"Although both governments want to avoid a slide into all-out war, India is determined to respond forcefully to the most serious incursion into its territory since 1948," says TIME New Delhi correspondent Maseeh Rahman. "Pakistan may be tempted to defend the infiltrators by attacking Indian planes, but that would mean a full-scale war." Pakistan has denied responsibility for the incursion by heavily armed insurgents, some of whom may have been trained in the Afghanistan camps of alleged superterrorist Osama Bin Laden. But Islamabad's protestations of innocence are dismissed in New Delhi, which insists that an incursion of this scale could not have been undertaken without active Pakistani military involvement. Thursday's shoot-down is taken by India as further proof of Pakistani complicity. The countries have fought two of their three wars in the past five decades over Kashmir. But now that they're armed with nuclear weapons, leaders on both sides face the complex challenge of retaliating ever more forcefully while avoiding an actual war.
Pakistan and India Play Dangerous Tit-for-Tat
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Now it's India's turn. Politically, the last thing either India or Pakistan can afford to do is to show weakness in relation to the other. So New Delhi is now bound to up the ante after Pakistan Thursday downed an Indian MiG-27 and claimed to have also hit an Indian MiG-21 that had crashed in the Kashmir border region. The two nuclear-armed states are once again jostling at the brink of full-blown war in Kashmir after India Wednesday began bombing some 600 Pakistan-backed guerrillas who had crossed into its territory.