Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  Nuclear Doctrine and Use

  Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are India-specific. Pakistan’s army has long believed that only an “openly deployed rudimentary nuclear system would adequately compensate for India’s superiority in conventional military power,” and thus the army views the acquisition of nuclear weapons not only “as an urgent response to equalize the disturbing balance of power in South Asia but [also] as a long-term option for the stable security of the country” (Hilali 2011, 203; see also Cheema 2000). There were some debates about timing. Maj. Gen. Asad Durrani (1989), who served as the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from 1990 to 1992, argued in 1989 that Pakistan should defer overt nuclearization: if Pakistan nuclearized first, it would legitimize India’s making similar moves. He explained that “under these circumstances [including a fallout with the US], perhaps the best policy is the one that the others believe Pakistan is following: the policy of deterrence through nuclear ambiguity, in the footsteps of Israel and South Africa” (21). But he concedes that “ultimately, Pakistan will have to acquire a credible nuclear capability, if Pakistanis wish to achieve an honorable relationship with India” (22). Ultimately, Pakistan followed this course, becoming an overt nuclear power only after India had taken that step.

  While India insists that it will adhere to a rigorous “no first-use policy,” Pakistan has refused to give up its “right of first-use of nuclear weapons” both because it has no confidence in India’s no first-use declaration and because doing so would undermine the deterrent value of its weapons (Cheema 2011). Rather than pursuing a massive and unaffordable nuclear arms race, Pakistani defense writers argue that Pakistan should have a minimal, credible deterrent (Anwari 1988). Zuberi (1971) explains that the concept of a nuclear deterrent does not mean “matching India bomb for bomb or missile for missile” and advocated following in the footsteps of France or Great Britain (23). Lt. Col. Israr Ahmad Ghumman (1990), after detailing the varied weaknesses in Pakistan’s military system, argued that with a nuclear deterrent, “Pakistan can cut down her large conventional forces and cut down the defence expenditures while ensuring her safety” (34). Speaking more recently and with greater authority, Kidwai, in an address at the US Naval Postgraduate School, explained that Pakistan’s nuclear policy has four key features: deterring all forms of external aggression; deterring a counterstrike against strategic assets; stabilizing strategic deterrence in South Asia; and investing in conventional and strategic deterrence methods (Cheema 2011, 60).

  Peter Lavoy (2008), a longtime observer of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program who served as the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs and now as the acting assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, observes that Pakistan’s strategic deterrence strategy has five major components. The first is an effective conventional fighting force capable of confronting a wide array of subconventional and conventional threats. Pakistan’s armed forces believe that its conventional military capabilities are the “first line of defense against Indian conventional military attack and the backbone of the country’s overall deterrence posture” (131).

  Pakistan has consistently employed this logic, with considerable effect, to secure conventional military assistance from the United States. Not only was this an important argument during the rule of Ayub and Zia, but also it was used during the Musharraf era and even into the most recent period of civilian governance. According to leaked US cables, the US effort in 2006 to provide Pakistan with F-16s was motivated by arguments of “symbolic, and perhaps emotional, salience” but were “directly tied to the existential threat Pakistan perceives from India. India maintains a substantial, and growing, conventional military advantage over Pakistan; Islamabad’s nuclear and missile programs reflect its need to counterbalance this advantage. An enhanced F-16 program also has deterrence value by giving Pakistan time and space to employ a conventional, rather than nuclear, reaction in the event of a future conflict with India” (Hindu 2011). Perhaps counterintuitively, as the weaker power in the India–Pakistan dyad Pakistan believes that it must have “escalation dominance at all rungs of the military ladder—from low-intensity conflict to conventional war and all the way to nuclear war” to ensure survivability (Lavoy 2008, 133–134). Pakistan’s defense planners believe as an article of faith that if “they allow India to seize the advantage at any level of violence—from subconventional through conventional to nuclear warfare—then India is sure to exploit it,” endangering the security of the Pakistani state (134; see also Anwari 1988; Sarwar 1995; Zuberi 1971).

