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South Asia's escalating nuclear
rivalry
By Praful Bidwai
NEW
DELHI - India and Pakistan passed 2002 amid
unprecedented hostility, a collapse of normal diplomatic
relations, and an eyeball-to-eyeball military
confrontation at their border that involved one million
troops.
They start 2003 with accelerated nuclear
weapons and missile development programs amid worrisome
disclosures of a heightened nuclear danger in South
Asia.
On Monday, Pakistan's President General
Pervez Musharraf told Air Force veterans that he had
"personally" conveyed to Indian Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee a clear message "through every
international leader who came to Pakistan" that "Indian
troops should not expect a conventional war from
Pakistan" if they "moved a single step across the
international border or the Line of Control" that
divides Kashmir.
Musharraf's "disclosure" was
linked to his hubris-driven claim that after September
11, when Pakistan was facing "many dangers", "no country
supported us"; yet "we have defeated our enemy without
going to war".
Although a Pakistani defense
spokesman later "clarified" that "unconventional" did
not necessarily refer to nuclear or biological weapons,
this explanation has few takers - especially in India,
which officially interprets the disclosure as highly
"dangerous", "irresponsible" and "provocative", and
warranting a fresh hardening of mutual hostility.
Musharraf's revelation has been interpreted as a
slide from the doctrine of using nuclear weapons only in
extreme circumstances, such as the wholesale overrunning
of the country, to threatening their use even in the
early stages of a military conflict with India.
It is known - and confirmed by the conservative
pro-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) weekly India Today -
that India and Pakistan were on the brink of a serious
conventional conflict at least twice last year. In
January and end-May and early-June, India drew up
elaborate plans for a conventional attack across the
border. It called off these plans under US and British
pressure.
In retrospect, such strikes might have
triggered a nuclear armageddon - with unspeakable
consequences. This once again proves, if proof were at
all needed, that South Asia remains "the most dangerous
place in the world", as former US president Bill Clinton
described it.
Since 1998, both India and
Pakistan have indulged in making conventional and
nuclear threats in a cavalier fashion. These threats
could be extremely serious. In the latest episode, India
has used Musharraf's statement to pillory the
possibility of any meaningful forward movement in
relations with Pakistan and to maintain a state of
intense rivalry. Only last week, New Delhi announced new
visa restrictions on Pakistani nationals, reducing the
number of cities they can visit from 12 to three.
More important, New Delhi is formalizing the
establishment of a Strategic Forces Command this month
that will be tasked with managing its nuclear arsenal.
It has already selected a senior air force officer as
chief of the command. India has also announced it will
soon test-fly a short version of its intermediate-range
Agni missile.
Going by the past pattern,
Pakistan is likely to retaliate with tit-for-tat
measures. Already, in April, it "upgraded" its nuclear
command authority, which is said to be more advanced
than India's in merging warheads with missiles.
These developments mean that the gap between the
manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons, openly
tested in May 1998, and their induction into the armed
forces and actual deployment, will further narrow,
greatly raising the probability of their use, whether by
design, accident or unauthorized detonation.
All
this is taking place in a certain domestic political
context in both India and Pakistan: rightward political
shifts, and the complete and utter frustration among
their rulers over their inability to get the better of
their rivals.
In India, following state
legislature elections in Gujarat - where the BJP won
despite the terrible pogrom of 2,000 Muslims under its
apparent sponsorship in early 2002 - the Vajpayee
government is under growing Hindu-fundamentalist
pressure to raise the level of hostility with Pakistan,
while in Pakistan, the nominally civilian government
faces pressure from a rejuvenated Islamic right.
The Vajpayee government is bitterly upset that
it could not get Pakistan to completely stop supporting
secessionist militants in Kashmir, despite the recent
costly military mobilization and India's energetic
lobbying with the United States.
The Musharraf
government feels frustrated that it cannot get India to
talk on the "core dispute" of Kashmir, or even restore
diplomatic ties that were curtailed after an attack on
India's parliament in December 2001 that New Delhi
blames on Pakistan.
Both states have assiduously
courted the United States to put pressure on each other.
But each has countered that pressure by leveraging its
own special advantage vis-a-vis the United States.
Washington needs Islamabad for the "war" on the
al-Qaeda-Taliban network. It treats India as a
"strategic first love", as a big emerging market, and as
a long-term strategic counterpoint to China.
Some enthusiasts of an even more intimate
Indo-US "strategic partnership" have used Musharraf's
latest statement to claim that Pakistan is indulging in
"nuclear blackmail" and that this can be countered
effectively only if India builds a missile defense
system in collaboration with the United States.
Besides further escalating nuclear rivalry, this
is not even a practical proposition. Not only have
missile defense systems not reached anything like
maturity anywhere in the world; but the United States is
unlikely to transfer such an evolving technology to a
non-North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally.
Even more important, such technologies have only
a dim chance of being effective over relatively short
distances such as 200 kilometers, and against a state
which strategically lives cheek-by-jowl with India.
For South Asia, this is an especially dangerous
conjuncture. India-Pakistan hostility remains
unresolved. Hardliners in both states have developed a
stake in maintaining and ratcheting it up. Domestic
politics, especially in India, remains in a state of
flux. If there is a further rightward shift, or if a
large-scale terrorist episode takes place, the two
rivals could soon be at war as each tries to emulate the
United States' macho, militarist approach to a range of
problems.
Compared to the 1999 Kargil conflict -
South Asia's first undeclared war since India and
Pakistan overtly crossed the nuclear threshold - there
is now a higher likelihood that a conventional war will
escalate to the nuclear level. Preventing an
India-Pakistan conflict has never been more imperative
than now. And yet, no major world power or multilateral
organization is taking this up seriously, at least not
in the open.
(Inter Press Service)
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