Pakistan marks one-year ceasefire anniversary

Pakistan is marking the first anniversary of the May 10, 2025 ceasefire with a mix of celebration, warning, and traffic control — which tells you a lot about where things stand. The guns have mostly stayed quiet for a year. But the politics underneath never really cooled, and neither side is pretending trust has come back. Pakistan’s military used the anniversary week to warn that any new “hostile design” would be met with even greater force, while Islamabad locked down parts of the capital for commemorative events branded as “Marka-e-Haq,” or Battle of Truth. (arabnews.com) What happened a year ago? A militant attack near Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22, 2025 killed 26 civilians, mostly tourists. India blamed Pakistan-backed militants. Pakistan denied involvement. India then launched strikes inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir on May 7, and the two countries spent four days exchanging missiles, drones, and artillery before a U.S.-brokered ceasefire was announced on May 10, 2025. (en.wikipedia.org) So why does the anniversary matter if the ceasefire is still holding? Because the ceasefire stopped a war, not the crisis. The current reality is a brittle pause. One broad summary of the moment is simple: the shooting largely stopped, but little else did. Diplomatic contact is thin, trade links remain badly damaged, and the old habit of managing tensions through quiet back channels looks weaker than before. (aol.com) Why is Pakistan leaning so hard into commemoration? Partly for domestic politics. The state is presenting the 2025 clash as proof of military readiness and national unity. Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Rizwan Saeed Sheikh, said India mistook Pakistan’s desire for peace as weakness and argued the confrontation reaffirmed Pakistan’s strategic importance. That message is aimed outward, but also inward — at a public that has lived through economic strain, political turmoil, and a long argument over the military’s role in national life. (pakistantoday.com.pk) What is India saying on its side? Basically the mirror image. Indian officials and media tied the anniversary to “Operation Sindoor,” the name for India’s 2025 strikes, and cast it as a demonstration that New Delhi had changed the rules of engagement after the Pahalgam killings. That matters because both governments are now selling the same four-day conflict as a strategic success. When both sides think deterrence worked for them, the next crisis can get dangerous fast. (dw.com) What is still broken? The biggest practical rupture is water. India put the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty into abeyance after the 2025 attack, and a year later that freeze is still central to the dispute. For decades, the treaty was one of the few systems that kept functioning even when everything else went dark. Losing that stabilizer raises the risk that future crises spill beyond the military track into agriculture, infrastructure, and long-term economic security. (digitallibrary.un.org) Has Pakistan gained anything regionally from all this? Maybe, but in a narrow way. Pakistan has been trying to show that even while relations with India stay frozen, it can still matter diplomatically elsewhere. Reporting around the past month points to Islamabad pushing mediation and facilitation efforts in U.S.-Iran talks. Even if those efforts are uneven, the signal is clear: Pakistan wants to be seen not just as a security problem, but as a regional broker. (aljazeera.com) The bottom line is that this anniversary is not really about peace. It is about deterrence theater after a near-war. The ceasefire has lasted one year, which is real and important. But the structures that normally make peace durable — dialogue, trade, treaties, and a shared story about what happened — are still missing. (aol.com)