Schaffer and Schaffer (2011) describe this process as the perfected art of the guilt trip. The authors, both diplomats with unusual depth and experience in South Asia, offer a concise description of this strategy: “in important negotiations, Pakistan usually tries to create a sense of obligation on the part of the United States, or to nurture and intensify the fear that failure to honor Pakistan’s requests will lead to disastrous consequences for US interests” (3). They observe that Pakistani military officers are particularly likely to paint a picture of American betrayal, highlighting past cessations of US military aid, the arming of India in 1962, and repeated US failures to help Pakistan in its time of need. “[Pakistan] Army officers tend to assume that the Americans they are dealing with know little about Pakistan. More than any other Pakistan government representatives, military officers start their presentations to US officials with a textbook brief on India-Pakistan and, in some cases, Pakistan–Afghanistan relations. They do not deviate from their cleared script, which in any case is probably close to their personal convictions” (65). Pakistan’s general “institutional culture of avoiding blame or self-criticism shows up at the negotiating tables as a strong tendency to blame the army’s problems on the United States, and to try to make their American counterparts feel guilty about Pakistan’s difficulties” (ibid.).
In other words, Pakistanis in and out of uniform use this revisionist history to convince the United States that it owes Pakistan for its past failures. This approach is obviously most efficacious during times when the United States believes it needs Pakistani help to pursue its interests in the region, notably during the anti–Soviet War and the so-called Global War on Terror. It is imperative that the Pakistani military—and civilian—personnel who deal with the United States believe this history. This is one of the reasons the military has invented so many tools for controlling key narratives both within and beyond the barracks.
Without extensive research on how Chinese leaders contend with Pakistan’s strategic culture, an effort that is beyond the scope of this volume, it is difficult to say whether the Pakistanis are equally successful at convincing the Chinese that they “owe” Pakistan. This is doubtful, however. In recent years, Pakistan’s military and civilian officials have busily obscured China’s repeated failures to act as the all-weather friend—a reliable alternative source of aid and support should the United States abandon Pakistan—that Pakistani defense publications claim it to be. Aparna Pande (2011) observes that when it comes to China’s failures Pakistani officials constantly devise various rationales for China’s inability (as opposed to unwillingness) to assist Pakistan. During the Cold War, Pakistanis forgave China’s shortcomings because it was also threatened by the Soviet Union. Other analysts seek to diminish the scope of China’s commitments in the first place; for example, some observers suggest that Yahya and Bhutto misinterpreted China’s pledge of “support for Pakistan’s independence and state sovereignty,” which they argue did not convey some sweeping security guarantee for all of Pakistan but rather simply meant that China supported a strong and independent West Pakistan (124).
Pakistan’s military authors seem unable to contemplate the possibility that China will not strongly support Pakistan in a future Indo-Pakistani conflict. As Pande (2011) notes, the reason for this refusal is obvious: should Pakistan’s military establishment admit this possibility, it would have to accept that China, like the United States, engages Pakistan on terms that advance its national interests. But the depiction of China as Pakistan’s all-weather friend has allowed Pakistan to wrest greater resources from the United States.
It is unlikely that the United States will call Pakistan’s bluff and deprive it of this essential bargaining tool. Doing so would require American diplomats who are as thoroughly knowledgeable as their Pakistani counterparts (Evans 2012). Even if more American negotiators were able to counter the narrative presented by their Pakistani counterparts and prevent them from employing their preferred strategy of playing on American desire to make restitutions for past failures, it not obvious that they would do so. American policymaking—toward Pakistan generally and the army in particular—is always aimed at quickly completing transactions to meet short-term needs. Finally, as discussed in Chapter 8, the introduction of nuclear weapons provides further insurance that the United States will not walk away from South Asia.
