Be very afraid

Representational image of the flags of Pakistan and India | File YouTube screengrab

Pakistan has been back in the headlines lately, and we have nothing to do with it at all. You haven’t seen it make headlines of any kind on its relations with us, India, for a very long time now. Is that good news, or bad news? So tortuously complicated is our neighbour’s worldview, that our situation defies the age-old logic of no news is good news.

Let me explain. For decades, and particularly so since the end of the Cold War and nuclearisation of the subcontinent, Pakistan has had only one real, permanent leverage with the rest of the world: its strained equation with

India, its ability, with just one provocation, to bring the two countries close to war (as after the December 13, 2001 Parliament attack, the tenth anniversary of which will fall later this year) or help its establishment drum up a fictitious war-like atmosphere, as they did after 26/11. That immediately gets the world to wake up. In short, it solves (albeit temporarily) Pakistan’s biggest problem: lack of attention from the rest of the world, particularly America. India is Pakistan’s permanent hostage and it is worth good ransom value whenever the Western powers seem to be losing interest in their old, favourite and often naughty child in the subcontinent.

Developments over the past few months may just be leading the Pakistani establishment into that state of mind. We have Admiral Mullen, and now Obama himself, accusing them of betrayal. It has, in fact, been a long time since you heard even the usual, patronising words of praise the Americans gratuitously throw at the Pakistanis. This, when the Americans are heading for their own elections, and when their plans for a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan are nearly final.

This is how the Pakistanis will read this: these guys are going away and won’t need us any more. Of course, if they are attacked from this region, they will respond with Tomahawks or drones as they do, hold your breath, in Yemen. Hold your breath, because, can you imagine the almighty, nuclear-armed Pakistan, with the fifth largest army and more civilians carrying Kalashnikovs than the rest of the world put together, being reduced to the utter irrelevance of a Yemen? Do the Americans really think they can leave us alone to deal with these Indians, or as a satellite of China with no leverage any more, globally, or in the neighbourhood?

If you go by the record of the Pakistani establishment, it is precisely moments like this that should get India worried. There is nothing the Pakistani establishment detests — and fears — more than falling in importance, and utility, for America. They can curse and abuse America, praise China as their only loyal ally, but they desperately crave Washington’s attention. This contemptuous American dismissal of Pakistan as a failed, and treacherous (client) state must hurt. In times like these the Pakistani establishment knows only one trick works — in fact, it always works. It is a provocation, and an escalation of tensions with India.

In spite of the three phases in its history when it acquired strategic relevance for the West for other reasons (as part of the anti-Communist alliance in the fifties, to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the seventies and then post-9/11), Pakistan sees its leverage with the rest of the world through India. At one point, it was seen as India’s more energetic, virile, more capitalist and faster-growing rival. Now it is as a spoiler.

It is no surprise therefore that, of late, intelligence and diplomatic sources are picking up a feverish build-up in the stockpile of fissile material and tactical battlefield nuclear weapons by Pakistan. Increasingly, Pakistani officials have not merely shed all inhibition in admitting this, they are now flaunting it. Some of the best informed international sources would tell you that Pakistan is now building its fissile material and tactical nuclear arsenal at a pace greater than any other country in the world. You won’t think it will be needed to deal with their own radical gangs after the Americans leave.

To justify this, the Pakistanis cite the alleged, new Indian doctrine of cold start. It’s not even been debated or seriously war-gamed in India. But Pakistan is latching on just one statement by an outgoing Indian army chief to build an entire mythology: that India plans to carry out limited, punitive strikes into their territory, using its conventional superiority, without waiting for a full mobilisation (as in Op Parakram, 2001-02) which takes more than a month. Battlefield nuclear weapons are needed to discourage, or halt, just any such Indian misadventure.

The most worrying thing about the Pakistani strategic discourse is how lightly, simplistically and even enthusiastically it treats nuclear weapons. So, on the one hand, they say there is already nuclear deterrence in the subcontinent, and that if India had the courage to go to war with them, it would have done so. On the other, they are building tactical nukes just in case India launches a conventional attack. If they refuse to see the contradiction between the two, they also do not learn from recent history, even when it was of their own making. The same, so-called nuclear deterrence did not stop them from walking into Kargil in 1999, a full year after Pokharan and Chagai. It may even have encouraged them: now that we have nuclear deterrence, we can grab some territory and dare the Indian cowards to escalate. Therefore it is the Pakistanis who checked out the cold start doctrine (in Kargil) with disastrous results. But the Pakistani establishment has never learnt from its mistakes. And the current set of circumstances are adding up to the kind of situation where the powers that be in Islamabad are tempted to repeat some old mistakes.

So, am I predicting a major provocation? A big terror attack, an escalation on the LoC, a flare-up of some sort in the Valley? Can you predict such things? Can anybody predict an earthquake?

But unlike with earthquakes, where shifts and drifts take place for years at depths not accessible to any sensors, the tensions and faultlines in the subcontinent lie in the open. Sometimes you can read these shifts in your headlines, and sometimes in the absence of headlines. This is one such period, and a time to get very worried. Particularly when we are so distracted with so many self-inflicted calamities and a government in freeze.-