With the Obama Administration’s increased focus on the US-led war in Afghanistan, scholarly and analytical attention returned to the problem of Kashmir, with prominent analysts such as Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid (2008) arguing that Pakistan will not stand down its jihadi proxies in Afghanistan until the Kashmir question is resolved to its satisfaction. Rubin and Rashid argue that the United States should pursue a regional grand bargain that would bring a wave of peace from Afghanistan into Pakistan and Indian-administered Kashmir. (Notably, Rubin became an adviser to Richard Holbrooke.)
Pakistan continues to raise the issue of Kashmir at every opportunity. For example, in November 2012 Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, explained to the 39th Session of the Organization of Islam Countries Council of Foreign Ministers that Kashmir remains a constant source of conflict between India and Pakistan (Dawn 2012). A few months earlier, Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari gave a similar speech before the UN General Assembly (Rediff 2012). By constantly raising the specter of a nuclear war for the Himalayan territory, Pakistan continues to draw international attention to this matter (despite the fact that any such war would likely be begun by Pakistan).
Nuclear weapons clearly have also facilitated Pakistan’s use of low-intensity conflict. Stephen Cohen (1984) observed that a Pakistani nuclear bomb, “besides neutralizing an assumed Indian nuclear force, would provide the umbrella under which Pakistan could reopen the Kashmir issue” (153). Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent facilitates low-intensity conflict and proxy war in two important ways. First, by cultivating ambiguity as to its employment and deployment doctrine and the redlines that would precipitate Pakistan’s use of nuclear weapons, Pakistan hopes to deter any militarized Indian response either to territorial incursions by regular or irregular Pakistani troops or significant activity against Indian interests by Pakistan-supported or Pakistan-based terrorists. Pakistan assumes that given its possession of nuclear weapons and, increasingly, tactical nuclear weapons, India is simply likely to “tolerate” these nuisances rather than risk a full-scale war (Khan 2011).
Second, nuclear weapons facilitate Pakistan’s ability to wage low-intensity conflict by drawing in international actors who work to limit a conflict once it begins (Lavoy 2005; Tellis et al. 2001). The United States is the most important target audience for the maneuvers. For example, during the 2001–2002 crisis Washington pressured New Delhi not to escalate, thus shielding Pakistan from direct military threat, either as a deterrent to future terrorist attacks or a punishment for the December 2001 attack that sparked the crisis. Musharraf explained in April 1999 that while the likelihood of a conventional war was virtually zero, due to the presence of nuclear weapons, proxy wars were not only possible but in fact very likely (Kargil Review Committee 2000). The Pakistan military seems to have concluded that nuclear weapons have “reduced the prospect that India will use force to solve regional problems” and “enhance[d] Pakistan’s foreign policy leverage vis-à-vis India and its other neighbors” (Cheema 2000, 180).
Equally important, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons make it virtually impossible for the United States to simply abandon Pakistan to suffer the consequences of its own vices. Lt. Col. Masood Navid Anwari (1988) admits that the warnings (issued by the United States and others) against Pakistan developing a nuclear weapon appear “menacing at the moment.” However, “once we do develop the capability it would be very difficult for the major powers to execute these threats.” He explains that in “international politics, it is easy for a major power to abandon a weak partner but very difficult to abandon a strong one. Pakistan as a ‘free lance nuclear power’ will be far more important to the interests of these major powers, and contrary to what they may be saying, they would rather keep nuclear Pakistan in their fold than abandon her” (47). Anwari’s predictions have been proven by time. No matter how vexed Washington may be with Islamabad, it will be loath to simply abandon Pakistan, both from fear of a nuclearized Indo-Pakistan crisis but also the ever-lingering threat of proliferation to either states or nonstate actors.
