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The Use of Force—Stability andInstability: India, Pakistan, and ChinaKartik Bommakanti aa South Asia Program, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,Nanyang Technological UniversityVersion of record first published: 10 Aug 2012.

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India Review, vol. 11, no. 3, 2012, pp. 161–190Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN 1473-6489 print/1557-3036 onlineDOI: 10.1080/14736489.2012.707905

The Use of Force—Stability and Instability: India,Pakistan, and China

KARTIK BOMMAKANTI

IntroductionWhy does a high level of strategic instability exist in South Asia? Is the nuclearcapability of both South Asian states the cause of instability or is it merely a symp-tom? This question has come under considerable scrutiny since the 1998 nuclear tests.Evaluating the source of instability in the Subcontinent is the subject of this article.We attribute the enduring instability between India and Pakistan particularly to theinability of the latter to accept the verdict of military defeats. This Pakistani incapacityto reconcile itself to its defeats is often underestimated and requires serious analy-sis. Exogenous shocks in the form of military defeats that Pakistan has suffered havenot done much to stanch the corrosive effects on stability. The source of instabilitystems from Pakistan’s frequent use of force because it has failed to accept the defeatsit has suffered at the hands of India. Readers should be cautioned that the analysis isprimarily centered on the India-Pakistan relationship, particularly over Kashmir; theSino-Indian boundary dispute is used more as reference point. Consequently, it willlack the level of in-depth focus as our examination of the India-Pakistan relationshipover Kashmir. This article analyzes the determinants of instability. It takes a compara-tive view of why there is high instability in the India-Pakistan nuclear dyad as opposedto the Sino-Indian dyad. Pakistan’s asymmetric warfare strategy under the cover ofnuclear weapons is what distinguishes it from India. Exogenous shocks in the form ofmilitary defeats in wars have done little to induce a shift in Pakistani preferences awayfrom the use of force. The article proceeds first by providing a historical backgroundon strategic relations between India and China and India and Pakistan. The secondsection focuses on competing schools of thought on the sources of instability in thesubcontinent and posits that Pakistan’s inability to accept the verdict of its militarydefeats is the key source of instability. This hypothesis will be tested thereafter througha Clausewitzian explanation to the extent that popular participation or public supporthas made decisions on durable peace settlements through military victories very hard toobtain. We also challenge the assumptions that capabilities determine the use of force.

Historical BackgroundThe Sino-Indian boundary dispute arose because the British rulers of the subcontinentwere never successful in clearly delineating the border. Although post-independenceIndia in 1954 accepted China’s sovereignty over Tibet, Indian nationalists including

Kartik Bommakanti is a Senior Analyst with the South Asia Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of InternationalStudies, Nanyang Technological University.

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Jawaharlal Nehru never surrendered their territorial claims over the Aksai Chin plateaubetween the Karakoram and Kuen Lun mountain ranges.1 Incidentally, the British con-sidered Aksai Chin to be a part of China. The Eastern frontiers between China andIndia were another source of controversy.2 Exploiting a weakened and divided Chinathe British secretly concluded a separate agreement with the Tibetans creating a newfrontier known as the McMahon Line. The Chinese who discovered the outcome ofthe Anglo-Tibetan Agreement considered it null and void. Following India’s indepen-dence and the Communists taking control of China, both sides tried to negotiate abilateral settlement without success through the 1950s. Notwithstanding India’s recog-nition of China’s sovereignty over Tibet in 1954, Communist China saw in IndianPrime Minister Nehru an opponent of China’s occupation of Tibet in 1950, which theChinese believed was visibly demonstrated by Nehru’s support for Tibetan rebels andhis decision to give refuge to the Dalai Lama. In addition, following independence in1947, India’s political elites who inherited the legacy of the British raj were attracted tothe forward school of imperial strategists.3 The latter, during the period of British rule,sought to extend India’s borders northward and westward to hedge against a potentialconflict with Russia.4 The legacy of the British forward school laid the seeds of India’sadoption of its own forward policy in late 1961 in a bid to bolster its position in dis-puted territory. The Chinese saw New Delhi’s “Forward Policy” as a direct threat to thelocal military balance. It was the proximate cause of the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962.The “Forward Policy” was not merely a product of British inheritance. It was as muchthe outcome of Nehru’s own reading of Indian history. Steven Hoffmann argues thatNehru had a very different interpretation of India’s traditional boundaries, which hebelieved were fairly well defined before the British arrived under the Kashmiri Dogragovernment.5 This stemmed from his beliefs about Indian greatness and India’s bound-aries being far more extensive than those that existed under British rule.6 In Ladakhhe believed India must stake its rightful claim to what was traditionally part of pre-British India. Realpolitik or geopolitical calculations, according to Hoffmann, animatedChinese strategy, whereas juridical, moral and nationalist factors were more criticalto India’s claims over Aksai Chin.7 For Nehru, by asserting claim over Aksai Chin,India was acting on high principle, whereas China was acting out of geopolitical expe-diency. China’s annexation of Aksai Chin was Nehru’s grievance and remains an Indianterritorial grievance to this day.8

There are three sectors along the disputed boundary—eastern, central, and western.Currently boundary negotiations in the eastern sector are focused on the Tawang Tractof the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Negotiations in the central sector includesNathu La which witnessed military clashes between China and India in 1967 claim-ing hundreds of lives on both sides. The Indian army acquitted itself well in this trialof strength, unlike its abject performance in 1962.9 Finally, the Western sector includesnegotiations on Aksai Chin controlled by the Chinese. The boundary negotiations havestaggered along, the key issue dividing the two sides being an east-west territorial swap.While, stability held on the boundary between 1967 and 1986 and both sides agreed in1983 to a sector-by-sector approach to resolve their boundary problem, in 1985, Beijingshocked Indian negotiators when it laid claim to the Southern Slope or ArunachalPradesh.10 India had assumed that Beijing had tacitly accepted New Delhi’s claim south

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of the McMahon Line or territory in the eastern sector. Control of the southern slope isvital for India to defend its northeastern states, whereas China’s control of Aksai Chin,while still important, is not as consequential for it as the Southern Slope is for India’sdefense of Arunachal Pradesh. India continued to insist then, as it does today, thatChina withdraw from Aksai Chin in the Western sector. China had made two offers in1960 and 1980 to India to respect China’s territorial control in the western sector forwhich Beijing would reciprocally respect India’s territorial claims in the east.11 Indiarebuffed both offers. John Garver claims Beijing was sincere in making these offers, butthey were nevertheless made during a period when China faced a stressed security envi-ronment in the late 1950s and the 1960s.12 The 1980 offer was made by Deng Xiaopingin a bid to improve relations with neighbors so that China could focus on reformingits economy. However, Hoffmann has argued that the Chinese offers were made infor-mally and, therefore, did not carry any binding weight.13 The Chinese withdrawal, aswe have observed, flummoxed India.

However, tensions erupted in 1986 close to the Sumdurong Chu River at theThagla Ridge and escalated following India’s launch of a war game called OperationChequerboard in March 1987.14 India deployed large forces for war, alarming Beijingand triggering counter deployments.15 The confrontation carried the risk of war.Further, the Indian Parliament also passed a resolution granting statehood to the areaknown as Arunachal Pradesh which was formerly a Union Territory. This decision togrant statehood also grew out of India’s federal process.16 It was a reward for the loy-alty of the region’s inhabitants who unlike other northeastern inhabitants such as theMizos and the Nagas had not taken up arms against the Indian state. The Indians alsoairlifted a brigade to the Zimithang ridge that overlooked Sumdurong Chu. Both sidesdeployed large forces in the guise of military exercises. Troop levels in the vicinity ofSumdorong Chu touched 50,000 troops, exceeding the limits of the 1962 war.17 Despitethe potential outbreak of a war they de-escalated following the Indian foreign minister’svisit to Beijing in June 1987.18 If anything, the mechanisms they developed followingthe 1986 crises may have only paved the way for a closer understanding on how toavoid tension and escalation in the future.

Tibet is the one area where the Chinese feel the most vulnerable vis-à-vis India. Tibetis the only effective instrument of influence that India has over China, although onethat has eroded significantly. Chinese vulnerability in Tibet mirrors India’s, vis-à-visPakistan.19 The wide gulf between the dominant ethnic Hans and Tibetans mirrors thecleft relationship between India and Pakistan.20 Bridging cleavages in both dyads hasvexed many strategists, because they remain so deep and intractable. The proximity ofIndia’s political and industrial centers to Pakistan coupled with the established “martialprowess” of Pakistan increases the Pakistani threat to India.21 Likewise, the bur-densome logistical challenges associated with Tibet’s terrain and remoteness increaseChina’s sense of vulnerability from a possible India-Tibetan connection.22 Just as Chinahas never directly interceded on behalf of Pakistan in an India-Pakistan conflict, Indiahas not played the Tibet card against China by employing its own forces in support of aTibetan rebellion. These options figure in both sides’ strategic calculations to the extentIndia considers a Chinese entry into an India-Pakistan confrontation just as Chinafactors in India’s support for a Tibetan rebellion.23

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India has dealt with its own ethnic insurgencies through a combination of repressionand compromise by granting autonomy thereby overcoming secessionist movements instates such as Mizoram, Punjab, and, to a great extent, Nagaland. India “prescribes” afederal solution to China over its Tibet problem to the extent Beijing grants auton-omy to the Tibetan region and shares some power, whereas Beijing retorts that India isencouraging “splittist” [separatist] forces seeking secession from China and that NewDelhi should curb anti-Chinese Tibetan activities such as pro-independence protestsand all criticism of China’s Tibet policy on Indian soil. New Delhi likewise asserts thatit does restrict some activities, but the rights of foreigners on Indian soil cannot becurtailed beyond a point under Indian law.24 At specific moments, such as under theright-of-center, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA)government India has loosened restrictions on the Tibetan exile community’s anti-Chinese activities, reflecting a more muscular Indian approach, but not to the pointof actually supporting an armed Tibetan rebellion.25 Further, the Tibetans in Indiaenjoy public sympathy and Indian governments have to bow to public sentiments.Notwithstanding India’s effort to urge China to find an autonomy-based solutionto its Tibet problem, Beijing has alternative options to neutralize Tibetan separatismwithin its borders, particularly through what John Garver calls a demographic “finalsolution.”26 Flooding the Tibetan region with a massive influx of majority Han Chineseis an effective way of significantly limiting any potential Indian adventurism againstChina through Tibetan proxies. Further, Beijing gradually moved away from support-ing insurgencies in India’s restive northeastern states recognizing the possibility thatIndia too could initiate support to Tibetan rebels.27 China’s decision to cease sup-porting militant groups in the northeast happened during the early years of DengXiaoping’s reign in the late 1970s.28 Both sides have figured out that it is best theyexercise self-restraint. This mutual deterrence has had a salutary effect in stabilizing therelationship.

