that India was “taking steps, aimed at altering the demographic and political fabric” of Kashmir, subjecting Kashmiris to “oppression, violence, and systemic brutalities.” Pakistani army chief, Gen. Asim Munir, envisions the India-Pakistan struggle as an intractable war of religion, describing Kashmir as “our jugular vein.”

Americans may be prone to minimize the religious aspect of the India-Pakistan conflict. After all, the West doesn’t fight religious wars anymore, and most adherents of Asian religions who come to America aren’t fighting them either.

But Americans can overlook the fundamentally religious nature of the conflict only at their peril. Not only does the ancient pagan pantheon of Hinduism have little in common with the starkly moralistic counterfeit of Christianity that is Islam, but both belief systems are deeply cultural and political phenomena. For many in the secularized West, one’s religion is an accessory to one’s identity; in south Asia, religion defines a person’s identity.

For that matter, both Hinduism — especially the ascendant nationalist Hinduism — and Islam are hostile to Christianity and have a poor record on religious freedom. In fact, India is quickly becoming one of the most dangerous countries in the world for Christians today.

Thus far, official American statements about the conflict have remained noncommittal. When asked about it, President Trump responded, “It’s a shame, we just heard about it as we were walking in the doors of [the] Oval [Office]. … They’ve been fighting for a long time. … I just hope it ends very quickly.” Meanwhile, the State Department is monitoring the situation.

Interestingly, Israel has taken a far stronger stance in India’s favor. “Israel supports India’s right for self defense,” tweeted Israeli Ambassador to India Reuven Azar. “Terrorists should know there’s no place to hide from their heinous crimes against the innocent. #OperationSindoor.” Both nations view Islamist terrorism as an existential threat, creating a natural bond on which to build a broader military alliance, despite their religious differences. India is also the largest buyer of Israeli arms exports.

It’s too early yet to say whether the latest Kashmir tensions will break out into full-scale war. It’s certainly true that two adjacent enemies are currently firing at one another. It is also possible — given the nuclear weapons held by both sides — that both militaries will seek ways to de-escalate. The only thing we can say for certain is that the Kashmir conflict presents just one more flashpoint in a world that has already grown too dangerous.