The writer is a well-known journalist and freelance columnist

mbnaqvi@cyber.net.pk

August 22, 2001

It would seem that India and Pakistan are on course to having another Summit before too long. It is also clear that the focus next time will be on nuclear weapons and the measures that 'enemies' can adopt to prevent an unintended war and accidents, and some mutual assurance that no unauthorised finger will press the nuclear button. This was certainly the pith and substance of Indian PM AB Vajpayee's Lahore initiative in Feb'99. The emphasis on the issue is not misplaced; its emergent importance perhaps outweighs its original cause of Kashmir dispute.

Linkage of nuclear weapons with Kashmir issue with its current Jehad and with Pakistan's quest to offset India's predominance in conventional armaments should be obvious. India's PNE (peaceful nuclear explosion) in 1974 appeared to have no apparent reason, cause or context. The world was rightly puzzled. This writer's hypothesis is that Mrs Indira Gandhi must have learnt of the secret Pakistani decision of 1972 to go for a crash nuclear programme and decided to warn Pakistan forthwith. All the usual laboured Indian explanations about China's capabilities - which were at least 10 years old then - 'currency of power' and the prestige factor were, in one's view, all waffling.

The rest of the story - and the terrible problems it has created - is to be pragmatically reconstructed from events. As soon as Pakistan acquired a nuclear capability, circa 1984, its attitude towards India became markedly truculent. India became alarmed and began flexing its conventional military muscle; in 1986-87 its largest ever military exercise Brasstacks was read in Islamabad as a cover for invading Pakistani areas adjoining Rajasthan: southeast Punjab and Sindh. Pakistan issued a stern warning that it has the will to nuke it, if the Indian advance threatened its security. The warning served its purpose and India desisted - or so Islamabad believed.

Pakistani high command felt emboldened by its largely putative strength based on a bomb-in-the-basement strategy; it believed Pakistan's defences have become invincible. Therefore it could do anything: tweak the tail of Indian tiger in Kashmir. Thus the Kashmiris' quite peaceful protest movement on the Indian side in the fall of 1989 was quickly transformed into an armed insurgency, later termed Jehad. Pakistan felt strong enough to go on encouraging its intensification in 1990s by not stopping private Jehadi organisations from making India bleed. Its calculation was simple: India cannot make the logical riposte: invade at least Azad Kashmir for fear of Pakistani retaliation; let India be thus weakened, its troops demoralised and the eventual denouement can be made manageable - and satisfying.

The 1990s saw non-stop military tensions and border incidents in Kashmir. In May 1998 India's BJP leadership decided to be more explicit by detonating five nuclear devices. It was a manoeuvre to force Pakistan to show its hand and it did. It detonated six nuclear devices just 15 days later. That demonstration of raw power strengthened all the militaristic tendencies and assumptions on both sides. Pakistan military mounted the Kargil operation, torpedoing Sharif's and Vajpayee's Lahore Process of Feb'99.

India stopped talking altogether as a result and eventually came out with a new doctrine that envisaged India launching a conventional war on the theory that Pakistan's nuclear weapons can deter at most India's nuclear armaments. To drive the point home, it organised yet another big military exercise Poorna Vijay, near Pakistan's same soft underbelly: Sindh and southeast Punjab. The intention was to demonstrate Indian ability to cope with even a Pakistani nuclear strike. Gradually, over the period, bomb blasts and sabotage attempts became numerous in both the countries. Proxy wars or sabotage are the only alternative to an all-out war that had become too risky. It was this background of unabated military tensions against which, with or without foreign pressures, Mr Vajpayee invited General Pervez Musharraf to Agra in July this year. That produced no results. Without a change in thinking, the next Summit might also be fruitless-except probably on the nuclear issue.

But first an aside on the nature and effects of atomic weaponry learnt from the brief 14-15 years history of Indo-Pakistan nuclear deterrence. First and foremost, the ability to nuke produced on both sides the arrogance of power and excessive euphoria. It made them more inflexible and maximalist in demands: Pakistan says solve Kashmir or at least start serious negotiations, while India says, in effect, forget about Kashmir; you should begin being friendly, start trading and promoting cultural exchanges. Both want to take but are unwilling to give.

Then, it has also made both venturesome. But the mischief of these weapons of offence is that it has created a profound mutual mistrust. For, there is no defence against them. Each Pakistani bomb, if delivered, will cause absolutely unacceptable damage and India cannot do anything to prevent it. Similarly Pakistan can do absolutely nothing to prevent the devastation that Indian bombs will cause. This mistrust does not fail to create exaggerated scenarios of what the 'enemy' is doing and planning; its maximum (possible) capability is assumed as the datum-line for one's own preparations.

An arms race is thus built into the nature of these weapons. Their political context, with its inevitable psychosis of fear, makes it hard to put a cap on the numbers of both deterrents. Thus this weaponry is profoundly destabilising from the word go. Extrapolating the Nato-Warsaw pacts' experience of a nuclear dÈtente is simply not applicable to South Asian situation. Moreover, those agreements were not between equals; Gorbachev was desperate for almost any agreement. Although Pakistan's economy is perhaps in a worse state than what the state of Soviet economy was, it is ready to go on living as a broken-back state-but determined to go on deterring India.

As for Mr Vajpayee's focus on the nukes, what he has to offer is, by and large, likely to be quite acceptable to Pakistani Bomb lovers-if indeed Islamabad has stopped making satisfaction on Kashmir a prior condition for progress on all other issues, the reason for the Agra failure. There is a background: The American sponsored Neemrana group's Track II diplomacy has already produced a near full agreement, if not consensus, on the need to make the US suggested CBMs the basis for a detente between the two hostile deterrents. Vajpayee had signed an MOU in Lahore (1999) with Pakistan on the subject. If adequate spadework is done by the two sets of sherpas, the Summiteers may be able to sign a series of agreements, constituting a nuclear detente.

This would be a pleasing prospect. For, no one can question the utility of the measures, the CBMs that reduce the risk of an unintended or unauthorised nuclear war. Nuclear accidents can also be contained by mutually agreed procedures and escalation through misunderstanding prevented. Having conceded this, it is necessary to enter a caveat here: while CBMs are necessary, they are not, repeat not, a solution to South Asia's problems posed by the nature of these weapons. As passions run high, the CBMs are sure to be the first casualty; they become untrustworthy amidst military tensions that get intensified from their inherent mistrust-generating characteristics. The CBMs can certainly provide preliminary help. But a proper resolution of the problem of two hostile deterrents is no other than their abolition. However difficult it may seem, this is the only way of getting rid of the nightmare.

There is a fatal snare inherent in CBMs. They make for the permanence of nuclear deterrents and also help promote the common acceptance of this permanence. A false sense of safety can be created amongst the populace by announcing such agreements with fanfare. That is the reason why bomb-lovers in India and Pakistan are at one in tom tomming a detente as an aim in itself. From a longer-range viewpoint, such a detente in South Asia will be a fair weather bird: it will chirp beautifully and may bewitch common folks in normal times. But as soon as political clouds appear, it would fly away.

Not that the two antagonists should not install CBMs. Only, they should not be mistaken for an end in themselves or a solution of the problem. They should be conceived as initial steps to, and made an integral part of, the solution: phased nuclear disarmament, each side acting unilaterally but in the context, and as a part of, the agreed goal of a grassroots level people-to-people reconciliation between the two estranged neighbours. The medium-term objective should be a NWFZ in South Asia-again as an intermediate station on the road to global nuclear disarmaments. All other approaches to the problem risk breakdowns at almost every stage.