The spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia has long been the subject of intense international concern. This concern has arisen from two major factors. First, India and Pakistan have a long, bloody history. The two countries were born out of a partition of British India in 1947. Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs fled from those regions of the empire that would become parts of India and Pakistan. In the spate of Hindu-Muslim violence that followed, 500,000 to 1 million people were killed and roughly 15 million were displaced.1 The bulk of this violence occurred in the state of Punjab.2
Partition left a legacy of animosity between India and Pakistan that continues to the present day.3 And the division of the subcontinent gave rise to bitter territorial disputes that have festered for decades.4 The conflict over control of the territory of Kashmir has been especially intractable, giving rise to four Indo-Pakistani wars as well as to a low-intensity conflict between Pakistani proxies and Indian security forces.5 Kashmir continues to be the primary source of regional tension and would be the likely cause of any future Indo-Pakistani conflict.
The origins of the Kashmir dispute can be traced to the process of British colonial disengagement from the subcontinent. The two principal nationalist movements in British India, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, had failed to reach any accord on power sharing under the aegis of a united India. The League asserted that Congress, despite its espousal of the cause of secular nationalism, was unable to guarantee the rights of Muslims in a predominantly Hindu polity.6 In the 1940s, the British made some belated efforts to preserve the unity of their subcontinental empire. However, when these attempts failed to meet the conflicting goals of the Congress and the League, the Crown chose to partition the subcontinent into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan.7 Reflecting the ideology and beliefs of the League, predominantly Muslim regions in the northwest and northeast sections of British India became the foundation of the new Pakistani state.
Despite this arrangement, the British still confronted an important problem, namely the question of the future status of India’s 562 “princely states.”8 These states had enjoyed nominal independence, recognizing the “paramount” status of the British and ceding control over defense, foreign affairs, and communications to the Crown. As independence approached, Lord Louis Mountbatten, India’s last viceroy, decreed that the doctrine of paramountcy would lapse when the British left the subcontinent. Accordingly, the rulers of the princely states would have to decide whether to join India or Pakistan, based on their demographic composition and geographic propinquity. The vast majority of the states posed little problem. Their rulers recognized that they had no choice but to accept Lord Mountbatten’s decree.
But the rulers of the states of Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Jammu and Kashmir refused to obey the viceroy. The nawab of Junagadh was Muslim; his subjects were predominantly Hindu; and his territory abutted the Indian province of Gujarat. Unwilling to accede to India, he fled to Pakistan with his family, after which Junagadh was absorbed into India. The Muslim nizam of Hyderabad, who ruled over a predominantly Hindu population, and whose territory lay deep inside the nascent Indian state, also proved to be recalcitrant. In the end, Hyderabad was incorporated into the Indian union by force.9
The state of Jammu and Kashmir posed a unique set of problems. Its monarch, Maharaja Hari Singh, was Hindu; his subjects were predominantly Muslim; and the state shared borders with both India and Pakistan.10 The maharaja, loath to accede to either India or Pakistan, hoped to create an independent state. He was unwilling to join India because he correctly feared that New Delhi would strip him of the bulk of his privileges, especially his substantial landholdings. He was averse to joining Pakistan because he surmised that as a Hindu monarch who had done little to improve the lot of his Muslim subjects, he would fare poorly in a state created as the homeland for South Asian Muslims.11 Consequently, almost two months after the independence of India and Pakistan, he still had not acceded to either state.
Hari Singh’s vacillation, however, soon came to an end. In October 1947, a tribal rebellion broke out in Poonch, in the western reaches of Kashmir. Sensing an opportunity to exploit the situation, the government of Pakistan quickly entered the fray.12 The Pakistanis sent in regular troops disguised as local tribesmen to aid the rebels. With Pakistani logistical, material, and organizational support, the rebels moved rapidly toward Srinagar, the summer capital of J&K, plundering and pillaging along the way. The maharaja’s forces proved utterly incapable of stemming the onslaught.13 Hari Singh, now in a state of panic, appealed to India for assistance. Prime Minister Nehru agreed to help, but only if two conditions were met. First, Kashmir would have to formally accede to India. Second, the Kashmiri people would have to approve the accession at a later date, once calm had been restored. Meanwhile, Nehru would accept the imprimatur of Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, Kashmir’s largest popular and secular political party. Only when he received Abdullah’s explicit assent did Nehru proceed with accession.14 Almost immediately, Indian troops were flown into Srinagar,15 where they managed to stop the tribal advance, but not before the rebels had managed to seize about a third of the territory of the state.16
Despite periods of intense fighting, the situation on the ground changed little. Pakistan-backed forces, which included Hazara and Afridi tribesmen, paramilitary elements from organizations such as the Muslim League National Guards and regular Pakistan Army personnel had made quick work of Maharaja Hari Singh’s troops. They then launched a three-pronged assault on a communications center located at Uri and damaged the power grid to Srinagar. On November 7, the Indian military counterattacked. They secured the Srinagar airfield, captured the town of Baramula, and by November 13 had managed to restore power to Srinagar.