In many ways, its possession of nuclear weapons has “warped judgments about Pakistan’s real strengths and weaknesses. … Strategically, it enabled Pakistan to put off the day of reckoning with India, by providing the appearance of equality between the two states” (Cohen 2004, 80–81). It has also fostered a false belief that Pakistan is a “technologically advanced country” (ibid.) that can stand up to India and the West. In contrast to Pakistan’s narrative of self-reliance, sacrifice, and honed expertise, the historical record suggests that Pakistan’s program was “a triumph of espionage and assistance from a friendly power, not the product of a technologically advanced state” (80).
There is also evidence suggesting that Pakistan has drawn unjustified conclusions about the efficacy of its nuclear program. Whereas many analysts believe that Pakistan had an actual bomb by the early 1990s (Cheema 2000; Cohen 2004; Lavoy 2005, 2008), prominent Pakistani writers such as former foreign minister Abdul Sattar (2007) insist that Pakistan had a nuclear device as early as 1983 (148). Khan (2012a) claims that Pakistan had “large bombs that could be delivered … by a C-130” as early as 1984 (189).
Equally important, the Pakistan Army believes that it had a deterrent capability long before even 1990. The Pakistan Army believes that Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities were critical in deterring Indian attacks in 1984–1985 (during India’s Punjab crisis), 1986–87 (during the Brasstacks crisis), 1990 (during the Indo-Pakistan Crisis of 1990), 1999 (during the Kargil War), and 2001–2002, implying that Pakistan believed in the deterrent power of its nuclear program before India or the United States (Cheema 2000; Lavoy 2005; Sarwar 1995). This suggests a perhaps unique dimension of the deterrent relationship between India and Pakistan: it is the presence of ambiguity about capability rather than an actual capability that may matter more to the cost–benefit analysis of both states. Pakistani military writers believe that as long as India cannot rule out a Pakistani nuclear attack with certitude it will be deterred from initiating a conflict. To some degree, this also implies that the Pakistan Army views India as being fairly pusillanimous. Indeed, the various essays discussed in this volume provide ample evidence that this is the case.
Until the nuclear tests of 1998, many analysts described the deterrence between India and Pakistan as existential deterrence, using the term introduced by McGeorge Bundy. Under the various conditions of opacity and uncertainty, the mutual deterrence calculation of India and Pakistan did not rest on “relative capabilities and strategic doctrines, but on the shared realization that each side is nuclear-capable, and thus any outbreak of conflict might lead to a nuclear war” (Kumar 2007, 240–241). Scholars of South Asia have coined other expressions that slightly modify this concept, including George Perkovich’s notion of nonweaponized deterrence and Jasjit Singh’s recessed deterrence (ibid.). Varun Sahni (2009) describes Pakistan’s beliefs that its capabilities deterred crises in the 1980s and refers to the lingering but indecisive role of nuclear weapons as “nuclear overhang” (22). According to Sahni, “The notion of nuclear overhang is certainly more expansive than the concept of existential deterrence—i.e. we could conceive of a degree of nuclear overhang even without existential deterrence” (23).
Paul Kapur (2007), mobilizing Correlates of War (COW) Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) data, concludes that nuclear weapons have made South Asia more conflict prone. His analysis can be situated within the body of scholarship proffered by deterrence pessimists (Krepon and Gagne 2001), who focus on the destabilizing effects of nuclear weapons in South Asia. Proliferation pessimists contend that nuclear weapons enable low-intensity conflict; in contrast, proliferation optimists point out that full-scale war has not broken out between India and Pakistan (Ganguly and Kapur 2010; Joeck 1997). For a debate about nuclear weapons and stability beyond the specific context of South Asia, see Sagan and Waltz (2002). In many ways, these positions offer a false binary. A perusal of the history of the region a
nd of the literature suggests that both positions have merit: while nuclear weapons facilitate subconventional and low-intensity conflict, they do operate to prevent either side from escalating to a full-scale war.
