Air Chief Marshal AP Singh
NEW DELHI: The world should learn about conflict termination from India, which ended the cross-border hostilities with Pakistan after striking it “nice and hard” under Operation Sindoor while taking care to avoid civilian casualties, because it had achieved its main objectives, Air Chief Marshal A P Singh said on Friday.Citing ongoing long-drawn wars like Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, the IAF chief said prolonged conflicts often result from “egos coming in between” as well as shifting objectives and goalposts.”Yes, Pakistan was on the back foot, no doubt, but what were our objectives? Our objective was anti-terrorism. We had to strike them. We had done that. So, if our objectives have been met, then why should we not terminate a conflict? Why should we carry on?” ACM Singh said, brushing aside criticism from some quarters that the May 7-10 conflict was stopped prematurely by India. “Any conflict has a lot of price which has to be paid. It will affect our preparedness for the next one. It will affect our economy. It will affect the country’s general progress. So, the world should learn from India how to start and terminate a conflict at the earliest possible opportunity,” he said, speaking at an Air Force Association meeting here.The IAF chief added, “We were given terrorist targets. We accurately struck them. When our enemies refused to stop the war and tried to attack us, then we struck them nice and hard. Many of their bases were damaged. A lot of their infrastructure, radars, control and coordination centres, their hangars, aircraft, suffered a lot of damage.”Referring to the doubts about the operational success of the air strikes at the JeM terror facility at Balakot in Feb 2019, ACM Singh said there was also an emphasis on getting video and other evidence during Op Sindoor so that “we could tell our critics that this was the damage caused”.On taking care to minimise collateral damage, he said Pakistan did not even close some of its airfields like Lahore during the conflict, using civilian air traffic as a cover for launching attacks and drones against India. “But we had decided that no matter what happens, we should not harm any such aircraft, even by chance, in which there are civilians or any other non-military personnel,” ACM Singh said.He described IAF’s Russian-origin S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system, which was forward deployed but kept changing its location due to high mobility to beat enemy targeting, as “a game-changer” during the conflict. “Our long-range radars and missile systems could threaten the enemy aircraft well inside their own territory. They could not operate even in their own territory. They could not even come up to weapons release range without being threatened and those who came had to face damage,” the IAF chief said.
