Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  Contrary to popular belief, Pakistan’s efforts to antagonize India between official wars were not always restricted to fanning Islamist insurgency and terrorism. In the mid-1950s, Pakistan (as well as China) supported India’s Naga rebels in northeast India through its own infrastructure in East Pakistan (Shekatkar 2009). In the 1960s Pakistan supported the Mizo rebels (Chadha 2009), also in India’s northeast. Support to insurgents there became more difficult after the loss of East Pakistan in 1971. Beginning in the late 1970s and through the early 1990s, Pakistan supported the Sikh insurgency in India’s northern state of Punjab (Fair 2004a, 2004c). By the mid-1980s, Pakistan’s creeping nuclear umbrella emboldened it to pursue revisionist agendas.5 In the late 1980s, Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir began to rebel against New Delhi for a range of excesses including appalling electoral manipulation and its malfeasance in managing Kashmiri political expectations. While the rebellion began indigenously, Pakistan quickly exploited these developments. Pakistan redeployed battle-hardened militants from the waning Afghan war to Kashmir. By 1990, Pakistan and India were already behaving as if the other had an existential nuclear deterrent (Fair 2011b; Kapur 2007).6 Within a few years, Pakistan transformed a conflict that began as an indigenous uprising in the late 1980s into a sustained campaign of proxy war in Kashmir (Evans 2000; Ganguly 1997).

  As Pakistan continued to expand its nuclear program, and thus its confidence that India would be deterred from taking punitive action, it also increased its reliance on militant proxies in India (Tellis et al. 2001). Following the overt nuclearization of the subcontinent in 1998, Pakistan became increasingly aggressive in its use of low-intensity conflict, employing both official military forces (i.e., the Kargil War) and Islamist militant proxies. Pakistan-backed Islamist militants have conducted dozens of attacks throughout India, the most significant of which were the December 2000 attack on an intelligence operations center located near New Delhi’s Red Fort; the December 2001 strike on the Indian Parliament, which brought the two countries to the brink of war; the May 2002 attack on housing for families of Indian army personnel at Kaluchak in Kashmir; a July 2006 coordinated bomb attack on Mumbai’s commuter rail system; and the November 2008 notorious multiday siege of several sites across Mumbai. (The terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba was responsible for most of these incidents, with the exception of the 2001 Parliament attack, which was carried out by Jaish-e-Mohammed. The 2006 attack was carried out by the Indian mujahideen with support from Lashkar-e-Taiba). These major assaults are in addition to many other smaller ones throughout India, which had fewer international and domestic consequences (Clarke 2010; Swami 2008). By expanding the conflict to the Indian heartland, Pakistan hoped to increase the cost of India’s adamant commitment to the territorial status quo in Kashmir.

  Despite the claims of some analysts (e.g. Rubin and Rashid 2008), Pakistan’s antagonism with respect to India cannot be reduced to the bilateral dispute over Kashmir. As I show throughout this volume, Pakistan’s defense literature clearly maintains that Pakistan’s army also aims to resist India’s position of regional dominance and its slow but steady global ascent, and more often than not this threat from India is described in ideological and civilization terms rather than those of security (Mohan 2004, 2006; Pant 2009a, 2009b; Scott 2009). Recently, Brigadier Umar Farooq Durrani (2010, 1) summarized Pakistan’s resilience against India’s “superiority complex” and refusal to deal with Pakistan “on an equal footing” by noting that some 60 years after independence, “Pakistan’s lasting defiant posture has kept the Indian-dream [sic] from becoming a reality” and that Pakistan’s nuclear program has made India only “more bitter and hostile.” His essay opened the 2010 Pakistan Army Green Book, which is issued every two years by the army’s Training and Evaluation Command and which bears the imprimatur of the army chief himself.

  The army’s revisionist goals endure despite the accumulation of evidence that Pakistan’s army cannot achieve them at present and is even less likely to succeed in the future. This is true for a number of reasons. For one, India’s economic growth since the 1990s has allowed it to undertake significant defense modernization while keeping defense expenditures well below 3 percent of its gross domestic product (World Bank 2012). Second, India has forged strategic partnerships with the United States, Israel, Iran, and other regional and global actors and has even staged limited military exercises with China. Third, India’s position in the international community is ascendant, with countries like the United States, Britain, and France formally backing its bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) within the context of UNSC reform (Thakur 2011).

  In contrast, Pakistan’s economy is shambolic, exhibiting weakness on virtually all measures (Economist Intelligence Unit 2012). The country has long been dependent on bilateral and multilateral development partners (Wahab and Ahmed 2011). Pakistan’s heavy investment in the armed forces since 1947 has crowded out investments in other areas. According to the World Bank (2006, 1–2), “Due to regional tensions, military expenditures in Pakistan have consistently absorbed a significant proportion of the budget (about one-quarter to one-third of total revenue). … There remained very little fiscal space for basic government expenditures, or development expenditures.” Shahid Javed Burki, a renowned Pakistani economist, argues that not only have Pakistan’s priorities affected its spending decisions but also its security competition with India has resulted in enormous opportunity costs. In 2007, Burki calculated that had Pakistan not pursued revisionism in Kashmir,

  [its] long-term growth rate could have been some 2.25 to 3.2 percentage points higher than that actually achieved. … A growth rate of this magnitude sustained over half a century would have increased the country’s gross product by a factor of between 3.4 and 4.4. Indeed, had the country been at peace with India over the past decades, Pakistan’s 2003–2004 GDP could have been three and a half times larger than it was—$330 billion rather than $95 billion—and its income per capita could have been $2,200 rather than $630 (25).

