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Article 4 |
The equalizer scenario breaks down now that India has shown the will to develop a second nuclear strike capability, deliverable by a triad of military assets in superpower fashion. It will probably take India another three to five years to develop this triad, in particular nuclear-powered submarines and an early warning system which will primarily rely on dedicated military satellites.
A US research group has estimated that India has of now 1,607 kg of unsafeguarded fissile material - a quantity that can produce 400 nuclear warheads. The cumulative yield of these weapons is about three megatons, roughly the nuclear weapon capability of the Chinese Liberation Army's Second Artillery Corps. In case of a nuclear war, about 60 potential targets are likely to be hit in Pakistan under the second nuclear strike regime, with at least four missiles dedicated to each target.
The ball is now in Pakistan's court to articulate its nuclear conceptualization. In doing so Pakistan gets caught between a rock and a hard place. If our plan envisages in a war scenario with India a first nuclear strike in an adverse military situation, even as a battlefield weapon, we lose world sympathy. No world power, including old friend China, will support the madness of a first nuclear strike. But this is exactly what our masses are being fed on. And sadly, even the father of our N-bomb is not above a bit of nuclear missile rattling.
If we opt for a no first-strike policy, we are back to square one: the conventional military imbalance will not only remain but enlarge. Our N-weapons will therefore remain locked by the inexorability of nuclear logic.
Since the Indian policy paper talks of increasing the level of deterrence, this means large increases in conventional defence outlay. To match it, it is estimated that our defence outlay will have to increase to the level of total revenue. At some point of time, the back of the weaker economic power is broken. And this is exactly what happened to the late Soviet Union. The US increased R&;n and defence outlays to a level which the Soviets simply could not match. Nuclear logic played its part in the break-up of the Soviet Union.
A nuclear war has the potential of dismembering Pakistan and to a lesser extent India. Both countries are multi-ethnic societies with vibrant sub-nationalisms. Both countries are vulnerable to collapse if the command structures disintegrate or mutate as they would in any nuclear exchange. Since the stakes are incredibly high, our recent historical past and present need to be reviewed eschewing the half-truths and untruths that fill our ears.
Like India, Pakistan too should announce its nuclear policy in draft to elicit public opinion. We have paid the penalty for not having a National Security Council (NSC) which would have avoided the Kargil misadventure; let the Defence Committee of the Cabinet not be a rubber stamp of our nuclear hawks. It might also be useful to circulate with the draft a paper on what "unacceptable damage" entails in nuclear parlance culled from the Hiroshima experience.
Since nuclear weaponry - and this comes in different shapes and sizes in terms of destruction and killing power - is the ultimate weapon of our times, it is necessary to define the enemy and our objectives. Failure to do so creates a crossfire of cannon balls flying in indiscriminate directions - as diverse as the objectives themselves. I give below some points for consideration:
1. Which is the greater enemy of Pakistan - the fundamentalist sectarianism spewing from Taliban Afghanistan or an obdurate India? Our sponsorship of the Taliban has alienated us from our traditional friends - China, Iran and Turkey and most of Central Asia, not to mention the west.
2. Our Kashmir thrust beginning in 1947 to Kargil in 1999 has been premised on a sub rosa creeping aggression or confrontation with India. The policy has miserably failed.
We shut our eyes and ears to the fact that the Pathan tribesmen sent to liberate Kashmir in 1947/48 indulged in loot and plunder. It took 40 years and even worse treatment from the Indian army to shake this memory. Operation Gibraltar in 1965, like Kargil in 1999, was based on trained guerillas led by army officers to infiltrate behind the cease-fire line. Foreign Minister Bhutto - the then leading hawk - convinced President Ayub Khan that the Kashmiris would rise once the spark was lit by the guerillas, pinning down the Indian army, whereupon 'Operation Grand Slam' would set in motion the army to capture Akhnur connecting the only road link between India and Kashmir. What history records is a classic domino fall; first at Tashkent, next the abdication of Ayub Khan, civil war in East Pakistan, war with India in 1971; defeat and the end of united Pakistan; the rise of Bhutto; Martial Law in 1977 and the final denouement of the hanging of Bhutto.
Of all the games invented by man, war is the most unpredictable and capricious. And yet the bitter penalty of 1965 was forgotten by 1999. Truly, those who suffer from amnesia are destined to sleep-walk into the same steps of disaster over again.
