Dangers of Inadvertent Escalation in South Asia

Abstract

Barry Posen has, in his study on Inadvertent Escalation, raised a very pertinent question asking, ‘Can Nuclear Powers fight conventional wars with each other and avoid the use of nuclear weapons?’ This question should always be kept in mind by all nuclear powers especially those with mutually hostile relationships. It is evident that the phenomenon of ‘Inadvertent Escalation’ cannot be understood without an understanding of the process of Escalation. South Asia despite the nuclearization of the region in 1998, has been facing one crisis after another each more belligerent than the preceding one and with the potential to wittingly or unwittingly embroil the antagonists into an irreversible escalation cycle with potentially catastrophic consequences. This paper is aimed at sensitising the decision makers in both countries to the dangers inherent in recurring crises especially in the absence of any overarching restraint regime and to make them understand that they might have escaped devastating results in the previous crises merely due to sheer good luck and not any prudence on their part. Case studies of February 2019 crisis between India and Pakistan and the March 2022 Stray Missile crisis have been employed to bring home the point.

1 Preamble

India and Pakistan have a history of chequered relations with several wars and border skirmishes and decades old unresolved dispute over the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was hoped that after the nuclearization of the two countries in May 1998, an era of relative peace and stability will usher in South Asia. However, this hope was not to be realized and the two South Asian antagonists have been moving from one crisis to the other over the past two decades or so. Many of these crises were quite serious and carried the potential of serious escalation leading to major conventional conflict and then on to a potentially disastrous nuclear conflict. While there may be little doubt that both countries are responsible international players, have established their respective command and control and safety and security mechanisms. They have also agreed upon some nuclear Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) but have failed to establish an overarching and institutionalized risk reduction and restraint regime which makes the strategic balance in the region tenuous at best. Currently the bilateral dialogue between the two countries is non-existent, tensions run high and the possibility of occurrence of a serious crisis is always lurking in the background. In this kind of an environment the danger of escalation as a result of unintended consequences of certain actions cannot be ruled out especially due to totally unexpected incidents such as the case of a stray Indian missile landing on Pakistani soil after traversing over 100 kms of distance inside the Pakistani airspace.

This brief paper will attempt to highlight the dangers of ‘Inadvertent Escalation’ between India and Pakistan by presenting two case studies of the two most recent crises between India and Pakistan which ended without causing catastrophic consequences but had a serious potential to quickly escalate into a devastating conflict between two nuclear armed states. The first case study is about the February 2019 Pulwama-Balakot crisis while the second study focuses on the most recent crisis in March 2022, involving a ‘run-away’ Indian missile.

2 The Pulwama–Balakot Crisis—A Case Study

This is one of the more recent crises between India and Pakistan that gripped the region in February 2019. It was precipitated when a young local Kashmiri dissident carried out a suicide attack, on 14th of February near the town of Pulwama in the Indian controlled part of Jammu and Kashmir, on a convoy carrying Indian Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel, killing at least 40 officers and men.¹ Given the fact that this attack happened in the midst of election campaign for national level parliamentary elections in India, Prime Minister Modi’s government decided to take full political advantage of it to bolster its campaign for re-election. Consequently, the Indian government authorised the Indian Air Force (IAF) to launch another so called ‘surgical strike’ against a religious seminary belonging to ‘Jaish-e-Muhammad,’ the militant group that was purportedly behind this attack. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan denied his country was involved and offered to help investigate the attack if any credible evidence was provided.²

The Indian reprisal strike carried out at 3 am on 26th of February, however, was unprecedented since it involved IAF for the first time since 1971 and the target itself was not in the Pakistani administered Kashmir but in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan some 80 kms from the Line of Control (LOC), which made the provocation far more serious.³ The Indian officials claimed to have killed 300–350 “budding militants” in the strike using Israeli made air to ground stand-off missiles. An Indian TV Channel, NDTV reported that, “The government has said that at least 300 Pakistani terrorists have been eliminated.” While another channel News 18 went a step further claiming that, “their sources indicated casualties as high as 400.”⁴ India’s Foreign Secretary, Vijay Gokhale, claimed that the strike killed “a very large number of Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists, trainers, senior commanders, and groups of jihadis who were being trained for Fidayeen action.” Another senior Indian government official told reporters that about 300 militants had been killed. A graphic report based on satellite images by a credible international news agency laid bare the false Indian claims. According to the report, Pakistan disputed India’s death toll estimates, terming the operation a failure adding that, Indian jets merely bombed a hillside without hurting anyone. Local villagers mocked the Indian claims. One local van driver Abdur Rasheed, said that, “It shook everything,” denying the Indian claims about any human casualties, he added, “No one died. Only some pine trees died, they were cut down. A crow also died.”⁵

