Pathankot, Charsadda and the Curse of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The complexity of South Asia’s security dynamics once more came into full view last month.  The new year was barely more than a day old when a group of Pakistan-based jihadis slipped into a major Indian air base at Pathankot and engaged in a multi-day firefight that left at least seven security personnel dead and wounded about 20 more.  The attack came less than a month after U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned of the possibility of “an unintentional conflict” between New Delhi and Islamabad sparked by a terrorist strike.

New Delhi places blame for the assault on a militant outfit called Jaish-e-Mohammad (“The Army of Mohammad”), which is also thought to have played a role in the brazen December 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian parliament – an event that in turn ignited a months-long military confrontation between India and Pakistan.

Two weeks after the Pathankot attack, another jihadi band snuck across the border from Afghanistan and massacred least 20 students and teachers at a university in Charsadda in the northwestern part of Pakistan close to the country’s tribal belt, a notoriously lawless area festooned with all kinds of extremist organizations.  Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a faction of the Pakistan Taliban that had carried out the horrific December 2014 slaughter of some 140 children at a school in nearby Peshawar that is managed by the Pakistani army.

Both attacks this month were conducted at widely-separated locations by two different jihadi networks with distinct agendas.  JeM, which benefits from links with Pakistani’s security services, is focused on wresting control of the Indian portion of Kashmir away from New Delhi. The Pakistan Taliban, on the other hand, directs its energies to attacking the institutions of the Pakistani state.

But both groups share a few similarities.  First, they find shelter in cross-border sanctuaries, effectively placing them beyond the retaliation of the aggrieved countries.  JeM has been officially banned in Pakistan since 2002 but nonetheless maintains an open presence in the country’s Punjab heartland.  Indeed, Pakistani authorities have attempted in recent years to build up the organization in an attempt to diminish the Pakistan Taliban’s ideological appeal and lure away its foot soldiers.

In contrast, the Pakistani army has mostly driven the Pakistan Taliban out of that country.  But the group has found refuge in Afghanistan, in connivance with Afghan officials seeking to pay Islamabad back for its patronage of the Afghan Taliban.  A senior Pakistan Taliban leader recently conceded to a Western journalist that “In Pakistan we can hardly operate anymore.  In Afghanistan, we have no problem going anywhere.”

A second similarity between JeM and the Pakistan Taliban is that they are manifestations of what can be called the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” problem.

Read the full essay at Fair Observer.

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Pakistan’s Evolving Nuclear Weapon Posture: Impact on Deterrence Stability

This essay provides an overview of the ongoing quantitative and qualitative changes in Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and their impact on deterrence stability vis-à-vis India. Prominent among these trends is a major expansion in fissile material production that enables the manufacture of lighter and more compact warheads optimized for battlefield missions; the development of cruise missiles and shorter-range ballistic missiles possessing dual-use capabilities; and a greater emphasis in doctrinal pronouncements on the need for strike options geared to all levels of conflict. Although these trends pose problematic ramifications for the risks of unauthorized and inadvertent escalation, deterrence stability in South Asia is not as precarious as many observers fear. The challenges of fashioning a robust nuclear peace between India and Pakistan cannot be lightly dismissed, however, and policy makers would do well to undertake some reinforcing measures.

Read the full essay in a special issue on “Nuclear Stability in South Asia” published this week in The Nonproliferation Review.

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Hamid Gul and Pakistan’s Schizophrenia

The recent passing of Hamid Gul, the Pakistani general who served as head of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in the late 1980s, elicited a good deal of media commentary about the instrumental role he played on several fronts: the collapse of the Soviet Union; the jihadization of Afghanistan and Pakistan; and the destabilization of the Punjab and Kashmir regions in India.

But Gul also exemplified the oscillations within the Pakistani military establishment between anti-India paranoia and the desire to stabilize relations with Delhi.

The example of Hamid Gul and his successors illustrates what is a basic frustration for Indian leaders: Any rapprochement with Pakistan can only come about via a military establishment that swings between paranoia and pragmatism.  The anti-India fixation receives much focus these days.  But officials in New Delhi would also do well not to lose sight of the desire to find equilibrium in relations.

Read the rest of the essay on Fair Observer‘s website.

