Indo-Pakistani Wars

The Indo-Pakistani Wars are a series of conflicts fought between India and Pakistan since the two states' violent partition from British India in 1947, driven chiefly by the unresolved dispute over the former princely state of Kashmir. The First Kashmir War, 1947 to 1948, began almost immediately after partition and ended with a United Nations-brokered ceasefire that divided Kashmir along a line of control without resolving its final status. India and Pakistan fought again in the Second Kashmir War of 1965, ended by the Soviet-brokered Tashkent Agreement, and then in a much larger Third war in 1971, in which Indian intervention in support of Bengali nationalists led directly to the creation of an independent Bangladesh from what had been East Pakistan. The two countries clashed once more in the limited but intense Kargil War of 1999, fought at high altitude in the Kashmir region after Pakistani forces infiltrated across the line of control. None of these wars has resolved the underlying Kashmir dispute, which remains divided along a heavily militarized line of control between the two nuclear-armed states.