The Indians were unable to provide any evidence in the form of aerial photographs or satellite imagery, to corroborate their claims. In reality, the missiles missed their target by some margin as graphically displayed by the Reuter report and landed in the nearby forest causing no casualties whatsoever except damaging some trees. Pakistan, lived up to its publicly declared intent to forcefully respond to any military action by India at a place and time of its own choosing by launching a retaliatory air strike on 27th of February in broad daylight in the Nowshera-Rajauri area in the Indian occupied Kashmir in an operation aptly code named ‘Swift Retort.’ However, since the Indian strike had not caused any casualties on the Pakistani side, Pakistani strikes were also modulated in a manner that the aircraft directed their ordnance to hit uninhabited spaces in the vicinity of important Indian military targets. As some IAF jets scrambled to intercept the Pakistani aircraft at least one Indian MIG-21 was shot down on the Pakistani side and its pilot captured alive and another Indian aircraft was reportedly hit but fell on the Indian side and therefore its shooting down could not be confirmed. The pilot who parachuted on the Pakistani side was later handed over to India by Pakistan as a ‘goodwill gesture.’ This Pakistani act of goodwill helped defuse the crisis. However, before the crisis subsided there were other twists and turns, wherein as per media reports India had conveyed threats to launch missile strikes against six Pakistani targets⁶ and Pakistan had responded by pronouncing that it would retaliate with three times the number of missiles fired by India. However, these threats did not materialise, otherwise the crisis would have then crossed many qualitative thresholds and might well have gone all the way up the escalation ladder. Knowledgeable Pakistani and Indian analysts have highlighted the dangers inherent in missile duels between two nuclear armed states. A prominent security analyst, Ejaz Haider has argued that, “an exchange of missiles would have remarkable escalation potential.” Adding that, “Missilery between nuclear powers is a big no.” Well known Indian journalist Shekhar Gupta concurs, saying that, “Both sides know the implications of even one ballistic missile… that is why all ballistic missiles, in both countries, have been taken away from conventional forces and put under the charge of their respective strategic force commands.”⁷

It is evident that India was encouraged to undertake this highly provocative and risky venture emboldened by the partisan statements by senior US officials that denounced Pakistan, but neither counselled restraint to the two parties nor did they emphasise the need for a negotiated solution to the crisis. For instance, the US National Security Advisor John Bolton seemed to openly encourage some military action by India by supporting India’s right to self-defence in the face of what he termed as ‘cross-border terrorism.’⁸ The two Prime Ministers had also boxed themselves into commitment traps from which it was difficult to back off. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his part, had publicly “threatened, ‘a fitting response’ for the Pulwama attack, stating ‘this is an India of new convention and policy,’ a posture which Indian analysts subsequently branded as the ‘new normal’…”⁹ Modi had also committed himself to “punish the perpetrators of terror and the Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan had vowed that Pakistan will retaliate to any Indian strike.”¹⁰ Modi kept the rhetoric alive long after the crisis had subsided by continuing to make inflammatory statements during election rallies.

The genesis of this crisis can be found in September 2016, when India had claimed to have carried out a ground surgical strike across the Line of Control in Kashmir against the alleged terrorist launch pads in retaliation to an attack allegedly by Kashmiri freedom fighters against an Indian military cantonment at Uri in the disputed territory. Many Indian military analysts such as Praveen Sawhney have described this so-called surgical strike as a routine happening astride the LOC where fire raids against each other’s posts are interspersed with physical raids against the same. Pakistan on its part refused to accept that any such action had actually taken place which was variously interpreted in India as well as the West as a Pakistani ploy to avoid embarrassment, as in their opinion the Pakistani military was either unable or unwilling to respond to this Indian action. The West instead of cautioning India not to go down this dangerous path appeared to be appreciating the Indian action and patting India on its back for it. This author firmly believes that irrespective of whether this surgical strike actually happened or not Pakistan should have taken the Indian claims on the face value and retaliated accordingly to discourage such adventurism in future. This might well have prevented the hostile Indian action in February 2019 by imposing caution on them. As in the ‘game of chicken’ if one of the players appears to have shown weak resolve in the previous encounter the opponent is encouraged to take greater risks the next time around since it believes that the other side will back off again, thereby setting a dangerous precedent.

Having given a broad overview of the way the crisis actually unfolded, one can now proceed to hypothesise the alternative possibilities, scenarios and unintended consequences whose basic ingredients were inbuilt in the crisis. Let us consider some of the alternative outcomes had the crisis unfolded differently at different stages one by one as under:

• What if, the Indian claim of having killed hundreds of seminary students whom they had arbitrarily labelled as potential terrorists had turned out to be true. It would have resulted in large numbers of body bags going to Pakistani villages and towns under the media glare in an era where every individual carrying a smart phone is a virtual live reporter, there would have been a tremendous public outrage in Pakistan putting pressure on the government to take revenge. In that eventuality, Pakistani air strikes would not have been calibrated to avoid casualties, but instead, would have been aimed at causing large number of casualties on the Indian side to settle the score. There were other serious possibilities associated with it, as according to some media reports senior Indian military commanders including the Army Commander and the Corps Commander were present at Rajauri cantonment at the time of Pakistani reprisal attack and could well have been hit with serious repercussions that were bound to lead to immediate escalation.

• What if the Indian pilot had died while bailing out or been killed by local civilians after he parachuted into Pakistani controlled territory. Any of these outcomes would have resulted in raising of temperatures, inflaming the emotions and would have surely led to further escalation. It would also have taken away the chance for a goodwill gesture on part of Pakistan that became a catalyst for de-escalation of the crisis.

• What if Indian stand-off weapons accidentally hit a sensitive target on Pakistani side. In such an eventuality it would have been difficult for Pakistan to determine whether this was unintended or a deliberate act and given the sensitivity of the target Pakistan would have acted accordingly by hitting a target with similar value on the Indian side and thus an irreversible cycle of escalation would have ensued.

• What if India had neither lost an aircraft nor a pilot into Pakistani captivity. Would it have emboldened India to greater vertical or horizontal escalation?

• What if Pakistani ‘Swift Retort’ had not achieved the desired results. Would it have been possible for Pakistan to de-escalate so easily? Without any results to show that a befitting answer has been given to the Indian provocation it would have been difficult for Pakistan to satisfy its public sentiment and it would have been forced to carry-out a follow up attack to visibly achieve the desired results. This again would have led to inevitable escalation of the conflict.

• What if Pakistan Navy had sunk the intruding Indian submarine rather than warning it and letting it go. It would have been impossible for India to swallow its pride and not take any retaliatory action against Pakistani navy again leading to serious escalation.

• What if India was not bluffing but made good on its threatened missile strikes against Pakistani cities or other critical targets and Pakistan lived up to its resolve to retaliate three times over. This was the surest recipe for disaster and would have jumped many rungs of the escalation ladder in one go and would have made any de-escalation highly unlikely.

• What if either side had mistaken a conventional armed missile strike as a nuclear strike and accordingly reacted in ‘launch on warning’ or ‘launch under attack mode.’ It is hard to believe that there would have still been a chance left to apply the brakes and prevent further escalation of the crisis.

3 The Renegade Indian Missile—March 2022—Another Case in Point

A curious and unprecedented incident happened in the evening of 9^th of March 2022, when an apparently out of control Indian Brahmos cruise missile entered Pakistani airspace and after flying over a hundred kilometres inside Pakistan landed near the town of Mian Channun in Southern Punjab. Providentially, the missile fell in a sparsely populated area, damaging the wall of a nearby house but causing no human casualties. However, there was no public reaction from either side for the next 24 hours and it was only in the evening of 10^th March 22 that Pakistan’s Director General Inter Services Public Relations held a Press Conference and gave the details of the incident. This was followed by the summoning of the Indian Charge D’ Affaires to the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A subsequent statement issued by the Ministry stated that the Indian diplomat was “conveyed Pakistan’s strong protest over the unprovoked violation of its airspace by an Indian origin ‘super-sonic flying object’ which entered into Pakistan from Suratgarh India at 1843 hours (PST) on 9 March 22 and fell to ground near Mian Channun city in Pakistan at around 1850 hours the same day causing damage to civilian property.” The statement further elaborated that the ‘imprudent’ launch of the flying object had not only put at risk human lives on ground it had also endangered several domestic and international flights which could have caused a serious aviation accident resulting in large scale civilian casualties.¹¹

It was only on 11th of March 22 that the Indian Government broke its silence, 48 hours after the occurrence of the incident and 24 hours after Pakistani official statement. The Press Information Bureau (Defence Wing) Government of India issued a brief statement acknowledging that, ‘On 9 March 2022, in the course of a routine maintenance, a technical malfunction led to the accidental firing of a missile. The Government of India has taken a serious view and ordered a high-level Court of Enquiry.’ The statement termed the incident deeply regrettable and expressed relief over the fact that no lives were lost due to the accident.¹²

The Indian statement raised more questions than it answered and prompted the summoning of the Indian Charge D’ Affaires to Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the second time in two days. Islamabad rightly asked as to why India had failed to immediately share information of the ‘accident’ with Pakistan and pointed out that India had accepted its slip-up only after Pakistan had gone public with it. The statement added that, ‘the grave nature of the incident raises fundamental questions regarding security protocols and technical safeguards against accidental or unauthorised launch of missiles in a nuclearized environment,’ The statement also listed the following pertinent questions which it demanded must be answered by India:

• Explanation of the measures and procedures in place to prevent accidental missile launches and the particular circumstances of this incident.

• Explanation of the type and specifications of the missile that fell in the Pakistani territory.

• Elaboration of the flight path/trajectory of the accidentally launched missile and how it ultimately turned and entered Pakistan.

• Was the missile equipped with a self-destruct mechanism? Why did it fail to actualise?

• Were Indian missiles kept primed for launch even under routine maintenance?

• Why did India fail to immediately inform Pakistan about the accidental launch of the missile and waited to acknowledge it till after Pakistan announced the incident and sought explanations?

• Explanation if the missile was indeed handled by its armed forces or some rogue elements given the profound ‘level of incompetence.’¹³

Pakistan also expressed its dissatisfaction on the Indian decision to hold an internal court of inquiry and demanded a joint probe since the missile had landed in Pakistan. The incident took place at a time of relative quiet and lower tensions between India and Pakistan. Had it happened during a crisis or in a period of heightened tensions between the two countries the outcome of this serious incident could have been very different. Many Indian analysts have also voiced serious concerns about the safety of Indian strategic systems, have appreciated Pakistan’s mature response and recognised the potential for serious escalation between two nuclear armed countries as a result of such lapses.¹⁴ They have also urged the two countries to use this incident as an opportunity to discuss safety related issues and to develop requisite mechanisms to forestall such incidents in future. However, some Indians displaying the typically arrogant Indian mindset have instead of feeling embarrassed for their own inefficiency have raised questions about the inability of Pakistan’s air defences to shoot down the missile. Such an attitude is highly irresponsible.¹⁵ The Indian government on its part has tried to play down the incident and feigned ignorance as is evident from the official Indian government statement wherein it said, ‘It was learnt that the missile landed in Pakistani territory,’¹⁶ This statement clearly shows that either the Indians did not bother to track the flight trajectory of the errant missile or they were incapable of doing so. On 11th March 2022, Pakistan’s National Security Advisor, Moeed Yusuf, also questioned Delhi’s ability to handle sensitive technology and urged the world to consider whether India was able to ensure the safety and security of its weapon systems.¹⁷

The most worrying aspect of the episode is that the available hotlines between the two countries were not used to instantly share information about the accident. The DGMOs’ hotline is normally used for exchange of information about any incident along the Line of Control or the International borders while the Foreign Secretaries’ hotline was established in 2005¹⁸ for the specific purpose of sharing information in case of a nuclear related incident to avoid any misunderstandings. There are several bilateral agreements between the two countries to prevent misunderstandings, such as the ballistic missile flight test pre-notification agreement¹⁹ and the agreement to prevent accidental or unauthorised use of nuclear weapons.²⁰ However, none of these agreements has any provisions to cover such an eventuality and there is definitely a need to either modify the existing agreements or to negotiate a new one to take care of accidental launch of missiles including the cruise missiles.

The incident typifies the scenarios that can cause inadvertent escalation between two nuclear armed nations with catastrophic consequences. A combination of good luck, and cool-headed Pakistani response and a relatively calm environment prevailing between the two countries at the time prevented an Armageddon but it could have ended up very differently. Just consider the following possible eventualities:

• What if the missile had landed in a thickly populated area or hit a sensitive target? In both cases public sentiment would have enraged demanding a reprisal by Pakistani government and in case of a sensitive target in addition to the public outrage need would have been felt by the Pakistani military leadership to payback for the damages caused by the missile.

• What if it had hit a passenger airliner and caused large scale civilian casualties? Depending on whether it was international flight operated by some foreign country or a domestic flight, and whether it involved a small airliner or a large aircraft with large number of passengers on board the severity of the incident would have varied but in all eventualities the connotations would have been very severe and long lasting.

• What if Pakistan had immediately responded in kind? If Pakistan had acted on the basis of worst-case scenario suspecting the missile to be carrying a lethal payload and in accordance with its declared policy of ‘quid-pro-quo’ plus India would have found itself in a bind; whether to accept its earlier mistake and Pakistan’s legitimate right to act in self defence and refrain from further action or react to Pakistani response and pave the way for rapid escalation.

• What if the missile was armed with a conventional, worse still a nuclear warhead? Had the incoming Indian missile been armed with a conventional warhead it would have caused much greater damage on ground compared with what it actually did and if it was armed with a nuclear warhead, it would have undoubtedly caused a nuclear war between two nuclear armed states.

4 Conclusions

The two case studies clearly highlight the need for in-depth and serious studies of the two incidents to recognise the inherent potential for inadvertently causing Armageddon. However, even this brief narrative allows us to draw some useful conclusions from the theoretical aspects of the concept of ‘Inadvertent Escalation’ as well as some pertinent lessons from the case study of the February 2019 crisis between India and Pakistan and the March 2022 stray missile incident as under:

• (1) The February 2019 crisis has for all practical purposes turned the conception of ‘Third Party Brokering’²¹ in Indo-Pakistani crises as a thing of the past. This is mainly due to the fact that there is no ‘honest’ or ‘impartial’ broker left to mediate in future South Asian crises. The United States has adopted a clearly partisan policy in favour of India which was clearly discernible from the conduct of US National Security Advisor, Secretary of State and other officials. China is viewed as hostile to India and sympathetic to Pakistan in general and by the Indians in particular. The middle eastern and Persian Gulf states that once had close fraternal ties with Pakistan now seem to be tilting towards India and in any case their politico-diplomatic clout though substantial cannot be compared with America’s diplomatic weight. Russia has long-standing strategic relationship with India and of late has been trying to revamp its relations with Pakistan but as of now it doesn’t have the political capital to influence the outcome of any India-Pakistan crisis beyond goodwill gestures and counselling restraint. The EU traditionally follows the US lead and rarely takes independent positions/initiatives in such situations.

• (2) The February 2019 crisis has re-established the efficacy of Pakistan’s conventional deterrence capability and has removed the myths that in any conventional confrontation with India Pakistan’s conventional responses will not be adequate and it will be forced to lean on its nuclear capability sooner than later. Pakistan has also been able to demonstrate its political will and resolve to forcefully deal with any infringement of its security and has thus bolstered its deterrence message.²²

• (3) The crisis has also raised serious questions as to India’s choices for escalation in a future crisis with Pakistan. India has now tried the ground ‘surgical’ strikes as well as the aerial ones and made a botched attempt to bring the maritime dimension also into play. What can be expected of India in the next crisis? Will it follow the same old playbook maybe at an increased scale and accept greater risks of escalation? The problem is that a large-scale aerial operation has greater risk of ‘entanglement’ thereby causing ‘inadvertent escalation’ and it cannot be pursued without taking defensive measures on ground which means creating greater tensions and risks of escalation. Will it use some other instruments such as the armed drones cutting the costs of failure because in case these are shot down the loss will be substantially less than an aircraft and there is no risk of losing a pilot in adversary’s hands. However, these cannot find targets close to the LOC or international border for spectacular results and their ability to strike at deep targets in an active air defence environment is suspect at best. Yet, it is likely to be an option for future ‘reprisal’ strikes.

• (4) It is also obvious that, the more limited the scale of an operation the more advantageous it would be for Pakistan, which can counter the threat with comparable or even greater force, while India would be frittering away its numerical advantage by employing its forces in a piecemeal manner. It is apparent that India has almost run out of options for sub-conventional responses and employment of anything more than very limited scale of force runs the risk of inevitable escalation. This problem would be further compounded by India’s compulsion for permanent force deployments in Ladakh as well as North East frontier with China, resulting from last year’s military stand-off between the two, the most serious since 1962; whereas in the past more of a lip service was paid in response to the Chinese threat than deployment of any meaningful military force on the Himalayan borders.²³

• (5) India’s option to foment terrorism in Pakistan in response to alleged Pakistan sponsored ‘cross-border terrorism,’ as articulated by India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval as well as by former Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar,²⁴ has also been severely curtailed with the loss of operational/intelligence facilities in Afghanistan.

• (6) The often-repeated claims by the Indians and by some in Pakistan after the so-called surgical strikes that, Pakistan’s nuclear bluff has been called were also proven to be baseless since Pakistan effectively demonstrated its conventional deterrence capability and the credibility of its nuclear deterrence was proven by India’s inability to further escalate the military confrontation. The crisis has proven beyond doubt that Pakistan can deal with such minor infringements with its conventional forces and any expectation that Pakistan would start contemplating the use of nuclear weapons at least the Low yield short range NASR weapon systems is a fallacy. It should be very clear that the minimum provocation to evoke a serious consideration of a possible use of NASR would be ‘Cold Start’ type attack by Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs) at several axes. Short of this Pakistan is more than capable of returning the Indian favour maybe with some bonus in the conventional realm.

• (7) The February 2019 crisis also witnessed irresponsible statements and nuclear sabre rattling by politicians on both sides of the border not unlike the past crises. However, in the past on the Pakistani side such statements came from ministers who are remotely concerned with security policy and particularly nuclear policy but the most disturbing development was that on the Indian side such inflammatory statements came from Prime Minister Modi himself who is the ultimate nuclear use authority in India, who continued to echo these threatening pronouncements even months later simply to gain some political advantage in the soon to be held parliamentary elections.

• (8) One can safely conclude that rhetoric aside India and Pakistan are sane enough to understand that unbridled military actions in a nuclearized security environment are fraught with dangers of escalation. Even if the care is taken to avoid deliberate escalation, the danger of inadvertent escalation cannot be eliminated altogether.

• (9) In the context of the ‘Indian missile that lost its way,’ the question arises would it be possible for Pakistan not to react to such an incident in future. The answer to this question is certainly in the negative and Pakistan would be bound to react to maintain the credibility of its deterrence. The incident has also raised several pertinent questions which India must answer. For instance, why India failed to use the available hotlines to immediately inform Pakistan after the so called ‘accidental launch.’ Moreover, there has been no explanation from India as to why it waited for 48 hours before issuing an official statement. One thing is however, certain that this incident will lead to higher alert and readiness levels for at least a part of the strategic assets to swiftly respond to any such incident in future with inherent dangers of its own.