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India-Pakistan Relations: Everything Old is New Again

Midnight’s Furies, Nisid Hajari’s new book about the violent division of the British Raj in India, has garnered much praise for its focus on how the decisions taken by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1946-1948 period embittered India-Pakistan relations right from the very start.  But one of the volume’s under-noticed contributions is highlighting how bilateral security issues with plenty of modern-day resonance were also present in spades at the creation.

Read the rest of the essay on Asia Sentinel‘s website.

One of the issues I examine in the essay is the peril of catalytic war — that is, the danger of freebooting non-state groups mounting operations aimed at provoking inadvertent conflict between New Delhi and Islamabad as a way of advancing their own interests.  I argued in a post last month that a number of militant attacks illustrate this menace, and the Indian government seems to be believe that this week’s terrorist attack in Gurdaspur in the Indian state of Punjab may yet another example.

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India, Pakistan, and the Problem of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The National Interest website has posted my essay questioning whether the deterrent signals India is sending toward Pakistan these days are all that relevant to the gravest terrorist threats India faces from that direction.

India’s commando raid into Myanmar the other week has generated a great deal of debate about the propriety of New Delhi’s chest-beating and its utility to the specific challenge of jihadi attacks emanating from Pakistani soil.  Some criticize the Modi government for seeking domestic political gain while embarrassing the regime in Myanmar which clearly wants to keep its anti-militancy cooperation under wraps.  Others question the wisdom of highlighting operational details about an instrument of state power that should properly remain in the shadows.  And still others doubt whether a similar special-forces mission can even be undertaken against Pakistan-based targets.

Unexamined in the discussion, however, is the critical question of whether the deterrence signals India is transmitting are even applicable to the threats emanating from Pakistan.  The bombastic attitude in New Delhi these days fails to differentiate between jihadi groups over which Pakistan has some control and uses to its own strategic purposes as opposed to the large number of outfits that operate in defiance of the Pakistani state and see triggering unintended conflict between New Delhi and Islamabad as a way to advance their own interests.

Last fall Reuters quoted an Indian security official as acknowledging that “It has been clear for some time that there is no [jihadi] group that is fully within [Pakistan’s] control. They are all itching for independent action, some want to have a go at us immediately.”  Yet so far, Mr. Modi’s government shows no evidence of even recognizing the resulting deterrence conundrum.   But the failure to do so could well lead to military conflict neither country intends.

Indeed, the challenge of preventing mass-casualty attacks by Pakistan-based jihadi groups may not even be one well addressed by threats of punitive retaliation – either in the military realm or by suborning terrorism inside Pakistan as the Modi government has suggested (see here and here).  Rather, the priority might better be placed on bolstering India’s domestic counterterrorism apparatus, whose woeful state was laid bare by the November 2008 Mumbai attacks (see here, here, here and here) and whose repair remains unfinished (see here, here and here) more than six years later.

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India and the Limits of Effective Deterrence vis-à-vis Pakistan

By emphasized the resort to covert action in response to another major attack on Indian soil from Pakistan-based militants, did India’s defense minister implicitly acknowledge the sharp limits of conventional deterrence vis-à-vis Pakistan?

Read the rest of the essay via The Diplomat.

See here for an earlier post on the problems of Modi’s hard line toward Pakistan.

[UPDATE, June 9: The Indian army today carried out an airborne commando assault on two militant camps in neighboring Myanmar.  The operation, which reportedly inflicted “significant causalities,” was in response to a militant attack a few days ago that killed nearly 20 Indian troops in Manipur, a state in northeastern India that is afflicted by insurgents sheltering in Myanmar.  The Indian action was also motivated by “specific intelligence” pointing to more imminent militant attacks.

Some analysts argue that the Indian strike “is not likely to go unnoticed in the neighborhood” and will have a salutary effect on Pakistan’s behavior.  This is most probably not the case, however, since today’s operation was launched with the permission of the Myanmar military and focused on targets located a few kilometers inside that country.  In contrast, a cross-border raid aimed at Pakistan-based jihadis would be a much more difficult and risky undertaking, so much so as to give pause to Indian political leaders.]

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Musharraf Needs a History Lesson on Kargil

My last post took issue with the historical amnesia of some Indian political leaders regarding the record of diplomatic engagement with Pakistan.  I turn my attention now to the self-serving reading of the 1999 Kargil mini-war between the two countries being offered by Pervez Musharraf, who was Pakistan’s army chief at the time and is currently in the dock facing charges of high treason for suspending the Constitution and implementing emergency rule in 2007.

