Daily Times

Pakistan and India have resumed their deadly minute of fire across the Line of Control (LoC), featuring a diurnal loss of precious civilian and military lives. 400 ceasefire violations this year by India betoken a recrudescence of belligerence that defies logic. Why would the Indian Army up the ante along the LoC when they know very well the futility of a military adventure against a nuclear adversary?

Is there a method to their madness or is the present showdown a desultory release of pent-up tensions through a prickly neighbour? Any war, whether limited or a quid pro quo nibbling of few posts here and there does not suit India. The Indian economy is in its take-off stage and with all of India’s competitive pretensions with China; it can ill afford a war. Also with a state like Kashmir in the grip of another freedom struggle wave, the Indian Army would not like to be caught up on both the internal and external fronts in the restive state.

So if there is no logic promoting war, then what is it that gets the war drums beating every with such metronomic regularity? Before getting lost in the ontology of war-logic, one must ponder over when logic has ever played a role in the wars between India and Pakistan? The war in the Clausewitz terms is the continuation of politics with other means. Does India want to play hardball with Pakistan to compel her into a state of strategic and diplomatic acquiescence?

Indians are playing a dangerous game that puts a diplomatic and economic squeeze on Pakistan in cahoots with global powers to get even with the Chinese and Russians. Indians are already being facilitated according to this grand design to make inroads into Afghanistan and Iran to encircle Pakistan

Is she alone in her quest or is being egged on by another stakeholder in the ‘Great Game’ being played on the South Asian chessboard? Has nuclear stability engendered an instability where a defiant Pakistan cocks a snook at India and she, in turn, launches herself into a deadly quest for rediscovering the lost space for conventional war?

Why a conventional war when the objective of bleeding Pakistan through a thousand cuts is served more effectively through a fourth generation war of sabotage and subversion? Are both countries ready to countenance the indescribable death and destruction wrought by an unwinnable nuclear war? Nuclear sabre rattling by us and war mongering by Indians would surely lead both countries down a very dark alley.

Why then does South Asia have a lemming-like propensity to self-destruct? One is reminded of a famous exchange of arguments between Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn, the proponent of the nuclear theory of escalation.

After Kahn explained all the steps up the nuclear escalation ladder like posturing, signalling, shot across the bow et al Kissinger asked a question, ‘you and I might understand these steps but would our leaders understand?’ It is the same precise question that begs an answer when we view both subcontinental neighbours caught up in a nuclear scrimmage after breaching of their tolerance thresholds in the conventional conflict.

Advanced industrialised democracies and the rest of the world, including Russia, have learnt the lessons of nuclear balconies like flexible response doctrine and its poster children the tactical nukes. Conceived at the height of Cold War these low yield nukes were supposed to act as tripwires according to US nuclear strategists in conjunction with US conventional tripwire force. A tripwire force in strategic parlance is a force that ensures that home territory is not run over by enemy forces and is employed defensively to buy time to condition the enemy for a strong counter-offensive from one’s own forces. The US tactical nukes were, therefore, a tripwire response against the multilayered armoured thrusts of the Soviet forces.

What happened to this fancy nuclear response notion is another interesting debate. Martin Van Creveld, the renowned Israeli defence scholar, writes in his book The Art of War that the concept of using nukes on a tactical level along with the tripwire conventional forces on European mainland died its natural death with nuclear theories like these ‘choking on their own absurdities’.

Since the Soviets declared that the use of tactical nukes would attract strategic nuclear reprisals against US cities the flexible response theory died its natural death. Now here in the subcontinent, where the two countries do not even enjoy the luxury of a few minutes’ response time due to border contiguity would a similar nuclear doctrine work?

Cold Start — another chimaera that kept few harebrained Indian Generals in the marketplace of strategic ideas for their petty gains needs a decent burial. Cold Start is nothing but an attempt by a large Army, bristling with arms, which its own government is questioning for relevance in a post-nuclear era, to show its civilian bosses that it is still relevant. In order to underscore its relevance and show that it could come up with a war doctrine that creates lost space for war in a nuclearised subcontinent Indian Army came up with the Cold Start Doctrine.

Cold Start Doctrine was an attempt by the Indians to employ eight integrated battle groups mustered from amongst the augmented holding Corps and forward deployed elements of Strike Corps in conjunction with Air support to launch attacks across the international border aimed at shallow territorial objectives well short of Pakistan’s nuclear tolerance thresholds.

Pakistan responded with its own conventional response through a doctrine relying on forwarding deployment, early employment of tactical and operational reserves, obstacle based terrain denial, and forward logistic deployment to nip the evil of Cold Start in the bud. The concept of tactical nukes was also employed as a strategic dissuader than a strategic enabler with all the familiar echoes of the NATO-Warsaw nuclear showdown in the sixties.

It is obvious from the above exposition that the concept of a conventional or nuclear war between the two countries is a no-brainer. Indians would not risk nuclear annihilation even if goaded by a global power to further its designs. Then what is all this LoC hullaballoo all about?

Indians are playing a subtle yet dangerous game that puts a diplomatic and economic squeeze on Pakistan in cahoots with a global power to get even with the Chinese and Russians. Indians are already being facilitated according to that grand design to make inroads in Afghanistan and Iran to encircle Pakistan. The Iranian grant of Chabahar port is also a link in the same chain of events. With a truculent Afghanistan not ready to take any practical steps to stop cross-border movement, the Western border remains hot, forcing Pakistan to maintain a costly deployment. The Eastern border is kept hot through the LoC, where the main objective is to ratchet up enough tensions through ceasefire violations to bring the two armies close to a quid pro quo fire exchange posture. Even a small miscalculation could lead to a local skirmish which could then be blown up by the Indian media to slate Pakistan as a dangerous conduit of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. The narrative would fit snugly with the Indian stance of Pakistan’s non-compliance with the UN anti-terrorism resolutions making things difficult in the FATF forum in June. Needless to say, there are other countries egging India on that moved a resolution in FATF to place Pakistan on the grey list.

Pakistan needs to declare a diplomatic emergency leveraging its economic and strategic linkages with China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. On the internal front, however, there is a need for a declaration of another emergency ie reclamation of state from the holds of organised crime, religious extremism, ethnic polarisation and politics of patronage and pelf. A soft state cannot fight internal and external threats confronting Pakistan. The charlatans masquerading as leaders, the mountebanks posing as custodians of faith, the criminals in politics, and the looters in bureaucracy would have to be purged to ensure effective governance by a strong state. A hybrid government supported by the state institutions might be our last hope provided we take time by the forelock.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST, he can be reached at rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, March 4^th 2018.