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How India and Pakistan adjusted to a dangerous new nuclear environment

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Asad Durrani
Asad DurraniAug 27, 2018 | 12:51

How India and Pakistan adjusted to a dangerous new nuclear environment

Presenting an exclusive excerpt from Asad Durrani's new book Pakistan Adrift: Navigating Troubled Waters (Westland) which offers his assessment of the challenges faced by Pakistan in the last decades.

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Photo: Westland Books

(Excerpted with permission from Westland Books)

***

Good concepts, brilliant designs and even sound strategies have never been enough. For their success, we make certain assumptions and lay down conditions that must be fulfilled. It must be assumed, for example, that an agreement, no matter how favourable to one or the other side, is not to be touted as a unilateral victory. Eager to make political capital out of the accord, some Pakistani officials went to town claiming they had made the Indians “finally” agree to discuss Kashmir. India reacted predictably and clarified that the only aspect of Kashmir it ever intended to discuss was Pakistan’s support to the insurgency. The composite dialogue, and along with that the peace process, was put on hold.

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The following year, in 1998, the arch rivals brought their nukes out of the basement. The celebrations that followed in India and Pakistan, and not only on the streets, were accompanied by plenty of chest thumping and bellicosity towards each other. Obviously, there were also concerns both inside and outside the region: how would the two nascent nuclear powers adjust to the new, potentially dangerous, nuclear environment? At the very least, some measures were necessary to prevent a situation in which one side or the other would fire a nuclear weapon in panic or because it misread a signal, such as a missile test by the other.

Since it was a matter of grave concern for both the countries, a hot­line between the two DGMOs was quickly established. Indeed, the basic issue to be addressed was the conflict-ridden relationship that might lead to a nuclear exchange. If that required a spectacular step, then Vajpayee was the man to take it. In February 1999, he undertook his famous bus yatra to Lahore. The Declaration that he signed on February 21, with his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, went beyond nuclear confidence-building measures and attempted to revive the peace process. The composite dialogue once again formed the bedrock of the agreement. Once again, it had to be shelved before it got a fair chance when, in early May 1999, Pakistan-backed troops and militia were found occupying heights on the Indian side of the LOC in the Kargil sector.

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Composite dialogue between India-Pakistan had to be shelved before it got a fair chance when, in early May 1999, Pakistan-backed troops and militia were found occupying Kargil. (Photo: Indiatoday.in)

Indo-Pak relations suffered another setback when, later in the year, the Pakistani Army Chief, General Pervez Musharraf, took over in a military putsch. Since the General was the architect of Kargil, India was obviously reluctant to resume the peace process as long as he was in power. But when Musharraf was found to be firmly in the saddle, Vajpayee invited him to give peace another chance. Musharraf, who had, in the meantime, assumed the office of president, visited India in July 2001 and met the Indian prime minister in what became known as the Agra Summit.

It failed because the hawks in Delhi led by LK Advani, the Indian home minister, scuttled the process.

In the aftermath of 9/11, events took a further dip. When America decided to invade Afghanistan to flush out the Al-Qaeda, the group suspected of having masterminded this enormity, it sought cooperation from Pakistan. India was obviously unhappy with the prospect of Pakistan once again becoming a frontline ally of what was now the sole superpower. It offered its own services instead. Pakistan got the role as it was better located. Already sulking over being upstaged by Pakistan, India mobilised for war when its Parliament was attacked, probably by members of a banned Pakistani militant outfit. For most of 2002, the armed forces of the two countries remained in a state of high alert. There were, however, good reasons why it did not escalate into war, even a limited one.

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Some of the reasons are well known: the risk of nuclear conflagra­tion, because of which third parties were eager to restrain both sides before they went over the brink. Another, perhaps the more potent constraint, is less known. An all-out conventional war between the two countries was very likely to end in a stalemate. Since countries do not normally start wars without a reasonable chance of achieving a strate­gic objective, India and Pakistan, after 1971, did not take their conflicts beyond a build-up on the border and skirmishes across the LOC. Another factor that led to the disengagement of forces was the vested interest of the resurgent Indian economy.