In remarks the other week, Musharraf claimed he initiated the conflict in order to retaliate against India’s military intervention into the 1971 political crisis in East Pakistan that eventuated into the creation of Bangladesh as well as India’s 1984 surprise seizure of the Siachen Glacier, an uninhabitable stretch of the Himalayas north of Kashmir that is contested by both militaries.  As Musharraf boasted, “I believed in a tit-for-tat policy on all fronts.”

He has advanced this point before, such as in his 2006 memoir in which he contended that the Kargil operation was a splendid tactical success that was undone by the fecklessness of then- Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.  But the truth of the matter is far less flattering to Musharraf’s reputation as a military leader and to the Pakistani army’s claim of institutional competence.

The Kargil conflict, named for a town in the mountainous reaches of northern Kashmir around which the fighting took place, began in early 1999 when a sizeable Pakistani force (numbering at least 1,500 – 2,000 and perhaps more) of lightly-armed mountain infantry troops infiltrated across the Line of Control – as the Kashmir divide between Indian and Pakistani troops is called – and seized large swaths of rugged territory that had been vacated by Indian soldiers during the winter.  By the time the intruders were discovered in May, they had occupied over 300 square miles of Indian territory and were in a position to interdict a strategic highway linking the Siachen Glacier to the rest of Kashmir.

In response, New Delhi launched a fierce and sustained counterattack.  The ensuing two-month battle featured intense ground fighting, heavy artillery barrages and the first combat sorties undertaken by the Indian air force since the Bangladesh war.  The crisis was finally defused by a combination of Indian battlefield successes and U.S. diplomatic intervention.

Significant details about the conflict remain a matter of debate, including the casualty figures.  Two years ago, the Indian defense minister reported that 530 battle deaths occurred on the Indian side, though the Indian army’s official website lists the number at close to 1,000.  And while Pakistan refuses to disclose its losses, observers estimate 400-700 fatalities.

Two recent sources have provided important clarification to parts of the historical record, however.  The first is a 2009 study of the crisis that is the most authoritative to emerge to date.  The second is a series of disclosures (here and here) made last year by retired General Shahid Aziz, who was the head of the analysis branch of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency during the crisis.  He would later go on to serve as director-general of military operations and chief of the general staff – both prestigious positions in the Pakistani army.

The two sources paint a far less heroic portrait than the one Musharraf supplies.  To start, Musharraf and a handful of other military leaders planned the Kargil operation in such isolation that little thought was given to broader coordination within the Pakistani army as a whole, the other military services or the wider government.  The lack of foresight resulted in utter disarray in Islamabad’s response once the Indians discovered the incursion.  Aziz, for example, calls Musharraf’s scheme an “unsound military plan based on invalid assumptions, launched with little preparations and in total disregard to the regional and international environment.”

Moreover, the failure to prepare for the possibility of an Indian counterattack meant that no provision was made for troop reinforcement and logistical supply of units occupying captured territory.  And Islamabad’s desperate insistence once the battle was joined that the intruders were not Pakistani soldiers but jihadis over whom it had little control all but foreclosed coming to their rescue. Aziz is particularly harsh on this latter point, excoriating Musharraf for sending men into battle without doing detailed planning and then abandoning them once the fighting began.

As I noted last year when Aziz’s disclosures first surfaced, Musharraf’s misleading puffery has relevance beyond the question of who bears personal blame for the Kargil fiasco.  It taps into a false narrative long sustained by the Pakistani army, in which it is the only institution capable of safeguarding the nation’s well-being against India’s external depredations and the domestic follies of civilian-led administrations.

This line has decisively warped civil-military relations throughout Pakistan’s history.  Musharraf used it to justify his coup against Nawaz Sharif a few months after the Kargil crisis wound down.  And aided by subservient media outlets, it has been employed in the post-Musharraf period to undermine two successive elected governments seeking to improve relations with India, the first led by Asif Ali Zardari in 2008-2013 and now the one run by Sharif, who is back in a return engagement as prime minister.  But as the record of the Kargil conflict makes clear, the army’s narrative is far from solid.  The sooner it is discredited, the better for Pakistan’s development as a democratic polity.

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The BJP Needs a History Lesson on Pakistan Policy

An earlier post on India’s new get-tough approach toward Pakistan quoted M.J. Akbar, the national spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political home, as saying that New Delhi has no interest in engaging Pakistan diplomatically until Islamabad proves its credibility as a negotiating partner by lifting the shadow of terrorism.  In a discussion at the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last week, Mr. Akbar elaborated on this stance by saying, “There was 10 years of unrelenting goodwill” by Mr. Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, toward Pakistan “but it achieved nothing in return.” (An audio recording of the full discussion is available here.)

