Why war should not be an option

Many moons ago, strategists from both India and Pakistan had concluded that war of the type that the two countries fought in 1965 or 1971 was not an option any longer. Nuclear parity and its deterrence value had forced this reality into military thinking on both sides.

Unresolved issues between the two pushed them into finding alternate means of war. General Musharraf, the army chief in 1998, made his surreptitious move in Kargil, unknown to the political government. If ever there was the need to determine the space for a limited conflict, Musharraf's ill-thought adventurism helped define the domain.

Regardless of whatever other positive attributes of the late General one might list, this one fact of puncturing the deterrence regime, even if ever so slightly, will countervail all else that he exhibited in his leadership. It was poor judgment, plain and simple.

It goes to the credit of Vajpayee that recognising the risk involved in the new paradigm of conflict he kept Kargil restricted and limited. Another major event that inflamed resident hostility was the 2008 Mumbai attack — jury is out on its genesis and enactment, but it hurt prospects of anything positive between the two to its irrecoverable and insurmountable breaking point.

Since then, the smallest of incidents can raise the specter of a war to its ultimate finality. The reality of the nuclear overhang, however, establishes the limits to how the two nations may fight their civilisational battles. Why they choose the futile is driven by the civilisational hate that triggers such a primordial resort.

All the development and progression that mankind has seen in the last half century has failed to cut through the base instinct that drives emotion and sentiment in this part of the world. When mankind will only survive through cooperation in the face of challenges that manifest in the future, South Asia continues to buck the trend.

Consider the geopolitics of war and the challenges that beckon the two militaries. India has an active northern front with China. The Line of Actual Control is the line of actual contact. That is how close and eyeball-to-eyeball the two armies stand. Ditto, with the Pakistani military on the Line of Control in Kashmir.

Wars in these two sectors will consume armies for their impassability. There is no strategic end that these sectors can deliver because of operational and tactical restraints. Also, the two sectors are contiguous where the heat of one easily reaches the other. These are not inherent flashpoints; these are real war sectors with pervasive deployments by the three nuclear neighbours. Only a fool will venture into anything beyond showing eyes or lathis and verbal abuse.

India's northeast is hot but hasn't yet boiled to the level where simultaneous actions can begin to worry. Garrisoned forces aren't yet fully deployed, and the nature is still very much insurrectionist — not military dominated. The Indian military is spread thin, and badly at that. The state of its air force is chronicled by its chief in his public utterings.

Plus, what objective will any military operation serve? Without a clear and achievable military objective, the exercise is at best hot air. Armies don't like to be wasted in useless, self-serving political ends of those in power, or in service of sentiment alone.

Indian military chiefs are baying for the blood of their civilian masters for inadequacies in their operational readiness. An irrational military adventurism can only exacerbate the imbalance in its system of forces and prolong the pain, and take India further from its dream of mimicking China at the global level.

Pakistan is in a similar bind. Its western borders and the terror emanating out of Afghanistan in its western provinces continue to absorb Pakistani military's attention and focus. It also is an imminent threat that cannot be let to persist for a stabler and a quieter inner front - Pakistan's economic and social imperative.

India played a great hand following the 1971 secession of what became Bangladesh when it tied Pakistan in bilateralism as the resort to resolve all issues. That in a way dulled the exactitude latent in the UNSC Resolution which had ordained both sides to a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir. What could be discussed remained bound to the whims of India.

When the incumbent BJP government under Narendra Modi began actively encouraging and supporting an insurgency and terror it forced Pakistan's liberty of action in a very limited domain — keeping itself safe from terror from Afghanistan. That slowly imposed on Pakistan a strategic withdrawal from Kashmir, if not operational and tactical.

By calling the long-serving Indus Water Treaty into question, India has literally unshackled Pakistan from its binds. Were Pakistan to follow suit and declare the Simla Accord dissolved she shall be freed from any bilateral construct with India and raise Kashmir as a legal and a political issue across all international forums serving these causes. This is India's strategic misstep that she will rue in time.

Similarly, by repeating the now dead and beaten façade of false-flag events India has played the fox far too often and lost its credibility. It will help to ask for neutral, transparent investigation into any such event if India thinks she has sufficient cause to allege Pakistan with a misdeed.

Else there is enough in her baggage to pin the blame on its own design and mechanisms. Pahalgam, like many before, is heading in the same direction of blame and counter-blame and not getting any trek with international observers and governments.

The reality of a two-front scenario is haunting enough already. In South Asia it was first brought up by China's Ambassador to Delhi in the 1950s when he threatened India with such an eventuality if things headed South as rapidly as they did then, leading to the war in 1962. When its western borders were activated by not so surreptitious Indian involvement with Afghan terror groups Pakistan very wisely toned down its engagement on the eastern border to focus on the west.

In the last few weeks heinous terror attacks by groups like BLA and the TTP — Indian funded and sponsored (openly admitted by its NSA) — and Pakistan's resolve to nip this evil with fullest force including incorporating support of the Afghan Taliban may have irked India enough to impose the second front on Pakistan diluting its attention and diverting its focus away from the west.

This is a hypothesis unlikely to be corroborated by Indian NSA's another public admission but has all the markers of a game conceived and enacted by Ajit Doval and his ilk. He swore to it before he took office and lived to it for the entire length of his continuing tenure as the NSA under Modi.

If that means the two nations will go to a full-fledged war with dreams of a 1971-like victory that Doval wants to pin on the 56-inch chest of his equally venomous boss, I don't see the making of it.

Except that the two nations will again be thrown back in time even as the rest of the world moves on in a rapidly changing global environment. But the likes of Doval have neither an understanding of it nor a concern. And there are no statesmen around to check the primal instincts of such henchmen. The region stands once again on the anvil of another obliteration. Pakistan would have no choice.