In 1993 and 1996 both sides agreed to observe the Line of Actual Control (LAC),and reduced force levels around neutral zones. Despite tensions resurfacing of late overstapled visas to people domiciled in Arunachal Pradesh, alleged Chinese incursionsinto Arunachal Pradesh and the glacial pace of the boundary negotiations, stabilityhas held. Based on the foregoing there are only two documented crises subsequentto the 1962 war between India and China. As we noted these include two crises:the 1967 Nathu La clashes in the central sector and the 1986–87 eye-ball-to-eye-ballstand-off at Sumdorong Chu in the eastern sector.

Let us now turn to the background of the strategic interaction between Pakistanand India. The first India-Pakistan war followed immediately after the partition of theIndian subcontinent. Kashmir had a predominantly Muslim population with a Hinduruler at the time of its accession. The Hindu ruler Hari Singh chose not to accede toeither India or Pakistan and wanted independence for Kashmir. Pakistan, however, senttribal raiders across the Ceasefire Line to wrest control of Kashmir. Hari Singh appealedto India for assistance, but he would get it only on the condition that he acceptedKashmir’s accession to India. Pakistan, however, failed to seize the Kashmir Valley thatincludes the capital Srinagar. For Jinnah the failure to absorb Kashmir amounted toPakistan being “incomplete.”29 It was also the war that laid the seeds of subsequent

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wars. In Pakistan’s case, the separation between the political and military leadership atthe time of the first Kashmir War had long-term consequences for India-Pakistan rela-tions simply because it cemented the consolidation of military power within Pakistan.The military leadership was based in Rawalpindi while the political leadership was inKarachi. Although this explanation is necessary it is insufficient. As Ian Talbot arguesregarding Pakistan:

It is impossible to appreciate the impact of the Army on contemporary domesticand foreign affairs without acknowledging the congruence between its interests andthose of significant sections of Punjabi society. This helps to explain, in part, thecontinuities in policy [over Kashmir] between periods of civilian rule and martiallaw. An interest group interpretation which sees the army as standing apart fromsociety ignores this reality. It posits a dichotomy between development-mindedpoliticians and security-driven generals.30

As is evident, a national consensus exists with regard to Kashmir and other critical areasof dispute with India. Therefore, Kashmir and a competitive relationship with Indiaserve as a beacon for national unity implying that the dominant sections [Punjabis] ofPakistan’s polity are resistant to any compromise with India.

The second documented instance of confrontation between India and Pakistan wasover marsh terrain in the Rann of Kutch. There were crucial logistical and terrainadvantages that aided the Pakistanis and India’s response was hardly resolute in theRann of Kutch episode. Although Pakistani commentators make the reverse case thatit was India that precipitated the crisis,31 the more critical factor was that the Pakistanileadership inferred from this episode that it could test India’s resolve and capacity tofight elsewhere. This was fully tested when Islamabad precipitated a second war overKashmir by despatching forces in September 1965 to seize Indian Kashmir. The warended in a stalemate with Pakistan securing control of some Indian territory in Kashmirand India taking control of some territory in Pakistani Punjab and the strategicallyimportant Haji Pir Pass. The subsequent Tashkent agreement brokered by the SovietUnion restored the pre-war status quo. In the next war in 1971 hostilities resultedfrom the constitutional and electoral order breaking down between the eastern andwestern wings of Pakistan. One critical factor leading to the run up to the 1971 war wasKashmir. The Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) led by Zulfikar Bhutto, following negoti-ations with the Awami League’s Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, rejected the latter’s proposalthat the PPP significantly dilute its confrontational approach with India over Kashmiras a price for keeping both the wings of Pakistan united.32 Mujib also made the caseto West Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders that they must deal with India morerealistically. The West Pakistanis, however, viewed his counsel with considerable sus-picion. Yahya Khan saw Mujib and the Awami leadership’s advice as “traitorous andseditious.”33

Clearly, this demonstrates that the Western wing of Pakistan was far more intenselypreoccupied with Kashmir, even when it was a unified state. Under Z. A. Bhutto, asHaqqani argues, “Continued confrontation with India, based on an ideological imper-ative, provided the justification for higher defense budgets.”34 Kashmir “was to become

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the cornerstone of Pakistan’s foreign policy and domestic politics for decades as civil-ian and military leaders struggled to keep the issue alive enough to further their owncareers.”35

Following the 1971 war, India reclaimed all the territory it ceded to Pakistan underthe Tashkent agreement in Kashmir, and the Simla agreement which was concludedin 1972 sought to make the Line of Control the basis for a final boundary settlement.However, even as India insists on its sanctity, Pakistan has, since the late 1980s, throughsupport for the insurgency in Kashmir, systematically extirpated the Simla agreement.More critically the Simla agreement means that India has, at least, tacitly forsaken itsclaims over Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, just as Pakistan is reciprocally expected togive up its claims over Indian Kashmir. Further, Pakistan lost the Siachen Glacier in the1980s and has yet to accept that loss.

In the 1980s, Pakistan extended support to Sikh militants in Indian Punjab. Theend of the 1980s coincided with the onset of militancy in Kashmir. Between 1986 and1990 two crises occurred, the Brass Tacks and 1990 crises. The latter episode wasas much a consequence of misperception as Pakistan’s decision to actively abet theoutbreak of militancy in Indian Kashmir and its failure to fully de-mobilize after itsZarb-e-Momin military exercise in 1989.36 The former crises resulted from misper-ceptions about India’s Brass Tacks military exercises in the Western Desert state ofRajasthan bordering Pakistan. The more critical import is that despite some mech-anisms for limiting tension, instability persists in the India-Pakistan strategic dyad.Instability has become even more pronounced post-1998, because Pakistan has cho-sen to use force. The 1999 Kargil conflict stood as a vivid example of Pakistan’s failureto accept past military losses, particular Siachen, and its continued support for militantviolence in Kashmir.

In both the Indian and Pakistani cases, we witness a shift in means and not goals;the former has moved away from the use of force and invested in diplomacy to settleits differences with the Chinese over their disputed boundary, while the latter has alsoshifted means but invests in other variants of force in that it seeks to obtain throughsub conventional warfare what it could not through conventional force. The period ofthe 1970s and the 1980s was only an interlude for the acquisition of a nuclear capabilitywhich Pakistan uses today as a cover for asymmetrical warfare against India in Kashmir.It is this intent, borne out of its beliefs to secure its goals through force, that is the moreenduring dimension in Pakistan’s strategy vis-à-vis India. This is in contrast with India,whose strategic actions against China are not driven by a need to seek redress throughforce and which has, as we will see in the following sections, implicitly accepted theverdict of its 1962 defeat.

From a maximalist perspective, India has accepted the verdict of its defeat in 1962.While this may be an exaggeration because India still lays claim to Chinese-controlledterritory and Beijing Indian controlled territory, it is not beyond the realm of possibilityfor both to end their territorial dispute diplomatically. However, from the perspectiveof a minimalist explanation, the weaker party, India, has generally made a serious effortto seek a diplomatic resolution to its boundary problems and not resorted to arms.“Bureaucratic politics” or that “means determine ends” is the most dominant paradigminfluencing most explanations regarding stability in the subcontinent. The subsequent

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discussion will challenge the dominant assumptions that capabilities drive decisions touse force. While several observers of South Asia have offered persuasive alternativeexplanations that extend beyond capabilities, we treat these as necessary, but not suf-ficient. Pakistan’s refusal to accept the verdict of its defeats is the critical source ofinstability that is ultimately the result of popular support at home and contrasts withIndia’s stable interaction with China.

Bureaucratic Politics and Stability in the Subcontinent“Bureaucratic politics” has been the dominant school in most of the analysis on stabilityin the subcontinent. This school of thought posits that military capability encouragesthe use of force. Graham Allison, the most articulate conceptualizer of bureaucraticpolitics, argues:

Capabilities can affect apparent costs and risks of the use of military force; theexistence of a capability can affect politicians’ interpretations of national inter-ests, commitments, and defense policies; capabilities can affect the advantages anddisadvantages of contending officials within a government. Capabilities can createtemptations.37

Based on this view, the growth of mutual nuclear capabilities between India andPakistan has only increased instability in South Asia. Some proponents of thebureaucratic politics approach include alliances, geography, organizational biases, andPakistan’s deep satisfaction with the territorial status quo as critical contributoryfactors for instability in South Asia.

Nuclear pessimists generally belong to the bureaucratic politics school. This schoolargues that Pakistan sees its nuclear capability as bequeathing opportunities for pur-suing war-making and coercive strategies.38 For example, P. R. Chari notes: “Theavailability of the nuclear deterrent to Pakistan encouraged its undertaking the Kargilintrusions, while increasing its cross-border terrorism and proxy war in Kashmir.”39

Another bureaucratic analyst Kanti Bajpai, too offered a variant of this argument bynoting, “It is instructive that as Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities increased in the 1980s,its willingness to support internal foment in India grew apace.”40 He does not tell uswhy India never seeks to foment internal trouble in China with the gradual acquisitionof an Indian nuclear capability. Both Bajpai and Chari’s viewpoints are consistent withAllison’s argument. We need to survey Bajpai’s analysis, which is the most sophisti-cated case against an Indian nuclear capability. Nevertheless, it has its share of internaltensions and contradictions. Bajpai states that India should forsake nuclear weaponsand insists on placing an emphasis on conventional capabilities. On the one hand hemaintains:

Bringing down troop levels, such that India would have had enough for defenseagainst Pakistan and China and for internal security duties, was not an impos-sibility. A defensive or non-offensive defense posture with limits on the moreoffensive class of weapons—strike aircraft, armour, mobile artillery—would havesupplemented manpower reductions and was not an impossibility either.41

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On the other hand he continues:

None of this means that India should put on rose-coloured spectacles when it looksat China. No Indian leader—it should be underlined, Nehru included—has hadany illusions about China. China is a big power, albeit with many weaknesses; itcontinues to hold Indian territory . . . and it has its share of ambitions. India shouldtherefore be watchful on its borders and should ensure that it has sufficient forceto deal with any Chinese provocations.42

In addition, he adds elsewhere:

. . . while the border dispute is unresolved in a formal sense, Beijing has got mostof what it wanted out of the issue. If its primary aim was to secure the route fromXinjiang to Tibet, it long ago achieved its goal. China is the satisfied power on theborder issue, and it did not need nuclear weapons then, and does not need themnow or in the future, to retain control of the area.43

This is not a tension, but a downright contradiction! If India is to limit the offen-sive class of weapons that Bajpai delineates, how is it going to contend with Chineseprovocations? In fact the offensive class of weapons that Bajpai wants to limit wouldbe absolutely indispensable in the face of Chinese provocations. For instance, in the1962 war, the failure to employ airpower did at least partially cost India the war. But,more critically, if “China is a big power,” whose power and ambition is growing whyshould India place a ceiling on the offensive class of conventional weapons? Chinacould equally use its offensive weapons against India? Further, the offensive categoryof weapons with India could also be employed for defensive functions such as holdingterritory with strong ground forces and artillery systems thereby deterring China fromattempting a land grab. Further, if China is the “satisfied power,” why should it engagein provocations at all? When it comes to nuclear weapons, this argument becomes evenmore consequential. In the absence of an Indian nuclear capability, a nuclear equippedChina could still grab Indian territory.

