This past February, South Asia witnessed a textbook unfolding of an India-Pakistan standoff: a terrorist attack in Kashmir claimed by a Pakistan-based terror group that triggered a conventional Indian response against Pakistan, leading to a military confrontation rife with fears of an escalation. The specifics of the Pulwama attack do merit deeper inspection (this was a fidayeen attack using a car bomb by a local Kashmiri youth claimed to have been recruited by the Jaish-e-Mohammad) and some actualities of the subsequent air skirmish are still debatable. But the overall chain of events has been far from unpredictable along with valid trepidations about conflict escalation. Lt Gen (Retired) Prakash Menon’s recent book The Strategy Trap: India and Pakistan under the Nuclear Shadow (Wisdom Tree, 2018) is illustrative of the predicament of India-Pakistan crises and the dangers that accompany a military confrontation between them. What is the ‘Strategy Trap’ about? The book’s central argument is that given the divergent belief systems that India and Pakistan have constructed around the use of force to resolve political disputes (the “clash of belief systems”) and their fundamentally contradictory approaches to nuclear weapons and deterrence (“competing bluffs”), ‘collisions’ between the two South Asian nuclear adversaries are inevitable.Also Read: Balakot and After, or How to Build a Strategic Doctrine for Political GainIn fact, the actual use of military force is unhelpful to achieve either state’s strategic goals, except for accruing domestic political gains, and an India-Pakistan crisis involves serious risks of an inadvertent escalation. Therefore, both countries need to rethink the political and military objectives of their conflict so as to make the ‘use’ of force an unattractive option.Lt Gen (Retd) Prakash MenonThe Strategy Trap: India and Pakistan under the Nuclear ShadowWisdom Tree, 2018The Clausewitzian theory of war is a running theme throughout the book that constantly guides the author’s analysis of the India-Pakistan nuclear conundrum, as also his prescriptions for strategic stability. A significant portion of the book – almost eight of the ten chapters – engages with perceptive discussions on nuclear doctrines, concepts, and the Indian and Pakistani deterrence perspectives. These include valuable observations on how the French nuclear doctrine of minimum deterrence influenced Indian strategic thinking on nuclear weapons (chapter 2). The examination of Indian and Pakistani nuclear concepts and doctrines is aimed primarily at bringing out the stark contradictions between their approaches to nuclear weapons and the differing lessons learnt by the political and military establishments in both countries from Kargil (1999), Operation Parakram (2001-02), Mumbai terror attacks (2008) and the post-Uri crisis (2016). Pakistan’s threat to use tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons early on in a conflict and India’s threat to retaliate ‘massively’ using nuclear weapons are characterised as “competing bluffs”. Inevitably, while probing the ‘unexplained’ shift in the Indian doctrine from punitive retaliation to massive retaliation in 2003, Menon brings out the unresolved incongruities within India’s nuclear doctrine: The threat of ‘massive retaliation’ that is linked to ‘unacceptable damage’ also lends itself to different interpretations and provides leeway towards some degree of flexibility in our retaliation.An itemised discussion on Pakistan’s Full Spectrum Deterrence (FSD), conspicuous by its absence in the book, would have been instructive of how Indian practitioners have understood the shift in Pakistan’s deterrence doctrine. The ‘strategy trap’ for India is concerned with its limited war doctrine. Menon says that India’s limited war concept has both a political context and a political rationale. The political context is the watershed moment of the Kargil conflict, and the political rationale consists of compelling Pakistan to give up its proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir.Also Read: India Has Clearly Abandoned Its Policy of Strategic RestraintWhile conceding that there is indeed a conventional military space available for India to prosecute Pakistan, Menon emphatically argues that the utility and scope of the limited war concept to achieve India’s strategic and political objectives of ending cross-border terrorism and infiltration are few. The inevitable uncertainties of the fog of war and the resultant escalation dilemma lend themselves to the inherent paradox in the limited war concept – winning the (conventional) war and avoiding the (nuclear) war. The limited war theory, Menon reminds political and military decision-makers, is not “about the primacy of political objectives over military means but of the primacy of military realities over political objectives”. By this assessment, while the Uri surgical strikes (and now the Balakot airstrikes as well) were an exercise of the limited war option, it did not enable India to attain the objective of compelling Pakistan to stop supporting cross-border terrorism.File photo of Indian special forces commandos. Credit: ReutersMenon argues the challenge for India’s political leadership, therefore, consists of factoring into the limited war concept clear steps towards de-escalation of conflict, and for military planners to closely contextualise their operations within set political objectives to be achieved. He suggests a shift in the military objective from the capture of territory as a bargaining chip to firepower-based destruction in India’s retaliatory approach. Evaluating the argumentsThe idea of conventional military retaliation against terrorist infrastructure based in Pakistan in response to trans-border terrorism has gained currency in India over the last decade following the Mumbai attacks of 2008. Although the Indian response to the Mumbai attacks was restricted to diplomatic manoeuvres, key practitioners from the time, including former National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon, have expressed the inescapability of military retaliation to future cross-border terrorist incidents supported by Pakistan. Strategic experts and policy analysts writing on the South Asian situation increasingly foresee the use of military force by India against Pakistan; this is indicative of a crystallisation of the belief among India’s political and military leadership that stability exists in the strategic nuclear realm between India and Pakistan (stability-instability paradox) and that the chances of nuclear use between India and Pakistan are remote. The confidence in the ability to control escalation is often palpable from scurried declarations of “calling Pakistan’s nuclear bluff.” Menon advises caution in exercising India’s limited war options. There is a need to also weigh these options against, not just India’s military-technological capabilities, but also likely Pakistani responses that will be driven by their belief systems and their capability to manage escalation.Also Read: Balakot: The Risks of Leaving All Decision-Making to Intelligence OfficialsIndia’s adventurism might come from the acceptance of stability at the nuclear level, but the challenge lies in correctly identifying differences between Pakistan’s posturing and preferences. It is helpful to assess whether Pakistan looks at the India-Pakistan situation from the prism of the stability-instability paradox. Alert levels, as Menon points out, are important markers of redlines, and are important for crisis controllability. However as new strategic weapons systems get deployed in the region, these traditional markers will become redundant. The author’s unique combination of experience in military, policymaking, and academia is best manifested through his sharp critique of India’s strategic decision-making apparatus and the state of civil-military relations, as well as his incisive prescriptions for establishing linkages between military strategy and political objectives. While Menon highlights the challenges of institutionalised interaction and strategic communication, a missing theme in this section is the problems within India’s operational intelligence. Both these issues come alive prominently in the diagnosis of the Pulwama attack and the Balakot strikes. Assuming that the current phase of the India-Pakistan crisis has come to an end, despite rhetoric to the contrary, it is indeed time to examine the lessons learnt. But the learning of lessons requires the posing of uneasy questions about operational preparedness, military-technological capabilities, political decision-making or strategic choices. More essentially, there is a need to constantly rethink the use and utility of force, as The Strategy Trap emphasises. Let us however not presume this to obviously translate into the futility of force.Tanvi Kulkarni is a PhD Candidate at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
