NEW DELHI, 26 May — If India and Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons they would have fought their fifth war by now. (Kargil was the fourth.) Is that good news or bad?
Which is worse? The periodic blood lust of the past or holocaust postponed? The promise of mutually assured destruction (appropriately acronymed MAD) kept the peace in Europe after the World War II.
There was more than one occasion when NATO could have moved against the coalition under the Warsaw Pact led by the Soviet Union: In 1956, when Hungary was invaded by Soviet troops; twice in 1961, when Soviet missiles were deployed in Cuba and when the Berlin Wall came up; perhaps even in 1967 when the Czech uprising was crushed.
Each time, one side blinked and catastrophe was averted. In the 1960s there raged proxy wars between the West and the Soviet Union. (West, of course, is a notional term. Australia, which is about as East as you can get, thinks of itself as part of the West, as indeed it is, politically, economically and ethnically).
Vietnam was the high point of this confrontation, but wars in the name of decolonization and neo-colonialism were rampant through Africa, Latin America and Asia. It was the Great Game played in every part of the world. But the principals, America and the Soviet Union, made absolutely sure that they did not lose the world in the process of trying to gain it. (China spent this phase of history quietly building up its strength and waiting to see which elephant survived before it took on the exhausted victor).
Eventually, when the death count became unacceptable, and public opinion could no longer be as easily manipulated by artificial or simulated scare tactics, America changed its strategy. It decided to bleed the Soviet Union to death. Moscow cooperated by its biggest blunder, the invasion of Afghanistan. But someone was also doing some sharp thinking in Washington. Even as the physical and economic cost of pacification rose in Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan upped the ante in nuclear capability.
Both sides always knew that the strength of their economy would be a crucial determinant in the confrontation. The stratified, over indulgent and undernourished Communist economy could not keep pace with the rapacious vigor of capitalism. The color television set defeated the black and white television set, to use a metaphor. Comrade Humpty Dumpty had a big fall.
But at least part of the reason for the unprecedented half-a-century of peace in Europe after the World War II was that Europe was exhausted. It had inflicted too many wounds upon itself; it had raped itself too often. The nature of war changed. At the beginning of the 20th century less than five percent of the causalities of war were civilians. By the end of the century the percentages were reversed.
The World War II destroyed the barrier between battlefield and civilian life over and over again. Between Germany and the Soviet Union alone they lost some 37 million lives.
By the 1960s, American soldiers were being officially encouraged to take their frustrations out on Vietnamese civilians through stark murder or serial rape. There was no urge toward ethics or discipline on the Soviet side; and Russian soldiers in Chechnya today have inherited the characteristics of savagery disguised as war. But, once again, Europeans and Americans never turned their own homelands into battlefields.
India and Pakistan are not tired of war. One reason may be because their four wars have been short, and the collateral damage has been minimal. Their longest war was the first one, lasting some 14 months during 1947 and 1948. The field of operations was limited to the province of Jammu and Kashmir, and air power was not used to any significant extent. 1965 did see dogfights, but civilian targets were scrupulously avoided. 1971 was a walkover, once the talk began. And Kargil was again limited in both scope and operations.
All four were very professional wars, to part it accurately. None spilled over into the kind of attrition displayed by Iran and Iraq during their terrible war of more than eight years. From the year of Kargil, or a bit before, a strange kind of artillery exchange has gone on, whose purpose is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals.
It is a slogging match on either side, empty of evacuated terrain that sends shudders of delight through the hearts of arms merchants but is of no practical use to anyone else. A more purposeful confrontation might be taking place in Siachen, but I am no expert on glacier warfare.
The nature of Indo-Pak wars began to change when the use of terror became an element in the overall Pak strategy. This was both more surreptitious and more immature during the Punjab days, when abatement and succor were on offer rather than official endorsement and policy-support to separatists.
The elimination of the Valley of Kashmir from the Indian Union is the declared aim of Pakistan. The support to terror in the Valley, and for the Valley, is qualitatively and quantitatively different.
What India is facing in what should be called its third Kashmir war is what the Soviet Union faced in Afghanistan: A struggle between regular and irregular armies. (This is exactly what American and British troops will face, by the way, in the next phase of the Afghan war, with the irregular forces still using Pakistan as their operating base, with or without the formal help of the Islamabad establishment).
Such a war is debilitating and provocative because it is conducted without rules. It suits Pakistan perfectly, because Islamabad can choose the distance it wants to maintain between itself and the successes or failures of this clandestine force. A regular army such as ours will search for a pitched battle. An irregular one such as Pakistan’s will seek darkness and offer suicide.
“Tiger” Prabhakaran has been conducting exactly such a war in Sri Lanka, and with more tenacity, since he has no safe base to fall back upon for rest and regroupment. Such a war is also, clearly a war of nerves. Pakistan has acquired extraordinary expertise in this war of nerves.
What can Delhi do in response? It can, and does, threaten a larger war. But this threat is partly compromised by the absence of clearly defined war objectives. The terrorists are effective, or not, on Indian soil. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that for one successful militant attack perhaps a dozen or more have been intercepted and aborted. But success is a one-paragraph story, while failure dominates the headlines.
The most familiar stated objective is to cross the line of control (LoC) in “hot pursuit” of militants into Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
But there is no Jenin across that line of control; and if a militant training camp had any sense it would probably be operating from Peshawar or Balochistan. How far do you go in search? How far can you go?
Shifting the line of vision to a subjective perspective, what does Pervez Musharraf have to lose by war? Nothing, and he may have everything to gain.
At which point comes the paradox: Can anyone gain from a war that everyone might lose? A nuclear war is implicitly and explicitly civilian; that bomb will not do surgery, it will flatten and mass-destruct. It serves the Pakistan military establishment twice over to raise the ante, because nothing is better guaranteed to bring the world scurrying to South Asia than the prospect of nuclear devastation.
The Pakistan government is the only government in history to openly and regularly threaten to use nuclear power. Armageddon is a weapon in the range of its options. Its strategic thinking can be summed up in a sentence: If we go, we take you along with us.
As the problem goes down to the wire it becomes a game of finer and finer calculation: What level of desperation is needed to touch that button? The trouble with the answer is that it is human. And no science has been devised that can accurately measure the vagaries of humanity. There are no standards to determine the power of anger or desperation.
The volatile passions that rule the fate of the subcontinent, fermented by religion and history and experience, are too provocative for a nuclear age. But one thing, and perhaps only this thing, is clear. The stalemate has become dangerously stale. It cannot continue without a geometric escalation of risk.
Between the World War II and the erosion of Soviet Union, the nuclear clock wavered at five minutes to twelve across Europe and America. In India and Pakistan it is now one minute to twelve.
