Storm in a teacup
The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington, DC
Last month, Indian-American scholar Vipin Narang stirred a
storm by casting doubt on the sanctity of India’s No-First-Use (NFU)
pledge on nuclear weapons and positing the possibility of Indian
pre-emptive strikes against Pakistan. Since,
the Pakistani state and several experts have pointed to the Indian
hypocrisy of claiming an NFU that they no longer plan to honour.
I would have usually dismissed the response as business as
usual. Worryingly, there is more, it seems. In the past few weeks, I
have heard regular references to Narang’s comments in Pakistani policy
circles, and even discussions suggesting that Pakistan must consider its
implications seriously. The talk continues.
I am alarmed because I found some of these conversations to
be strikingly similar to what I heard a decade ago when the Indian army
floated its Cold Start doctrine — a Pakistan-specific limited war
strategy conceived by the Indian army after the 2001-02 crisis with
Pakistan.
In that crisis, India not only discovered that its nuclear
weapons have no bearing on the ability of terrorists to strike inside
India, but also that its ability to leverage its superior conventional
might was neutralised by Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent. Cold Start
offered India an option to wage limited war that would punish Pakistan
selectively, without bringing Pakistani nuclear use in response into
play.
In 2007, three years after Cold Start was floated, I, along
with several other scholars, analysed this Indian doctrine threadbare.
The question posed to me was why Pakistan had not reacted to the
doctrine in any visible way. I argued that Pakistan hadn’t and wouldn’t
because Cold Start did not alter the military’s Order of Battle, or its
ability to neutralise India’s conventional aggression, given that its
short lines of communication and forward bases already secured it
against such an Indian adventure. I was wrong.
The state has never believed in the sanctity of the Indian NFU.
Pakistan reacted, in fact overreacted, by developing a fresh tactical nuclear weapon capability.
Most objective analysts agree that Cold Start is simply not executable,
and even if it were, Pakistan’s conventional forces could easily tackle
it. Moreover, the Nasr missile defies decades of experience during the
Cold War that confirms the exorbitant risks attached to fielding
battlefield nuclear weapons.
For now, Nasr has offered the latest reason for the world to question the dangers posed by Pakistan’s nuclear programme.
The NFU saga is also a storm in a teacup, no more. Vipin
Narang is a well-respected Indian-American scholar who neither speaks
for the Indian establishment, nor claims to have any clout over it. He
made these remarks while speaking on a conference panel that
specifically focused on envisioning hypothetical scenarios that entailed
nuclear weapons use.
As scholars often do in such gatherings, Narang went for a
counterintuitive scenario rather than the run-of-the-mill one that would
have envisioned a Pakistani first use, probably of its tactical nuclear
weapon against invading Indian conventional forces. Basing his
observations on the statements of senior Indian ex-officials, he posited
Indian pre-emptive strikes against Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Narang
clearly wished to provoke an analytical debate on the sanctity of
India’s NFU.
But he wasn’t claiming anything had happened in the days
preceding his talk that had made such an Indian first-use likelier than
before.
I am not arguing that the concern about India’s loosening
NFU is made up. Indeed, this has been an ongoing debate in India and
several serious voices have hinted that the posture may not be as
sacrosanct after all. It is also true that a country’s shift from NFU to
first-use is no trivial development. Under certain contexts, it could
require the rival to consider significant changes in force planning,
postures, deployment protocols, etc.
Luckily, this isn’t the case for Pakistan.
The reality is that
the Pakistani nuclear establishment and experts alike have never
believed in the sanctity of the Indian NFU to begin with. No Pakistani nuclear or conventional choices assume a credible Indian NFU; in fact, all discount it.
This isn’t surprising. After all, even though an NFU
directly impacts force requirements and postures, at its heart, it is a
declaratory commitment that can never be fully verified. When rivals are
as mutually distrusting as India and Pakistan, scepticism about such
declarations is only natural.
But this also implies that Pakistan needn’t worry about an
Indian shift away from the NFU, much less a fanciful scenario (according
to Narang himself) of an Indian pre-emptive strike. This is the time to
exhibit the psychological security that behooves a nuclear power
confident of its capability. To the contrary, reacting to an independent
scholar’s academic analysis in this manner suggests exactly the
opposite.
The development of Nasr has already shown the kind of
decisions such insecurity can produce. Pakistan must not fall in this
trap again.
The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington, DC