If anything, it might be much easier for China to pull off a fait accompli. This isequally plausible. On the one hand, Bajpai tries to show that China is a status quopower, but on the other he imputes aggressive motivations or some proclivity to useforce to the Chinese. He wants to limit capabilities, yet proffers to tell Indian leadersthat they make adequate provision for defense against the Chinese. What “sufficientforce” against China means is unspecified. This is an attempt to have it both ways bybureaucratic analysts such as Bajpai, to the extent that he wants India to circumscribe itscapabilities even as he alerts Indian leaders to the military risks emanating from China.

Another problematic feature with Bajpai’s analysis is his use of counterfactuals. Heasks what if India had given up its nuclear capability in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s,which he believes was not beyond the realm of possibility. He overlooks crucial evi-dence. The first being: India’s defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962 and China’sLop Nor nuclear test of 1964. India’s nuclear explosive development started in earnestin early 1965 based on the best known account of the Indian weapons program.44

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Further, in the late 1960s, as the Nonproliferation Treaty came into existence, therewere several factors that militated against India’s accession, such as absence of crediblesecurity guarantees, New Delhi’s commitment to non-alignment, and the iniquitousterms of the treaty.45 Bajpai states that the Pakistanis were required to not raise theKashmir issue at international fora under the terms of the Simla Agreement, but that isexactly what Pakistan ended up doing. Bajpai himself admits that Pakistan was movingtoward a nuclear capability even before the Indian nuclear test of 1974.46 This againreflects the motivation behind Pakistan’s historically strong quest for parity with India.As Zulfikar Ali Bhutto put it:

If Pakistan restrains or suspends her nuclear program, it would not only enableIndia to blackmail Pakistan with her nuclear advantage, but it would impose acrippling limitation on the development of Pakistan’s science and technology.47

Further, China supplied Pakistan nuclear bomb know-how in the 1980s and missiletechnology in the 1990s48—evidence Bajpai consciously and selectively omits in hisdiscussion. What interest did and does China have in aiding the growth of Pakistanistrategic capabilities that directly threaten India? Bajpai says China does not pose a“nuclear threat” to India but it sure sees Pakistan as a proxy to advance its strategic goalson the cheap in that Islamabad serves the purpose of a low-cost balancer against Indiafor Beijing. This calculated strategy enables Beijing to “conceal” its own motivationsvis-à-vis New Delhi even as it smothers any “threat” based labels being put on it. Use ofcounterfactuals must proceed from the premise that they are co-tenable with the facts.Instead, Bajpai’s counterfactual analysis rests more on assertion than demonstration.

He elaborates that deterrence can fail in that China and Pakistan could pull of a faitaccompli against India under the cover of nuclear weapons. Bajpai says that Pakistan hasa flair for the dangerous, which is in fact true, but if Pakistan and China are prone to afait accompli, is India supposed to capitulate? If not, how is India supposed to defenditself without conventional and nuclear capabilities? If China and Pakistan pursue irre-dentist goals under the cover of nuclear weapons should India not have conventionaland nuclear capabilities to thwart their designs? Unless he is prescribing capitulationas a strategy, in which case, there would be nothing to fight about! India might as welllet Pakistan and China take what they believe to be their due. Bajpai insinuates hostileintent to Pakistan and China and presuming some form of inherent passivity in India.He is making a normative assumption about each of the states. If India is the defen-sive state as Bajpai suggests, it will need capabilities even in self-defense in response toPakistani and Chinese provocations. He accuses realists of being romantic but ends upconceding too much to them. In one remarkable section he observes:

The commitment problem, it could be argued, would not be at issue in the caseof India-Pakistan or India-China conflicts: surely no Pakistani or Chinese coulddoubt that an attack on Kashmir or say Arunachal Pradesh would be regarded asanything less than a threat to core values. This is an appealing objection, but perhapsa rather romantic one.49

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Indeed, Pakistan did attempt a fait accompli in 1999 and was soundly defeated. Bajpaicould point to Kargil as a failure of deterrence, but deterrence also failed in 1965 lead-ing to the second India-Pakistan war. The absence of nuclear weapons did not preventPakistan from going on the offensive in Kashmir. Even in the presence of nuclearweapons the Pakistanis have not gone beyond a point. Consider Kargil. In an inter-cepted phone conversation between Generals Musharaf and Aziz during the conflict,the latter is heard telling the former to take great care in not allowing any furtherescalation.50 The Pakistanis have precipitated conflict at the margins but knowing fullwell that any expansion would come at a significant cost. Bajpai might counter thatPakistan did not secure its objectives in 1965, but nor did Islamabad in 1999. Pakistanhas not repeated a Kargil-like operation again. To be sure it could attempt a repeat act,but that is exactly why India should not let its guard down, because of Rawalpindi’sstrong proclivity to using force. More precisely, pointing to deterrence failure at Kargilgives bureaucratic politics advocates like Bajpai and Chari a convenient alibi to provetheir case simply because deterrence failures are visible, but deterrence success is notalways visible. Patrick Morgan observes, “. . . the difficulty in testing deterrence theoryvia its failures is disturbing since failures seem easier to detect.”51 Morgan also notes,based on a meticulous survey of case studies, that deterrence failures and successes areessentially a product of “motivation” that “covers both the desire to challenge and awillingness to take risks.”52 Again, this point appositely illustrates Pakistani motivationin using force against India for decades. Ultimately, as Lawrence Freedman observesabout nuclear disarmament advocates:

The conviction that sets of nuclear arsenals had no purpose other than to detereach other’s use reinforced the assumptions that the solution to the problem lay ingeneral agreement to eliminate all sets simultaneously for their residual rationaleswould also be eliminated at the same time. This implied a rather unlikely degree oforchestration.53

On China we need to turn to the late K. Subrahmanyam. He observed years ago:“Irrespective of the state of relationship at any particular time . . . India and Chinawill constitute mutual challenges for each other”54 simply because of their civilizationalheritage, global ambitions, and geographic contiguity. Therefore, as he elaborated, Indiamust “adopt a policy of directly befriending China and at the same time” balance China[through] “an Asian and global balance of power system.”55 India’s relationship withChina ties into general deterrence and balance of power. General deterrence, as Morganexplains: “The potential attack is more distant and less defined, even hypothetical, whilethe components of the deterrence posture are less specific . . . While deterrence alwaysrests on the existence of conflict, we can think about general deterrence in the absenceof intense conflict”56

Lawrence Freedman reinforces general deterrence in relation to the balance ofpower:

General deterrence may become frail at times of revolutionary change or whenthe international order appears illegitimate in the eyes of rising states. History is

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therefore full of cases in which general deterrence, in the guise of a balance of power,has broken down. However, it did not do so when the balance was based on nuclearpower and, over time, rather than tending towards a revival of immediate crisis,despite some tense moments, it tended instead towards consensual relations.57

India’s relations with China have tended toward the consensual despite unresolvedboundary issues. A widespread misconception is that realists are hawks; they are hawk-ish about preparation and planning but not necessarily in the use of force. Further,Sino-Indian economic ties are booming. Subrahmanyam’s view is consistent with thisessential fact. Simply put, the Sino-Indian dyad is stable precisely because both states,particularly the weaker state, India, have resisted the use of force. Bureaucratic ana-lysts ignore one glaring reality: if nuclear capabilities indeed encourage the use of force,why is it absent in the Sino-Indian relationship? India has not sought to revive its for-ward policy or employ force to settle its boundary dispute with China at least sincethe 1960s. Has it precipitated conflicts against China at the margins under the cover ofnuclear weapons along its disputed boundary as Pakistan did at Kargil? The bureau-cratic politics school, on the other hand, postulates that Pakistani capabilities induceit to frequently resort to force against India. They overlook the complex motivationsdriving Pakistan’s resort to force. In the context of Kashmir Pakistan’s use of force isas much a function of the fact that it has refused to accept the verdict of its defeats.Military force is a very blunt instrument and it can have a strongly negative impact onstability. The difference between India and Pakistan is in the level of political controlexercised over the military instrument. India seeks deterrent goals out of its nuclearcapabilities whereas Pakistan seeks compellent benefits out of its nuclear capabilities.The contrast is in the degree of ambition of the two states.

The latest in this monomania that means determine ends is S. Paul Kapur’s anal-ysis. He counters that the stability/instability paradox is actually reversed in SouthAsia to the degree that there is strategic instability at the nuclear level. How does thisphenomenon which is unique to South Asia work? Pakistan a nuclear armed state isconventionally weak but revisionist whereas a nuclear armed India, the conventionallystronger, is the status quo power. Kapur explains:

If a conventionally weak state has status quo territorial preferences, the acquisitionof nuclear weapons will be unlikely to encourage it to behave in a conventionallyaggressive manner. . . . However if the weak state has revisionist preferences, theacquisition of nuclear weapons could create significant incentives for conventionalaggression, enabling it to challenge the territorial status quo in ways that wouldhave been too dangerous.58

As we will see, Kapur’s hypothesis veers closely to the notion that capabilitiesdrive decisions to use force. To be sure, Kapur admits that Pakistan is revisionist.Nevertheless, asserting that Pakistan is a revisionist state stemming from its deep polit-ical dissatisfaction with the status quo is a normative claim and implies a type of statebehavior that involves aggressive actions and hostile intent. Is it Pakistani revisionism(expansive objectives) or is it Pakistani capabilities that drive its aggressive behavior

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leading to instability? More devastating is that he has no case to make on India’sactions vis-à-vis China. The link between proliferation or capability and instabilityis a tenuous correlation. It confuses the causal strength of what creates instability inthe subcontinent: revisionism or nuclear capabilities. Kapur’s argument suffers froma selection bias. All the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) he probes overlookSino-India boundary dispute;59 a glaring omission considering the strategic significanceof the relationship. Further, as we will see in greater detail in the following sections,Pakistan’s revisionism is as much a product of the fact that Pakistan has not acceptedthe verdict of its military defeats. At a doctrinal level, there are problems with Kapur’scomparison between the Soviet Union and Pakistan. Kapur argues based on his inter-view with Musharraf that Pakistani policy rests on “strategic defense through tacticaloffense.”60 The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had a far more defensive doctrine.This is what Richard Betts observed about the contours of a potential Soviet attackagainst Western Europe in the 1980s:

1.) political indecision in response to warning indicators which could delay alert andcoordination of the defense (especially if several “cry wolf” false alerts in a graduallyevolving crisis dulled sensitivity);

2.) an adventurous Soviet attack plan that, for ex- ample, launched air strikes well beforethe ground offensive was ready, in order to disrupt the U.S. airlift, interdict sea ports,wreck POMCUS depots, and short-circuit Western communications; and

3.) deceptions that could mask the main axes of Soviet advance, preventing NATO’slimited mobile reserves from moving efficiently to the critical sectors. Judging bymost historical precedents, the first vulnerability is quite plausible. The second is notthoroughly consistent with what is known of Soviet doctrine which stresses carefulpreparation and mass and condemns adventurism (although the doctrine does alsoemphasize surprise), but it is certainly conceivable. The third is unlikely given thetechnical capabilities of modern intelligence surveillance mechanisms, unless there isa combination of bad weather and novel Soviet means of spoofing. In any case, theposition of initiative gives the Soviets more options for resolving the uncertainties onpreferred terms, for setting the conditions of engagement and focusing an attack onNATO’s weak points, if they are willing to take high risks and mount operations inways unheralded by previous evidence in their military writings and exercises. Anydecision to resort to war, though, presupposes radical action.61

What we can infer from Betts’ argument is Soviet doctrine was far more defensive andmoderate to the extent that it was not very risk-prone. The content of Soviet doctrinepartly derived from its history in attritional warfare is widely known to be a defensivebrand of warfare. As a formidable land power, its armies could abandon territory andretreat into Russia’s vast interior and still stage a fight back as Napoleon discoveredwhen he invaded Russia in 1812 and Hitler in 1942. Therefore, the incentive for theoffensive use of force by the Soviet Union was less than what characterizes Pakistanistrategy. As Patrick Morgan argues the US and the Soviet Union were partially statusquo powers who came to develop “hard-line images of each other.”62 But, they ulti-mately had no territorial disputes, which are the most common source of wars and they

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had no long history of conflict nor were their people imbued with a visceral mutualdislike.63 After all, were they not allies in the last major war, World War II? Further,based on Soviet archival evidence, Morgan observes “the Soviet Union had politicallyexpansionist objectives but not a strong bent for attacking the West.”64 These variablesdo not obtain in the India-Pakistan relationship. As our background section has shown,Pakistani claims over Indian Kashmir predate the nuclearization of the subcontinent.Recourse to force has been a fixture of Pakistani strategy since 1947. What it couldnot achieve through conventional wars in 1947–48 and 1965, it is now seeking throughsub-conventional force under the cover of nuclear weapons.

A fourth group of analysts led by Scott Sagan argue from an organization theoryperspective. Organization theorists posit that the parochial interests of the military inmilitary-dominated states dictate the direction of the means and goals of the state.65

Such states, as organization theorists note, are biased toward offensive actions, suchas preventive wars and large defense budgets. In states where civilian control over themilitary is prevalent, such is in India the prospect of offensive actions is constrained.As Sagan argues, “Military rule in Islamabad (and military influence during periodsof civilian rule) certainly has played an important role in Pakistani decision-makingconcerning the use of force.”66 If the latter is true then it is Pakistani militarism thatexplains its decision to wage wars. But Sagan does not stop there. As he observes, “. . .the Pakistani military did not possess nuclear weapons before India tested in 1974, andthus was not in a position to argue that preventive war now was better than war laterafter India developed a rudimentary arsenal.”67 Did India possess nuclear weapons inthe 1947–1948 and 1965 wars? Further, how does this square with his claim that thePakistani military has been crucially involved in initiating and conducting wars prior tothe 1974 nuclear test by India.68 Further, he overlooks the fact that it was the civilianZulfikar Ali Bhutto who started Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program in 1972; whereas,Ayub Khan the soldier rejected it in the 1960s.

The nuclear optimists, on the other hand, view the impact of nuclear weapons aseventually stabilizing the conflict between India and Pakistan. Optimists take refugein the stability/instability paradox.69 The stability/instability paradox postulates thatwhile stability holds at the nuclear level, it encourages violence at the subnuclear level.The real reason for Indian restraint in crises as Sumit Ganguly notes is because:

. . . through a process of inference and attribution, one can make a cogent argumentthat the principal source of Indian restraint was Pakistan’s overt possession of anuclear arsenal. Indian policy makers, cognizant of this new reality, were compelledto exercise suitable restraint for fear of escalation to the nuclear level.70

This may be true, but why does the stability/instability paradox not play itself outin the Sino-Indian dyad? The conceptual paradigm of stability/instability ultimatelypresumes lower levels of violence. If force is used even at the sub-conventional levelit has to originate from some hostile intent and motivation. The source of instabilityis Pakistan’s persistent and frequent use of force, particularly in its sub-conventionalform for nearly three decades. Low intensity violence orchestrated by Pakistan milita-rizes the conflict and is a form of force that allows it to do at a lower cost under the

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cover of nuclear weapons what it could not do in their absence. In addition, Gangulyand Biringer argue that despite the “asymmetries” in capabilities between India andChina their boundary and security problems “lack(s) the immediacy” that obtainsbetween India and Pakistan.71 The authors assume that the absence of “immediacy”in the Sino-Indian dyad is a given without explaining why. It is only evident becauseIndia, the weaker party in the dyad, has accepted the defeat of 1962 or, at a minimum,exercised restraint in the use of force. Secondly, there is no nationalist groundswellto use force sub-conventionally or conventionally against China under the cover ofnuclear weapons. It orders its preferences prudently to the extent there is a consider-able degree of political regulation over the use of force which contrasts with the wayPakistan behaves with India. In sum, the Sino-Indian dyad lacks the militarization thatobtains in the India-Pakistan relationship.

A final group of experts reason that the asymmetry of power between India andPakistan is what contributes to instability in the subcontinent. T. V. Paul for instanceargues that Pakistan and India are locked in a “truncated power asymmetry.”72 Thismeans that in aggregate terms India is significantly larger and globally stronger; how-ever at the local level the power balance is more symmetrical in that Pakistan is ableto exploit geographic advantages in Kashmir.73 Further, Paul notes that alliances, capa-bility and strategy explain Pakistan’s ability to sustain the conflict over an extendedperiod of time.74 There is no denying that alliances have played a part in Pakistan’scapacity in sustaining the conflict over a protracted period of time. Pakistan has provedto be an invaluable proxy for both China and the United States. Rugged mountain-ous geography too has enabled Pakistan to engineer infiltrations by militants across theLine of Control (LoC) to the extent that India cannot completely seal of the Line ofControl (LoC). The argument advanced by Paul is necessary, but insufficient. As ourbackground section reveals there are geographic opportunities for India to infiltrateTibetan rebels just as China can stoke and aid insurgencies in India’s North East. Theone variable, which is critical to this analysis and which Paul overlooks, is that Pakistanhas never really accepted the verdict of its defeats in war or at a minimum undertaken adivestiture of covert and overt use of force.

Ashley Tellis’s argument comes closest to our hypothesis. He concludes that Indiaand Pakistan are locked in a state of “ugly stability.” As he argues, “this peculiar formof stability derives substantially from the inability of both India and Pakistan to attainwhat may be desired political objectives through war.”75 Nuclear capabilities, Tellisobserves, have encouraged brinkmanship and security competition in South Asia.76

While he correctly observes that Pakistan is still beholden to the “chimera” of wrestingcontrol of Kashmir, Tellis overlooks the fact that Pakistan, despite suffering numerousdefeats by India, has never really accepted their verdict. Notwithstanding, there is no“ugly stability” in the Sino-Indian dyad and the growth of India’s nuclear capabilitieshas not resulted in a commensurate increase in instability.

As the British military historian Brian Bond notes, apart from capabilities, alliances,and strategy that a state may possess that prolongs the war or lead to a recurrence ofwars: “firm realistic statecraft with specific aims and the willingness of the vanquishedaccept the verdict of battle”77 is vital for wars yielding a decisive result. Achieving peacethrough battlefield success has not always been easy largely because popular support

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for war makes conflict more intractable. This is the essential insight of Clausewitzwhich foreshadowed Bond’s argument. This conclusion is also consistent with MichaelHoward’s observation that several wars dating back to the nineteenth century have beenindecisive, and the conflict between India and Pakistan has followed the same pattern.At one level, this is true of the Sino-Indian contest over territory, but it is markedlymore stable, because there is an absence of force.

In fact, if the Pakistani polity reconciles itself to its defeats against India it will placeprogressive limits on Pakistan’s use of force enabling a stabilization of the relation-ship. It will denude Pakistan of the motivation to use force. Alliances, capabilities,and strategy can of course deter a potentially hostile India. This contrasts with India’stacit acceptance of its defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962. China achieveda decisive operational victory and India, if not out rightly accepting the verdict ofthat military loss has charted a diplomatic pathway toward resolving its boundaryproblems with Beijing. Nevertheless, achieving decision through battle has been verydifficult for Pakistan, but equally and more significantly India, because the latter inparticular has failed to convert its operational successes into a durable peace settle-ment. Bond’s argument connects directly to the Clausewitz’s remarkable “Trinity.”Clausewitz argued:

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to a givencase. As a total phenomenon its dominant tendencies always make war a para-doxical trinity—composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity which areto be regarded as a blind natural force; of the play of chance and probability withinwhich the creative spirit is free to roam; and of its element of subordination, as aninstrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.78

Clausewitz continues:

The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the comman-der and his army; the third the government. The passions that are to be kindled ina war must already be inherent in the people; the scope which play of courage andtalent will enjoy in the realm of probability and chance depends on the particularcharacter of the army; but the political aims are the business of government alone.79

Clausewitz contends that if a political objective cannot be met with suitable militaryobjective, a different military objective would be necessary to achieve the political goal.Particular attention has to be paid to the character of each state involved in the conflict,the level of tension within them and between them. The less the population is involvedin a conflict the conflict will assume a political character with a proportionate reduc-tion in militarization. Therefore, the “center of gravity” lies with the people. As longas popular support exists for a war or the use of force, conflict will persist. Clausewitzmaintains it is “moral factors” that directly relate to the will of the government, com-manders, and, most importantly, its people that “permeates war as whole.”80 “Onemight say, as Clausewitz argues “that the physical seem little more than the woodenhilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed

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blade.”81 War is an interaction between the moral and the physical by means of thelatter. As Clausewitz observes:

Generally speaking, a military objective that matches the political object in scalewill, if the latter is reduced, be reduced in proportion; this will be all the more soas the political object increases its predominance. Thus, it follows that without anyinconsistency wars can have all degrees of importance and intensity, ranging froma war of extermination down to simple armed observation.82

Note Clausewitz’s observation that wars can have varying degrees of intensity. Nuclearweapons may stanch escalation and force from touching untrammeled proportions inthe subcontinent, yet the application of force continues at the sub-conventional level,as we witness daily infiltrations into Kashmir and occasionally at the conventional levelas in Kargil. More specifically in Clausewitz’s immortal words “. . . war is not merelyan act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse,carried with other means.” For instance, advocates of the stability/instability paradoxinstability in South Asia use it as a conceptual and empirical basis to substantiate theircase. But the military realities in the subcontinent can be equally addressed through thetenets of Clausewitzian thought. As we will see in the following, based on Clausewitz’sargument, the employment of a sub-conventional strategy by Pakistan is as much afunction of public support. As long as public “passions” reign, the conflict betweenIndia and Pakistan will remain durable and indecisive. Only political regulation canrestrain the application of force. Militarism bedevils both India and Pakistan, andChina and India. The degree to which it animates relations in both dyads is the crucialdifference.

