Merry Christmas to US’s ‘absurdity’

US sanctions on Pakistan's missile program highlight concerns over regional balance, not global threat.

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Pakistan’s nuclear and missile program has always remained a matter of great concern for the United States and, therefore, has been subjected to related sanctions since the 1980s.

The apprehensions on missile capabilities date back to the late 1990s and early 2000s when the US official reports suggested that the Chinese entities were providing considerable assistance to Pakistan’s long-range ballistic missile program.

Fast forward to 2024, based on similar suspicions, the US in October, imposed sanctions on three Chinese entities for supplying missile-applicable items to Pakistan and on four Pakistani entities including the National Development Complex (NDC) in December.

What the US gains from imposing these sanctions is debatable, as Pakistan has continued to strengthen its strategic and missile capabilities to restore the regional balance which is frequently disturbed by Indian developments – be it the Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system, the wish to pre-empt Pakistani nuclear forces, or basing its strategic platforms on farthest territories like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in an attempt to ensure their survivability against credible yet minimalistic Pakistani capability.

Pakistan has continued to restore the balance even once the technology denial was at its peak and Pakistan had to rely on foreign procurements.

The US has, at several instances, expressed concern over Pakistan’s missile ranges and the number of nuclear warheads that the US experts believe Pakistan to be possessing. The desire to cap and limit Pakistan’s strategic capability serves the interests of its regional allies.

Although the sanctions are not unprecedented, the accompanying commentary by the US Deputy National Security Adviser (NSA), Jon Finer, that highlights Pakistan’s long-range missile capability as an ‘emerging threat’ to the US is new, disturbing, and unprecedented.

Shaheen-III, with a range of 2,750km, is Pakistan’s longest-range missile, which even if all logics are defied, is not capable of hitting targets in the US Development of an even-longer range missile does not serve any of Pakistan’s deterrence requirements.

Issuance of such illogical statements from the US officials can only work to complicate the relationship between the two countries as a new Administration assumes offices in the US

Pakistan has time and again reiterated that it’s nuclear and missile capability is India-centric and does not have any extra-regional factors associated. There is a tendency to take the negative side of every Pakistani policymaker’s statement on nuclear issues at face value.

While the zero-range part of former Pakistani Director General for Strategic Plans Division, Lt Gen (Retd) Khalid Kidwai, was picked up; there’s little trust in the latter part of the statement that specified the upper limit for missile ranges at 2750km.

The US is grasping at straws while ignoring the elephant in the room. Indian ICBM capability includes the existing Agni-V (5400kms), while DRDO is also developing even a longer-range missile Agni-VI (12000kms), which should raise alarms in the West.

Unfortunately, it is believed that India is unlikely to pursue capabilities beyond China and that the requirement for ranges should be calculated from the farthest point in the operating country to the farthest point in the adversary’s landmass.

However, the same criterion is not applied while assessing the rationale for the development of Pakistan’s Shaheen-III missile that barely reaches the farthest points in India.

Anything exceeding the stated Indian objective of deterrence vis-à-vis China would indicate either a technological competition driven by status or catering for a deterrent capability to address potential threats from across the globe – including from the US.

At the doctrinal level, Indian missiles with ranges up to 12,000 km go well beyond what may be required for maintaining a credible minimum deterrent vis-à-vis China and Pakistan.

The US should refrain from self-imposing threats to its security only for the sake of portraying Pakistan’s genuine deterrent capability as irrational. With this needless alarmism regarding Pakistan’s strategic capability, the outgoing US administration has left a bitter after-taste for the incumbent government to deal with.

Pakistan and the US are already witnessing a low in their relationship and such misplaced assertions will only exacerbate the existing insecurities and mistrust. There are already a number of misperceptions about each other between the US and Pakistan.

This was an ill-thought remark that will provide a basis for further misplaced analyses and informing the US threat perceptions for the times to come as this statement will likely be used in a host of policy memos, backgrounders, opinion articles, and academic papers.

The discrimination lies only within the fact that even stated Indian intentions to counter a potential US threat through nuclear deterrent are ignored and ‘analyses’ are fabricated to present Pakistan’s minimalistic and India-centric capability as a global threat.

The writer is a Research Fellow at IPRI, Pakistan’s premier think tank