South Asia A Three-Body Problem

Abstract

An important feature of the strategic dynamics in my part of the world, not sufficiently appreciated elsewhere, is that it is no longer just a binary India-Pakistan problem.

1 Kill that Hyphen

An important feature of the strategic dynamics in my part of the world, not sufficiently appreciated elsewhere, is that it is no longer just a binary India–Pakistan problem. The notion of a hyphenated Indo-Pak duality came into being during the Cold war days. Both countries had just gained their independence from British rule in 1947.The US establishment of the time, led by its Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, despised India for its sanctimonious sermons in the UN, for its unwillingness to join US led alliances and generating, instead, the Non-Aligned Movement. So the US chose to support Pakistan financially and strategically. In return, the USSR supported India on the diplomatic front and by supplying arms and industrial infrastructure. In that sense the US-USSR binary appeared to have spawned a miniature replica in the form of India–Pakistan in S Asia.

This a somewhat crude, un-nuanced description of the evolution of the India–Pakistan binary in the immediate aftermath of the cold war. It may make professional diplomats and historians cringe. We beg their forbearance. But, as a quick summary for fellow non-experts we hope it broadly conveys how the western binary view of the Indian subcontinent came to be.¹

In reality, however, there never was much symmetry between the two countries, except as seen from far away, through the inverted binoculars of the Cold Warriors. On the one hand, India was much larger than Pakistan, in physical size, in population and in its S&T infrastructure. On the other hand, in terms of poverty, I don’t think Pakistan (i.e. the western part of the old undivided Pakistan) was ever as much of a basket case as India was, in the aftermath of their independence. Apart from all these and other characteristics distinguishing them, the two nations have also differed in their political history, with Pakistan’s civilian governments interspersed with periods of military rule.

Nevertheless, since they

• (i) fought 3 wars with each other,

• (ii) officially became nuclear weapon nations within a few weeks of each other and

• (iii) are, till today, embroiled in an unending conflict over the state of Kashmir,

it is understandable if the world views, in strategic terms, our subcontinent primarily as the scene of India and Pakistan rivalry. In deference to this viewpoint, I will give, a little later in this talk a comparative summary of the nuclear forces possessed by India and Pakistan and the extent of mutual deterrence they provide.

I will also argue that S Asia is NOT the “most dangerous place on earth” as has sometimes alleged. Such a judgement was first articulated in public by US President Bill Clinton during a visit to India.² It was very quickly refuted by the then Indian President K. R. Narayanan, but that has not stopped people in the academia and the media from repeating that catchy phrase. The fact is that despite several conflicts between them, the two countries have been quite responsible in staying away from any nuclear red-line.³

But before dwelling more on the Indo-Pak strategic behaviour, let me first introduce the new element in this narrative, which is the crucial role of the third player in the subcontinent’s affairs, namely, China.

2 Entry of China into S Asian Affairs

India and China, both ancient civilizations, had no military conflicts between them for over two millennia. A part of the reason was that they had no common border, with the mighty Himalaya mountains and the Tibetan nation separating them. They only had amicable, if sparse trade and cultural relations, with Buddhism spreading from India to China and E. Asia

Coming to more recent times, both emerged, around the same period, as independent modern nations freed from centuries of fragmentation and foreign rule. India became independent of the British in 1947, although in the process it was broken into India and Pakistan. The People’s Republic of China PRC was established by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949.

India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was an enlightened statesman with a vision for his country as a liberal democratic republic. He also envisaged an important collective role in the affairs of the world for the many recently independent and developing countries and pioneered the Non Aligned Movement (NAM)

In particular Nehru was a strong supporter of China. When PRC wanted to be recognized in the United Nations as the sole representation of China, (as distinct from the ROC government in Taiwan), India strongly supported the move. The PRC became a member of the Security council with veto powers, which, ironically, have been subsequently used by China oppose Indian interests. In addition, India renounced its own special rights in Tibet in 1954 and recognised it as the “Tibet Region of China”.

In 1954 Jawaharlal Nehru and Premier Zhou En Lai signed the Panchsheel Agreement—a treaty to bring peace to the post-colonial South Asia.⁴ I remember that during the ‘Fifties we children in New Delhi schools were raised on the slogan of “Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers).

But, alas, Mr. Nehru’s rose-tinted, benevolent view of geopolitics, including warm friendship with China, turned out to be illusory.

Earlier, China did not have a common border with India, since Tibet was a buffer in between them. But with the annexation of Tibet by China (ironically, facilitated by India), India’s Tibetan border became now a border with China and a contentious one, as China felt that some of the territory on the Indian side belonged to the old Tibet and hence to China now.

Instead of negotiating the normalisation of this border issue China attempted to move into that disputed territory leading, in 1962, to a full-fledged war between China and India, which India, quite unprepared for such a war, lost.

The Chinese managed to enter Indian territory and declared a ceasefire only after occupying some part of the territory which they had claimed.

