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South Asian War Games SOUTH ASIAN WAR GAMES The Indo-Pakistani Rivalry The major bone of contention in Indo-Pakistani relations is Kashmir, which has been partitioned since the armistice that ended the hostilities accompanying the birth of the two states in 1947. India occupies two-thirds of Kashmir; the other third, Azad Kashmir, is controlled by Pakistan. Both countries view Kashmir as vital to their security. Its high mountain passes look down on India and Pakistan from the north; its rivers irrigate crops in both countries. The dispute over Kashmir, however, goes beyond strategic considerations. The raison d'être for the creation of Pakistan was to unite Muslim majority regions in a separate state to avoid domination by the Hindu majority in India. Three-quarters of Kashmir's 13 million inhabitants are Muslims. For its part, India sees retention of Kashmir as essential to its conception of a pluralist secular state. India also fears the possible consequences of the separation of Kashmir creating a “domino effect” in predominantly Muslim sectors of India. What began in 1989 in the Indian sector as an indigenous Kashmiri independence movement has been joined by Islamic militants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, who have turned it into a protracted guerrilla struggle.1 India has committed between 300,000 and 400,000 troops to an effort to put down the movement, and between 25,000 and 50,000 people, mostly innocent Kashmiris, have been killed in the struggle. Meanwhile, along the LOC (Line of Control) between the Indian and Pakistani sectors of Kashmir, India and Pakistan are engaged in the world's longest running artillery duel, which is punctuated with occasional dare-devil raids across the LOC by local commanders. After 2 the two sides demonstrated their nuclear capabilities in 1998, President Clinton declared the subcontinent to be “the most dangerous place in the world” (Miller and Risen, 2000). In the winter of 2001-2002, an attack on the Indian parliament by terrorists associated with Pakistan led to a full-scale crisis, as both states prepared for war. Three principal elements increase the risk that the weapons will be used. First, the dangerous and unstable situation in Kashmir provides a ready precipitant to escalating hostilities. The once indigenous separatist movement has been co-opted by Islamic militants from Pakistan and veterans of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan, who are bent on turning it into an Islamic jihad against Hindus. Pakistan faces a classic principal-agent problem in which the elements that they have nurtured for the jihad in Kashmir have become a threat to the stability of Pakistan itself (Stern, 2000; Rashid, 1999). Islamic radicals also have become influential in the officer corps of the army, despite Musharraf’s purge of the upper ranks following his decision to ally with the United States in its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Musharraf, who came to power via a military coup, makes no major decisions without consulting his military advisors. By the same token, the influence of Islamic fundamentalism within the population at large has grown with the impoverishment of the middle class following economic sanctions imposed for Pakistan’s violations of U.S. non-proliferation statutes and the Musharraf coup. These conditions provide a reliable supply of Pakistani teenagers seeking a way out of poverty and boredom, who are recruited, trained, and armed by militant Islamic groups promising adventure and salvation to those who join the jihad in Kashmir. 3 The second element is distrust bordering on paranoia, which began with the communal violence accompanying partition. It has been sustained by four wars, several instances of hostilities short of war, and numerous crises. Each confrontation has added to the legacy of distrust and hatred. Indian leaders, who blame Pakistan for inciting and sustaining the separatist movement in Kashmir, claim that forty percent of the guerrillas captured in Kashmir are Pakistani volunteers. Pakistani leaders view India’s annexation of two-thirds of Kashmir as an illegitimate power-grab, and they warily eye statements by Vajpayee’s BJP party urging the seizure of Azad Kashmir as well. A deeper Pakistani fear is especially prevalent among military leaders, particularly those with memories of the Indian military assistance to the Bangladesh independence movement, which led to the loss of East Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. Their fear is that India will use an escalation of hostilities over Kashmir as a pretext for a war to reunite the subcontinent under Hindu control.2 That fear has gained greater currency as India has used the United States’ “war on terrorism” as a justification for a more proactive approach to terrorism associated with the struggle for Kashmir. The third element is the unstable relationship between the strategies of the two sides and their comparative military capabilities. The status quo party, India, enjoys a significant advantage in