  The second component is a minimum nuclear deterrence doctrine and force posture. Zafar Iqbal Cheema (2000) notes that Pakistan “did not have a nuclear declaratory, deployment, or employment doctrine” prior to the May 1998 nuclear tests (159). Although Pakistan has since disclosed significant features of its command and control arrangements and has laid out crude redlines, it has deliberately kept these aspects of is deployment and employment doctrine opaque. Even though Pakistan has not formally declared its doctrine for nuclear employment, it does have “operational plans and requirements for nuclear use integrated within its military war-fighting plan” (Lavoy 2008, 134). The army’s principal task is to deter an Indian conventional military attack, first through conventional military preparedness and ultimately—if necessary to prevent the loss or occupation of Pakistani territory or the decimation of Pakistan’s military forces—through the use of nuclear weapons (Lavoy 2005, 283).

  Bhutto laid out the basic lineaments of Pakistan’s nuclear employment doctrine in December 1974, explaining that “ultimately, if our backs are to the wall and we have absolutely no option, in that event, this decision about going nuclear will have to be taken” (Lavoy 2008, 135). In April 2002, at the height of the 2001–2002 standoff with India, Musharraf made a similar statement. Although he called nuclear weapons a “last resort” and asserted that he was “optimistic and confident that we can defend ourselves with conventional means,” he conceded that nuclear weapons could be used. “If Pakistan is threatened with extinction, then the pressure of our countrymen would be so big that this option, too, would have to be considered” (Lavoy 2005, 283).

  Kidwai, in an extraordinarily rare exposition of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine, explained that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are India-specific and that Pakistan would resort to nuclear use “if the very existence of Pakistan is at stake” (Lavoy 2005, 283). In the event that deterrence should fail, he identified four conditions under which Pakistan would employ nuclear weapons: “a) India attacks Pakistan and conquers a large part of its territory (space threshold); b) India destroys a large part either of its land or air forces (military threshold); c) India proceeds to the economic strangling of Pakistan (economic strangling); d) India pushes Pakistan into political destabilization or creates a large-scale internal subversion in Pakistan (domestic destabilization)” (ibid.).

  While it is well-known that Pakistan’s military understands preventing India from either destroying or overwhelming Pakistan as the primary purpose of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, the precise activities that would meet these criteria are kept purposefully ambiguous to buttress their deterrent force. After all, if Pakistan were to articulate these red lines more clearly, India could simply modify its strategic plans and operations accordingly. Pakistan’s refusal to articulate the Indian actions that would prompt it to employ nuclear weapons increases the uncertainty in the “minds of Indian policymakers as to how far they can press Pakistan on the battlefield” (Lavoy 2008, 137). Zia himself explained this in the late 1980s, when he said “that ambiguity is the essence of deterrence. The present programs of India and Pakistan have a lot of ambiguities, and therefore in the eyes of each other, they have reached a particular level, and that level is good enough to create an impression of deterrence” (Giles and Doyle 1996, 147). Beg similarly explained that a “state of uncertainty and ambiguity … serves as a meaningful deterrence”
(Documentation: General Mirza Aslam Beg’s Major Presentations 1991, 41). Cultivating this ambiguity, and thus strategic instability, is a central element of what Kapur (2007) describes as the instability–instability paradox that characterizes Indo-Pakistan security competition.

  The third component of Pakistan’s deterrence, in Lavoy’s (2008) inventory, is a sufficient stockpile of nuclear weapons and delivery systems to assure a second strike capability (131). Although Pakistan does not publicize its force requirements, it asserts that it wants only the minimum necessary deterrent (based on Pakistani assessments of India’s own capabilities and assumptions about the nature of future contingencies). Pakistan aims to have a stockpile large enough to permit dispersal to multiple launch sites and thus ensure a second-strike capability (ibid.).