  Pakistan’s revisionist agenda not only has posed heavy costs upon the state but also in recent years has directly affected the security of Pakistan’s citizens and even the state’s own stability. Current members and direct descendants of many of the militant groups spawned by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies now target Pakistan’s civilian, military, and intelligence institutions as well as its citizens (Fair 2011b; Hussain 2010; Swami 2007). Assessments of the number of such incidents and of their victims vary between several thousands and several tens of thousands (Global Terrorism Database 2012; Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies 2012).

  In short, Pakistan has doggedly attempted to revise the geographical status quo and roll back India’s ascendency, and the very instruments it has used to attain these policies have undermined Pakistan’s standing within the international community and even its own long-term viability. Looking to the future, Pakistan is even less likely to succeed either in altering the geographical status quo or in retarding India’s ascent to regional and global power—yet it will continue to try to do so.

  Pakistan should have abandoned its revisionism long ago. After all, scholars expect that “good strategy will … ensure that objectives are attained while poor strategy will lead to the ineffective execution of a state’s power. … It is also assumed that strategies that fail to attain a state’s objectives will, in all probability, evolve or be abandoned” (Glenn 2009, 533). Despite numerous and ever-expanding obstacles, Pakistan remains staunchly revisionist, even though its position, already untenable and destabilizing, will become increasingly so in the future. Given India’s upward trajectory and Pakistan’s ever-sinking position in the global system, game rationality7 suggests that it would behoove Pakistan to come to some accommodation with India today, as conceding defeat now will be less costly than doing so later, when the power differential between the two states is even greater.

  Explaining Persistent Revisionism

  The like
lihood that Pakistan’s military or even civilian leadership will abandon the state’s long-standing and expanding revisionist goals and prosecute a policy of normalization with India is virtually nil. Even the 1971 catastrophic military defeat did not force Pakistan to revise its policies with regards to India. Pakistan’s persistent revisionism can be situated within the more general scholarly puzzle as to why states are revisionist. Despite the challenges that revisionist states pose to international security, relatively few scholars have sought to explain why states remain revisionist, especially when such efforts consistently fail and even undermine the prospects for a state’s very survival.8

  Zionts (2006) sought to explain why some states refuse to abandon their revisionism in the face of clear policy failure. He does not deal with the question of why states are revisionist in the first place but rather seeks to understand a state’s decision to persist with or abandon its revisionist goals. To do so, he posits domestic political structures as the crucial mediating variable.9 Zionts examines several revisionist states and defines them as either unreasonably or reasonably revisionist. This judgment is based not on a normative evaluation of the goal pursued or contingent upon the success or failure of the goal, but rather on the feasibility of achieving that goal given a cost constraint. According to Zionts, the sine qua non of an unreasonably revisionist state is that the state fails to moderate its policies despite decisive defeats, even when the state’s survival is at stake (634).10

  Zionts (2006) cites Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan, both of which pursued their revisionism until they were destroyed. These states exemplify suicidally revisionist states, an extreme form of unreasonable revisionism that resulted in the regimes’ demises. He describes Iran’s actions during the Iran–Iraq war as those of a nonsuicidal but still unreasonably revisionist state. Despite Iraq’s initial victories, Iran managed to repel Iraqi troops from its territory. When Saddam Hussein realized that he could not swiftly defeat his adversary, he pressed for peace and in June 1982 offered a ceasefire. Iran not only refused the offer but also actually attacked Iraq as part of its own effort to secure regime change. Despite severe casualties and economic hardship, Iran persisted in this policy for almost a decade. What made Iran’s revisionism unreasonable, in Zionts’ terminology, was its refusal to moderate its goals even though its assumptions proved time and time again to be false. Ayatollah Khomeini accepted a ceasefire only when he became convinced that failure to do so would mean the end of his Islamic revolution and of the Islamic Republic. But as unreasonable as Iran’s revisionism was with respect to regime change in Iraq, it eventually relented. Pakistan, in contrast, has never moderated its revisionism since 1947.

  Zionts (2006) distinguishes unreasonable states from those that are reasonably revisionist. States in this latter category drop their revisionist pursuits after having concluded that, given the low likelihood that they will prevail, the probable benefits of their revisionist activities are less than the probable costs. For Zionts, the actions of Israel during the 1982 war in Lebanon provide an example of reasonable revisionism. Israel invaded with the goal of destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), ejecting it from Lebanon and installing a Maronite Christian-dominated leadership that would be positively disposed toward Israel. Israel succeeded in pressuring Lebanon to install Bashir Gemayel, an ally of the Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, as president in August 1982. Gemayel, however, was assassinated the following month. In response, Israel scaled back its goals in Lebanon, ceasing to seek an explicitly pro-Israeli government there. Note that Zionts does not frame Israel’s revisionism within the larger context of its dispute with Palestinians or with other Arab states, and he does not use revisionism in the narrower sense of territorial revisionism but instead uses political revisionism.