CHAPTER 8
Seeking Security under a Nuclear Umbrella
While Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is generally associated with its army, it was actually initiated by a civilian, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in the late 1960s. In fact, while Bhutto tried to build a constituency around nuclear weapons, Pakistan’s army leadership opposed them: Gen. Ayub Khan was convinced that they would be a costly boondoggle and would alienate Pakistan’s Western partners. Moreover, he naively believed that, should India acquire a nuclear bomb, Pakistan could simply buy one “off the shelf” from one of its allies (Bhutto 1979; Khan 2012a). With the army opposed, the nuclear weapons program did not gain momentum until after the loss of East Pakistan in the 1971 war and Bhutto’s subsequent ascendance. India’s (risibly named) Peaceful Nuclear Explosion of 1974 gave a further impetus to Pakistan’s quest for a nuclear deterrent. After Bhutto was deposed in 1977, the program fell into the hands of the army, where it has remained ever since.
While India and Pakistan did not become overtly nuclear until their reciprocal tests in May 1998, Pakistani and Indian analysts alike concede that their mutual possession of nuclear weapons technology and later weapons had long influenced Pakistani and Indian behavior during crises. Nuclear proliferation pessimists (Kapur 2008; Krepon and Gagne 2001; Tellis et al. 2001) argue that the nuclearization of the subcontinent has enabled low-intensity conflict, whereas proliferation optimists such as Ganguly (2008) attribute the lack of any major conflicts in the region to the nuclear deterrent. In many ways this debate offers a faux binary. As the evidence I present here demonstrates, nuclear weapons do encourage risk-taking behavior (especially by Pakistan but also by India, e.g., during the Brasstacks crisis), which precipitates conflict. However, they also ensure that these conflicts do not escalate to a general war where nuclear use becomes possible.
In this chapter, I argue that Pakistan’s army sees nuclear weapons as a way of enabling risk-taking vis-à-vis India in two key, interrelated ways. First, Pakistani defense writers cited here agree that it is not an objective assessment of Pakistan’s capabilities that deters India but rather ambiguity about what Pakistan can or would do in a crisis. This allows Pakistan to engage in risk-seeking behavior (or to support terrorist elements that engage in such behavior) as part of its effort to change the status quo: the Pakistan Army believes that India is likely to put up with such “minor” trespasses for the sake of preventing a crisis that could go nuclear. In other words, Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent increases the cost of Indian action.
Second, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons ensure that the United States, among others, will become involved in efforts to prevent any regional crisis from becoming a full-fledged conflict. The United States is motivated to intervene for two reasons. First, it remains a preeminent US interest to prevent a nuclear exchange in South Asia. Second, the United States understands that when weapons are assembled, mated to their delivery vehicles, and forward deployed they become vulnerable to theft. In recent years, Pakistan has publicly claimed that it is pursuing tactical nuclear weapons in response to defense and civilian cooperation between the United States and India and Indian efforts to develop a doctrine of limited war (Hoyt 2001; Smith 2013). American concerns about preventing a nuclear war and precluding theft during dispersal are even more acute when tactical nuclear weapons enter the picture. Nuclear weapons thus confer a degree of immunity, shielding the army from bearing the full costs of its adventurism; in fact, in the army’s eyes this is the main benefit of Pakistan’s nuclear program.
In this chapter, I first present a brief historical overview of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Next, I examine the
concerns about proliferation that arose in response to Abdul Qadeer Khan’s nuclear black market and detail Pakistan’s doctrines of nuclear development, deployment, and employment. Then, I review the ongoing debate over the role nuclear weapons play in the region’s frequent crises. Employing a modified version of Kapur’s (2007) analytical approach, I offer an assessment of nuclear weapons’ effects on the crisis-proneness of the Indo-Pakistan security competition. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of the nuclear program for Pakistan’s strategic culture and the army’s revisionist agenda as regards India.
Origins of Pakistan’s Nuclear Program
Pakistani writers correctly note that, relative to India, Pakistan was late to develop nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s nuclear program was founded in the mid-1950s under the Atoms for Peace Initiative begun by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) was founded in 1956, but its chair reported to a “relatively junior officer in the Ministry of Industries and had no direct access to the chief executive,” and the civilian bureaucracy “had an apathetic attitude” toward the endeavor from the start (Khan 2012b, 8; see also Khan 2012a). The effort received some impetus in 1958, when Bhutto became the minister of fuel, power, and natural resources. During his term in office, which lasted until 1962, he lobbied for Pakistan to develop a robust civilian nuclear program and established the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) (IISS 2007; Khan 2012a, 2012b). Under Khan, Pakistan’s military leadership was opposed to pursuing a nuclear weapon, viewing it as a costly misadventure that would estrange Western allies. He also believed that if India were to develop a nuclear bomb Pakistan could simply procure one from the United States or another ally (Cohen 2004; Khan 2012a, 2012b; Salik 2009).
