One silver lining to the dark cloud hovering above Pakistan-India relations is that it has made our policymakers aware of the need to cultivate better bonds with our neighbouring countries. There is a widespread consensus among scholars and journalists that Pakistan’s relations with its neighbours have hit a low point because of our security establishment’s continued support of some Taliban factions.
There are few fundamental questions at the heart of this debate: why is it that our military and intelligence establishment always views its neighbouring countries with suspicion? Why India dominates the thinking of our security planners? And what explains our propensity to conjure up exaggerated threat perceptions? The answers to these questions lie in a deeper understanding of Pakistan’s strategic culture that continues to foster our delusions of grandeur.
On a theoretical level, understanding the strategic culture of a country or predicting factors that motivate its defence policies has always been a challenging task for security experts. Jack Snyder, a well-known American political scientist, defined strategic culture as “the sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of behaviour that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other.”
Another security expert, Stephen Rosen, a professor of national security and military affairs at Harvard University, believed strategic culture to be made of the shared “beliefs and assumptions that frame choices about international military behaviour, particularly those concerning decisions to go to war, preferences for offensive, expansionist or defensive modes of warfare, and levels of wartime causalities that would be acceptable.”
The latter approach has the most explanatory power, but it still does not adequately address more specific questions like our past decision of becoming a ‘hyper-national security state.’ Confronting a strong enemy like India in the early 1950s, Pakistan had two fundamental choices: ‘bandwagon’ or ‘balance’. Historically, countries choose bandwagon more than balance. Pakistan could also align itself with a major power and focus on its economic development, but our leaders chose to take the wrong turn. In order to seek balance against external threats, Pakistan decided to squander enormous resources on the development of a nuclear weapons program. Lo and behold, the development of nuclear weapons also failed to make our fears go away. After 2004, our military leaders made a totally unnecessary shift in our nuclear weapons posture from ‘credible minimum deterrence’ to ‘full-spectrum deterrence.’ As they say, insanity never stops.
The fact of the matter is that Pakistani leaders and the general public have an exaggerated fear of external threats, which, in turn, helps explain our obsession with ‘national security.’ Our civilian and military leaders have always emphasised our insecurities, making gullible masses believe that the whole world is conspiring against Pakistan.
The idea that Pakistan was created as a ‘castle of Islam’ further contributed to this prevailing sense of insecurity. Some of our misguided opinion-makers and media elites have spent their lives in the propagation of India’s image as an enemy. A considerable number of people in Pakistan still believe that India has not accepted the creation of Pakistan and continues to undermine our security. This theory has gained some credence in recent years because of India’s covert support of terrorist elements operating inside Pakistan.These factors have given rise to the emergence of a delusional strategic culture, triggering agitated and delusional strategic behaviour. This delusional strategic culture made our policymakers think that the production of nuclear weapons was the only option left to ensure our security as a state. However, what we failed to realise to realise was that a state’s security couldn’t be completely ensured without relating it to human security.
The general perception is that our policymakers decided to develop nuclear weapons after suffering defeat from India in the 1971 war, but historical evidence suggests the presence of a very strong pro-bomb lobby in Pakistan even before 1971. Many countries in the developed world have adopted human-centered perspectives on security because the state-centric framework fails to appreciate the real threats to individuals. However, it remains a largely ignored issue in Pakistani academia due to a lack of imagination on the part of our academic scholars.
There is no gainsaying the fact that Pakistan has historically faced a conventional threat from our eastern neighbour and India’s active role in the disintegration of East Pakistan in 1971 further gave credence to this threat. But our threat perceptions should have changed after 1998. Pakistan and India are nuclear states with quite an impressive number of nuclear weapons and delivery means in their possession. Given the fact that Pakistan does not even adhere to a no-first-use policy, the possession of more than a hundred nuclear weapons should have done a lot to offset the threat from India, leaving us with fewer reasons to continue to be a paranoid national security state. But paranoia continues to persist.
The Pakistani public has to understand that powerful military forces all over the world tend to exaggerate the threats and it is the responsibility of civilian leaders to bridle their ambitions. In Pakistan, the incompetence and lack of interest on the part of our civilian leaders in national-security issues leave them with no option but to parrot the military establishment’s line. The ascendancy of the military in Pakistani politics is also one of the unwanted outcomes of our political leaders’ incompetence. Yet, one thing is clear: unless we, as a nation, ensure an open and honest debate on national security matters, we cannot get out of our diplomatic isolation.
The writer is a US-based nuclear security analyst and can be reached at [email protected]