  Zionts (2006) argues that three variables (domestic structures, domestic politics, and elite ideology), “mediated by the structure of incentives and constraints” (639) facing leaders, explain the persistence of unreasonable revisionism. In terms of domestic political structures, Zionts distinguishes between democratic and autocratic states. In those that are democratic, the public’s views will influence policymakers’ decision to alter or sustain the state’s foreign policy, if for no other reason than the need for democratic leaders to deliver popular policies or face defeat through democratic competition. In a closed system, however, the ideology of autocratic leaders will determine whether a state is reasonably or unreasonably revisionist. If leaders are ideological, they are likely to pursue a course of unreasonable revisionism, while pragmatic leaders are less likely to do so. This dynamic is captured in Figure 2.1.

  The conceptualization Zionts (2006) presents of ideal types of domestic political structures and of their role in producing unreasonable revisionism offers some promise for explaining Pakistan’s persistent commitment to reversing the status quo. Pakistan has been governed directly by the military for much of its history: from 1958 to 1969 by Ayub; from 1969 to 1971 by Gen. Yahya Khan; from 1977 to 1988 by Gen. Zia ul Haq; and from 1999 to 2007 by Musharraf.11 Even when not directly governing Pakistan, the army has wielded enormous influence over the country’s domestic politics and has dictated its foreign policies. Thus, even during periods of relative democracy, Pakistan still suffers under the weight of persistent praetorianism (Cohen 2004; Haqqani 2005; Jalal 1990; Siddiqa 2007). As recently as July 2013, the official commission established by the Pakistan government to investigate the US raid on Osama bin Laden’s safe haven in Pakistan concluded that, while constitutionally setting defense policy is the responsibility of the civilian government, “in reality. … defence policy in Pakistan is considered the responsibility of the military and not the civilian government even if the civilian government goes through the motions of providing inputs into a policy making process from which it is essentially excluded” (Report of the Abbottabad Commission 2013, 159). Over the expanse of its history, Pakistan—under military or even democratic governance—has distinct autocratic features.

  Figure 2.1 Domestic politics of unreasonable revisionism. Source: Derived from Zionts (2010, 639).

  Pakistan’s military, specifically the army, has long justified its dominant role in running the state by arguing that it is uniquely well positioned to protect not just Pakistan’s territorial integrity but also the very ideology of Pakistan, which centers on protecting Pakistan’s Muslim identity from India’s supposed Hindu identity (Haqqani 2005; Pande 2011). Oddly, civilians seem to have thoroughly acquiesced to this reality. The Report of the Abbottabad Commission (2013) observed that the civilian government did not evidence the slightest interest in exerting control over the nation’s defense policy and further quipped that the minister of defense did not object to being “an irrelevance” (227).

  For a number of reasons, Zionts’ (2006) model ultimately cannot resolve the Pakistan puzzle in entirety. First, he looks at the decision to revise or sustain a policy within the context of a single conflict (the Iran–Iraq War, or Israel’s efforts to install a pro-Israeli government in Lebanon). Compared with Pakistan’s 65-year history of initiating clashes with India, both of these episodes are relatively brief. In neither case does Zionts examine a state that persists in its revisionist goals for more than one decade. The Indo-Pakistan security competition has persisted for well over six decades despite the fact that Pakistan has either lost outright or failed to defeat India in every war they have fought. And unlike Zionts’ case-study subjects, since independence Pakistan has actually expanded its revisionist goals beyond the territorial dispute over Kashmir to include resisting what it sees as Indian hegemony.

  Second, Zionts (2006) does not define elite ideology. Nor does he attempt to account for how it is created; how it comes to control the views of other, less important, elites; or even how it shapes the views of the general public. (For Zionts, ideology is merely an intervening variable, one that he suggests explains the relationship between political structures and a state’s decision to jettiso
n or embrace its revisionist goals. For this reason he does not dilate upon this concept of ideology.) It is important to understand these processes because states like Pakistan vacillate between autocracy and weak democracy. Part of the Pakistan Army’s ability to defend its preeminent position within the state stems from the success of its ideology, which permeates Pakistan’s varied institutions and societal groups. Even during the periods of (invariably weak) democracy, civilian leaders and citizens alike embrace the elite ideology of the military: its strategic culture. It is entirely possible that civilians lack the adequate will or motivation to challenge the army rather than simply embracing its strategic outlook and assessments. However, it is impossible to disambiguate coercion and acquiescence on one hand from complicity and agreement on the other. Crucially, even if civilian elites were able to change the country’s defense policy, it is unlikely they would do so because the military’s defense policy is in line with popular preferences and because the army can simply oust the elected government as it has done repeatedly.