New Delhi, May 20 -- The recent ceasefire announced by India and Pakistan ended, at least for now, the latest bout of armed conflict between the two South Asian rivals. The announcement followed the launch of Operation Sindoor - India's response to the April 22 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, which claimed the lives of 26 people. India's strike prompted a worrying tit-for-tat standoff which quickly escalated into the worst conflict between the two nuclear-armed nations in a quarter-century. The fighting has stopped for now, leaving policymakers, scholars, and analysts the task of deciphering the longer-term consequences of the recent crisis. One of the most thoughtful analysts in this space is Christopher Clary, who teaches political science at the University of Albany and is affiliated with the Henry L Stimson Center in Washington DC. Clary spoke about the recent crisis on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Clary told host Milan Vaishnav that the Pahalgam episode marked a new chapter in India-Pakistan relations and that he believes the recent conflict will serve as a template for the next crisis. "It's tough to know in these early days how confident Indian decisionmakers were about how they calibrated escalation in this crisis," Clary explained. "But there's no doubt that standoff air-delivered weapons or [ground-launched] missiles.and drones - all of those things are more easily calibrated than the use of ground power." Clary said that India showed that it can choose which rung to reach for on the escalation ladder and, "while both countries might wind up one or two rungs above where they desired, they didn't wind up ten rungs from where they desired." The scholar noted that India hopes to secure what security studies theorists refer to as "escalation dominance" - that at each step of the escalation ladder, India wants to show that it can win at the level. "The problem for India is that India does have escalation dominance along most of the rungs of the ladder, but it appears that Pakistan has at least as many - and possible more - nuclear weapons than India," Clary explained. "So, at the highest rung of the ladder, you get parity again - and it's unclear how far the shadow of that parity at the very top casts on the rungs below." A distinctive feature of this crisis, Clary said, was the degree of misinformation and disinformation about strikes and counterstrikes, which made it very hard for researchers to separate fact from fiction. "There have always been rumours in war. The problem is that people could not easily report on those rumors to the world, they could only report on those rumors to whomever they bumped into on the street," noted Clary. "And now reporters, who in India and Pakistan are in a very competitive media environment, are also rewarded by virality." If you can move first on a big story, Clary stated, that may be the difference between your continued employment and not. While many of these rumours began with quasi-reporters who fancy themselves as journalists but perhaps don't get a paycheck from a journalistic media firm, Clary said, they were picked up and amplified by established reporters on both sides. This, in turn, spilled over out of social media and into the cable newsroom. The result, Clary lamented, was a "perfect, bottom-up, technology-driven storm of misinformation that we are all trying to wade through to figure out what is real and what is false."...