Tactical nuclear missiles not a very smart idea

Islamabad diary
But first things first: I had bravely predicted that the Obama-Nawaz meeting would last for no more than thirty minutes. It went on for two hours…which means egg on my face and the cup of humility in my hands. Predicting timelines in advance is always a silly undertaking.
The major point remains. The US is a super-duper power. That is still no reason for Pakistani leaders to think that they become baptised in holy water when they go on a pilgrimage there. Easy does it. When will we learn this and when will we cut the hyperbole?
The problem is that we measure everything by an Indian yardstick. Any US-Indian understanding gives us the shivers. More than the US it is India that we should learn to take more calmly. The US feting an Indian prime minister should not mean the end of the world for us. India has its own trajectory to follow and we ours. Seeing everything through an Indian prism scarcely enhances our standing. Yet day in and day out our leaders, both civil and military, keep raising the bogey of an Indian threat.
One of the good things to come from the 1971 war – which we lost and which led to the severance of East Pakistan – was our turning towards the Arab and Muslim world under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. For all the years that he was in power, India was off our radar screens. And we forgot about Kashmir, which was the subtle understanding at Simla. Indeed, for close to 16 years – right until the Kashmir uprising in 1989 – we never raised the subject anywhere.
It was India mismanaging its part of Kashmir, subverting the election process there and stoking the fires of resentment, which provoked the Kashmiris to rise against Indian rule. Had that revolt remained an indigenous affair it would have worked to the advantage of both the Kashmiri people and of Pakistan. But we – by which is meant the higher school of ideological policy, otherwise known as the ISI – had to step in where angels would have exercised greater caution.
It seemed a brilliant idea at the time, tying down umpteen Indian divisions in Indian-held Kashmir. But it has backfired since then, tarring Pakistan with the brush of cross-border terrorism.
What poisoned gifts have we not received from that wellspring of things unintended called the Afghan ‘jihad’? Misplaced triumphalism corrupted the thinking of an entire generation of our military men who, forgetting the American Stingers and the unending stream of dollars channelled through the good offices of the CIA and Saudi intelligence, were seduced by the thought that it was the power of Islam, the power of faith, which had driven the Soviets from the killing fields of Afghanistan.
Nor was that all…they chose to turn faith – or blind belief – into a defining principle of foreign and defence policy. From the cauldron of such thinking arose the doctrine of Kashmir ‘jihad’ – an idea whose time is over but whose vestiges or lingering traces remain in the patronage or indulgence still extended to non-state organisations ostensibly devoted to the liberation of Kashmir.
Kashmir cannot be liberated by arms. This is the overwhelming lesson of our accident-prone history. A strong and prosperous Pakistan, firmly set on the path of development, home to all that is good and uplifting in human thought and endeavour, can be as the North Star to Kashmiri hopes and aspirations. This is what we should aim at. The problem of Taiwan will not be settled overnight. We need to take a similar long-term view of Kashmir.
The lesson of Syria and Iraq, and that of Libya and Afghanistan, is that the meek or the defenceless do not inherit the earth. I recently attended a conference in Hong Kong and it was an eye-opening experience to see a delegate from Nepal and a few from Bangladesh openly and bitterly critical of Indian diktat and interference. With India yet to reach that level of maturity where it stops throwing its weight around vis-à-vis its neighbours, Pakistan cannot afford to lower its guard.
But this awareness is one thing. Paranoia is an altogether different commodity. Our army and air force, not to mention the navy, are enough to deter any notion of aggression – and this remains true even if a third of the army is now employed on the western marches in the war against so-called radical Islamism – an offshoot of: 1) the Afghan ‘jihad’; and 2) the American invasion of Afghanistan.
Without the Americans blundering into Afghanistan, especially the manner in which they went about it, we would still have had our extremism problem. The dragon’s teeth were scattered long ago. But the Americans made it infinitely worse.
I have gone off on a tangent. Despite all current preoccupations, including the military’s engagement along the Durand Line, Pakistan has strength enough to deter any aggression. And our nukes, what are they for? Aren’t they enough of a deterrent?
But if we say, as our generals do, that our strategic nuke capability is still not enough of a deterrent to deter an Indian conventional attack, then it either means that we are dealing with insanity or that our strategic nukes are so useless that they were best kept on a desert island.
This entire thesis rests on a frightening premise. It suggests, first, that India, despite our strategic nukes, can still launch a conventional attack and that to stop that we need smaller nukes – artillery batteries firing short-range nuclear-tipped missiles to stop Indian tanks from overwhelming our defences.
What kind of alarmism is this? If tactical nuclear missiles are the only defence against an Indian tank advance then the first thing we should be doing is disbanding the 1st and 6th armoured divisions – for we are already implying that they won’t be enough to stop an Indian attack. And when we deploy those missiles wouldn’t the Indians follow suit? Then wouldn’t we need more missiles to pre-empt an Indian second nuclear attack, and a third and so on?
This is a slippery path and it has no end. During the cold war the Americans and the Russians tried to match each other bomb for bomb and missile for missile – until they reached the point where each side could destroy not just themselves but the entire planet ten times over. India and Pakistan currently have the capability to destroy each other completely. Once a nuclear exchange starts nothing will be left – not Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, not Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi. So what are our warriors – from both sides – talking about?
Forget about what the Americans are saying or what their concerns are. We should have the sense to think this through ourselves. India and Pakistan are more than self-sufficient in poverty, people, open-air latrines – incidentally, the largest in the world – tanks and nuclear armaments. Just as they don’t need more poverty they for sure don’t need more nuke bombs and missiles, whatever the fancy doctrines fuelling such crazy notions.
Tailpiece: But all is not grim and dark. The made-to-order survey outfits – Pildat funded by American money and Gallup Pakistan funded by God knows who – can always be depended upon to lighten the public mood. Their surveys, as the initiated know all too well, are largely exercises in unrestrained comedy. The latest Pildat survey puts Nawaz Sharif’s and Shahbaz Sharif’s popularity at near Hosni Mubarak levels. No wonder it has excited laughter far and wide.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com