Even after that, China continues to claim, till today, about 90,000 sq. km of India’s territory in the northeast, including the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which is as integral a part of India as Kerala or Rajasthan. It is governed as per India’s constitution like any other state, under the overall authority of the nationally elected central government in Delhi. Yet, the Chinese lodge protests whenever any major Indian functionary, including our President, visits that state. It is like Mexico claiming Texas as part of its territory, and objecting every time the US president visited that state.

Meanwhile there have been repeated clashes with China at various places on their border. The most recent of border skirmishes took place in 2020 where there was physical man-to man combat in which a score of soldiers from both sides lost their lives.

In addition to its own direct border clashes with India, China has also provided vital economic and strategic support to Pakistan on various fronts. These include:

• (i) Providing loans and helping construct Civilian infrastructure

• (ii) Constructing the Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea, and getting management control of that Port, and

• (iii) Building the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which is a pathway being constructed from the S. Eastern corner of China all the way to the Gwadar port.

China is also building the Karot power station, a Karachi Circular Railway, the Karakoram Highway, a subway in Lahore, the civilian reactors in Karachi. The CPRC corridor and the related infrastructural projects funded by the Chinese in Pakistan are shown in Fig. 13.1 below. In return, Gwadar and the CPEC will give China easy access to the Gulf region, without having to go around S.E Asia through the Malaccan Straights on which, as of now, China has little strategic control.

Fig. 13.1

Map of Pakistan showing the China–Pakistan economic corridor and related projects (Map taken from “China–Pakistan Economic Corridor; Prospects and Challenges for Balochistan, Pakistan”. Farooqui, Muhammad and Aftab, Syed Mobasher, IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 414, 13th September 2018; https://doi.org/10.1088/1757-899X/414/1/012046)

All this should provide jobs and prosperity to Pakistan, which is good for them and good for India, which would prefer a stable and prosperous Pakistan.

But there are other areas where China’s help has clear adverse implications for India on the strategic and diplomatic front.

• (i) On the strategic front, China provided clandestine help for Mr A.Q. Khan’s centrifuges in the old days, and later in enabling its 1998 its nuclear weapon tests, and in building the military Plutonium production reactors at Khushab. Portions of CPEC roads are built on territory under dispute with India. This did not happen by accident or oversight. It attempts to give some legitimacy to Pakistan’s occupation of those areas.

• (ii) China has given diplomatic support to Pakistan vis a vis India, such as blocking India’s entry into NSG, blocking UN strictures against the Islamist militant Hafeez Sayed and so on.

Indeed, China is now Pakistan’s biggest supporter in the world. So, India has to contend with two nuclear weapon states on its western and its northern borders respectively, both of whom are India’s adversaries but support each other (Fig. 13.2).

Fig. 13.2

A map of the upper half of India, showing China on its northern border and Pakistan on its western border, with disputed areas on both sides. (Map Taken from the article “Fantasy frontiers”, in The Economist, Feb 8th 2012 (Updated Oct 7th 2021); https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2012/02/08/fantasy-frontiers?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social)

3 India’s Nuclear Equations with Its Adversaries

China reportedly has a battery of nuclear armed missiles located in Tibet capable of reaching New Delhi and other cities of India. India too has developed nuclear weapons and as George Fernandez, an honest no-nonsense person and our Defence minister at the time of our nuclear tests said, India’s nuclear weapons were intended more to deter China than Pakistan.

But, to start with, India did not have the delivery vehicles to carry its warheads to China. Its Prithvi, Agni I and Agni II missiles were only of intermediate range. It was not clear whether bomber planes sent deep into to China would have enough fuel to return or could be refuelled en route. Since then it has been developing and testing missiles of 5000 km range (Agni V) that can reach major Chinese cities. India also has a deployed nuclear powered Submarine and a couple more in the making which could potentially wander into the Pacific.

However, the India–China conflicts now are nowhere close to a nuclear threshold. Both nations have other priorities, on the economic and technological front. Notwithstanding their border disputes, they have considerable economic trade with each other and warily cooperate wherever they can—in alignments like BRICS. The India–China dialogue is less belligerent in tone, less visceral and more nuanced than the India–Pakistan exchanges. Therefore, despite all this nuclear armoury on both sides, there is very little possibility of a nuclear exchange between India and China.

Next, let us look at India–Pakistan nuclear dynamics. With both sides reportedly possessing over 100 warheads each, and sufficiently reliable platforms for delivering them, there is fairly credible second strike capability on each side to cause “unacceptable damage” to the other. I have shown this in quantitative terms in op-eds and articles.⁵ Such retaliatory capability provides substantial mutual deterrence against deliberate, rational nuclear attacks on one another.

But some sources of strategic instability need to be considered in the South Asian context.

• A. Crisis instability

One can ask if deterrence through credible retaliatory capability will be sufficient to stave off a nuclear exchange, if it is forced by other provocative factors—terrorism, domestic political crises and, the civilian-military equation, border conflicts, mini-wars etc. On this, much of the international community of analysts shows little confidence in S Asians. As mentioned already, the subcontinent has repeatedly been called the “most dangerous place on earth”.

