Indo-Pakistan conflict has dangerous escalation potential
By Praful Bidwai in New Delhi
May 27, 1999
Barely three months after what was claimed to be their "historic"
summit for peace and reconciliation at Lahore, India and Pakistan
are back shelling each other and exchanging bellicose and vicious
rhetoric across the Kashmir border near the town of Kargil, 200
km from Srinagar.
The conflict, involving the use of Indian air power at the border
for the first time in 27 years, this time to repulse alleged
intruders, has the potential to escalate to dangerous levels.
Although India says the operation is confined to its side of the
line of control (LoC), as the disputed boundary is called,
Pakistan claims that some bombs have fallen on its territory and
it regards the matter as "very, very serious", grim enough to put
its forces on high alert.
Menacingly, the border is undemarcated on the ground.
Both states accuse each other of having acted in bad faith,
started hostilities, and breached the letter and spirit of both
the Lahore Declaration of February 21 and the Simla Agreement
signed after the Bangladesh war of 1971. India says it will hold
Pakistan alone "responsible" for any escalation of the Kargil
conflict. The Pakistani foreign minister says: "Pakistan is
already retaliating and will retaliate."
At work in the Kargil conflict is a complex dynamic driven by
mutual suspicion and distrust on a range of issues, unresolved
but deep differences over Jammu and Kashmir, insecurities about
each other's military capacities and intentions, opacity in
strategic and foreign policy-making and in sharing of pertinent
information with each other and with the public, and above all,
domestic political factors, particularly the severe crisis of
legitimacy which the two governments face.
The Kargil crisis further highlights the perils of the crossing
of the nuclear threshold in South Asia exactly one year ago.
This confrontation began three weeks ago when the Indian army
first detected the presence of what it called armed
"infiltrators", or mujaheedin guerrillas allegedly backed by
Pakistan, near the heights of Kargil and Drass. (Pakistan denies
supporting them, but says they are Kashmiri "freedom-fighters").
Such cross-border forays have been routine for years, especially
after the winter snows melt, as are exchanges of heavy artillery
fire. More than 350 exchanges were reported in less than six
months after the nuclear tests.
What is new about the present case is the relatively large number
of guerrillas crossing the border (officially estimated in India
first at 300 and later at 680, and unofficially at 1,000 to
1,500) and their success in penetrating seven km into Indian
territory and establishing relatively well-equipped camps over
an area reportedly as large as 15 square km. Apparently, the
Indian army's routine operations failed to dislodge the
militants.
Army sources say this is the first time in 50 years that India
faced a virtual occupation of its territory near its western
border, however small--and that too in "peace time". Why the army
allowed the situation to aggravate and reach this point remains
unexplained.
The official line as stated by Indian home minister L.K. Advani
is that the infiltrators included "army regulars along with
mercenaries" from Pakistan. "This is incursion into our territory
with the clear endorsement of the Pakistan army." India says it
had no option but to use air power to soften up the intruders and
cut off their supply lines.
Semi-official Indian briefings emphasise that the air strikes'
rationale is that any delay would have encouraged Pakistan to
extend its operations; non-eviction of the "infiltrators" would
have changed the alignment of the LoC to India's disadvantage;
the security of the vital Srinagar-Leh road would have been
threatened; and continued occupation of the heights would have
led to further infiltration.
In the absence of full and verifiable information, the only
inference that can be drawn is that after the Indian army failed
to dislodge the militants, perhaps after sustaining high
casualties itself (according to the local Kashmiri press), the
government decided to launch air strikes.
Such strikes are apparently being carried out by helicopter
gunships and a range of combat aircraft including MiG-21s and
MiG-27s, with MiG-29s, providing cover. These strikes add a new
element of speed to the military confrontation and involve the
risk of aircraft straying across the border, and bombs and
rockets missing targets and hitting militarily significant assets
in Pakistan.
Given the many grey areas along the undemarcated border, the
chances of escalation through retaliation and counter-
retaliation, or through strategic misperception or
miscalculation, are distressingly high.
The history of India-Pakistan rivalry is replete with
miscalculation. In 1965, for instance, Gen Ayub Khan thought that
merely parachuting troops into Kashmir would trigger a popular
rebellion against India. This started a bitter war which Pakistan
did not win.
In 1986-87, a routine Indian military exercise ("Operation
Brasstacks") went out of control. Pakistan's generals read some
of its manoeuvres as threatening and deeply offensive. An
eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation ensued.
The most serious such crisis occurred in 1990 when another
military exercise spun out of control. The Pakistan government
apparently felt threatened enough to want to "brandish the
nuclear sword" in an indirect and oblique fashion. According to a
number of experts, it lined up trucks at the Kahuta uranium
enrichment plant to demonstratively indicate its willingness to
escalate the confrontation to the nuclear level.
The crisis was defused only when the U.S. sent a high-powered
functionary, Robert Gates, to New Delhi and Islamabad, urging
restraint.
The present stand-off raises three serious questions: Was the
Pakistan army or its Inter Services Intelligence agency really
involved in the "infiltration"? If so, did it act independently
or with the civilian administration's concurrence? Why did all
the mutual-consultation and confidence-building measures agreed
by the two states to avoid conflict fail? And what determined the
timing of the Indian air strikes?
If the Pakistani army was involved, that would cast doubts both
over the viability of limited "good faith" agreements such as
those reached at Lahore and the ability of the Nawaz Sharif
government to prevail over the army which is considered all-
powerful and the final arbiter of political decisions in
Pakistan.
If, on the other hand, the Indian claim is false, then that would
put a question-mark over the transparency that "democratic India"
professes. Such transparency has always been low in Kashmir where
the public has limited access to information and cannot verify
official claims.
Secondly, the crisis exposes the flimsiness of the substantive
(as distinct from symbolic) aspect of the Lahore process. The
Lahore accords are not really about serious arms restraint and
control. They are at best about good intentions to improve
relations and about transparency of a very limited kind.
For instance, India and Pakistan did not agree to bilateral
measures to reduce the danger of nuclear war, but only to
(unspecified) "national measures" to reduce "accidental or
unauthorised use of nuclear weapons under their respective
control." They agreed not to suspend their nuclear and missile
programmes, but only to inform each other of test flights, etc.
They agreed "to continue to abide by their respective unilateral
moratorium on conducting further nuclear test explosions--unless
either side ... decides that extraordinary events have
jeopardised its supreme interests."
Thirdly, it is entirely plausible that the timing of the Indian
decision to bring air power, and hence greater mobility and
speed, into play, had something to do with the temptation of the
Vajpayee government (itself a "caretaker", which has lost
Parliament's confidence) to outmanoeuvre its domestic political
opponents.
The ruling coalition is in deep trouble and its principal
opponent, the Congress, is on the upswing with the return of
Sonia Gandhi as president after her resignation following the
questioning of her credentials to lead the country on account of
her "foreign origins" by dissident leaders.
Domestic considerations have indeed played a role in the past--as
in 1986-87 and then again in the early 1990s. They also explain
why the political opposition in India is not unconditionally
supporting the government on Kargil and criticises it for
mishandling the issue.
In Pakistan, the Sharif government has brutally cracked down on
critical journalists and public-spirited NGOs and women's groups
as it desperately seeks a figleaf of legitimacy through Islam to
cover up corruption and misgovernance.
Kargil starkly demonstrates the falsehood of the assumption that
nuclearisation has imparted stability or maturity to India-
Pakistan relations, or reduced the danger of a conventional
conflict. If anything, it has created more insecurity.--end--
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