conventional military forces: a 2-1 edge in ground and air forces, and a 3-1 naval advantage. To challenge what it sees as an illegitimate status quo, irredentist Pakistan has resorted to low intensity hostilities to destabilize the situation and encourage the diplomatic intervention of major powers. Consequently, Pakistan has offered encouragement and support to guerrilla and terrorist forces whose activities it can no longer control. For its part, the Indian government, which holds Pakistan responsible 4 for the activities of the Kashmiri militants, is sorely tempted to use its conventional military advantage to punish or neutralize the other side. Deterrence and Indo-Pakistani Perspectives Deterrence theory assumes that at least one of the parties prefers the status quo to an outcome that would be created by a challenge to the status quo by the other party. Assuming two rational parties, successful deterrence depends on the ability of the status quo party to communicate a threat that causes an opponent to prefer the status quo to the perceived consequences of challenging it. That ability is dependent on the opponent’s perception of the capability of the deterring party and the credibility of the threatened action (see Zagare, 1987:33-39). The deterring party has a capable threat if its opponent views the status quo as preferable to the threatened action. The deterrent threat is credible if the opponent believes that the deterring party prefers carrying out the threat to accepting the opponent’s challenge to the status quo, that is, that the threat will be carried out. Stripped to its essentials, deterrence theory rests on the twin pillars of Realpolitik: carefully calculated estimates of comparative interests and capabilities. But it also is dependent on the ability of statesmen to make those estimates and, more difficult still, to calculate how their opponents are making those estimates. Arguments for nuclear deterrence are based on the devastating destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons. In a dispute between two states with rudimentary nuclear forces, neither side can be certain that it has the capability to completely eliminate the second strike capabilities of the other in a first strike; therefore the possibility exists of suffering a devastating second strike, even if the other party has only a few remaining 5 nuclear weapons. The nuclear deterrence argument is extended to conventional war on the grounds that neither side wants to run the risk that a conventional war will escalate to a nuclear war (Waltz, 1981; Hagerty, 1995/96). A counter-argument is that each party’s awareness of the other’s concern with the costs of a nuclear war raises its perception of the other’s provocation threshold and neutralizes nuclear deterrence of conventional war (Snyder and Diesing, 1977:453-57; Leng, 2000:12-13). In a dispute of such pronounced asymmetry in conventional forces as exists between India and Pakistan, the stronger party (India) may believe that its nuclear second-strike capabilities will allow it to escalate limited hostilities to full-scale conventional war without a high risk of a nuclear first- strike from the other party. Conversely, the weaker party (Pakistan) may use the same logic to attempt to blur the line between conventional war and strategic nuclear war by employing tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons to redress the imbalance in conventional forces. Moreover, once a conventional war is underway, there is an incentive for both parties to attempt to “decapitate” the other’s nuclear forces in a first- strike with either conventional or nuclear weapons. The logical places to gauge the relative validity of the two sides of the nuclear debate in South Asia would be in the performance records of the two states and the stated views of their leaders. But there, too, the information is ambiguous. When Indian troops fired into a crowd engaged in a separatist demonstration in Kashmir on January 20, 1990, Pakistan entered the dispute on the side of the separatists, and the resultant militarized crisis raised the possibility of nuclear war. American intelligence put the possibility of an Indo-Pakistani conventional war at fifty percent and worried about escalation to nuclear war (Hagerty, 1995/96:106). Hersh (1993), in fact, claims that Pakistan had placed its 6 nuclear arsenal on alert. The extent of the threat of nuclear war in 1990, and Hersh’s assertions in particular, have been the subject of considerable debate. Hagerty (1995/96:101-107) argues that the potential threat of nuclear war was a key factor in preventing the outbreak of conventional war. When India, and then Pakistan, broke the informal nuclear test ban in 1998, both sides claimed that the tangible demonstration of their mutual nuclear capabilities would induce caution and reduce the risk that low-intensity hostilities across the LOC in Kashmir would escalate to full-scale war. As an Indian officer stationed along the LOC put it, the nuclear risk made war “unthinkable” (Burns, 1998).
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