Kapur (2007) explains Indian and Pakistan behavior using what he calls the instability–instability paradox. He correctly notes that the literature on deterrence in South Asia frequently uses the stability–instability paradox to explain the way nuclear weapons enable conflict at the low end of the spectrum (Jervis 1989; Krepon and Gagne 2001; Snyder 1965) and also that this application of the paradox is inapt. First, the stability–instability paradox was born in the context of US–Soviet Union deterrence: having achieved strategic stability by making very clear which actions would elicit a nuclear response, the two states were encouraged to pursue low-intensity conflict in other theatres. The United States was particularly motivated to establish strategic stability because the Soviet Union was the revisionist state and was also conventionally superior in Europe. The Soviets would not logically expect the United States to risk a nuclear war if the Soviets invaded Europe. Thus, the United States posted American troops and nuclear weapons in Europe to signal to the Soviet Union that it would indeed respond with nuclear weapons should the Soviet Union seek to disrupt the status quo there.
Kapur (2007) sagaciously identifies two problems with scholars’ widespread application of this concept to South Asia. First, while the Soviet Union was the revisionist and conventionally superior state, in South Asia Pakistan is revisionist but conventionally inferior to India. Second, Pakistan is able to perpetrate low-intensity and subconventional conflict precisely because of the strategic instability it deliberately fosters by obscuring its redlines. Using COW MID data, Kapur concludes that it is in fact strategic instability that fosters conventional instability in the subcontinent.
As Bad as It Gets?
I replicated Kapur’s analytical methods with a few important modifications derived from my engagement with Pakistan’s defense literature. Upon doing so, I found that nuclear weapons have been even more destabilizing than Kapur’s analysis suggests. Like Kapur, I included all international disputes between India and Pakistan between 1972 and 2002 that appear in the COW militarized interstate disputes database to evaluate the impact of nuclear weapons upon all conflict proneness.4 (It makes little sense to use data prior to the 1971 war and the loss of East Pakistan.) I employ the same recoding as implemented by Kapur: I updated the COW data to include both of the 2001–2002 crisis by adding an observation for this conflict, which lasted from December 2001 to October 2002; amended the dataset’s information on the 1986–1987 Brasstacks crisis by adding an observation that spans from December 1986 to March 1987; and remedied the dataset’s failure to handle the Kargil War appropriately by separating it from the earlier Kashmir dispute and adding an observation for a three-month dispute in 1999 (Kapur 2007). I also used Kapur’s definition of a dispute month as “each month in which a militarized dispute” took place between India and Pakistan (19).5
Where my analytical methodology diverges from that of Kapur is in the periodization of nuclearization in South Asia.6 I define the nonnuclear period as the period from 1972 to April 1979. I suggest that April 1979 (when the United States applied Symington Amendment sanctions) should be taken as the starting point for Pakistan’s nuclearization.7 Taking this as the start date accounts for the extensive Pakistani interference in the Sikh insurgency beginning in the early 1980s and the Pakistan Army’s enduring belief that its latent nuclear capability deterred Indian aggression throughout the 1980s as well as during later crises. (Recall that India tested a rudimentary device in 1974.) Second, I define the incipient nuclear period as May 1979 (when sanctions were first applied) to August 1990 (when the Pressler sanctions came into effect). I define the de facto (or covert) nuclear period as September 1990 to May 1998. Finally, I define the overt nuclear period as June 1998 onward.