There is no doubt that Pakistan is a vexatious and duplicitous neighbor to all countries sharing borders with it.  In particular, as the new books by C. Christine Fair and Carlotta Gall remind us, it must surely hold the patent on the use of non-state proxies to inflict injury on adjoining nations.

But is the specific claim advanced by Akbar – that Indian diplomacy toward Pakistan over the last decade was futile – accurate?  Two huge pieces of contradictory evidence come to mind on this count.

The Wagah Bombing and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Pakistan

As a series of earlier posts note (here, here and here), the last few months have cast new light on the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” problem in Pakistan.  Drawing on Goethe’s classic tale about the dangers of conjuring up proxies one cannot ultimately control, this refers to the predicament Pakistan finds itself in whereby some of the Sunni-based jihadi forces it has long directed to do mayhem against others have now turned against it.

Besides causing increasing levels of chaos inside Pakistan*, the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” problem raises significant questions for Indian deterrence policy vis-à-vis its vexatious neighbor.  As then-U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned a while back, an ominous possibility exists that freebooting jihadi groups will mount operations aimed at catalyzing inadvertent war between New Delhi and Islamabad as a way to advance their own interests.  A timely illustration occurred in early September when jihadi forces assaulted a naval dockyard in Karachi, apparently with the aim of seizing a Pakistani frigate that would then be used to attack Indian warships with anti-ship missiles.

Although some details remain unclear, the suicide bombing earlier this month at Wagah, the main road border crossing with India, could well be another example.  The deadliest terrorist strike in Pakistan in over a year, it killed nearly 60 people, including three Pakistani paramilitary troops, and injured well over 100.  It occurred just inside Pakistani territory as the famous border-closing ceremony involving Indian and Pakistani guards was concluding at the end of the day.

A variety of jihadi outfits have claimed responsibility.  One of these, the Jundallah, a Pakistani Taliban offshoot, states that the bombing was in retaliation for the major military assault the Pakistani army launched this past summer to clear anti-government militants from the North Waziristan tribal area, a notoriously lawless zone along the border with Afghanistan that has become infested with all sorts of jihadi groups.  The operation commenced shortly after the terrorist attack on Karachi’s international airport in early June, and a senior commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan acknowledged earlier this month that it has weakened the Haqqani network, one of the main Pakistan-based jihadi groups fighting in that country.

But Wagah remains a curious choice if the real objective was payback for the North Waziristan operation.  Even with a heightened police profile due to the Shia holy day of Ashura, the public spaces in near-by Lahore, Pakistan’s second largest city, would have offered a much more inviting target.  The security presence at Wagah, which had been beefed up due to an intelligence report about a possible attack, should have served as a deterrent.  Indeed, the suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest at a security checkpoint half a kilometer away from the border.

This detail points to the possibility that the attack’s true objective was the infliction of mass casualties on the Indian side of the border.  If such an event had occurred, already strained ties between New Delhi and Islamabad could have been pushed to the breaking point.  As the eminent Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, notes:

Militant groups such as the [Pakistani] Taliban – which wants to topple the government in Islamabad – would like nothing better than a conflict between India and Pakistan to distract the army from north Waziristan. The easiest way to achieve this would be by planting bombs on the border, leading both governments to levy accusations of terrorism against each other.

Indian security officials have reportedly reached a similar conclusion.  The Economic Times quotes one as saying that “It appears the target of the bomber was India with collateral damages across the border, but he exploded due to some miscalculation.”

Further underscoring this possibility are the statements issued by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a newly-formed Pakistani Taliban splinter group also claiming to behind the bombing.  Its spokesman tweeted that “This attack was a message to the governments on both sides of the border. If we can carry out an attack on this side, then we can attack the other side too.”  He also warned that the group had set its sights on India and would avenge the deaths of Muslims in the disputed Kashmir region and in Gujarat, the home state of new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Following this threat, the Indian security services issued an unusual alert about a strike by Pakistan-based terrorists in the port city of Kolkata (Calcutta), causing the Indian navy in turn to hurriedly send two of its visiting warships to sea.

