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Pak jihad’s nuclear umbrella

How is that Pakistan, a country with a shambolic economy and an army that has never won a war, can unremittingly orchestrate a deadly arpeggio of terror against India, a larger and generally better-armed country, without any significant adverse repercussions? Not only has Pakistan deliberately cultivated a menagerie of Islamist militant groups to harass India and Afghanistan since its inception as an independent state in 1947, many of the 9/11 conspirators stayed and enjoyed sanctuary in Pakistan, while — perhaps most egregiously — US forces located and killed Osama bin Laden in the cantonment town of Abbottabad, less than one mile from the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy.

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C. Christine Fair

How is that Pakistan, a country with a shambolic economy and an army that has never won a war, can unremittingly orchestrate a deadly arpeggio of terror against India, a larger and generally better-armed country, without any significant adverse repercussions? Not only has Pakistan deliberately cultivated a menagerie of Islamist militant groups to harass India and Afghanistan since its inception as an independent state in 1947, many of the 9/11 conspirators stayed and enjoyed sanctuary in Pakistan, while — perhaps most egregiously — US forces located and killed Osama bin Laden in the cantonment town of Abbottabad, less than one mile from the prestigious Pakistan Military Academy. Despite what was surely a vertiginous outrage to the United States, Pakistan escaped American wrath unscathed. Understanding how Pakistan has managed to use Islamist (and non-Islamist) proxies with breathtaking impunity requires one to grasp how the state developed its nuclear program precisely to shield it from reprisals for its proxy warfare strategy. In many ways, the history of Pakistan’s nuclear program and strategy of proxy warfare are inexorably tied together.

Not only does Pakistan’s nuclear program constrain India’s punitive options, it also keeps in check the options of the international community, which is also coerced by Pakistan’s fast expanding arsenal. Punishing Pakistan for using terrorists as an elemental pillar of foreign policy will require not only India but the United States as well to disencumber themselves from Pakistan’s nuclear coercion strategy. While not impossible, doing so is politically risky and few policy makers would be willing seriously to contemplate such options.

Pakistan first grasped the utility of proxy actors in 1947, when it mobilized lashkars (or tribal militias) from Pakistan’s Pashtun areas to invade and seize Kashmir. From 1947 until the mid-1980s, Pakistan supported various kinds of low-level sabotage. Its efforts to spark a wider insurgency in the 1960s failed. Pakistan’s opportunity and capabilities to cultivate mayhem dramatically improved in the mid-1980s when Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir began to rebel against New Delhi for an array of excesses including appalling electoral manipulation, malfeasance in managing Kashmiri political expectations, and state-sponsored violence against protestors. While the uprising began indigenously, by the early 1990s Pakistani Islamist militants had taken the helm from the local ethnic Kashmiri insurgents who had initiated this phase of political violence.

While Pakistan is renowned for its efforts to instigate Islamist insurgency and terrorism, it has also supported other militant movements in India. In the mid-1950s, Pakistan (as well as China) backed India’s Naga rebels in the northeast and, in the 1960s, Pakistan supported the Mizo rebels, also in India’s northeast. From the mid-1970s through the early-1990s, Pakistan also supported the Sikh insurgency in Punjab. Similarly, before and during the 1971 war in East Pakistan, the military relied upon Islamist militants to brutalize ethnic Bengalis in East Pakistan.

To complement and enable its advances at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, Pakistan also innovated at the strategic level through the acquisition of nuclear weapons. We now know that Pakistan had a crude device around 1983–4, if not earlier. Varun Sahni, describing Pakistan’s beliefs that its capabilities deterred crises with India in the 1980s, refers to the lingering but indecisive role of nuclear weapons as “nuclear overhang.” As Pakistan became increasingly confident of its nuclear capabilities, it was ever more emboldened to use its proxies in India, secure in the belief that India would be unable to punish Pakistan militarily. Consequently, Pakistan’s adventurism in India became bolder both through the use of state-sponsored proxies, but also through Pakistani security forces masquerading as militants in the 1999 Kargil War. Until the reciprocal nuclear tests by India and then Pakistan in May 1998, scholars used a term introduced by McGeorge Bundy, “existential deterrence,” to describe the deterrence that seemed to exist between India and Pakistan. Given the opacity and uncertainty surrounding the two countries’ programs, the mutual deterrence calculation of India and Pakistan did not rest on “relative capabilities and strategic doctrines, but on the shared realization that each side is nuclear-capable, and thus any outbreak of conflict might lead to a nuclear war.”

PAKISTAN’S NUCLEARIZED JIHAD

After the 1971 war, the Pakistan army was demoralized and held in low esteem by its citizens after effectively losing half the country. The people’s ire was compounded when they learned that Pakistan had been defeated despite unremitting state propaganda to the contrary. Z.A. Bhutto, whose Pakistan Peoples’ Party won the largest share of votes in West Pakistan in the 1970–1 elections, seized the reins of power. He had wanted to pursue a nuclear weapon as early as 1964; however, General Ayub rebuffed him then, arguing that developing a weapon would alienate Pakistan’s western allies and furthermore, if necessary, Pakistan could likely “buy a weapon off the shelf somewhere,” presumably from one of its Western allies. With his now unchecked authority, Bhutto began actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, hoping to curry favor with the army, diminish the chance of a coup, and consolidate the role of civilian decision-making in security and defense matters. Bhutto tasked A.Q. Khan with the ignominious task of stealing nuclear secrets for his country, and established two rival organizations in the hopes that their competition would hasten Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. In his gasconading death-row autobiography, If I am Assassinated, Bhutto professed that the United States facilitated Zia’s coup for the sole purpose of denying Pakistan a nuclear future. (I found no evidence to support this claim in any secondary or primary source I have encountered.) According to Bhutto, when he came to power in December 1971, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program was twenty years behind that of the Indians. However, by the time he was deposed, in 1977, Pakistan was on the threshold of possessing a nuclear capability. 

Excerpted with permission from the publisher

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