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Concerns both inside and outside the region — How would the two nascent nuclear powers adjust to the new, potentially dangerous, nuclear environment? (Photo: PTI)

India still could have initiated a war in 2002, either in frustration or in the belief that the US presence in the area would deny Pakistan its nuclear option. But then there were other implications to consider. With active hostilities removing all constraints on Pakistan from sup­porting the insurgency in Kashmir, it could become more intense and durable. More importantly, if the war ended without causing major damage to Pakistan, it would have deprived India of a potent card that it had so far used to good effect: the threat of war. Even though Pakistan had a reasonable chance of preventing India from achieving a decisive military victory, it was still sensitive to Indian threats of war.

Being the smaller country, its economy was more vulnerable to wartime ten­sions. After thirty years of high economic growth, it had gone through its worst recession in the 1990s. Now that there was some promise of recovery as an important ally of the US, tensions with India was an unwelcome development. Paradoxically, when the drums of war receded, both the countries found that their threat cards had been played out, seemingly for the last time.

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Dove and hawk - Unlike Vajpayee, seen to push for peace with Pakistan, Advani was considered a hardliner. (Photo: PTI)

Pakistan had, time and again, warned that if India did not agree to resolve the Kashmir problem, the region could be blown apart in a nuclear holocaust. In the absence of any desperate resolve in Pakistan to follow up on these threats, the argument was fast losing its effective­ness. I believe, by 2002, India’s threat of a major conventional war too had run its course. Now that the two countries had manoeuvred each other into a deadlock, it was time to revive their on-again off-again peace process. The 2004 SAARC Summit in Islamabad seemed to be the right moment. Before that, the stumbling blocks that had caused the failure at Agra had to be removed.

The very fact that the framework evolved in 1997 had survived nuclear tests, the Kargil episode, a military coup, 9/11, and the stand­off of 2002, proved that it was a robust construct. One of its best fea­tures was that it could accommodate the preferences of both the par­ties and prevent concerns, even serious ones like Kashmir, from scuttling the process. In Agra, this potential for an understanding was not best used because the two sides insisted that their respective inter­ests be recognized as ‘the core issue’: Kashmir for Pakistan and cross-border infiltration for India. To resolve this conflict in the spirit of the original concept, all one had to do was to make both the concerns part of the process.

Two extracts from the joint press statement of 6 January after Vajpayee met Musharraf to seal the agreement show how smoothly it could be done.

President Musharraf reassured Prime Minister Vajpayee that he would not permit territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner…

The two leaders are confident that the resumption of composite dia­logue will lead to peaceful settlement of all bilateral issues, including Jammu & Kashmir, to the satisfaction of both sides.

The plan was now perfect, but to start the process, some movement had to take place on the ground, for example, with a round of meetings on mundane issues to establish a good beginning. It had, however, been the thinking in some quarters that a gesture on Kashmir, even a symbolic one, might be the best way to kick-start the process. Kashmir after all was not only the ‘core issue’ for Pakistan, having sucked in hundreds of thousands of Indian troops, it was also a ‘multi-corps’ problem for India.

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Former ISI chief Asad Durrani presents a detailed picture of the challages faced by India-Pakistan in the last few decades. (Photo: Screengrab/Al Jazeera)

The gesture had to meet some essential criteria: it was to be without prejudice to the declared Kashmir policies of India and Pakistan; it had to provide some hope that a resolution of the dispute was seriously sought; and it had to sufficiently engage the Kashmiris to let the two countries work on their less intractable issues. The meeting of the lead­ership on both sides of the Kashmir divide seemed to meet these criteria adequately. Ultimately, it was decided to start a bus service between the two parts of Kashmir from April 7, 2005. The idea must have been that not only the leaders but divided families too could be brought together.

The bus was also bound to make a bigger and better all-round impact than meetings between a few individuals, which, in any case, were not expected to show immediate results. There was, however, a risk involved: if the odd bus were to be blown up by any of the many detrac­tors of the peace process, it would be a serious setback at this nascent stage. That, mercifully, did not happen, and nor did much else after the initial euphoria over the bus trips and some high-profile visits by the Hurriyat leaders to Pakistan. The symbolism was still helpful.

(Excerpted with permission from Westland Books)

Last updated: August 28, 2018 | 18:35
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