The Clausewitzean Trinity and Capabilities as TemptationsNow, it is plausible to argue that capability incentivizes the use of force because highlevels of capabilities positively correlate to the use of force and low capabilities inducerestraint in that minimal capabilities serve as a prophylactic against adventurism andhigh capabilities foreclose the possibility of intensively looking for diplomatic solutionsto problems. Nevertheless, it can be false because high capabilities need not necessitatethe use of force. An anecdote from the 1990s will reveal how misleading this can be.Madeleine Albright in 1993 as the United States permanent representative to the UnitedNations in the midst of ethnic violence in the Balkans is reported to have told ColinPowell then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having thissuperb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it? As Powell laterrecalled, I thought I would have an aneurysm.”83

This demonstrates why leaders are tempted to use force because they prefer orwant to for ideological reasons. In sum there must be some prior intent and motiva-tion to use force, or element of choice. Similarly, in the Pakistani case according toJalil Jilani a senior Pakistani Foreign Ministry official, the Kargil conflict was “justi-fied” as it “made the point that India’s adverse possessions [in Kashmir] should belooked at.”84 In fact, the withdrawal from Kargil is seen by many Pakistanis as a climb

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down and an act of cowardice.85 During the Kargil conflict, as one RAND study quiteperceptively observed, there was widespread disbelief in Pakistan about the adverseinternational reaction and India’s response against Pakistani aggression.86 This disbe-lief stemmed from a conviction that what Pakistan had done at Kargil was somehowjust. Further, a critical casualty of Kargil was Pakistan’s civilian leader Nawaz Sharifwho was overthrown in a post-conflict bloodless coup by his own army chief GeneralPervez Musharraf. Musharraf is on record stating that there could be more Kargils87

and describing Kargil as a “great” tactical success. Equally true is Pakistan’s refusalto come to terms with its loss of Siachen in the 1980s. Just consider its oppositionto authenticate the actual troop positions held by each army that would be necessaryfor a mutual force withdrawal. Any validation of the latter by Pakistan at a minimumwould mean an admission of defeat. This admission could potentially precipitate cas-cading domestic costs for the civilian and military leaderships of Pakistan. In fact, oneof the crucial factors that led to the Kargil conflict was India beating off the Pakistanisfrom the glacier in the 1980s. Siachen was an operational and battlefield defeat forthe Pakistanis. Instead of accepting what are essentially irreversible military outcomes,the Pakistanis have sought compensation elsewhere. For instance, the hijacking of anIndian Airlines plane in late 1999 by Pakistan based groups enjoyed the patronage ofthe Pakistani army, which was again the direct result of the Pakistani army’s defeat atthe hands of the Indian army at Kargil. The Pakistani army could not defeat the Indianarmy in combat at Kargil yet took recourse to terror by exacting retribution againstinnocent Indian civilians through essentially an act of blackmail. Acts of vengeanceremain a strong leitmotif of Pakistani strategy. In sum, India not only faces a hostilePakistani security establishment, but ultimately a hostile Pakistani population. MichaelHoward reflecting on “decisive battles” had this to say:

Its [decisive battles] disappearance has often been attributed to the developmentof weapon technology, but it was not the introduction of rifled firearms that pro-longed the American Civil War, or machine guns and recoilless artillery the FirstWorld War. It was the development of communications and, with it, the mobi-lization of nations. Lost battles, operational setbacks that might once have been“decisive,” became mere episodes in campaigns that could be indefinitely prolongedso long as fresh forces could be brought into the field, recruited from and supportedby large and enthusiastic populations; populations that may have had little sophis-ticated understanding of national interests, but were easily moved by propagandathat played on emotions of fear and, even more, of honor. It was thus advent of“people’s wars” that made war total, shifting the centre of gravity away from armieson the battlefield to the people on whose endurance and support the continuanceof the war depended, making it ever harder to reach a “decision.” Not simply thearmies but the will of the enemy people had to be crushed.88

Militarism and nationalism drive Pakistan’s preferences to use force. As Howard’sargument suggests, capabilities can only reinforce intentions and motivation. India toohas high capabilities, but it does not choose to use force as our examples of its relation-ship with China will demonstrate. Bureaucratic politics advocates infer intentions from

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capabilities to use force. France and Britain too have nuclear weapons, but do they useforce against each other under the cover of nuclear weapons? This deductive approachhas seductive allure in that it seeks to deny or ignore the political causes that precipi-tate the employment of force. Plainly put, there are no security issues between Britainand France, but there are between India and Pakistan, and China and India. Pakistan’snuclear acquisition was a direct consequence of its defeat at the hands of India in1971. Lt. General J. F. R. Jacob, who was critical to India’s war effort against Pakistaniforces in the East and engineered their surrender, noted that the Pakistani officers werevery angry and promised to avenge the defeat. Its acquisition of nuclear weapons onlyserves as a cover to perpetrate acts of vengeance to fulfill its “national honor.” TheRAND study which we alluded to earlier argues that Pakistan has not internalizedthe “rational demand imposed by the nuclearization of the Subcontinent.”89 This isarguable—Pakistan has certainly accepted the rational demands that came with weild-ing a nuclear capability, yet it is yet to accept the verdict of its operational defeats.Consider another point. If the Pakistani objective is to redress its relative insecurity italready wields a weapon in the form of its nuclear capability to defend itself againstIndia in case New Delhi’s intentions turn hostile. That is, its capabilities will serve thepurpose of deterrence, inducing Indian restraint, and deterrence is a defensive strategy.But, it seeks something more ambitious in that its nuclear capabilities serve as a coverfor reasserting its claims over Kashmir through force. Force, as Clausewitz explains,never occurs in a political vacuum or rather as he argues, “war is only a branch ofpolitical activity; that it is in no sense autonomous.”90

Therefore, capabilities in themselves cannot determine the use of force. Capabilitiesare only a symptom or merely the “wooden hilt.” Now, if the goal is deterrence, therewould be an absence of force and a deterrent strategy is, at best, restricted to onlyimplicit or explicit threats; but if it is compellent, force in some instances will be applied.The application of force for compellent goals is a function of motivation. This is theprincipal fallacy that undergirds the bureaucratic politics approach in that it ties backinto our earlier point that war is an interaction between the moral and physical bymeans of the latter. Means do not determine the use of force. It is the motivation thatdoes. Without the moral or motivational the physical would be of no real use. It is themoral or “the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade” that providesthe impetus to use physical (capabilities or means). Any war, as Clausewitz argues,stems from a deep political premise, and it is only obvious that the principal “causeof its existence will remain the supreme consideration in conducting it.”91 Further, asClausewitz notes:

Two different motives make men fight one another: hostile feelings and hostileintentions. Our definition is based on the latter, since it is the universal element.Even the most savage, almost instinctive, passion of hatred cannot be conceived asexisting without hostile intent; but hostile intentions are often unaccompanied byany sort of feelings—at least by none that predominate.92

Without hostile intent, it is hard to see how any form of force can be used. Militarismhas had a reifying effect on Pakistan in that its frequent use of force is less suscep-tible to political control. Political control over the use of force is stronger in India,

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yet militarism remains to the degree that New Delhi is unable to give ground onancillary issues such as Siachen, let alone Kashmir. Take Siachen, for example. Twofailed attempts under the current Manmohan Singh-led Indian government to resolvethe dispute are largely a consequence of strong opposition among hard-line elementswithin the Indian defense establishment to any concessions unless Islamabad authenti-cates troop positions held by each side, delineates and then demarcates the line dividingboth sides on a map. Conversely, Pakistani demands for an unconditional withdrawalcoupled with its Kargil military misadventure at Kargil in 1999 have only served toneuter Manmohan Singh’s two attempts to resolve the dispute to the degree that itmakes it very difficult for even a democratically elected Indian government to exertstrong political control in securing a negotiated diplomatic settlement. Pakistan’s use offorce in 1999 has scuttled two political initiatives to resolve the Siachen dispute. Thisis how force can harden positions and limit options for compromise by increasing thestrength of the Indian military’s viewpoint in the domain of national security. SrinathRaghavan has quite rightly argued that intrinsically there is nothing valuable aboutSiachen that warrants maintenance of a military presence on the glacier, but the Indianarmy insists on authentication of troop positions and India’s politicians have deferredto the army’s judgment.93 Looking at it historically, as Brian Bond has observed, in therun up to World War I virtually every belligerent was bedeviled by militarism withGermany at one end of the spectrum and Britain at the other.94 Nowhere was themilitary under the complete regulation of civilian governments, and there was a cru-cial absence of total civilian control over strategy. But, the difference lay in degree andintensity. Militarism was far more visceral in Germany and Austria-Hungary producingdisastrous consequences for both as opposed to the other powers.95

In Pakistan’s case militarism is much stronger than it is in India and based onClausewitz’s formulation hostile intentions play a significant role in Pakistan’s useof force and makes the conflict intractable. Nationalist fervor inextricably tied toPakistan’s claims over Kashmir imbues the India-Pakistan conflict with durability andirresolution. It is for this reason that wars in the sub-continent have been indecisive,particularly over Kashmir and decision through battle has proved difficult to attain.As Ashley Tellis incisively observes, “. . . relations between the two states can bedescribed, albeit hyperbolically, as ‘one long war’ waged almost continuously sinceindependence.”96 It also reduces the incentives for reason or rationality to regulatethe use of force to the extent that Pakistan’s diplomats and politicians do not havemuch control over the direction of Pakistan’s strategy against India simply because thePakistani public’s passions and beliefs remain strong. Thus, the level of militarizationin the India-Pakistan dyad is greater than it is in the Sino-Indian dyad. The Sino-Indianboundary dispute has progressively assumed a political character consistent with thetenets of Clausewitzian thinking to the extent that Chinese repression of Tibetans doesnot arouse the “passions” of the Indian people nor does its control of territory thatIndia claims evoke popular demands for the use of force. As Srinath Raghavan aptlyargues:

. . . does the political issue of Tibet (as opposed to the moral one) have any real trac-tion on Indian public opinion or indeed the political parties? Evidently not. Despitethe vicissitudes of Sino-Indian relations no Indian government has ever sought to

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extend political support to the Dalai Lama. Successive governments have adhered tothis stand. The BJP might now strike an activist pose, but as foreign minister in theJanata Party government, Vajpayee stated in Parliament that “We regard Tibet as aregion of China.” In 2003, the BJP-led government inked an agreement, affirmingTibet as part of China. This long-standing policy stems from a realistic recognitionthat India has no leverage on Tibet. It is idle to pretend otherwise.97

In line with Raghavan’s factually accurate argument, bureaucratic politic advocatesought to recognize that capabilities do not singularly drive the employment of force.The notion that tactical options govern decisions to use force or that means determineends is intellectually and analytically misleading and unhelpful in explaining why thereis variation in the level of stability between the Sino-Indian and India-Pakistan dyads.If capabilities indeed serve as temptations India should have precipitated as many crisesand wars in the name of Tibet against China as the Pakistanis have done against India.Further, India has made no purposive effort to detach Pakistan-controlled Kashmireither. Stated bluntly, there is popular support in Pakistan for the use of force againstIndia, just as there is popular support in India to employ countervailing force to thwartPakistani designs in Kashmir. But, there is no popular support within India either toprecipitate a limited aims conflict against China or to use asymmetric violence againstChina. The aforementioned also validate the assumptions of general deterrence andconfirm Subrahmanyam’s argument to the extent India befriends and balances Chinaor at least tries to.

