Serious Business Of War

By M H Ahssan

Can India exercise the military option against Pakistan?

The suggestion of external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee that India could exercise a military option against Pakistan has alarmed the international community, particularly the US, that a war between the two nuclear-armed neighbours could see the first ever use of nuclear weapons by both sides. It is precisely this nuclear nightmare scenario that Pakistan’s establishment and its military brass, in particular, have often exploited to blackmail the world each time India wants to take them to task for their many acts of terror. Is war really an option?

On at least one occasion in the recent past — after the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 — India appeared serious about exercising the military option against Pakistan. Apparently, our politicians were energised only when they were directly targeted; as if, the deaths of thousands of other Indians — mostly by Pakistansponsored terror groups — weren’t reason enough. But the only chance to hit Pakistan with swift air attacks was in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the Parliament. Technically, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), where many of the terror camps were located, is a part of India, since India claims all of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. Hitting terror camps within it can thus be justified. This opportunity was lost as the Vajpayee government dithered.

Deploying the army for almost a year thereafter along the Indo-Pak border was of no use. The Vajpayee government gave in to Washington’s pressure not to distract the Pakistan army from supporting America’s ‘war on terror’ on the Pak-Afghan border; as if India’s war was not against terror. Pakistan today is using the same argument now to slip out of its current predicament by threatening to shift its forces from its western border with Afghanistan to the Indo-Pak border. And the Bush administration is once again counting on India backing down. But what was apparent then and even now is that India’s political elite, having taken a tough posture, is in a bind. India has a long tradition of a complete absence of strategic thinking on matters of national security and our politicians are just not up to the task.

This is essentially a Nehruvian hangover. Jawaharlal Nehru insisted that the military must be outside independent India’s policymaking if the country were to shed the tradition of the British raj where the commander-in-chief was second only to the viceroy in the cabinet. That apart, Nehru cut defence spending to 1 per cent of India’s GDP. As a consequence this country was humiliated by the Chinese aggression of 1962. Nehru’s legacy of uninformed politicians and half-informed bureaucrats running the ministry of defence is still alive in Raisina Hill. In short, the lack of understanding of national security issues amongst the neta-babu set-up is glaringly evident.

If India has to become a great power then Nehru’s legacy of civilian supremacy in matters of national security must be abandoned. Just as the Indian economy was turned around by a group of technocratic professionals led by Manmohan Singh in 1990, at this dark hour, we need two cabinet ministers — one each for the ministry of defence and a new ministry of internal security — who understand what military options India can now exercise.

A full-fledged war against Pakistan — on the scale of the 1971 war or on the lines of the American invasion of Iraq — could tie us down in long-drawn battles of attrition and give India little in terms of territorial gains to put pressure on Pakistan. Without that, you cannot negotiate concessions from your enemy. Moreover, Pakistan has always made it known that if India attempts to dismember it again like in 1971 it won’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons. However, as the Kargil conflict has shown, even nuclear weapon states have the strategic space for a swift military operation with India simultaneously attacking a number of terror training camps in PoK by missiles and special forces units.

And if Pakistan were to escalate matters by responding with tactical nuclear weapons in the battlefield then New Delhi must remind Islamabad that it has the capacity to annihilate Pakistan. The fear of mutually assured destruction — the MAD syndrome — prevents even a trigger-happy nuclear weapon state from using nuclear weapons in the first instance. In fact, studies of the Indo-Pak stand-off in 1990 have shown that the professionalism of the Pakistan army and the deep understanding of the damage that nuclear weapons could do prevented the military brass of Pakistan from seriously considering a nuclear strike against India. The same can be said even now about Pakistan’s armed forces and that of India’s. They know the business of conflict management, unlike our politicians.

Winston Churchill had once said that “war is too serious a business to be left to generals”. But Churchill was a passionate student of military history and had done some military service. The British military historian, Basil Liddell-Hart, had also commented that “if you want peace, understand war”. Until our politicians get to understand war, it might be a good idea to turn Churchill’s words on their head, and say that war is too serious a business, to be left only to politicians.