Daily Times

On the nuclear front, no other region of the world has been experiencing developments quite like the South Asia region has. The decade of the 1990s prompted its de facto nuclearisation when the region’s two giants, India and Pakistan, went nuclear in May 1998, though India had tested its nuclear weapon in 1974.

The Brasstacks crisis of 1987 and the Kashmir insurgency crisis of 1990 — when there was witnessed massive deployment and maneuvering of troops by India and Pakistan along their shared border — could not mature into a war between them because of presumed nuclear deterrence, as India had overt nuclear capability while Pakistan had opaque nuclear capability. Similarly, the Kargil war in 1999 and, in the wake of a five-man militant attack on the Indian parliament, the large scale military stand-off in 2001-2002 between the armies of India and Pakistan could not ripen into an across-the-border war because of affirmed nuclear deterrence expressed by both the countries. This was the time when India practiced the Sundarji Doctrine (1981-2004), which was primarily defensive or counter-offensive in nature. In this way, nuclear deterrence (by having large-yield strategic nuclear weapons deliverable through long-range ballistic missiles or airplanes) served its purpose of establishing regional peace by raising the fear that conventional war might turn into nuclear war.

Now, it seems that the space hogged by nuclear deterrence to avert a conventional war in South Asia has shrunk. India claims to have not only created some space to launch a limited sub-conventional war (predicated on the element of surprise) against Pakistan but that it also has the ability to sustain it below the nuclear-threshold level. Replacing the Sundarji Doctrine, India has declared the Cold Start Doctrine, which derives its strength from the blitzkrieg strategy used by India in December 1971 against Pakistan’s army in East Pakistan to hasten the emergence of an independent Bangladesh. Through the Cold Start Doctrine, India envisions that, in case of war, it can divide Pakistan into two halves by separating Sindh or the Pakistani part of Kashmir from Punjab in a quick and powerful manner, besides holding the occupied limited area for some time to bargain with. Lately, a modified version of the doctrine has been tossed around. This version detaches itself from the war-time-only limitation and unlocks the possibility for a peacetime swift, potent but short duration surprising assault. The probable, identified areas in Pakistan are those that come under the sway of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), an internationally banned organisation notorious for attacks inside India to liberate Indian-held Kashmir.

Pakistan has not fully realised yet that the Mumbai attacks in 2008 changed India. The books written on Ajmal Kasab, the then sole survivor from amongst the attackers, describe the plan in detail, besides establishing the relationship of all the attackers to Pakistan. Lately, it has been reported in the media that, on the visit of Pakistan’s Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif to the US in October this year, the US authorities presented Nawaz Sharif with the evidence implicating three Pakistanis in the attack, which took place on July 27 this year on a passenger bus and in a police station in the Gurdaspur district of India and which consumed the lives of about one dozen Indian civilians and policemen. On their way to the police station, the attackers thankfully failed to explode a railway track on a bridge, though they had planted a mine there. The Global Positioning System (GPS) sets recovered from the attackers (after they were killed in a gun battle) indicated Sargodha (in Pakistan) as the starting point of their journey on July 21. Incidents such as these ratchet up the possibility of provoking India into thinking out-of-the-box ways of avoiding war in the face of nuclear deterrence. The projected modified version of the Cold Start Doctrine seems to have a solution for this emerging scenario, which India calls Pakistan’s asymmetric war against it. The likelihood of any such attack is in the Pakistani part of Kashmir where, reportedly, the India-specific LeT also has its bases.

Pakistan has recently declared that it has developed low-yield (battlefield) tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) attached to short-range missiles such as the Nasr (developed in 2011 and carried by a shoot-and-scoop delivery system) to counter India’s Cold Start Doctrine. Clearly, Pakistan is basking in the impression that India’s doctrine is wartime specific and no modified version of it is available in the market for any peacetime confrontation. Secondly, Pakistan believes that its TNWs, in whatever form, are a substitute for any method to counter the quick, sub-conventional Indian offensive, whether the target of the offensive is Mureedke, the headquarters of the LeT in Pakistan (near the India-Pakistan border) or any distant safe haven such as Sargodha. Thirdly, Pakistan thinks that India cannot deploy its TNWs such as the Prahaar missile (developed in 2011) to neutralise Pakistan’s reaction. Fourthly, Pakistan thinks that India cannot have access to an Iron Dome, which is an anti-missile air defence system.

Against this backdrop, it is apparent that Pakistan is devoid of any anti-Cold Start Doctrine; instead, Pakistan takes refuge in the term ‘offensive-defence’. Secondly, Pakistan has failed to reign in non-state actors using its land to attack India. Thirdly, Pakistan is still undervaluing the importance of the element of surprise on which India has been relying. Fourth, Pakistan is still not realising that the success in having TNWs and the presence of Islamic militants on its land is a lethal combination the world is scared of, not to say South Asia.

South Asian politics are fraught with unpredictability. It is not known when Pakistani non-state actors cross the border, carry out any atrocious act and prompt a reaction from India. Similarly, it is not known why Pakistani civilians should be ready to become victims of the collateral damage caused by any TNW, even if it is launched to counter any version of India’s Cold Start Doctrine.

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at qaisarrashid@yahoo.com