Victory has a thousand fathers, as they say, but defeat is an orphan.
And so it goes after the brief but bruising conflict between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan with both sides loudly talking up their successes while quietly down-playing losses.
On India’s frantic television news channels, minutes after a US-brokered ceasefire came into force, the headline “Pakistan Surrenders” was splashed across the screens.
India’s military action against Pakistan, sparked by the killing of tourists in India-administered Kashmir last month, sent a bold message to terrorists, India’s defense minister, Rajnath Singh, said later.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, crowds gathered in the streets of the capital to celebrate what Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif described as “military history” achieved by “our brave army in a spectacular fashion.”
“In a few hours our jets silenced India’s guns in a way that history will not soon forget,” Sharif said, while an effigy of his Indian counterpart burned outside.
But this was an eruption of violence between two nuclear-armed neighbors in which both sides delivered and suffered heavy blows.
Pakistan has trumpeted successes in the skies, claiming its pilots shot down five Indian fighter jets in aerial battles – including three advanced French-made Rafales – in what would be a stinging humiliation for the Indian air force.
But Indian officials are still refusing to acknowledge even a single aircraft loss.
Meanwhile, India has released new satellite images showing serious damage to air strips and radar stations at what Indian defense officials say are multiple Pakistani military bases crippled by massive Indian airstrikes.
In other words, political and military leaders in India and Pakistan can spin it how they like, but there is no clear winner in this conflict.
There’s even a struggle to take credit for what were clearly US-brokered negotiations that led to the ceasefire, announced almost out of the blue by US President Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform.
Amid a rapidly deteriorating security situation at the weekend, which threatened to spin out of control, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he and Vice President JD Vance called political and military leaders on both sides urging them to hold back.
Pakistani officials expressed gratitude for the intervention. But Indian leaders are playing down any US role, saying the truce was worked out between India and Pakistan directly.
The reason is likely to be driven by national pride, with Indian officials loathe to admit a truce was imposed on them, or even brokered, by the United States.
India also has a long-standing policy of refusing to allow foreign mediation when it comes to the status of Muslim-majority Kashmir – a disputed region claimed by both India and Pakistan in its entirety – which has been at the center of the latest conflict with Pakistan and which India regards as a strictly internal matter.
Nevertheless, perhaps buoyed by his quick ceasefire win, President Trump has offered to help the two countries find a lasting solution “after a thousand years” concerning Kashmir. Inevitably, Pakistan has welcomed the idea, while in India it has fallen on deaf ears.
The offer is a stark reminder, though, that the US-brokered truce is little more than a quick fix, a band aid that is unlikely to remotely address the fundamental grievances fueling what is actually a decades long dispute, over the status of Kashmir.
And if you think the Indian and Pakistani claims of victory both ring a bit hollow now, just wait until the simmering Kashmir dispute, inevitably, boils over once again.