  Pakistani calculations about the necessary size and nature of its deterrent have changed in recent years, due to post-2005 developments in the US–India relationship. Pakistani defense officials frequently note with alarm that the 2005 Indo-US civilian nuclear deal as well as other defense-related aspects of the Indo-US strategic partnership have “put Pakistan’s policy of a ‘minimum credible deterrence’ under an intense pressure” (Khan 2011, 1). Specifically, the nuclear deal and the concomitant India-specific amendments to the Nuclear Suppliers Group will afford India access to new “vistas of dual-use technology and other scientific avenues between India, US, and other members of the [nuclear suppliers] cartel” (ibid.). Cheema (2011), then with Pakistan’s National Defence University, maintains that “the most fundamental international developments affecting the minimum credible deterrence posture of Pakistan” include “the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement” and the “Nuclear Suppliers Groups’ unconditional exemption,” which allows India to purchase certain nuclear material that was formerly prohibited (44–45). Cheema’s principal fear is that the agreement will allow India to purchase uranium on the international markets for its civilian nuclear program, freeing up its own supply of uranium for exclusive use in its weapons program (ibid.).

  These developments, along with India’s search for ways to punish Pakistan for, and compel it to abandon, its terrorist misadventures in India while still avoiding escalation, has prompted senior Ministry of Defense analysts like Khan (2011) to argue that Pakistan should “reinvigorate its present nuclear doctrine of a ‘minimum credible deterrence,’ to an offensive-deterrence posture” (1). Khan also believes that Pakistan could “bolster its limited conventional capability and accord it a confidence by inducting a whole series of tactical nuclear weapons into its strategic calculus and, to deploy them along its borders with India” (ibid., 2). Such “doctrinal restructuring by Pakistan would induce ‘restraining effects that are based on the fear of nuclear war’” (ibid., 3, citing Art 1985). Inducting such tactical nuclear weapons would allow Pakistan to have escalation dominance in a crisis with India, perhaps to deter a crisis in the first place, and—if necessary—wage and win a conflict with India. Given the conventional forces Pakistan confronts, Khan argues that “Pakistan should focus on maintaining the balance of terror with appropriate strategy against its adversary—India, instead of indulging in conventional forces number game” (7). He argues that “any transparency [in Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine] … would only undermine Pakistan’s ability to deter India’s calibration of ‘Cold Start Strategy’ or limited conflict thinking, to its peril” (25).

  A fourth component of Pakistan’s deterrence posture is the survivability of its strategic forces, including the ability to withstand conventional military attacks, sabotage, and at least one Indian nuclear attack (Lavoy 2008, 131). Since the beginning of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Pakistan has feared that the United States, India, or even Israel may act to eliminate or degrade Pakistan’s strategic capabilities. (As noted already, Bhutto [1979] believed that the United States deliberately undermined his government because of his insistence on acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.)

  These general suspicions crystallized into specific fears on at least four occasions in the 1980s. In 1982, in the wake of Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor, Pakistani press reports suggested that India might seek to attack Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. Chari et al. (2001) conclude that while “there is no evidence … of plans for such an attack. … Indian officials certainly discussed it and Pakistan definitely raised it with the Americans” (24). Two years later, Pakistani officials, citing Canadian and European intelligence reports, concluded that Israel was planning a strike on the nuclear facility at Kahuta and that Indian or Soviet help would be necessary for such an attack. Zia even made a speech before Pakistan’s legislature in which he announced that India might launch an Osirak-like attack on Pakistan. US officials also believed that an Indo-Pakistan war, or at least an Indian attack, was imminent and took immediate steps to prevent such a crisis. This same drama played out again in mid-1985, when Pakistani officials again came to believe that India was preparing a strike against Kahuta (ibid.). In 1986, a démarche from Moscow indicating that it would take “retaliatory steps if Pakistan were to acquire a military nuclear capability” caused Pakistan once again to fear an attack (26).