That begs the question: what should a state’s objectives be? That depends onwhether a state is seeking defensive or offensive goals. Are they deterrent or compel-lent in their objectives? The former is passive coercion in that it requires an adversarydo nothing and prevents him from altering the status quo. The latter, however is moreambitious and risk-prone than deterrence in that it seeks to make the adversary doyour will. Force and threats of force are integral to a compellent strategy and there-fore intentionally hostile. Maleeha Lodhi a prominent member of Pakistan’s strategicestablishment typifies this sentiment:

[Kashmir’s] status quo is the problem. It cannot be part of the solution. . . . Indiamaintains the world’s fourth largest military machine. . . . My country’s modestefforts to replace and modernize its worn out conventional weapons have beenseriously affected by U.S. sanctions. In this growing asymmetry, Pakistan will beincreasingly forced to rely on strategic capabilities. Meanwhile, the Kashmir disputeremains a flashpoint of tensions between the world’s newest nuclear powers. Risksof escalation through accident and miscalculation cannot be discounted.98

This attempt to play on nuclear fears to settle Kashmir on Pakistan’s terms is clearlya compellent strategy and essentially reflects the offensive biases of the Pakistani state.Reinforcing this is General Mirza Aslam Beg’s observation that Pakistan made a “. . .departure from stereotyped maneuvers and the self-defeating concept of holding for-mations. Now, our Armed Forces are fully tuned to fighting an offensive defence,

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with well-tested concepts and strategies, even in an environment where they may beoutnumbered.”99

To be sure Pakistan has not explicitly enunciated its nuclear doctrine, but its actionsagainst India essentially confirm Beg’s argument. As Brian Bond observes, “If anywar could produce the . . . ambitious political goals demanded, it [has] to be foughtoffensively.”100 Lodhi’s and Beg’s arguments are consistent with this viewpoint andreflect the offensive intent of Pakistani military doctrine. Kargil remains a vivid exampleof Pakistan’s adventurist strategy. But, more critically it contrasts with Soviet doctrine,which had defensive foundations borne out of its history in attritional warfare. Thisis why scholars like Kapur have to pay attention to empirical evidence before usingmisleading analogies from the Cold War. On the other hand, Indian nuclear and mili-tary doctrine is premised on credible minimum deterrence, which amounts to defensivesecurity. Pakistani objectives over Kashmir give it a profoundly visceral and offensiveedge. Therefore, capabilities are only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for theuse of force. As the aforementioned passages reveal the latter happens because thereis hostile intent and in the Pakistani case hostile feelings toward India.

On the other hand, India’s response to Pakistan’s sponsorship of militancy inKashmir is to wear it down and thwart its territorial ambitions. As New Delhi’s objec-tives are primarily defensive and limited to preventing Kashmir’s secession its attritionalstrategy fits Clausewitz’s description: “judging from the frequency of its use, is to weardown the enemy . . . Wearing down the enemy in a conflict means using the durationof the war to bring about a gradual exhaustion of his physical and moral resistance . . .resistance is a form of action, aimed at destroying enough of the enemy’s power to forcehim to renounce his intentions.”101

Wearing down the enemy through a strategy of exhaustion enables India to keep itsstrength at its peak. In line with the Prussian military theorist Delbruck, Bond observes,“. . . the strategy of exhaustion was not an easy option, rather that in certain historicalcontexts it was the only realistic mode of warfare available.”102 This has fundamentallycharacterized conflict in South Asia. As Clausewitz argues, few wars are decided on thebattlefield, they are ultimately decided at the peace table. A victorious military outcomecan only produce opportunities for the victor that are in many instances limited byconditions that are simply beyond its control. As Clausewitz states: “The defeated stateoften considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil, for which a remedy may stillbe found in political conditions at some later date.”103

This is exactly what happened following Pakistan’s defeat in 1971 and the consum-mation of the Simla Agreement on Kashmir. The Simla Agreement wound up being aninconclusive and transitory peace which was intended to lead to the ratification of theLine of Control (LoC) as an established boundary. As Shuja Nawaz noted accuratelyregarding the Simla Agreement:

Bhutto had pulled of a major coup, though negotiating from a weak position ini-tially. He managed to get India to return all Pakistani territory, to restore tradeand communications between the two adversaries, and convert the ceasefire line inKashmir into the Line of Control. But he did not give way on Pakistan’s stand onKashmir.104

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None of the Pakistani Prisoners of War (PoWs) were subjected to war crimes trialsand returned to Pakistan following the latter’s recognition of the newly establishedBangladesh. India also returned the bulk of the territory it had captured in the West,but Bhutto did not make any territorial concessions in Kashmir.105 The concessionover PoWs was substantial considering the atrocities committed by Pakistani forceson the East Pakistani population. Further, under the terms of the 1972 Simla AccordPakistan was expected to resolve all disputes including Kashmir bilaterally and diplo-matically, but the Pakistanis did not adhere to the pledge. Rather, Zulfikar Bhutto atSimla never allowed his country into a no-war pact and in fact contrasted his ownactions favorably against Ayub Khan’s “capitulation” at Tashkent in January 1966.106

The Ayub-led military regime never regained its toehold as a result of the 1965 war andAyub was relentlessly condemned for buying peace at the cost of “national honor” and“betraying the “just cause” of Kashmir.”107 When Indira Gandhi chose to interpret theSimla agreement as meaning that Pakistan would not internationalize Kashmir, Bhuttoquickly challenged her view.108 This was the very Bhutto who vehemently opposedthe Soviet draft of the Tashkent agreement that contained a provision stating: “settle-ment of disputes through peaceful means without the application of force.”109 Bhuttowanted the last five words excised. More importantly, while the 1965 war produced anoperational stalemate, India’s response was certainly sufficient to thwart Pakistan’s pri-mary goal of annexing Indian Kashmir. If wars are fought for specific objectives, thenPakistan certainly failed in its original endeavor in 1965.

Post-1972, Pakistan went about frenetically acquiring a nuclear capability, and todayuses that capability to pursue an asymmetric warfare strategy against India, skewer-ing the Simla Agreement. Pakistan’s break-neck nuclear acquisition reflects the intensemotivation inherent in the Pakistani polity to rival and compete with India. In line withClausewitz’s observation Pakistan has only sought to remedy its failure to incorporateIndian Kashmir through conventional force by acquiring nuclear weapons as a shieldfor perpetrating sub-conventional violence in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.

Similarly, the Germans following World War I never accepted the terms of Treaty ofVersailles precipitating German rearmament in the 1930s that triggered World War II.Nevertheless, Islamabad’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not the problem; its use offorce is. The use of asymmetric violence must enjoy a good measure of domestic publicsupport in Pakistan, despite the fact that Pakistan is a military-dominated state. Further,the Punjabis are the dominant ethnic group in Pakistan and the Pakistani military isessentially a Punjabi force. There are historical antecedents. For instance, the Russianpeople supported a dynastic autocracy for three years between 1914 and 1917 againstthe Germans during World War I. This reflects the level of popular participation in awar even in a non-democratic state. Further, the Allied victory at the end of World WarI produced an inconclusive peace in the form of the Treaty of Versailles, and it wasunacceptable to the German people just as the Simla Agreement has been unacceptableto the Pakistani public.

Critically, the German people neither accepted the verdict of the war nor werethey sufficiently conciliated at the end of World War I. Similarly, the West Pakistaniswere not defeated, remain bitterly resentful, and have not been sufficiently concil-iated. Operationally, the Indian victory in 1971 was as decisive as any recorded in

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military history. While the Pakistanis conceded in the East and eventually recognizedBangladesh, they never accepted their defeat in Kashmir. As noted, the West Pakistanileadership was more obsessed with Kashmir even before Pakistan’s split. If anything, itmay have only reinforced its claims over Kashmir post-1971. As Ian Talbot argues:

The major cause of the military role, however, has been Pakistan’s ‘strategic deficit’vis-à-vis India, and consequent emphasis on security-driven rather than otheraspects of foreign policy. This explains the continuities in attitude to the keyKashmir issue across both civilian and martial law regimes. The only serious chal-lenge to the establishment/army supported view was provided by the Bengali elitein the former East Pakistan. Their marginalization ensured that the ‘official’ viewwould prevail. Since 1971, significant sections of Punjabi society have identifiedboth their domestic and foreign-policy concerns with those of the army.110

As the aforementioned quote amply demonstrates there is a national consensus orcoalition of interests undergirding Pakistani strategic choices vis-à-vis India. Thus,an absence of a large constituency in Pakistan today that questions the basic premiseof its six-and–a-half decade long position on Kashmir renders the conflict indecisive.Therefore, two further conditions need to be satisfied if the twin principles enunci-ated by Bond are to be met: the leaders of the vanquished power must cooperate withthe victors and must convince their own population of a cooperative solution with thevictor. The leaders of the vanquished state must have an independent credibility withtheir own people in that they cannot be seen to be caving into the victor.111 Otherwise,they risk becoming targets of new, particularly right-wing resistance movements suchas those faced by Matthias Erzberger of Germany following World War I and MichaelCollins of Ireland.112 Z. A. Bhutto was astute enough to avoid this fate and perhaps henever wanted to make any concessions to India at Simla that would be unacceptable tohis own people. Also, Bhutto’s civilian successors, including his late daughter Benazirand Nawaz Sharif, could only abandon Kashmir at their peril. Sharif, after all, becamethe victim of a coup in 1999, because of Kargil. Consider what Syed Salahuddin, chiefof the largest militant organization the Hizbul Mujahideen operating in Kashmir, hadto say recently about any dilution in Pakistan’s position on Kashmir: “We are fightingPakistan’s war in Kashmir and if it withdraws its support, the war would be foughtinside Pakistan.”113

Salahuddin’s statement only reinforces Clausewitz’s argument that tensions withinstates can also play a role in the hostility that animates relations between states. Forone fear among Pakistani military and civilian leaders is that if they abandon or sig-nificantly limit state support to militant violence in Kashmir could lead to fratricidalviolence within Pakistan. Domestic resistance may make it very challenging, if notoutright impossible for the Pakistani military as well as civilian leaders to jettison theuse of force and migrate toward an exclusively diplomatic settlement with New Delhi.Threats could emerge from religiously motivated extremist or Jihadist groups based inPakistan and within its army who may be as relentlessly hostile to conciliatory shifts inPakistan’s Kashmir policy.

