JUNE 6, 2014
In the beginning of April 2014, at a
conference initiated by the Indian government, Manmohan Singh casually urged
the creation of a global convention to forswear thefirst use of nuclear weapons. Why the Indian
prime minister chose to make this major policy declaration in the last hours of
his term in office is a mystery.
To unravel this mystery, it is
important to note the context. Singh was addressing a conference at the
Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses (IDSA) titled “A
Nuclear Weapon-Free World: From Conception to Reality.” The IDSA is
supported by the Indian Ministry of Defense and has been a favored venue for
India’s leadership to make important policy declarations on national security.
The Indian bureaucracies that deal with foreign policy and security issues
often use this forum to articulate their preferences on arms control,
nonproliferation, and disarmament issues. It would be natural if these
bureaucracies wished to commend the virtues of continuity in policy to the new
Indian government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who took office in
May 2014.
Following Singh’s remarks, the then
opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) instantly issued a rejoinder in
its election manifesto, stating that the party
“believes that the strategic gains acquired by India during the [earlier BJP-led]
Atal Behari Vajpayee regime on the nuclear programme have been frittered away
by [Singh’s] Congress.” Hence, the BJP pledged to “study in detail India’s
nuclear doctrine, and revise and update it, to make it relevant to [the]
challenges of current times.”
BJP spokespeople
clarified that a review of India’s no-first-use policy would be accorded
priority if the party came to power. This evoked great concern in some quarters
that the BJP would abandon no first use, which has been a central feature of India’s
nuclear doctrine since the country conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998
and established itself as a nuclear weapons state. The BJP’s Modi, campaigning
for the 2014 election, subsequently declared that there would be “no compromise” on no first use, which
reflected India’s “cultural inheritance” (whatever that means). But as the
respected Economic and
Political Weeklycommented in an editorial: “Given the BJP’s
naturally aggressive posture, such clarifications must be viewed with some
scepticism and it is legitimate to explore what may be on the agenda.”
All this rhetoric is par for the
course in the heated atmosphere of the Indian electoral process.
Disconcertingly, both the Congress party and the BJP have forgotten the
historical record. India’s no-first-use policy was originally declared by the
BJP and the National Democratic Alliance government after it conducted the May
1998 nuclear tests. The prime minister at the time, Atal Behari Vajpayee,
stated thereafter that India would pursue a policy of no first use of nuclear
weapons vis-à-vis other nuclear-armed states and would not use these weapons
against nonnuclear countries. This restraint was also embedded in the
BJP’s draft nuclear doctrine, declared in August
1999, which took several years to be finalized. It was finally endorsed by the
Cabinet Committee on Security and officially promulgatedin January 2003.
Consequently, India’s no-first-use
policy and its nuclear doctrine are BJP formulations. The Congress party
adopted them and, with Singh’s April speech, simply sought to extend no first
use globally. This makes the BJP’s concern with its own no-first-use policy and
nuclear doctrine part of the mystery of Singh’s proposal.
THE LIMITATIONS OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE
There are valid grounds to revisit
India’s nuclear doctrine, as much has happened over the intervening years that
challenges the assumptions made by the BJP. On the conceptual front, the
limitations of nuclear deterrence have become apparent. In important ways,
India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has not increased its security.
While nuclear weapons have obvious
relevance for the external dimensions of national security, they cannot
ameliorate threats to India’s territorial integrity that arise from domestic
discontent or from crossborder militancy and terrorism emanating from Pakistan.
In other words, nuclear weapons cannot provide any defense against the
subconventional threats to India’s national security from extremist elements
within its own territory or, especially, against those who receive moral and
material assistance from across the border. As Singh repeatedly warned, the internal
threats to India’s national security are critical to its overall national
security challenges. Nuclear weapons provide no defense against these dangers.
The evidence in
this regard is overwhelming and discernible from continuing unrest in the state
of Jammu and Kashmir and in northeast India and from Maoist violence in central
and east India. Further, after Pakistan followed suit with its own nuclear
tests in 1998, India’s superiority in conventional forces was conspicuously
eroded. This can be seen in India’s fitful responses to incidents of
crossborder terrorism from Pakistan and its thus far confused approach to the
concept of Cold Start and delay in establishing the
forces required to operationalize it.1
Nuclear deterrence can only provide
security against the use of nuclear weapons or a major conventional attack.
This ineluctable reality evades India’s strategic elites and its armed forces
establishment. They find it hard to accept that nuclear weapons, unlike other
weapon systems, are not designed for use and cannot achieve strategic
objectives like gaining territory or dominating populations. Moreover, these
weapons’ immense destructive potential within very short time frames and their
ability to cause genetic mutations over generations ensure that they are
essentially meant to deter their use by an adversary. In other words, nuclear
deterrence cannot accomplish any vital national security goals other than
preventing an adversary from using nuclear weapons.
In a larger sense, no doubt, nuclear
deterrence permits peaceful conditions to be established, a situation that is
conducive to economic progress and the stimulation of regional trade and
commerce. However, an entire spectrum of security threats also arises, ranging
from border incursions to subconventional warfare and crossborder terrorism and
militancy. Nuclear weapons provide no security against this range of
existential security threats.
These fuller implications of the
nuclear tests were not thought through before the tests were conducted in 1998.
Perhaps these limitations surrounding nuclear deterrence were not knowable in
advance. But this belief is questionable. It was known, for instance, that
India would be subjected to punitive economic and technological sanctions that
would affect its growth and poverty alleviation programs in response to the
nuclear tests. Indeed, India’s earlier experience after its so-called “peaceful
nuclear explosion” in May 1974 was a forewarning that further nuclear tests
would not enable India’s entry into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a
nuclear weapons state and that the imposition of more stringent sanctions was
certain.
According to available evidence, the
decision to conduct the nuclear tests in May 1998 was made by a very small
coterie around Vajpayee. He and his advisers believed that India needed to go
nuclear to meet the nuclear threats from Pakistan and China, elevate India in
the comity of nations, and fulfill the pledge in the BJP’s 1996 election
manifesto to conduct nuclear tests if the party came to power. The rest is history:
sanctions on India’s civilian nuclear program were reinforced, severely
impeding its progress—despite tall claims that the restrictions provided a
fillip to indigenous research and development.
India’s Atomic Energy Commission has
traditionally argued that sanctions on importing nuclear technology, equipment,
and materials from abroad did not hurt, since the commission could harness the
human and technical resources available in the country to meet its
requirements. This bravado was first expressed after India conducted its 1974
nuclear test. It is clear, however, that despite some limited success, India
remained dependent on foreign assistance to establish its nuclear
infrastructure. This fact was reflected in the United Progressive Alliance
government’s rationale for entering into the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal in 2008,
namely to rescue India from its “nuclear pariah” status and open the way for
imports of nuclear materials and technology.
The establishment of nuclear
deterrence vis-à-vis Pakistan had only limited value for India’s overall
national security. It did not deter Pakistan’s crossborder incursions in winter
1998 and spring 1999 into the Kargil sector of Jammu and Kashmir, which led to
a short but intense conflict ending in the ouster of Pakistan’s regular and
irregular forces. Pakistan had the advantage of surprise, but its intruders
were no match for India’s superior conventional forces, which were brought into
the Kargil and neighboring sectors of the Line of Control. Yet despite India’s
overwhelming superiority in conventional arms, the effects of nuclear
deterrence inhibited it from attacking Pakistan’s lines of communications
across the border or from enlarging the theater of conflict along the border to
relieve pressure on the beleaguered Kargil sector. Pakistan was disadvantaged
by its need to maintain the fiction that militants had conducted these intrusions,
and therefore it could not openly deploy its regular forces to defend them.
Significantly, these operations revealed that a nuclearized Pakistan had
constrained New Delhi from launching a counteroffensive elsewhere along the
Line of Control or into Pakistan to relieve pressure on Indian forces in
Kargil. New Delhi decided that it would exhibit restraint and not expand the
theater of conflict. Political considerations were said to be at play, as India
wished to establish that it was a responsible nuclear power by not escalating
the conflict.
There was also a subliminal desire
among Indian leaders to paint Pakistan into a corner by highlighting its
irresponsible conduct in attacking across recognized borders without any
provocation. In pursuance of this policy of restraint, the Indian Air Force was
given strict orders not to attack Pakistani territory across the Line of
Control or enter Pakistan’s airspace. The ground forces were similarly
prohibited from expanding the area of conflict along the Line of Control to
relieve pressure on the Kargil sector. There is little doubt, however, that
this restraint was also informed by New Delhi’s awareness that an escalation of
this border conflict could become uncontrollable and lead inexorably toward
the nuclear threshold.
PAKISTAN UPS THE ANTE
A similar sequence of events
inhibited India during its border confrontation crisis with Pakistan after an
attack by Pakistan-based militants on the Indian parliament in mid-December
2001. India moved large elements of its armed forces to the India-Pakistan
border, where they remained for almost one year. Unable to mount an attack into
Pakistan, they returned without achieving anything worthwhile. Again, in
November 2008, New Delhi found itself constrained in retaliating against brazen
attacks by Pakistan-sponsored militants on several high-profile targets in
Mumbai.
More generally, it would seem that
Pakistan has acquired virtual impunity in launching terrorist attacks at will
into India through organizations that enjoy its patronage, like Lashkar-e-Taiba
and Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Admittedly, these groups operate in collaboration with
local militants like the Indian Mujahideen, but leadership, funding, training,
and sanctuary are provided by Pakistan. Despite grave provocation by these
groups, India has been unable to undertake any punitive counterstrike but has
sought redress by painting Pakistan into an ideological corner within the
international system.
A more general
argument against nuclear deterrence was made by the four horsemen, George
Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and William Perry, in 2007 in the Wall Street
Journal. “Nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining
international security during the Cold War because they were a means of
deterrence. The end of the Cold War made the doctrine . . . obsolete.
Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states. . . .
But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly
hazardous and decreasingly effective.”
Pakistan’s decision
to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in a battlefield mode along the
India-Pakistan border can be surmised from a report by Hans M. Kristensen and Robert
Norris of the Federation of American Scientists that identified Pakistan and
China as either having or developing nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Pakistan had
made clear, Kristensen told the Times of India,
that it was developing its nuclear-capable Nasr (or Hatf IX) missile “for use
against invading Indian troop formations that Pakistan doesn’t have the
conventional capabilities to defeat.” These weapons, according to Indian
experts, are meant to be used along the border in case of any skirmish with the
Indian Army. The Nasr is described as “a 60-kilometer [37-mile] ballistic
missile launched from a mobile twin-canister launcher.” According to
Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations, the Nasr also
has “shoot and scoot attributes” to serve as a quick response system to “add
deterrence value” to Pakistan’s strategic weapons development program “at
shorter ranges . . . to deter evolving threats.”
These developments have highlighted
the insufficiency of India’s no-first-use policy to deter Pakistan’s
destabilizing strategy. For one thing, this policy articulation frees Pakistan
of the uncertainty and angst that India might contemplate the preemptive use of
nuclear weapons to deal with terrorist attacks or limited conventional strikes
by Pakistan. Pakistan could also go to the extent of deploying its short-range
Nasr missile without being concerned that India would target it with its own
nuclear missiles. For another, the determinism inherent in India’s nuclear
doctrine that any level of nuclear attack will invite massive retaliation is
too extreme to gain much credibility. It defies logic to threaten an adversary
with nuclear annihilation to deter or defend against a tactical nuclear strike
on an advancing military formation.
Moreover, in an adversarial situation
between two nuclear powers, recourse to massive retaliation by one side would
surely trigger a similar counterattack. How would the mutual annihilation that
would undoubtedly ensue serve the ends of national security? This is a question
that must induce greater reflection on how to devise a more appropriate
strategy to meet Pakistan’s threat of using tactical nuclear weapons in crises
along the India-Pakistan border.
Pakistan, for its part, has not
countenanced a no-first-use policy on the grounds that the weaker
conventionally armed power has to rely on nuclear weapons to ensure its
security. However, conventional wisdom warns that deployment of nuclear weapons
along the border makes these arms vulnerable to attack, which, in turn, could
generate a “use or lose” mentality on the part of their possessor. A related
danger that has not been sufficiently articulated is that nuclear missiles
situated near the border could become vulnerable to targeting by long-range
artillery, apart from special forces operations, highlighting the hair-trigger
nature of such deployments. Pakistan argues that locating tactical nuclear
weapons along the India-Pakistan border in a state of battle-readiness enables
it to counter India’sCold Start strategy, which envisages
positioning offensive, battle-ready forces along the India-Pakistan border to
deter any crossborder attack.
In this fashion, according to one
nuclear expert, “Pakistan has upped the nuclear ante in South Asia by choosing to
adopt tactical nuclear weapons . . . because they lower the nuclear
threshold, the point at which nuclear weapons are brought into use. As such,
they are straining South Asia’s deterrence stability, the idea that roughly equivalent
nuclear capabilities will deter adversaries from using these weapons.” Pakistan
claims that deploying its tactical nuclear weapons would provide it with “full
spectrum deterrence” against India. Rawalpindi would also be enabled to counter
any offensive operations India might contemplate against Pakistan in response
to another Mumbai-style terrorist attack.
The particular danger of this
deployment pattern is that it creates pressures to delegate to field commanders
the authority to use these missiles in a crisis situation. Pakistani
authorities insist that no such delegation would be necessary. In the end, and
especially with the fog of war intervening, whatever arrangements were thought
to control such weapons could never be foolproof. The possibility of human error
would have to be accepted. But, with nuclear weapons entering the calculus,
such errors could have horrific consequences.
Adding to these uncertainties is the
fact that the internal situation in Pakistan has been rapidly deteriorating
over the last few years, with extremist and religious fundamentalist groups
exercising control over growing areas in the country. Political differences
between the military and civilian leaderships in Pakistan are also increasing,
with the judiciary functioning not as an umpire but as a third leg in an
unstable relationship between elements of the country’s ruling elite. How this
increasingly dysfunctional system can implement a responsible nuclear strategy
is an open question.
An impasse has now been reached that
threatens the stability of India-Pakistan relations. It is arguable that
India’s commitment to a no-first-use posture has encouraged Pakistan to adopt
its present adventurist strategy, secure in the belief that it could undertake
provocative actions without the angst that India might contemplate a nuclear
riposte. Its provocative actions would include promoting crossborder militancy
and terrorism into India and even brazen actions like the attack on the Indian
parliament in 2001 or the Mumbai attacks in 2008. Arguably, the adoption of a
deliberately vague policy in regard to nuclear retaliation by India, instead of
the certitude of a no-first-use declaration, might have better served India’s
overall strategic ends.
Apart from that, the no-first-use
policy, which has been incorporated into India’s nuclear doctrine, has several
other infirmities.
AN INADEQUATE DOCTRINE
The decision by the Cabinet Committee
on Security to endorse India’s nuclear doctrine makes clear that India will use
nuclear weapons only to retaliate against a nuclear attack on its territories
or on Indian forces anywhere; that nuclear weapons will not be used against
nonnuclear states; but that, in the event of a major attack by biological or
chemical weapons, India retains the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons.
This enumeration of India’s qualified no-first-use policy doctrine is flawed on
several counts.
First, it does not address the
possibility of an attack by nonstate actors, which is the present and imminent
danger. Would the country hosting those nonstate actors be targeted following
such an attack? And how would India address an attack by an international
organization like al-Qaeda that is situated in several countries in the
proximity of India?
Second, how would a
“major attack” with biological or chemical weapons be identified? What is
“major” and what is “minor” is debatable. This issue is significant since
biological and chemical weapons are not truly weapons of massdestruction,
but they are certainly weapons of mass disruption. Nonstate actors
might favor these weapons due to the comparative ease of their manufacture,
concealment, and transportation.
Third, serious difficulties arise in
any attempt to identify the perpetrator of a biological or chemical weapons
attack that could be undertaken by state or nonstate actors or, not
inconceivably, by a nonstate actor assisted by a state actor. This issue is
ultimately a question of reliable forensics, which is at a rudimentary stage of
development. The difficulty in identifying those guilty of chemical weapon
attacks in Syria is instructive here.
India’s no-first-use declaration
cannot be separated from the country’s overall nuclear doctrine as it has been
articulated since 1999. Inadequate as it is, this doctrine deserves to be
reviewed in the light of changes over the past fifteen years.
The current nuclear doctrine dictates
that nuclear retaliation against a first strike would be “massive” and designed
to inflict “unacceptable damage” upon the attacker. This is an unrealistic
certitude because, ethically, punishing large numbers of noncombatants
contravenes the laws of war. Besides, threatening massive retaliation against
any level of nuclear attack, which would inevitably trigger assured nuclear
annihilation in a binary adversarial situation, is hardly a credible option. No
doubt, it raises a ticklish question: Would India then favor a counterforce or
countercity strategy? India’s stated adherence to an assured and massive second
strike suggests the latter.
However, in addition to the other
infirmities of a massive retaliation response, the uncomfortable reality is
that the trade winds in May–September associated with the southwest monsoon
blow from Pakistan into northern India. Consequently, secondary and tertiary
radiation from a nuclear attack launched by India against Pakistan in these
months would blow back into India’s agriculturally rich Punjab and Haryana
states and, indeed, into New Delhi. India therefore faces a huge time
constraint to mount a massive nuclear attack into Pakistan. Operationally, too,
destroying the territory in dispute is feckless.
In a nuclear adversarial situation,
moreover, the inevitability of mutual destruction must also be considered. Is a
counterforce attack on the adversary’s military formations and assets the
answer? The issue of uncontrollable escalation then arises, for which there is
no reassuring answer. Leaving the problem of how India should retaliate to a
nuclear first strike to the discretion of the prime minister would provide
greater flexibility to mount the counterattack instead of threatening assured
nuclear annihilation, which is just not credible.
India’s present chain of command with
respect to nuclear weapons functions under the rubric of a Nuclear Command Authority and a Strategic
Forces Command. The prime minister has been designated as the “release
authority.” He has the unequivocal authority to decide whether, when, and how
to use nuclear weapons. A Political Council headed by the prime minister
constitutes the apex of this command structure. An Executive Council headed by
the national security adviser serves the Political Council. Its composition
includes the service chiefs and relevant government secretaries, including the
scientific adviser to the prime minister.
The Strategic Forces Command is
headed by a commander-in-chief; the incumbent comes from one of the three
services of the Indian Armed Forces, on a rotating basis. The Strategic Forces
Command is located within the Integrated Defense Headquarters in the Ministry
of Defense. But it also functions under the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Its
chairman is the most senior service chief, which ensures that the post rotates
among the three services, without any fixed tenure. A conscious effort is
evident, however, to assert the primacy of civilian control over the military
at all levels of the nuclear command structure.
The element of
doubt arising in this arrangement is that a tri-service command like the
Strategic Forces Command should, logically, function under a single line of
authority representing the three services, like a chief of defense staff, who
would be a single-point adviser to the government on sensitive security issues.
The proposal to establish a chief of defense staff, incidentally, is of ancient
vintage and can be traced back to the Sino-Indian border conflict of 1962. The
option of a chief of defense staff has been recommended by numerous inquiry
committees, notably theArun Singh Committee on defense expenditure (in
1990) and, most recently, theNaresh Chandra Committee on national security.2
But this proposal to appoint a chief
of defense staff who could provide a unified service view to the government on
sensitive issues continues to languish since it has been resolutely opposed by
the Indian Navy and Air Force. The attitude of the Ministry of Defense and the
Government of India, which could force through a decision, can at best be
described as studied insouciance. It remains unclear in these circumstances
whether, in a crisis situation, the strategic forces commander would report to
the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, which would be an unsatisfactory
arrangement as far as civilian control is concerned, or whether he would report
directly to the national security adviser and the Executive Council, which is
equally unsatisfactory from an interservice coordination perspective.
It is for these reasons that it makes
more sense for the decision about whether, when, and how to retaliate against a
nuclear attack to remain the prime minister’s. Moreover, time would clearly be
at a premium in a crisis situation. A committee system of decisionmaking is
hardly suited to handle a fast-developing situation. Providing the “release
authority” the greatest flexibility to decide how to mount the counterattack,
according to the exigencies of the situation, provides a more workable solution
to this problem.
The present doctrine fetishizes
acquisition of a “credible minimum deterrent.” But India is seeking a force
structure that is no different from that established by the United States or
the former Soviet Union. India seeks a strategic triad comprising land-based,
airborne, and underwater nuclear weapon systems that will require increasing
resources.
It is arguable whether India’s
strategic circumstances require a naval component for its deterrent or whether
the country requires only a submarine-based deterrent, on the assumption that
the nuclear deterrent posture ultimately rests on the survivability of the
nuclear arsenal. Land- and air-based systems are more vulnerable to
counterattack and destruction than submarine-based missiles are. That leads to
the argument that taking the deterrent out to sea would ensure the acquisition
of an invulnerable second strike capability. This question has not been
seriously discussed in India, resulting in vociferous demands from the three
services that the government concede some component of the nuclear deterrent to
each of them.
Criticism is widespread that there is
little transparency about the size and structure of India’s nuclear forces and
what its credible minimum deterrent comprises in terms of weapons systems.
Instead of debating this issue, official spokesmen have argued that it is
impossible to define what a credible minimum deterrent requires since there can
be no “fixity” in this regard, which suggests that the contours of the credible
minimum deterrent are a moving target. Incidentally, India’s armed forces have
been kept out of the nuclear decisionmaking process; hence, there is a touch of
unreality about these declarations on nuclear force structures.
The survival of the chain of command
also needs to be credibly ensured and made more transparent to provide
leadership continuity in all eventualities. To achieve this objective, the
Strategic Forces Command should be enjoined to maintain survivable, dispersed,
and sheltered communications with multiple redundancies. Appropriate measures
must be taken to ensure the safety and security of the nuclear stockpile at all
times.
CONCLUSION
It should be emphasized that neither
former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh’s last-ditch attempt to
universalize India’s qualified no-first-use policy nor the confusions created
by BJP protagonists regarding their commitment to this policy are to be
commended. A detailed study of India’s nuclear doctrine is required to address
all the relevant issues in their totality.
Clearly, none of the underlying
issues that bedevil the nuclear doctrine allows for easy answers. For instance,
the question of whether the retaliatory nuclear counterattack should pursue a
counterforce or countercity strategy can be argued interminably.
However, a reasoned debate on this
and other controversial issues is overdue. India’s nuclear doctrine is not cast
in tablets of stone. Circumstances change, making periodical reviews of the
nuclear doctrine essential. India’s nuclear doctrine has not been revisited for
over a decade. The issues that suggest themselves for review are India’s
command-and-control arrangements, which require greater clarity; the threat
held out of assured massive retaliation, which forebodes self-annihilation;
imparting greater content to the objective of credible minimum deterrence; and
revisiting or abandoning the no-first-use policy in light of its numerous
deficiencies.
It would also be realistic to
appreciate that India’s major nuclear security problems arise not from the
postulates of its nuclear doctrine but from the complexities of its
geostrategic situation. India confronts two nuclear adversaries—Pakistan and
China—that enjoy close relations with each other. It is clear that Pakistan’s
nuclear weapons are unequivocally directed against India and are under the
command and control of the Pakistan Army. But the negotiation of nuclear issues
and confidence-building measures has been left to Pakistan’s civilian
bureaucracy, which clearly lacks authority and functions under the close
supervision of the army. How, then, should India negotiate?
There is a global consensus that the
real danger from Pakistan’s nuclear weapons emanates from militants gaining
control over them. The impunity with which militants have attacked military
installations and headquarters in Pakistan reveals the inability of the
country’s armed forces to defend themselves, as well as the likely existence of
insider collusion with nonstate actors. Still, the Pakistani establishment
chooses to externalize its difficulties by undertaking dangerous maneuvers like
developing its short-range Nasr missile for a tactical role, which is
universally condemned as highly destabilizing.
The recent debate in India on
reviewing the country’s no-first-use policy and its nuclear doctrine might only
signify preelection rhetoric. But the essential problem that remains and will
tax the government of Narendra Modi is how India plans to credibly engage
Pakistan in the interests of nuclear stability in South Asia.
P. R. Chari is a
visiting professor at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi,
India.
NOTES
1 The Cold Start strategy differs radically
from the defensive posture traditionally adopted by India after it gained
independence in 1947. The goal of this strategy is “to establish the capacity
to launch a retaliatory conventional strike against Pakistan that would inflict
significant harm on the Pakistan Army before the international community could
intercede, and at the same time, pursue narrow enough aims to deny Islamabad
any justification to escalate the clash to the nuclear level.” Some progress
has been made toward acquiring the relevant operational capabilities,
especially in the sphere of network-centric warfare. But the doctrine still
remains in the experimental stage.
2 The committee
recommended a permanent head of the Chiefs of Staff Committee to try to
overcome the negative sentiments associated with the “chief of defense staff”
designation.
By P. R. Chari
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
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