  Pakistan registered similar concerns about potential attacks in the early 1990s, as the Pakistan-supported Kashmir uprising intensified, and again after India’s May 1998 nuclear tests. On this latter occasion Pakistan cited both the provocative statements of the Indian ruling party (the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Dal/Party, or BJP) and ISI reports that an Israeli aircraft had been identified in India while Pakistan was preparing for its own tests (Cheema 2000). Pakistan’s assessment that its strategic assets would come under attack was a major factor in Musharraf’s 2001 decision to work with the United States, as he explained during his September 19, 2001 speech. The most recent spasms of nuclear fears were set off by the December 13, 2001 attack on India’s parliament, which spawned the 2001–2002 crisis, and by the November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba attack in Mumbai (Lavoy 2008). As noted already, Pakistani analysts such as Salik also suspect that the A. Q. Khan affair has been exploited to make Pakistan’s program appear illegitimate and thus to legitimize an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities.

  Chari et al. (2001), however, note that many of these alleged threats to Pakistan’s nuclear program actually had the effect of encouraging the United States to support Pakistan during a period (the 1980s) when Washington was growing increasingly alarmed by the Pakistani nuclear program. They suggest that this behavior fits “into a larger Pakistani strategy … of linking its own nuclear program (at the highest policy level) with an American commitment to defend Islamabad” (27). This judgment likely extends to the post-2001 crises as well. Both periods were marked by an American dependence on Pakistan that outweighed even its deep concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear program.

  Given these concerns about the vulnerability of its program, which date back to the 1970s, Pakistan has prioritized the “survivability of all nuclear production facilities, weapons and missile storage complexes, and potential launch facilities” (Lavoy 2008, 148). While Pakistan does not publicly disclose the various efforts it has taken to ensure survivability, Lavoy suspects that they likely include “an emphasis on mobile systems; camouflage; hardened and deeply buried facilities; and strict compartmentalization of information about the plans, locations, and standard operating procedures governing the movement, deployment, and possible employment of strategic forces” (149).

  The fifth and final component of Pakistan’s deterrence strategy is a responsive strategic command and control system. Whereas India has tended to be more open about operational and doctrinal concerns and reticent about command and control systems, Pakistan has sought to portray itself as being open about the latter while avoiding significant disclosures about the former. Important landmarks in the development of Pakistan’s command and control system include Musharraf’s 2000 formation of a National Command Authority, located at the Joint Services Headquarters, with the SPD serving as its sec
retariat. In the same year, Musharraf established related bodies such as the Employment Control Committee, which provides policy direction and exercises authority over strategic forces, and the Developmental Control Committee, which is responsible for optimizing the “technical and financial efficiency of the entire program to implement the strategic force goals set up by the Employment Control Committee” (Lavoy 2008, 150; see also Clary 2010; Khan 2012a, 2012b). As discussed already, the A. Q. Khan imbroglio motivated Pakistan to seriously reconsider its command and control arrangements (Clary 2010; Khan 2012a, 2012b; Lavoy 2008; Salik 2009).

  Risk-Taking under an Expanding Nuclear Umbrella

  Pakistan’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was motivated by the shift in the conventional military balance and the loss of half of Pakistan’s population and territory that followed the 1971 war. India’s 1974 test of a nuclear device further motivated Pakistani efforts (Cheema 2000). While the deterrent value of nuclear weapons is clear, they play several other strategic roles that may be less evident.

  At one level, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are political tools. Pakistan has used its nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclearized conflict to draw international attention to the Kashmir dispute. By most accounts, this strategy has worked. Following the 1999 Kargil War—the first conventional conflict after the overt nuclearization of the subcontinent—President Bill Clinton remarked that Kashmir was the most dangerous place on earth (Iype 2000). In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent 2001–2002 Indo-Pakistan crisis, US Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concern about the role the Kashmir dispute played in preventing a lasting peace in the region (Ahmed 2002). Barack Obama focused on Kashmir and the importance of resolving the dispute during his 2008 presidential campaign. Upon winning the presidency, he appointed senior US diplomat Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to the region. After swift, skilled Indian protest, Kashmir was removed from Holbrooke’s portfolio, and he became known as the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan without any reference to India or Kashmir (Wax 2009).