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On the other hand, there have been decisive victories which have yielded a durablepeace. The Falklands campaign in 1982 produced a decisive military victory for theBritish, but it also discredited the Galtieri-led Argentinean military Junta paving theway for a new leadership that was more receptive to compromise. Four losses overKashmir and over two decades of unending “proxy” war in Kashmir have not enabledPakistan to wrest control of the region. As per Clausewitz, Pakistan’s policy overKashmir has merely converted “the overwhelmingly destructive element of war intoa mere instrument.”114 Pakistan, as Clausewitz would say, has converted the militaryinstrument into a rapier than a bludgeon. Its use of militant proxies serves the purposeof a rapier to secure its goals over Kashmir. Although its pursuit of Kargil-like oper-ations is also an attempt to bludgeon India, at least at the margins. This is largely areflection of its ambitions. As Clausewitz argues: “If war is part of policy, policy willdetermine its character. As policy becomes more ambitious and vigorous, so will war. . .”115 It became more vigorous and ambitious in the form of Pakistani escalationat Kargil. Again, this point only serves to challenge those who argue that capabilitiesdrive decisions to use force. The offensive élan of Pakistan pitilessly consummated inthe form of Kargil was a function of its ambitions.

With the exception of Kargil, in a nuclearized Subcontinent sub-conventional forcehas supplanted conventional force thereby embodying Clausewitz’s maxim:

. . . war is a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means.We deliberately use the phrase “with the addition of other means” because we alsowant to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse orchange it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues,irrespective of the means it employs.116

Pakistan’s recourse to low-intensity warfare still reflects the ambition of its long-standing goal of gaining Kashmir or at a minimum securing the region’s independence.Pakistan’s generals may consider asymmetric means as cost-effective, but the goal is stilldistant and the status of Kashmir has not changed in over sixty years and is unlikely tochange for a very long time.

Consequently, Pakistan exhibits a peculiar case of a state whose military despitebeing beaten in battle has managed to reassert itself. For example, immediately fol-lowing the 1971 war, but before he met with Indira Gandhi at Simla, Z. A. Bhuttoconfabulated with the Pakistani army’s top brass about what Pakistan should demandfrom India. The Pakistanis had many demands on their wish list, but one telling andfinal demand on that list was that India: “Reduce the size of her armed forces to removethe fear of aggression in Pakistan.”117 As Shuja Nawaz observes in response:

The irony in the peremptory tone of the list and especially in the final demand wasclearly lost on the army high command. This was not an army that had just lost awar. It sounded more like the terms of surrender offered to a defeated enemy.118

Evidently, militarism remains a very potent driver of Pakistani revanchism. For thePakistani military to be able to sustain the effort for such a protracted period cannot be

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explained without popular support at least in the context of Kashmir. Pakistan’s claimsas they exist today over Kashmir can unfortunately only be satisfied at the expense ofIndia, which in turn results in enduring instability. The reality reverses in the Sino-Indian dyad to the degree that both sides have exercised due restraint.

The rump Pakistani state that exists today has not produced any leaders who enjoythe domestic credibility for an enduring peace settlement with India or at a minimumthe credibility to foreclose force as a means to achieve their goals. To be sure, onecan grant that Pakistan is justified in using force through proxies and in precipitat-ing a limited aims war over Kashmir because that has been Pakistan’s position since1947–1948. Further, successive Indian governments contributed directly to Kashmirialienation and disaffection, and one could thus rationalize Pakistan’s support for sepa-ratist militancy in Kashmir. Again, the critical problem with this argument essentiallyties back into our hypothesis: Pakistan has suffered a succession of defeats against Indiaand over two decades of Pakistan’s sponsorship of militancy in Kashmir has not yieldedits longstanding objective of wresting control of the region from India. This is primar-ily because the Pakistani people have yet to accept defeat and concede that a proxywar in Kashmir has diminishing returns. India, on the other hand, has changed coursethat is visibly reflected in its actions vis-à-vis China. Pakistani strategy in regards toKashmir quite sharply contrasts with India’s strategic behavior over disputed territorywith China. Again let us draw attention to Raghavan:

It is naïve to expect China to drop its claims on Arunachal Pradesh at this stage. HasIndia forsaken its claims over Aksai Chin? Both sides will only relinquish themwhen a deal is struck. To be sure, India cannot give up any populated areas; butshort of this there is room for compromise. China, too, can accommodate India’sinterests in the Ladakh sector.119

It is as simple as it is devastating. Even as India claims Chinese-controlled areas it doesnot resort to force. At the level of means India has acted prudently unlike the provoca-tive actions epitomized by its “forward policy” in the run up to the 1962 war. Norhas it tried to precipitate territorial contests at the margins against the Chinese. HasPakistan abandoned or forsaken its claims over Kashmir? Reinforcing this is the factthat in aggregate terms India is a conventionally weaker state than China. Moreover,despite the asymmetries in power and capabilities, the Sino-Indian dyad is hardly asvolatile. Chinese analysts themselves concede the fact that despite competing territorialclaims the Sino-Indian border is essentially stable.120 Therefore, based on a minimalistcriterion, India as the weaker state in the dyad has exercised restraint and invested in adiplomatic solution. In Pakistan’s case we get a deeply dissatisfied state that is incapableof putting the past to rest and accept its military defeats. To be sure, one could arguethat Raghavan’s evaluation exaggerates the fact that Tibet hardly has traction with theIndian public. As the current Indian National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menonnotes:

The Tibetan movement has the sympathy of the Indian public, and India has beena generally supportive home to tens of thousands of Tibetans, including the Dalai

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Lama, for nearly 50 years . . . the tacit agreement that Tibetans are welcome in Indiaas long as they don’t cause problems is being challenged at a time when India’s com-plex relationship with Beijing is churning with border issues, rivalry for regionalinfluence, growing economic interdependence, the nascent stages of joint militaryexercises, and numerous other priorities.121

What we can infer from Menon’s statement is that while India’s actions have reflecteda carefully crafted balancing act between Beijing and the exiled Tibetan government inIndia, Pakistan has not managed to do the same with India over Kashmir as what Indiahas done vis-à-vis China over Tibet. As Garver argued, a form of mutual deterrencehas developed between India and China. For one, it is plainly evident that India hasproduced leaders able to regulate public passions and sentiments over Tibet, somethingPakistan’s leaders have not accomplished with the Pakistani public over Kashmir. As thehistorical record clearly shows, Indian leaders have avoided stoking Indian nationalismin the name of Tibet despite the presence of an exiled Tibetan community within itsborders or even used it as a diversionary strategy by precipitating war and crises withChina. More critically, as Raghavan’s points capture, one critical inference we can makeis that policy has actually become institutionally embedded and subject to consider-able political regulation in the Indian case; a fact that is fully reflected in the stableinteraction between India and China over their boundary dispute. Indian actions havereflected predictability vis-à-vis China, unlike Pakistani actions vis-à-vis India whichhas been decidedly unpredictable.

To be sure, one could contest this point and argue that the Sino-Indian boundarydispute may erupt into a conflict if left unresolved but that does little to explain thegeneral stability that has undergirded the relationship for nearly fifty years. Reinforcingthis fact is the effort made by both sides to persist with negotiations despite misgivingsabout each other’s motives over contentious territorial claims.

Kashmir is as much a territorial issue as it is about the identity of both India andPakistan to the extent that it validates the secular nationalism of the former and thecommunitarian nationalism of the latter. Control over territory is not the only issue;control over the destiny of the Kashmiri people is as important for both. Herein laysone of the great Clausewitzian insights: popular participation was making war a people-centric enterprise and increasingly indecisive to the extent people were less likely toallow their political destinies to be controlled. As Howard observes:

Mao Zedong and the theorists of revolutionary warfare gave to this social dimen-sion an overriding importance which perhaps it deserves only in the context of“wars of national liberation”; but it is one that strategists under any circumstancesignore at their peril. In this respect Marxist military thinkers had a far more realisticgrasp of the central issues than their opposite numbers, hypnotized as they were bytechnology and geopolitics, in the West. If the people themselves are not prepared ifnecessary to take part in the defence of their country, they cannot in the long run beprotected; and if they are not prepared to acquiesce indefinitely in alien conquest,that conquest cannot in the long run be sustained.122

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Pregnant in Howard’s observation is an elemental reality that strategists in the Westand progressive commentators writing on strategic instability in the Subcontinent failto grasp: the potency of public opinion and nationalism. It is public support and nation-alism that makes the conflict between India and Pakistan more indecisive, enduring, andintractable just as it does in the Sino-Indian contest. However, the latter relationship ismore stable because there is an absence of force and the former unstable, because thereis force used. There is popular support for the Kashmiri cause in Pakistan just as there ispopular support among the Indian people to defeat Pakistan’s objectives and the mili-tant movement that it supports. There is no public support as of now in India for aidingan armed Tibetan rebellion or precipitating a limited aims conflict with China under thecover of nuclear weapons. The collapse or erosion of public support in either India orPakistan could see one side prevailing over the other. Notwithstanding the prospect ofsuch an outcome, it need not be that one side has to actually collapse before a peacesettlement is reached. As Clausewitz observes:

Inability to carry on the struggle can, in practice, be replaced by two other groundsfor making peace: the first is the improbability of victory; the second is its unac-ceptable cost . . . war, if taken as a whole, is bound to move from the strict law ofinherent necessity towards probabilities.123

As of now neither Pakistanis nor Indians have seen the costs rise so high that they feelthe need to abandon their goals in Kashmir; yet in the case of Pakistan the probability ofsecuring its goal in Kashmir through low-intensity or offensive force is rather remoteconsidering the succession of defeats it has suffered. Pakistan’s polity has been veryresistant to internalizing this reality just as the German people never ‘internalized’ theverdict of their defeat following World War I.

