The Drone, the Strike, and the Ritual: Why Kashmir’s War Is Never Really About Kashmir – The renewed fighting in Kashmir this month – Pakistan’s drone strike on Indian positions in Kupwara and India’s swift air and artillery retaliation across the Line of Control – has been framed, yet again, as a border skirmish between two nuclear-armed rivals. That framing is worse than lazy. It is dangerously outdated.
What erupted in May 2025 wasn’t a conventional dispute over lines on a map. It was a clash between rival political theologies, each rooted in a civilizational project that has outgrown the Westphalian state system. Kashmir is no longer the frozen conflict we pretended it was for decades. It is a proving ground for a new geopolitical order – one that bears far more resemblance to the medieval world than the postwar international system we still claim to inhabit.
Image of Pakistan’s missiles. Image: Creative Commons.
To see Kashmir clearly, we must first let go of the fiction that the modern world is governed by rational states pursuing secular interests in a rules-based framework. That fiction may have offered temporary stability under American hegemony, but it is collapsing under the weight of multipolarity. What’s emerging in its place is something far older: a world of overlapping sovereignties, sacred geographies, and hybrid warfare – a world, in short, that looks strikingly like the political order of the Middle Ages.
Start with India. Under Narendra Modi’s rule, India has evolved from a post-colonial democracy into an avowedly civilizational state. The logic of secular pluralism has given way to a muscular Hindutva vision of Bharat—a sacred homeland that must be unified, purified, and defended. In this vision, Kashmir is not merely a territory. It is a sanctified limb of the national body politic. Its loss—or even the suggestion of its illegitimacy within India—is treated not as a geopolitical setback but as a spiritual wound.
This is why New Delhi’s reaction to the Pakistani drone strike was not just retaliatory – it was sacramental. When Indian fighter jets crossed into Pakistani-administered territory, they did not do so merely to restore deterrence. They did so to enact sovereignty. To reassert, in symbolic and literal terms, the indivisibility of the Indian state and the primacy of its civilizational core. This was not Clausewitzian war – it was war as liturgy, waged not for territorial gain but to reaffirm a sacred order.
Pakistan, of course, plays a parallel game. For Islamabad – more precisely, for the Pakistani military and intelligence elite – Kashmir remains the ideological keystone of the Islamic Republic. Partition’s unfinished business, the Kashmir cause, provides not only moral legitimacy but institutional purpose. The drone strike was not the beginning of a campaign to “liberate” the Valley. It was an attempt to reassert relevance in a strategic environment where Pakistan increasingly plays second fiddle to China even in its own sphere of influence.
And yet, both India and Pakistan operate under the illusion that they are still players in a late-modern world of diplomacy, international law, and strategic restraint. The reality is that they are acting out roles that would have been legible to any medieval chronicler. Just as the Angevin kings and Capetian rivals fought ritualized wars over borderlands they both deemed sacred, so too do Delhi and Islamabad perform sovereignty in Kashmir as much as they contest it.
But what’s truly medieval about this moment is not just the symbolic language of war. It’s the structural conditions in which these conflicts now unfold.
The medieval world was defined by the absence of a singular sovereign. Authority was diffuse, legitimacy was contested, and violence was an accepted means of communication. The Pope might condemn a war, but he lacked the means to stop it. In today’s international system, the United States plays the role of that enfeebled papacy: still issuing statements, still invoking norms, but increasingly unable – or unwilling – to enforce them.
Washington’s calls for “restraint on both sides” are not just ineffective. They are irrelevant. India no longer needs American cover to assert dominance in Kashmir, nor does it fear meaningful diplomatic blowback. Pakistan, though battered and isolated, still knows that neither the United States nor China will allow it to collapse outright. And so, both sides escalate, confident that the ceiling of international concern is a sternly worded press release.
This diffusion of authority is not a bug in the system – it is the system. In a world where great powers retreat, regional powers are no longer constrained. The vacuum is filled not by liberal order, but by political theology and ritualized violence. Kashmir is not a border dispute gone wrong. It is the inevitable result of this emerging neo-medieval order.
And the danger is not just regional. A conflict like this – driven by symbolism, fueled by identity, and detached from classical deterrence theory – is inherently unstable. In the Cold War, India and Pakistan could be counted on to escalate within limits. Today, with China lurking behind Pakistan and the U.S. tethered to India for its anti-China Indo-Pacific strategy, those limits are eroding.
Kashmir is becoming a site of convergence for multiple civilizational tensions. Delhi sees it as a frontier in its struggle to consolidate a Hindu national identity. Islamabad sees it as the litmus test of Muslim solidarity. Beijing sees it as a node in its wider effort to encircle and contain India through its Belt and Road-adjacent infrastructure investments in Pakistan. And Washington? Washington sees it – when it sees it at all – as an inconvenient distraction from its preferred Indo-Pacific narrative.
But strategic vision demands more than selective attention. If we continue to treat Kashmir as a localized flashpoint, we will miss what it actually is: a test case for how conflict works in a world no longer governed by Westphalian logic. The era of clearly demarcated borders, secular sovereignty, and regulated war is ending. What replaces it is a system in which legitimacy is claimed through history, identity, and faith – and in which war becomes a means of storytelling, not just statecraft.
If there is a lesson to be drawn from medieval geopolitics, it is that conflicts like this do not end with treaties. They end with exhaustion, or with the rise of a new hegemon capable of imposing order. Neither of those conditions exists today. Instead, we are drifting back into a world of frontiers, not borders – zones of contested meaning, perpetually unstable, and prone to flare-ups when leaders need to reaffirm their sacred role.
That is what we saw in Kashmir this month. Not a border incident. Not an aberration. But a ritual. One that will repeat itself – again and again – until we realize that the post-war dream of orderly international relations has given way to something much older, and far more dangerous.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, where he writes a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