I cross-tabulate the conflict months by nuclear status (Table 8.1) to demonstrate that peace was far less likely in the de facto and overt nuclear periods than in the nonnuclear period and that conflict was more likely (by two orders of magnitude) in all three nuclear phases. In Table 8.2, I calculate the conflict rates for these four periods. In the nonnuclear period (1972–1979), I find a conflict rate of 0.011 (compared with 0.139 for Kapur’s nonnuclear period, 1972 to 1989). The conflict rate steadily increases: rising from 0.011 to 0.265 as one moves from the nonnuclear period toward the incipient period, then again to 0.710 as one moves to the de facto period, and finally to 0.818 in the overt nuclear period.8
Other factors, quite apart from the expanding nuclear umbrella in both India and Pakistan, likely have contributed to the conflict proneness of the region. Looking at the period from 1972, what is most striking is that during two of the nuclear periods (per my coding scheme), the United States and Pakistan were closely allied, with the United States using a variety of military and economic assistance packages to encourage Pakistan to support US strategic goals. For much—but not all—of what I have coded as the incipient nuclear period, the United States provided considerable military and economic support to Pakistan to reward it for helping the United States (along with Saudi Arabia, among others) to repel the Soviets from Afghanistan. Similarly, for some of the overt nuclear period (i.e., after September 2001) Pakistan was again the beneficiary of substantial US military and economic aid meant to induce Pakistan to assist the United States in Afghanistan. Given that Pakistanis easily appreciated how much the United States relied on Pakistan during these two periods, Pakistan no doubt assumed that it had greater leeway to engage in adventurism in India, fully expecting that the United States would pressure India to back down in any crisis. Thus, US involvement is a compounding factor that may have encouraged Pakistan to ever more boldly pursue revisionist behavior.
Table 8.1 Cross-Tabulations of Conflict Months by Nuclear Status
Table 8.2 Conflict Rate by Nuclear Period
Conclusions and Implications
Nuclear weapons have figured in the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture since the 1970s, even though Bhutto prioritized them much earlier. Once the army endorsed nuclear weapons, Pakistan could further innovate at the lower ends of the conflict spectrum, as I discuss in Chapter 9. In the army’s vision, nuclear weapons can neutralize its larger conventional foe, render Pakistan immune from Indian punishment for its use of low-intensity and subconventional conflict, and ensure that the United States cannot walk away from Pakistan despite the former’s disquiet with the latter’s outrages. In this chapter, I present strong evidence that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program encourages risk-seeking behavior, which has often led to crises, be it interstate war or militarized disputes short of war. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have distorted Pakistan’s perception of its own capabilities, encouraged it to think of itself as India’s peer competitor on equal terms, and afforded a degree of impunity for its risk-seeking behavior.
In this chapter, I focus mostly on the history and empirical data about nuclear weapons and conflict in South Asia. The data I present here suggests important correlations between crisis proneness in the region and the expanding nuclear umbrella. In Chapter 9, I provide evidence from Pakistan’s defense literature that strongly suggests not only a correlation but also a causal relationship between nuclearization and conflict. In Chapter 9, I also exposit the ways Pakistan Army writers have explicitly imagined subconventional conflict as a military tool for changing the status quo. Many defense writers explicitly concede that Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella enables Pakistan to engage in this risky behavior. After all, as we have seen, defeat for Pakistan is not defined using the terms of game theory. For the Pakistan Army, defeat is defined as succumbing to India and accepting its hegemonic position, in South Asia and beyond. As long as Pakistan can continue challenging India, it has not been defeated. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons play a critical role in enabling Pakistan to continue denying and retarding India’s rise.
C
HAPTER 9
Jihad under the Nuclear Umbrella
Scholars and policy analysts alike generally agree that Pakistan first began employing Islamist militants as a tool to prosecute its foreign policy objectives during the anti-Soviet jihad. Under Zia ul Haq, Pakistan, working with the United States, Saudi Arabia, and others, built a massive system for producing Islamist insurgents, generally known as mujahideen, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. According to this narrative, when the Soviets formally withdrew from Afghanistan, Pakistan redeployed its battle-hardened operatives to Kashmir. Even prominent intelligence officials repeat this truncated version of Pakistan’s jihad history. For example, Bruce Riedel (2008), who spent nearly three decades at the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and who has advised four presidents on Middle East and South Asian affairs, wrote, “The contemporary jihadist terrorist movement has its origins in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s” (Riedel 2008, 32; see also, e.g., Coll 2004; Evans 2000; Markey 2007; Nasr 2004; Stern 2000).
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