- Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's "disclosure"
in Karachi Monday that he had plans to launch "unconventional"
war on India in case Indian troops crossed the border during the recent
10-month-long military confrontation adds a new and dangerous twist to
the India-Pakistan strategic hostility.
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- The disclosure and the Indian response to it have significantly
lowered the threshold of a nuclear confrontation in South Asia - the world's
sole region with a half-century-long continuous hot-cold war between the
same two rivals, now both armed with nuclear weapons and missiles.
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- India has denounced Musharraf's statement as "highly
dangerous" and "provocative", but also declared that it
will conduct further test-flights of its Agni medium-range missile. More
important, India is planning to establish a Strategic Forces Command (SFC),
tasked with managing its nuclear arsenal. It has already selected a senior
Air Force officer as chief of the SFC.
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- Musharraf Monday said that early last year he had conveyed
to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee a clear message "through every
international leader who came to Pakistan" that Indian troops "should
not expect a conventional war" if they "moved a single step across
the border or the Line of Control".
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- The Pakistan government later that day attempted some
"damage control" by clarifying that Musharraf "only meant
unconventional forces, and not nuclear or biological weapons".
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- However, this is not convincing, given the context that
Musharraf was referring to - defined by Indian and Pakistani leaders' extreme
frustration at the inconclusive outcome of their recent eyeball-to-eyeball
standoff, which is the globe's greatest military mobilisation since World
War II involving one million soldiers.
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- Musharraf's statement means that Pakistan can threaten
to use nuclear weapons in the very first stages of a military conflict,
not when it is about to be overrun in a conventional attack. Earlier, in
April, Musharraf had declared that he would use nuclear weapons only when
the whole of his country "faces the threat of being erased from the
map".
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- Pakistan's officially stated nuclear doctrine permits
a first strike with nuclear weapons. India rejects the first use of nuclear
weapons. But in practice, this may not mean much, given that there is little
strategic distance between the two South Asian rivals.
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- India-Pakistan's latest hostile verbal exchange indicates
a further hardening of their rivalry. India has cited Musharraf's statement
as proof that the prospect of any "forward movement" in relations
with Pakistan in mutual relations is "unrealistic".
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- The two governments are taking active steps to close
"the gap" between the manufacture of nuclear weapons, and their
induction into the armed forces and deployment. Once they are deployed,
nuclear weapons will be harder to get rid of. Worse, the probability of
their use will considerably increase.
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- In South Asia, nuclear weapons must be placed within
the general context of India-Pakistan one-upmanship and the rival claims
of each being stronger or "tougher" than the other. In recent
weeks, India and Pakistan have both claimed that their side "won"
in the latest military confrontation.
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- Musharraf even said: "We have defeated our enemy
without going into war." Indian leaders, including Defence Minister
George Fernandes, have made identical statements over the past two months.
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- In reality, both India and Pakistan lost billions of
dollars in mobilising their armed forces at the border. In India's case,
anything between $1.2 and 2 billion was spent - equivalent to the central
government's entire education budget. Both imposed avoidable hardship and
fatigue upon their soldiers by keeping them on high alert for long periods.
Both sacrificed the lives of scores, if not hundreds, of their own men
- in landmine blasts, shelling and accidents.
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- Yet, neither country's leaders seem to have learned many
lessons from this standoff. India's outgoing army chief S. Padmanabhan
confirmed that "we were absolutely ready to go to war", but dismissed
the notion that Pakistan's nuclear capability had deterred India.
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- He said: "When we assess our adversaries, we assess
all (their) capabilities. We had evaluated it (Pakistan's nuclear capability)
and were ready to cope with it."
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- Nuclear sabre-rattling in South Asia serves to foster
the irrational illusion that each side is in some sense "prepared"
to counter and "cope with" the other's "nuclear" challenge,
that nuclear wars are winnable, that "protection" is possible
against these mass-annihilation weapons.
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- This is pure, heady, myth-making. There are no victors
in a nuclear war. There can be none. Nuclear weapons are strategically
irrational. They cannot protect soldiers, leave alone civilian non-combatants.
Rather, they make unarmed civilians particularly vulnerable to mass-destruction
attacks.
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- The best "security" which nuclear weapons can
provide is of a negative kind -based on fear, insecurity, balance of power,
through so-called deterrence, itself a flawed doctrine. But deterrence
can break down, leading to nuclear retaliation.
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- However, nuclear retaliation is an act of senseless revenge,
not of regaining security. There is no defence, military, civil or medical,
against nuclear weapons.
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- As India and Pakistan get sucked into a dangerous nuclear
arms race, no major world power is restraining them. The U.S. is preoccupied
with Iraq and Al-Qaida, and needs to keep Islamabad and New Delhi in good
humour for its own political-strategic reasons. It needs Islamabad's help
in its "war" on Al-Qaida. And India is Washington's "strategic
first love", and a long-term counter to China.
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- Nuclear restraint is unlikely to come from within the
Indian and Pakistani governments. Both are conservative regimes and hostage
to extreme-right pressure. After the Gujarat elections, the Vajpayee cabinet
has moved into an aggressive anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistan stance.
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- For now, the call for nuclear sanity has to come from
conscientious citizens and progressive politicians.
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- (The writer is a leading commentator on political and
strategic affairs)
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- Copyright © 2001 IANS India Private Limited. All
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