In 1963, Bhutto began pushing for Pakistan to develop a nuclear weapons capability in his capacity as minister for foreign affairs. When China tested at Lop Nor in 1964, he was certain that India would follow suit (IISS 2007). He was not alone in this view. Maj. Muhammad Aslam Zuberi, writing in the Pakistan Army Journal in 1971 (three years before India tested its first nuclear device), expressed the fear that once India, with its conventional advantages, acquired a nuclear weapon, “Pakistan would be reduced to a status of an innocuous spectator. … A nuclear India would automatically claim the right for leadership of areas in her immediate vicinity if not the entire non-communist Asia and Africa” (22–23).
Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Kamal Matinuddin (2002) argues that Bhutto’s unwavering contention that Pakistan required nuclear weapons was confirmed by the 1965 war with India, which proved to Bhutto that Pakistan could not defeat India and also that Pakistan’s international partners would not necessarily come to its aid. According to Matinuddin, Bhutto also learned an important lesson from Operation Gibraltar, which he initiated during his time as foreign minister. Bhutto concluded that it would be dangerous for Pakistan not to plan for a nuclear deterrent; this conviction was “reinforced by the fact that the United States had imposed an arms embargo on Pakistan after the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965” (83). In 1965, Bhutto declared that “Pakistan will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry” to acquire a nuclear weapon (IISS 2007, 15). Bhutto grew increasingly alarmed as India appeared to be “on the threshold of becoming nuclear as early as 1966” and wanted to signal to the Indians that “aggression against Pakistan would be a very dangerous affair. What he had in mind was an effective deterrent” (Matinuddin 2002, 83).
But Bhutto’s vision did not bear fruit until after the 1971 war. Following the loss of East Pakistan, on December 20, 1971, Gen. Yahya Khan resigned in disgrace, transferring power to Bhutto, whose party had won the most West Pakistani seats in the 1970 elections. Bhutto, who became Pakistan’s president, commander in chief, and first civilian chief martial law administrator, made it a top priority to energize Pakistan’s lethargic nuclear weapons program. In January 1972, a few weeks after assuming power, he convened a meeting of several dozen of Pakistan’s nuclear scientists in Multan. He requested the assembled scientists to produce a nuclear bomb within five years and placed Munir Ahmad Khan in charge of the PAEC, who reported directly to Bhutto (IISS 2007; Khan 2012a, 2012b; Salik 2009).
Following a similar path as India’s scientific enclave, the PAEC initially opted to produce weapons-grade plutonium. This route was the obvious choice, both because M. A. Khan was a plutonium expert and because Pakistan would need only a reprocessing plant to recover the plutonium produced by its civilian reactor (IISS 2007). But Pakistan’s reactor, the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP), was inefficient and was monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Furthermore, as Pakistan came to be seen as a proliferation risk, western states began to restrict its access to reprocessing technology.
Given the uncertainty of the plutonium option, Pakistan also began to pursue a “less technically efficient, but more discreet, highly enriched uranium (HEU) route as early as 1974” (IISS 2007, 17). This shift was facilitated by two events. The first, which took place in 1974, was India’s Peaceful Nuclear Explosion in the Pokhran Desert in Rajasthan. The second was the appearance on the scene of Abdul Qadeer Khan, often referred to as A. Q. Khan. He received a PhD in metallurgy from a Belgian university and was employed by a Dutch member of the Urenco enrichment consortium, where, among his other responsibilities, he translated a German report on centrifuge technology. In September 1974, he wrote to Bhutto and offered his services to help Pakistan acquire a nuclear weapon. Bhutto apparently requested that Khan stay in the Netherlands a while longer so that he could acquire more technical knowledge. In 1975, however, having attracted the suspicion of the Dutch government, Khan fled to Pakistan with stolen centrifuge designs. Given Bhutto’s dissatisfaction with PAEC’s progress, Khan persuaded Bhutto to grant him direct control of the centrifuge project (IISS 2007; Khan 2012a, 2012b; Matinuddin 2002).