ConclusionThe real difference in both dyads is the absence of force in the Sino-Indian relationship,which renders it more stable. The reverse is true of the India-Pakistan dyad, renderingthe relationship significantly more unstable. A cold peace obtains in the Sino-Indiandyad, while in the India-Pakistan case we witness continuing violence at the sub-conventional level punctuated by sudden bursts of violence. The weaker state, Pakistan,has frequently resorted to force against India whereas India, the weaker state in theSino-Indian dyad, has abstained. Pakistan has not internalized its defeats and shownno capacity for setting realistic goals in dealing with India. On the other hand, Indiahas not been able to convert its operational successes into an enduring peace settlementover Kashmir. If anything, it has suffered “the tragedy of victory.”124

Pakistan, as the Pakistani commentator Shuja Nawaz notes, “. . . will need tobreak out of its prevaricating behavior vis-à-vis the Islamists and break all ties withtheir radical militia, even at the expense of finding another solution for the Kashmirissue.”125 While negotiations have moved at a glacial pace between India and China asolution to their boundary dispute is more tractable despite risks and strains, but India-Pakistan relations are highly susceptible to Pakistan’s unpredictable behavior making

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the issues that divide the two sides extremely intractable. The Pakistani army is essen-tially a Punjabi force; and the demographically and politically dominant ethnic group inPakistan, as we have noted earlier, are Punjabis. A combined shift in Pakistani Punjabipublic attitudes and a sizeable segment of Pakistan’s military would be indispensablefor restraint in the use of force and in the long-term a durable peace settlement overKashmir.

NOTES

The author expresses his deepest gratitude to Anthony Cerulli, Eswaran Sridharan, Prof. Rajesh Basrur,Prof. Yuen Foong Khong, Ajai Shukla, Shanmugasundaram Sasikumar, A. Vinod Kumar (IDSA, New Delhi),and all anonymous reviewers for their forbearance and incisive, yet helpful criticism. The author is especiallyindebted to Anindya Saha for proposing the idea for the article and the S. Rajaratnam School of InternationalStudies for generous support. Any shortcomings in the essay are the author’s own. The article is dedicated to the lateNerella Nilakantam and Nerella Gowramma, the author’s maternal grandparents.

1. Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1981), pp. 184–86.

2. Ibid.3. Ibid.4. Ibid.5. Steven A. Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 86–87.6. Ibid.7. Ibid.8. John W. Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 2001), p. 88.9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.11. Ibid. pp. 98–100.12. Ibid., p. 101.13. Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (see note 5 above), pp. 86–87.14. Garver, Protracted Contest (see note 8 above), p. 97.15. Garver, Protracted Contest (see note 8 above).16. Garver, Protracted Contest (see note 8 above).17. M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 200.18. Ibid.19. Garver, Protracted Contest (see note 8 above), p. 75.20. Ibid.21. Ibid.22. Ibid.23. Ibid.24. Ibid.25. Ibid., p. 77.26. Ibid.27. Ibid., pp. 94–95.28. Ibid.pp. 94–95.29. Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997), p. 8.30. Ian Talbot, “Does the Army Shape Pakistan’s Foreign Policy,” in Christophe Jaffrelot, ed., Pakistan:

Nationalism Without a Nation? (New Delhi: Zed Books Ltd., 2002), p. 315.31. Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (New Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 2008), p. 205.32. See Leo Rose and Richard Sisson, War and Secession: Pakistan, India and Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1990), pp. 106–07.33. Husain Haqqani. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press,

2005), p. 85.34. Ibid., p. 93.35. Nawaz, Crossed Swords (see note 31 above), p. 73.36. P. R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen Philip Cohen, Perception, Politics and Security in South Asia

(London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 138.

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37. Graham T. Allison, “Military Capabilities and American Foreign Policy,” Annals of the American Academyof Political and Social Science, Vol. 406, (1973), p. 24.

38. Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, India, Pakistan and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 32–33.

39. P. R. Chari, “Nuclear Restraint, Nuclear Risk Reduction, and the Security-Insecurity Paradox in SouthAsia,” in Michael Krepon and Chris Gagne, eds., The Stability-Instability Paradox: Nuclear Weapons andBrinkmanship in South Asia (Washington: The Stimson Center Report No. 38, June 2001), p. 21.

40. Kanti Bajpai, “The Fallacy of an Indian Deterrent,” in Amitabh Mattoo, ed., India’s Nuclear Deterrent:Pokhran II and Beyond (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 1999), p. 179.

41. Ibid., p. 154.42. Ibid., p. 159.43. Ibid., p. 156.44. George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Nonproliferation (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1999), pp. 84–86.45. Ibid., pp. 138–39.46. Bajpai, “The Fallacy of an Indian Deterrent” (see note 40 above), p. 153.47. Cited in Lawrence Saez, “The Political Economy of the India-Pakistan Nuclear Standoff,” in Lowell

Dittmer, ed., South Asia’s Nuclear Security Dilemma: India, Pakistan and China (New York: M.E. Sharpe,2005), p. 5.

48. Garver, Protracted Contest (see note 8 above), p. 329.49. Bajpai, “The Fallacy of an Indian Deterrent” (see note 40 above), p. 183.50. See partial conversation transcript published in Shishir Gupta, “99 Phone Tapes Show General Kept Sharif in

Dark on Kargil, in Book He Says Opposite,” Indian Express, October 26, 2006, http://www.indianexpress.com (accessed May 28, 2012).

51. Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 149.52. Ibid., p. 164.53. Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 428.54. Cited in Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb (see note 44 above), p. 385.55. Ibid.56. Morgan, Deterrence Now (see note 51 above), pp. 81–86.57. Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 41.58. S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia (New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 143.59. Ibid., pp. 141–81.60. S. Paul Kapur, “India and Pakistan’s Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like War Europe,”

International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Autumn 2005), p. 139.61. Richard K. Betts, “Conventional Strategy: New Critics, Old Choices,” International Security, Vol. 7, No. 4

(Spring 1983), pp. 145–46.62. Morgan, Deterrence Now (see note 51 above), p. 36.63. Ibid.64. Ibid.65. Scott Sagan, “Nuclear Instability in South Asia,” in Robert J. Art and Kenneth N. Waltz, eds., 6th edn., The

Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,2004), p. 371.

66. Ibid., p. 371.67. Ibid., p. 371.68. Ibid., p. 371.69. Sumit Ganguly and Devin Hagerty, Fearful Asymmetry: India-Pakistan Crises in the Shadow of Nuclear

Weapons (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 136.70. Sumit Ganguly, “Nuclear Instability in South Asia,” International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2008), p. 59.71. Sumit Ganguly and Kent L. Biringer, “Nuclear Crisis Stability in South Asia,” Asian Survey, Vol. 41, No. 6

(November/December 2001), p. 922.72. T. V. Paul, “Why has the India-Pakistan Rivalry Been so Enduring?: Power Asymmetry and an Intractable

Conflict,” Security Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4 (October-December 2006), p. 616.73. Ibid., p. 624.74. Ibid., p. 617–22.75. Ashley J. Tellis, Stability in South Asia (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, Arroyo Center, 1997), p. 5.76. Ibid.77. Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1998), p. 61.78. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War [1832] in Michael Howard and Peter Paret, trans. and eds. (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 89.79. Ibid.80. Ibid., p. 185.

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81. Ibid.82. Ibid., p. 81.83. Cited in Walter Isaacson, “Madeleine’s War,” Time, May 17, 1999, http://www.time.com (accessed on

May 27, 2012).84. Cited in S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent (see note 58 above), p. 125.85. Ibid.86. Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamieson Jo Medby, Limited Conflicts Under the Nuclear Umbrella:

Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Monograph Report, 2001),p. 9.

87. Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent (see note 58 above), p. 125.88. Michael Howard, “When Are Wars Decisive?,” Survival, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 1999), p. 129.89. Tellis, Fair, and Medby, Limited Conflicts Under the Nuclear Umbrella (see note 86 above), p. 51.90. Clausewitz, On War (see note 78 above), p. 605.91. Ibid., p. 87.92. Ibid., p. 76.93. Srinath Raghavan, “Soldiers, Statesman, and India’s Security Policy,” India Review, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2012),

p. 127.94. Bond, The Pursuit of Victory (see note 77 above), p. 100.95. Ibid.96. Tellis, Stability in South Asia (see note 75 above), p. 11.97. Srinath Raghavan, “The Case for Restraint on Tibet,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 43, No. 14 (April

5, 2008), p. 11.98. Ambassador Maleeha Lodhi, “Ambassador Offers Pakistani Perspective on South Asian Security,” The

CISAC Monitor (2001), http://www.cisas.stanford.edu (accessed May 20, 2011).99. Mirza Aslam Beg, “Deterrence, Defence and Development,”Defense Journal, July, 1999, http://www.

defencejournal.com (accessed on May 20, 2012).100. Bond, The Pursuit of Victory (see note 77 above), p. 81.101. Clausewitz, On War (see note 78 above), p. 93.102. Bond, The Pursuit of Victory (see note 77 above), p. 24.103. Clausewitz, On War (see note 78 above), p. 80.104. Nawaz, Crossed Swords (see note 31 above), p. 331.105. Talbot, “Does the Army Shape Pakistan’s Foreign Policy” (see note 30 above), p. 319.106. Ibid.107. Ibid., p. 318.108. Ibid., p. 319.109. Nawaz, Crossed Swords (see note 31 above), p. 239.110. Talbot, “Does the Army Shape Pakistan’s Foreign Policy” (see note 30 above), p. 332.111. Howard, “When Are Wars Decisive?” (see note 88 above), p. 132.112. Ibid., p. 132.113. “Hizb warns Pak against not backing J&K Jihadis,” Hindustan Times, June 8, 2012, http://www.

hindustantimes.com (accessed on June 10, 2012).114. Clausewitz, On War (see note 78 above), p. 606.115. Ibid., p. 606.116. Ibid., p. 605.117. Nawaz, Crossed Swords (see note 31 above), p. 330.118. Ibid., p. 330.119. Raghavan, “The Case for Restraint” (see note 97 above), p. 12.120. See “India-China Dialogue,” Report, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, January 7, 2011.121. “Influence of Dalai Lama over Tibetans may be Waning: U.S. Cable,” Times of India, December 17, 2010,

http://www.timesofindia.com (accessed May 20, 2012).122. Michael Howard, Clausewitz: A Short History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 76.123. Clausewitz, On War (see note 78 above), p. 91.124. Term used to describe Israel’s inability to convert her operational successes into durable peace settlements,

cited in Bond, The Pursuit of Victory (see note 77 above), p. 185.125. Nawaz, Crossed Swords (see note 31 above), p. 580.

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