Military adventure - overt or covert - has not yielded us one inch in Kashmir - and by our own recent admissions lost us much territory.
There has been a genuine mass uprising against Indian rule in the Valley since 1989. Like most liberation movements, it has its pacific and violent parts. Successive governments in their wisdom have chosen not only to back the violent elements within the movement but also to augment them with trigger-happy Afghan mercenaries. This was a tragic mistake. World attention has now moved from human rights abuses in Kashmir perpetrated by India, which was in focus before the Kargil misadventure, to Pakistan as a country accused of aggression.
It is high time for Pakistan to give up this obsession with creeping aggression. Liberation wars are won and lost today not by bombs and bullets but by the climate of international opinion and its mouthpiece, the independent media. Recent BBC/CNN coverage of the Indian election showing empty ballot boxes in Srinagar conveys the depth of Kashmiri alienation more explicitly and convincingly than our hamhanded official propaganda. The independent media will support the aggressed not the aggressor; the victims of terrorism not the terrorist; peaceful activists, not fire-spewing holy warriors. The bottomline is that an entire range of new options - non-violent and morally acceptable - have to replace the old Kashmir paradigm.
This is best left to the next government in Pakistan as the present government has lost credibility as a serious negotiating partner.
The recent UN referendum in East Timor has been cited in the Kashmir context repeatedly. The comparison is incorrect. The difference is that Indonesia has agreed to give the choice between autonomy and independence to East Timor; Pakistan has never agreed to give the option of full self-determination to the Kashmiris. Our voice gets sotto voce when it comes to an independent Kashmir. It has gone to the extent of labelling the pro-independence Kashmiris as Indian agents. Our Foreign Office harks back to UN resolutions of 1948/49 which prima facie (but not intrinsically) exclude this possibility.
For reasons given in my article appearing in these columns on August 7, these UN resolutions are non-starters. If India ever has the courage to accept the UN resolutions, Pakistan will surely reject them as they stand.
If military means appear to be doomed, and a nuclear war too dangerous to consider, where do we set our Kashmir objectives? I submit, as stated in my article appearing in these columns on August 7, that in the prevailing situation our objectives in Kashmir should be lowered to getting India to honour the special status of Kashmir as provided in Article 370-A of the Indian constitution as an ad interim measure pending the final settlement of the problem, and to trade the exit of the Indian army out of Kashmir by respecting the sanctity of the LoC. No nuclear weapons are needed to attain these objectives. A less confrontational policy in relation to India is called for. It is tragic that Kargil has squelched many independent, pro-Kashmir solution voices that were emerging in India in the past year or so.
This brings us finally to the question of our nuclear conceptualization in response to India:
1. We should declare that Pakistan has no intention to develop a second nuclear strike capability. It would be a gross error if we attempt to follow the Indian policy in this regard. Kuldip Nayyar, writing in these columns on September 7, quoted an estimate of Rs 7,700 crores for developing SNS capacity by India. We do not have the means to enter this competition.
2. Our nuclear conceptualization be premised on the use of battlefield N-weapons on our own territory 'in extremis' only to eject enemy concentrations. The policy must categorically declare that we have no intention of hitting any Indian city or territory as a first nuclear strike.
3. Declare the framework of a Kashmir policy which aims at an interim settlement of the problem and calls for negotiations leading to the withdrawal of the two armies from the disputed territory.
4. Recognize the inherent right of the Kashmiris to trade and travel across the LoC and for their elected representatives to meet as a joint body to make recommendations to the governments of India and Pakistan without prejudice to the UN resolutions, Simla agreement or the recognized positions of the respective governments in regard to the dispute.
Boasts such as "we shall even eat grass if we have to build N-weapons" win thunderous jingoistic applause but when it comes to paying honest taxes and repaying bank loans to the piper, none from the man who invented this slogan to the current prime minister is prepared to pay.
The existence of nuclear weapons should compel us to concentrate our minds. Our public and politicians have no conception of a N-war and the unacceptable damage caused to mother earth, water, land, crops, livestock, forests and humans.
A N-war is virtually a war against mankind. By theorizing the most modest and minimum use of N-weapons, we send a signal to India to reconsider the consequences of its present draft N-plan.
As appeared in The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 1999
Newsletter No. 1