By this time, a number of trends that began in the mid-1960s had converged, rendering the nuclear option irresistible to Pakistan. First, “the asymmetry in power with India prompted Pakistan to search for potential counterweights other than the conventional sources” (Hilali 2011). Second, during Pakistan’s wars with India, the United States had avoided providing robust support to Pakistan. This led Pakistani military writers to question the credibility of conventional, much less nuclear, security guarantees (Zuberi 1971). Third and fourth, “the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 and India’s nuclear explosion in 1974 once again brought to the surface Pakistan’s fears of India’s hegemonic designs” (Hilali 2011, 200; see also Anwari 1988; Durrani 1989; Sarwar 1995). Bhutto shared the army’s fundamental threat assessment: the worst threat to Pakistan’s sovereign existence was India, either acting alone or in alliance with external actors, such as the United States (which Bhutto viewed with suspicion). Bhutto believed that a nuclear weapons program would allow him to manage two problems simultaneously: it could counter India’s military might while also providing a counterweight to Pakistan’s overly powerful military, which justified its expansive claims to resources and to interfering in affairs of governance with reference to the ever-present Indian threat. By pursuing a nuclear weapons program, Bhutto could both “reduce the army’s role and could face India on an equal footing” (Cohen 2004, 80). Bhutto worked assiduously to keep the military far from the program to ensure civilian control over national security and domestic politics in general and the nuclear program in particular. The military, however, did provide the resources the nuclear program required (Khan 2012a, 2012b).
In 1979, during the imprisonment that ended with his execution, Bhutto wrote If I Am Assassinated, an autobiography-cum-manifesto defending his actions and policies. He explains that he—not the military—achieved Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability, reminding Pakistanis that he sent hundreds of young men to North America and Europe for training in nuclear science and that he successfully negotiated the purchase of a five-megawatt reactor from France. He bitterly decries the United States for prevailing on France to ca
ncel the sale, a success that Bhutto attributes to the untrustworthiness of the military’s regime and to American perfidy. Bhutto even argues that the United States (for the sole purpose of preventing Pakistan from acquiring a reprocessing capability) facilitated the coup that overthrew him by backing his political rivals and encouraging the army. Bhutto further insinuates that his opponents, in and out of uniform, sold him, and Pakistan’s nuclear future, to the Americans.
Consistent with Bhutto’s claim that it was he, and not the army, who had tirelessly sought to secure Pakistan’s future vis-à-vis India by developing nuclear weapons, he asserts that at the time he became president, Pakistan lagged behind India by some 20 years but that by the time he was deposed in 1977, Pakistan was on the threshold of possessing a nuclear capability. He brags that even though Christian, Jewish, and Hindu civilizations as well as the Communist powers had acquired a nuclear weapons capability, it was he who delivered this capability to all of Islamic civilization (Bhutto 1979; Khan 2012a).1
The Jimmy Carter Administration was disquieted by nuclear developments in Pakistan. In late 1978, European intelligence had obtained evidence that Pakistan was constructing a uranium enrichment plant, a claim confirmed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In April 1979, Carter found Pakistan to be in violation of the Symington Amendment, which prohibits most forms of US assistance to any country that traffics in nuclear enrichment technology or equipment outside of international safeguards (Hathaway 2000; Salik 2009).2 After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, however, Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, told him that the United States would need to secure Pakistan’s support to oust the Soviets and that this would “require … more guarantees to [Pakistan], more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy” (Coll 2004, 51). The Carter Administration held its proliferation concerns in abeyance, offering Gen. Zia ul Haq a $400 million aid package which would be equally divided between economic and military assistance. Shrewdly, Zia rejected it and denounced it as “peanuts.” As Brig. (Ret.) Naeem Salik (2009) notes, Zia “patiently waited for over a year after the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, and so was able to obtain a more substantive deal than the ‘peanuts’ offered by Carter. Zia and his advisors had correctly appreciated the outcome of the US Presidential elections and were willing to bide their time to see off the last few months of the Carter presidency” (97).
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