Reuters quotes an Indian security official as acknowledging that “It has been clear for some time that there is no [jihadi] group that is fully within [Pakistan’s] control. They are all itching for independent action, some want to have a go at us immediately.”  Yet it is unclear whether Mr. Modi’s government understands this as well.  The “zero-tolerance policy” it has adopted toward Islamabad suggests not.  But the failure to differentiate between jihadi forces over which Pakistan has some control and those that operate entirely in defiance of the Pakistani state could well lead to military conflict neither country intends.

*UPDATE, November 20: The newly-released Global Terrorism Index reports that, with the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan was the country most affected by terrorist activity in 2013.  The anti-state Pakistan Taliban was responsible for almost a quarter of all terrorist-related deaths that year, as well as half of all claimed attacks.  The report also notes that India ranked sixth, behind Syria but in front of Somalia and Yemen, in terms of the impact of terrorist action.

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The Problems with Modi’s Hard Line toward Pakistan

The new Indian government has pursued a noticeably harder line toward Pakistan-based terrorism than its predecessor.  During the recent electoral campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and promised to “Talk to Pakistan in Pakistan’s language because it won’t learn lessons until then.”  He has responded to the ongoing firefights along the Kashmir divide with aggressive shelling.  Consonant with his tough-guy image, that “The enemy has realised that times have changed and their old habits will not be tolerated,” and displaying his skill in wordplay that “This is not the time for empty talk [‘boli’] … but for bullet [‘goli’] for our soldiers.”The new Indian government has pursued a noticeably harder line toward Pakistan-based terrorism than its predecessor.  During the recent electoral campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a “zero-tolerance policy” and promised to “Talk to Pakistan in Pakistan’s language because it won’t learn lessons until then.”  He has responded to the ongoing firefights along the Kashmir divide with aggressive shelling.  Consonant with his tough-guy image, he boasts that “The enemy has realised that times have changed and their old habits will not be tolerated,” and displaying his skill in wordplay he proclaims that “This is not the time for empty talk [‘boli’] … but for bullet [‘goli’] for our soldiers.”

Mr. Modi’s national security advisor, Ajit Doval, stated last week that while New Delhi is willing to talk with Islamabad, “effective deterrence” is key to dealing with Pakistan.  Referring to the cross-border skirmishes in Kashmir, Indian Defense Minister Arun Jaitley similarly warns that “Our conventional strength is far more than theirs and therefore if they persist with this, the cost to them would be unaffordable. They will also feel the pain of this kind of adventurism.” And a senior government official reports that “The prime minister’s office has instructed us to ensure that Pakistan suffers deep and heavy losses.”

The merits of this tougher posture have sparked a lively debate within India.  Some observers caution that “machismo has never worked as a plan against Pakistan” and that an approach based solely on coercion is “a dangerous game” that could easily spin out of control.  A former Indian envoy to Pakistan contends that a policy of escalatory response is “what the Pakistani army wants and we are falling into this trap.”  Others, however, argue (here, here and here) that Mr. Modi has no choice but to reply robustly to what are deliberate Pakistani tests of his resolve.

But beyond this debate, there are other problems associated with Modi’s new line toward Pakistan that have so far escaped much notice.

Read the entire essay in The Diplomat.

[UPDATE, October 31: In an opinion piece in The Hindu today, Sharat Sabharwal, a former Indian ambassador to Pakistan, echoes some of my points.  He writes:

“Faced with Pakistan’s firing across the LoC, we have no option but to respond. However, in general, more subtle strategies to contain and counter threats from Pakistan would be in our interest.

Finally, the jingoistic and threatening rhetoric in a section of our media in response to each provocation from Pakistan does us no good. Our growing power ought to be felt by our adversaries and not flaunted. Threatening language tends to drive a significant number in Pakistan, who think constructively of relations with India, into the arms of the security state proponents.”]

[UPDATE, November 2: A suicide bombing today killed over 50 people, including three members of Pakistani Rangers, a paramilitary organization, and injured well over 100 others, at Wagah, the main border crossing between India and Pakistan.  The attack occurred on the Pakistani side of the border and just as the famous border-closing ceremony involving Indian and Pakistani guards was concluding at the end of the day.  Several jihadi groups, including Pakistani Taliban splinter groups and an Al Qaeda offshoot, have claimed responsibility.  The attack’s objective is unknown at present but had it caused Indian casualties, it would have further strained already fraught relations between the countries, conceivably prompting Indian military retaliation.]

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