Adventurism as strategy

There is another rationale 8212; a dangerous one 8212; given by Pakistan for its decision to test nuclear weapons: asymmetry in conventional strength vis-a-vis India. Since it thinks the India-Pakistan conventional arms balance is tilted in India8217;s favour, it believes it can correct the imbalance with nuclear weapons. What this means is that nuclear weapons are meant to be used, or their use threatened, at some stage in an Indo-Pak conflict. Vajpayee believes the opposite. He has pledged not to use nuclear weapons first. Pakistan believes in the usability or threatened usability of nuclear weapons; we believe in their non-use, politically or diplomatically. For us their only utility lies in deterring a nuclear adversary.

Pakistan8217;s idea of the usability of nuclear weapons is similar to NATO8217;s. To compensate for the perceived Soviet superiority in men and arms, NATO8217;s strategy inthe Sixties and Seventies stipulated the use of low-yield nuclear weapons in the Central European theatre. Situations never arose calling for the implementation of this strategy, but to think that such situations in other contexts and locales will never arise is wrong. Yet our strategic experts who have taken it upon themselves to pontificate on the Vajpayee government8217;s nuclear policy say that nuclear weapons have banished wars and conflicts for good. Nuclear nirvana will reign on earth, or at least between neighbours who possess this awesome power.

According to Eric Arnett of the Stockholm International Peace Re-search Institute SIP-RI, an institute of impeccable integrity, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan told an American official in 1996 that Pakistan had contemplated the use of nuclear weapons in the event that the situation in May 1990 in Kashmir deteriorated into a war. The May 1990 event, coming in the wake of popular unrest in Kashmir in the winter of 1989, has gone down the memory hole of SouthBlock. No one talks about it but we should, if we wish to prevent it from recurring.

Operation Brasstacks of 1987 is another instance of a near Indo-Pak clash; mercifully neither country had nuclear weapons then. A civil servant-turned- academic, P.R. Chari, has reconstructed the event, showing how the two miscalculated and misjudged each other8217;s intentions and capabilities. Now that both have nuclear weapons we had better know each other8217;s strategy, for its ignorance could end in disaster.

We would like to divorce the nuclear issue from Kashmir because our objective in Kashmir is to maintain the status quo. We also hope that some day it will be recognised by the major world powers as an international boundary. We think nuclear weapons will freeze the Kashmir situation, for no one can change it now without a nuclear war. This is what President Nara-yanan said in an interview on the Republic Day. Our establishment defence analysts say the same thing, but more pedantically. They say that the LoC in Kashmiris now as frozen as the Oder-Neisse line dividing eastern and western Europe was frozen at one time. But the European division vanished in November 1989 when the Berliners peacefully dismantled the Wall. Nuclear weapons too do not freeze conflicts for ever.

This could happen in Kashmir. Precisely because the antagonists are now deterred from going to war, they may be tempted to test each other8217;s resolve short of a nuclear confrontation: in fact they can do so with impunity, since neither dares to cross the nuclear threshold.

Some such thinking may well be operating in the mind of Pakistan8217;s ruling elite. Mushahid Hussain says that nuclear weapons have brought Kashmir into international focus. Former ISI director Asad Durrani even says that Pakistan would use, or must demonstrate its determination to use, nuclear weapons against India in case its national objectives are threatened; 8221;for example, a major crackdown on the freedom movement in Kashmir8221;.

No doubt much of this is plain posturing. But it hasa purpose. It is aimed at telling the Americans and the Chinese that with the appearance of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent the Kashmir situation has become more dangerous. Here is a plausible scenario: a large influx of terrorists into the Kashmir Valley, followed by the usual bellowing by Indian and Pakistani leaders and then the levelling of veiled nuclear threats by Pakistan.

Some such event would reconfirm in the American mind that nuclear weapons are dangerous in the hands of these 8221;irresponsible and reckless South Asian countries8221;. The United States, and those who take their cue from it 8212; Britain, Germany, Russia, China and Japan 8212; would act in concert to pressure India to negotiate the Kashmir issue.

It is indeed in our interest to delink Kashmir from the nuclear issue. A severance between diplomacy and nuclear weapons is what we want while a link between them is what Pakistan wants. The way to beat Pakistan is to accept its proposal for a no-war pact and seriously consider its othersuggestion of a reduction in our conventional strength. A negotiated settlement will strengthen the security of both and sever the relationship between the power of the atom and diplomacy.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi