Pakistan is a real nuclear threat

Pakistan nuclear threat is not a bogey: Warmongering must stop

ANJIV KRISHAN SOOD @sood_

It was a refreshingly candid talk by (retd) General Mehta to an English news channel when he was asked for his reaction to the killing and mutilating of an Army jawan supposedly by terrorists aided and abetted by Pakistan.

He said the surgical strikes carried out by the Indian Army in late September were a good example of our ability to cross the LoC and conduct an operation. He further stated that political leaders lacked understanding of how to handle the situation. Therefore, they did not think things through before taking the action and were unable to assess the consequences.

Lt-General Kamal Davar (retd) in a piece in The Quint dated October 24 has succinctly put it, that it is high time India stopped gloating over its minor tactical success and looked towards the future.

While the Army is to be commended for the action on September 28/29, it is our inability to evaluate Pakistani response and prepare for contingencies which is a cause of concern.

The strategic community appears to be of the opinion that the threshold of Pakistan to violence against it is very low. Discussions about likely Pakistani responses seem to evolve around a consensus that if we escalate the level of conflict, Pakistan will back out and fall in line.

My own experience at a tactical level while commanding my unit at Samba has been that the Pakistanis are capable of giving as good as they get.

This is also borne by their action of attacking Indian posts on the LoC. The Indian Army describes it as militant action supported by cover fire from Pakistani posts. However, in my assessment these were well-coordinated BAT action plans, equivalent roughly to the surgical strikes that we had carried out. The Pakistanis chose their own time and place to respond to our action.

Actions like use of precision-guided missiles and use of Israel-type lightening air raids to eliminate terrorist training camps and personalities antagonistic to India are being suggested. Exemplary violent reactions to teach a lesson have been suggested by various experts.

While these actions are within the realm of possibility, the difficulty is lack of precise intelligence about the location of proposed targets, besides the Pakistanis taking simple precautionary measures like frequent change of location. The strategic community appears to believe Pakistan will not up the ante and retaliate to such actions because of India's conventional superiority.

There is further consensus among thinkers that Pakistan is using the nuclear bogey to prevent India from escalating the level of conflict. It has been argued that even if the Pakistanis use a tactical nuclear weapon in the battlefield, it will cause very little harm to Indian troops whereas our retaliation will decimate them.

The strategists seem to totally discount use of larger nuclear weapons by Pakistan because of fear of total annihilation due to retaliation.

My considered view is that the nuclear bogey, as it has been called, is actually a real threat and can be ignored only at our peril. India has conventional superiority and therefore is most likely to use the nuclear option as the last resort in case of an existential threat.

This is in conformity to the first-use doctrine followed by us. Pakistan has a sufficiently large stockpile to survive our retaliation. It has not built up this stockpile at a huge cost just for keeping it. That the threat is real can be deduced from the fact that during the Kargil conflict, the US had to intervene to prevent escalation.

As said by General Mehta (retd), we need to consider the fact that options so far available to India are finite because our responses are limited to use of regular soldiers, whereas the Pakistanis have positioned several terrorists behind our lines. They simply have to activate these militants to cause trouble for us before and during any military conflict that may take place in the future.

Policymakers must refrain from pandering to an aggressive and masculine sense of patriotism which appears to be happening presently.

What about the option of resorting to covert action to take out terrorist training camps and prominent terrorists leaders sheltered in Pakistan? Presumably, we have the capability and if not, then we need to quickly build it. As they say in Hindi: "Saanp bhi mar jaye aur lathi bhi na toote."

Underestimating Pakistani reaction and capabilities is worrisome, leading to war hysteria and talks of revenge all around. Public opinion appears to think that Pakistan is a walkover.

Hopefully this war hysteria will not lead policy planners to take hasty measures resulting in washing away of years of peace dividend that we have reaped with Pakistan.

We must refrain from blowing our own trumpet as it leads to unrealistic public expectations. Affairs of war and international relations are best conducted in relative secrecy.