Will India or Pakistan resort to the nuclear option?
Air strikes and the downing of aircraft are just the latest escalation in a long-running conflict.
After the April 22 terrorist attack that killed at least 26 people and wounded dozens more – all of them civilians – in Pahalgam, a scenic hill station in the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir, the question was when, not whether, India would strike back at Pakistan, which it immediately blamed for the carnage. Aside from the widespread outrage the killings ignited in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has assiduously cultivated his tough-guy persona and vowed to chase the perpetrators “to the ends of the earth,” had to retaliate.
Yet Modi isn’t captive to Indian public opinion. Instead, he orchestrates and manipulates it masterfully, and won’t permit popular passions to dictate his decisions without regard to consequences. India waited until 7 May before using missiles and air strikes to target several military sites located in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and inside Pakistan. Though Pakistan’s military said that the strikes killed at least 31 and injured at least 46 more, India has described its retaliation as “focused, measured and non-escalatory,” adding that it had “demonstrated considerable restraint” – a choice of words that signaled the desire to prevent the crisis from careening out of control. As for Pakistan, it has vowed to hit back; national pride, together with the need to show India that it can’t act with impunity, ensure that it will make good on the threat. Indeed, it claimed that it had already done so by shooting down five Indian jets and at least one drone during the strike. Still, Pakistan, like India, has compelling reasons to avoid an all-out war, which would be hugely destructive.
Paradoxically, the fact that this crisis involves two nuclear-armed states offers grounds for optimism. Though nuclear weapons rightly evoke horror, military strategists have generally assumed that they will prevent both nuclear and “conventional” war between states that possess them. The prospect of immediate mass carnage will, it is hoped, deter leaders from firing their nuclear weapons at states that can retaliate in kind. An extension of this claim has it that even if nuclear-armed states do embark on a conventional war, they will strive to keep it limited so as to avert nuclear escalation. This two-step logic, though hardly the equivalent of an ironclad law, has held up for a generation and extends to other adversaries who have nuclear weapons, such as India and China, China and the United States, and the United States and Russia.
That said, in South Asia the reliability of the “balance of terror” claim is currently being tested to a degree we’ve not witnessed since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. What’s more, the fact that there hasn’t been an unbridled war between nuclear-armed states doesn’t guarantee that the fear of catastrophe will prevent the leaders of India and Pakistan from turning to their nuclear weapons – or threatening to. Nor can we be certain that the current crisis won’t beget a runaway conventional war. On balance, however, it’s reasonable to expect that the spectre of nuclear war will check recklessness on both sides.
The great powers will, albeit in different ways, also help contain this crisis. China, seen by India as its biggest threat, has had a decades-long alignment with Pakistan and bills itself as the latter’s “all-weather friend” – not out of benevolence but because Pakistan sits on India’s western flank, which adds to India’s vulnerability given that China lies across its northern border. Yet the Chinese leadership, preoccupied with an economic slowdown and a trade war with the US, isn’t likely to compound its problems by risking a conflict with India simply to demonstrate its loyalty to Pakistan. But it won’t have to: Beijing’s verbal support for Pakistan will suffice to get India’s attention. China has reaffirmed its support for Pakistan, but it has urged both sides to act cautiously and has also called for an impartial inquiry into the Pahalgam attack.
In sharp contrast to the Cold War era, when Pakistan was the US’s military ally, Washington has drawn steadily closer to India – part of its larger effort to checkmate China. But though Donald Trump is prone to bouts of braggadocio, he hasn’t generally been a hothead when it comes to war and isn’t likely to offer India the kind of backing that would lead Modi to believe he has a free hand. Trump has nothing to gain by encouraging India to expand the war in response to a Pakistani retaliatory strike. That could draw China into the fray and confront the White House with a terrible choice: look weak or get sucked into a war no one wants. Accordingly, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the Pahalgam attack, he has urged India and Pakistan to “de-escalate tensions” and “re-establish direct communications”. Russia – an India ally since the mid-1950s – has adopted a similar stance.
History also gives grounds for optimism. Yes, Kashmir and its contested border has been the venue for intermittent cross-border terrorist attacks or ones traced to groups operating in Indian-controlled Kashmir. These incidents have produced skirmishes along the so-called Line of Control (LoC), as the ceasefire line from the 1947-1948 India-Pakistan war over Kashmir has been called since a landmark 1972 agreement. In February 2019, India went much further after a suicide bombing in Pulwama, Kashmir, by the Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 members of India’s Central Reserve Police Force. India has long linked the JeM to Pakistan, and Modi responded to the suicide bombing by ordering airstrikes on the group’s strongholds near Balakot, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Pakistan responded in kind. Dogfights between the two countries’ fighter jets ensued and an Indian pilot was captured after his jet was downed. But the fear that a wider war, one that could turn nuclear, and calls for calm from Washington and Beijing, helped de-escalate the tensions. Ultimately, both antagonists claimed victory while avoiding a larger armed confrontation.
None of this means that the current crisis isn’t worrisome. After the 22 April attack in Kashmir, India beefed up its military presence near the LoC, Pakistan responded with parallel moves, and their armies have since traded fire. According to India, shelling from Pakistan has killed at least 15 Indians and wounded 43 more. Both countries have closed the sole land crossing connecting them (at Attari-Wagah), each has closed its airspace to the other’s aircraft, and their navies have conducted drills in the Arabian Sea barely 100 miles apart.
More alarmingly, Modi suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which was brokered by the World Bank in September 1960 and has regulated the sharing of the waters of the Indus river network between India and Pakistan. The waters of the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi, the Indus’s eastern tributaries, were allotted to India, those of the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab to Pakistan. The treaty requires disputes to be resolved through negotiation and prohibits unilateral steps to disrupt the water-sharing arrangement. Pakistan was therefore alarmed by Modi’s precipitous suspension of the treaty: a downstream state, it relies on water from the Indus for crop irrigation and power generation.
Recent video footage shows low water levels in the Chenab ahead of its crossing into Pakistan, the apparent result of India’s closure of the sluice gates of two upstream dams, supposedly for desilting operations. Modi won’t take the extreme step of completely blocking the water flows that nourish 80 per cent of Pakistan’s irrigated agricultural land, but Pakistan has warned that a stoppage will be treated as “an act of war” and met with “full force across the complete spectrum of national power”. That sounds ominous, especially because Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine (unlike India’s) doesn’t include a no-first-use pledge. Pakistan has, however, set a high bar for the circumstances under which it would consider the use of nuclear weapons. It might do so if India shuts off water from the Indus, occupies large chunks of Pakistan’s territory or destroys a substantial part of its armed forces. India won’t cross the first of these red lines and lacks the military muscle required to cross the other two.
Still, as Barbara Tuchman’s classic work on World War I, The Guns of August, demonstrates so vividly, during crises, hubris, bravado, miscalculation, fear, even sheer stupidity, can together lead to outcomes that no leader sought – or even imagined. Though this could happen to India and Pakistan, there’s one big difference between 1914 and today: back then there were no nuclear weapons to concentrate leaders’ minds.