We totally disagree with this view, which is condescending about the leadership of the two countries. The truth is that despite many provocations both India and Pakistan have stayed very far from nuclear thresholds, albeit accompanied by some verbal saber rattling. The response of the Indian leadership to major terrorist attacks including the attack on Mumbai in 2008, and one on the Indian Parliament in 2001 was extremely restrained and statesmanlike. For an analogy, imagine the Houses of Parliament in London being attacked, while they were in session, by terrorists identifiably trained by, say, Iran or N Korea. Would the UK have been as restrained as we were?

In their own way, and for whatever reason, the Pakistani leadership has also been restrained. Let me give some examples. At no stage during the Kargil war in 1999, was there any serious thought by either side of escalation to a nuclear war. Let us not forget that that was just one year after both countries had turned nuclear, with fairly new Command and Control structures put in. One might have worried that the chance of a nuclear launch, by accident or because of misreading signals, were higher at that time. But good sense prevailed on both nations in not getting carried away by their new found nuclear arsenals.

In 2016, India finally launched a set of surgical strikes across the Line of Control in Kashmir, in retaliation against repeated attacks by Pakistan supported insurgents. The humiliation resulting from these successful strikes could have generated domestic pressure in Pakistan to retaliate against India with even bigger strikes. But Pakistan quickly dampened that by simply denying that the Indian strikes had even taken place! Whether this was due to statesmanship or wisdom or some other domestic compulsions, the fact remains that it helped de-escalate the crisis.

Likewise, once it became clear after the Mumbai terrorist attack in 2008 that in the event of another such attack, India would have to escalate their response, Pakistan has generally refrained from launching mainland terrorism on India. One can give more such examples. In short, we don’t have serious Crisis Instability in S. Asia in the nuclear realm.

• B. Instabilities induced by technological developments

(i) The Nasr: The introduction by Pakistan of the short range battlefield nuclear capable missile Nasr a few years back has affected the operational equation between the two countries, but it did not lead any serious strategic instability. The Nasr is intended to be used by the Pakistanis on their own soil against a possible conventional incursion by Indians into their territory. They feel it strengthens their deterrence against such an invasion. Of course India has no plans to attempt any such invasion. But they may well be forced to do it in response to continuing terrorist acts emanating from Pakistani soil.

From the Indian side the Nasr did not really call for any major changes in their nuclear arsenal or deployment. It only generated some mainly academic discussion about whether India would respond to a Nasr attack on our forces with massive nuclear retaliation, as the current language in its Nuclear Doctrine would imply. But even this debate has not led to any proposal to modify our nuclear doctrine. In fact, like the missile itself, the Nasr was just a “tactical” development doctrinally as well.

(ii) BMD: India has been developing a Ballistic Missile Defence program for some years. It has met with some success in its early stages but the program is still in its infancy. That is good because there is still time to shepherd the BMD program in the right directions so that it doesn’t destabilise strategic equations. BMD could have two different types of goals. It could be designed to protect certain specific sites which house the apex leadership and key strategic assets. That is an important and comparatively realistic goal. Although that information is classified, the major nuclear powers undoubtedly have such protection for key sites. Alternatively, BMD could be designed to protect all or some of the major cities. This is a far more ambitious goal. No country is even remotely close to achieving that. Furthermore, it would be an unwise goal from the strategic viewpoint for the following reasons.

Recall that the deterrence strategies of both countries rely on counter-value attacks on population centers. Only that can provide damage sufficiently “unacceptable” to act as a reliable deterrent. As long as neither side had the capability to significantly intercept missiles attacking their cities, they may be persuaded to stay with the relatively small arsenals they currently possess, which are sufficient for creating unacceptable damage through attacks on population centers.

Once each of the sides obtains enough ABM capability to protect their population it will significantly reduce their deterrence capability of the other side. That in turn will generate an arms race, as each side will feel that its existing offensive capability is inadequate in the face of it being shot down. As consequence, there is already some talk in S Asia of developing MIRVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles) to overcome the enemy’s BMD systems. It would be disastrous both financially and strategically if either country in the subcontinent started a program to build MIRVs. Therefore, any development of BMD on either side has to be tempered by some understanding of what that will do to the deterrence posture of the adversary.

4 Conclusion

We are not for a minute saying that it isn’t terribly dangerous to possess nuclear weapons, especially in a region with 3 nuclear neighbors (India–Pakistan–China) two pairs of whom are in a state of conflict. Yes, S. Asia IS a dangerous place and there is no doubt about that. Those of us who live there, and have let our governments foist this deadly danger upon us bear a special responsibility to fight against it.

But it is no more dangerous than, say, the N Korea–S Korea–US triad or the S China sea, or Syria, let alone the Ukraine–Russian border. Or, for that matter, the world as a whole, what with the two superpowers still possessing thousands of nuclear weapons, many of which are deployed on trigger alert!!