I almost stopped reading your post after this sentence. But even funnier was your response to Plawolf, where you implied that Russia would intervene against China, to save India... lolz.
In any case, you're making a whole lot of assumptions based on the same bean-counting approach. If 2019 exposed anything for the IAF, its that its "air situation" is worse than the PAF's. Simply name dropping Rafales (and now apparently "F-35s" + "Su-57s"...?) to remedy the situation won't work. We literally just discussed this. And you also brought up ATGMs again, trying to make an invalid point which has already been covered in the threads I referred you to. I'm noticing that you have a tendency to ignore what the other person is saying and just wiggle around the same point from different angles. That is annoying, stop it, if you want people to keep responding to you politely.
Also, CPEC isn't "dead." If you're referring to some DAWN articles, newspapers and political budgetary concerns don't control CPEC. That is a Pakistani Army supervised project and a matter of national security. It is basically untouchable. The pandemic will slow it down, but it will not stop it.
Indeed, but interdiction alone isn't enough for a decisive conclusion. You actually need to take the sector before the end of the war if you want to claim the territory. And that sector connecting Kashmir to India is vital, because if that is taken, whatever India has left in the valley is irrelevant.
I didn't intend to imply that Russia would bail India out vs China, I implied that Russia wouldn't accept a Chinese crippling of India and it'd create tensions.
Russia long-term is a European power, my phrase: "China is the mistress, Europe is the wife. The husband might dally with the mistress, but eventually he'll return to the wife." And the timing of Russia-Europe integration has to be to China's favor, not to its disfavor.
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I think if you look closely at the terrain and the relative economic capabilities of Pakistan and India, there is no way a Chinese, Pakistani, or Sino-Pakistani military adventure in Kashmir could work.
Put another way, I'd view the Indians as delusional, but the Pakistanis as even more delusional, given that they're stuck hewing to Chinese skirts because they have no way to defeat India.
Hell, when it comes to potential Pakistani allies against India, Iran is arguably a more effective power as while China would like Pakistan to be an effective offset to India, China can't effectively intervene for Pakistan given the difficulties of terrain; at best, China could set up rocket parks and airfields to shatter the InAF, but the Indians have a lot of air defense themselves.
Iran, on the other hand, has good direct land access to Pakistan and can do a decent job of directly reinforcing Pakistan with ground forces. Hell, Iran happens to be more developed as a state than either Pakistan or India; despite continuous US sanctions, Iran has around 5500 USD GDP / capita.
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As far as your Pakistani air superiority issue goes, you're basically assuming the InAF/InA is a mess and completely incompetent. I'd say that's nationalistically tinged, and while it might be true, it's not something that can be relied on. The point is development over time; an Indian interlocutor was once surprised when I told him I tend to look at things in the 2100 time-frame, and when he acted surprised, I told him that's a Chinese thing, when you consider the Han Xiongnu War took 25 years to execute and took 75 years to build-up to.
Over the time frames we're looking at today, I was originally proposing 5 years for the PLA to build up enough forces in India to make Kashmir viable. But right now, today, the Pakistani air force can't even handle the Su-30MKI with antiquated F-16s and JF-17s. If the JF-17 Block 3 had come online earlier, it could have maintained parity, but the JF-17 Block 3 just made its maiden flight this year in China. If it had come online last year, for a brief period, PAF would have had a major technological, but not quantitative, advantage over the InAF's old Su-30MKIs, but it didn't, and once the Rafales come online only the direct sale, which the Chinese have banned, of J-20s would have reversed the balance.