These successes notwithstanding, by December the Indians were suffering from a paucity of logistical support and adequate high-altitude warfare equipment.17 Pakistan-backed forces exploited this weakness, forcing an Indian retreat. Not until the spring of 1948 did the Indian forces managed to launch a counteroffensive. The Indian counteroffensive and its attendant territorial gains, however, resulted in more direct involvement by the Pakistan Army in Kashmir. And this, in turn, created further problems for the Indians. Pakistan Army parachute and artillery unit deployments, for example, threatened the slender communication links between Amritsar and the cities of Jammu, Pathankot, and Poonch in the state of Kashmir.18
As the fighting continued in this back-and-forth manner, Indian leaders concluded that the conflict would continue indefinitely unless they could devise a strategy to end Pakistani support for the Kashmiri rebels. To accomplish this end, India would have to dramatically expand the scope of the conflict. But the Indians realized they lacked the military resources to carry out such a strategy.19 Cognizant of their military limitations, and acting on the advice of Lord Mountbatten, India referred the Kashmir question to the United Nations Security Council on January 1, 1948, where a diplomatic battle ensued.20 On January 1, 1949, the UN imposed a cease-fire. At the time of the cease-fire, Pakistan was in possession of about one-third of the princely state and India the remaining two-thirds.
A second Indo-Pakistani war for Kashmir erupted sixteen years later. Its outbreak bore a striking similarity to the first Kashmir conflict. Pakistan again sought to seize the territory, using soldiers disguised as local inhabitants. A confluence of events—including internal political disturbances in Indian-controlled Kashmir in December 1963, the death of Prime Minister Nehru in 1964, the presence of a new and untested prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, at the national helm, and India’s willingness to refer a border dispute along the state of Gujarat to the International Court of Justice in May 1965—led the Pakistani military dictatorship of Ayub Khan to conclude that India would be unable to withstand a swift Pakistani onslaught. Based on this assumption, the Pakistanis forged a military strategy designed to seize the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. The plan had two distinct segments. The first was Operation Gibraltar and the second Operation Grand Slam. The initial segment involved sending lightly armed Pakistani troops disguised as locals into the Kashmir Valley. Once in the valley the troops were expected to link up with Pakistani sympathizers and foment a rebellion. Taking advantage of these disturbed conditions the Pakistan Army would then launch a full-scale assault on the valley, seizing it in a series of quick incursions. The plan, of course, was acutely dependent on the ability of the initial infiltrators and the local Pakistani sympathizers to wreak sufficient havoc and create conducive conditions for the invasion.21
The infiltration began along the 470-mile cease-fire line in Kashmir around August 5, 1965. The intruders carried small arms, hand grenades, plastic explosives, and radio equipment. Much to the dismay of the Pakistani military and political leadership, however, the local population did not support the infiltrators and instead turned them in to the authorities. Despite this loss of surprise, the Pakistanis decided to go ahead with their original war plans. They launched Operation Grand Slam on August 31–September 1 in southern Kashmir. Two infantry divisions spearheaded by seventy tanks constituted the Pakistani strike force. The Pakistanis hoped to capture the town of Akhnur, which would have enabled them to cut off the state of Jammu and Kashmir from the rest of India. In response, India escalated horizontally, launching a powerful attack directed against the Pakistani city of Lahore on September 6. Simultaneously, they also launched an offensive toward the town of Sialkot, a major nexus of roads and railways and a military center in the Punjab. These two coordinated offensives produced the desired result: They forced the Pakistanis to withdraw from Akhnur.
The Indian drive toward Lahore was initially quite successful, and the military managed to capture a number of villages along the way. In the end, however, the Indians were unable to assault Lahore directly, as the Pakistanis had destroyed the bridges across the Ichogil irrigation canal on the outskirts of the city. Similarly, the Indian effort to capture Sialkot failed in the wake of several inconclusive battles. Toward mid-September the war was reaching a stalemate. On September 20, the UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for a cease-fire. India accepted the cease-fire resolution on September 21 and Pakistan on September 22. Under the Soviet-brokered Tashkent Agreement, which officially ended the 1965 war, both sides agreed in January 1966 to return to the status quo ante and to renounce the use of force in settling future disputes.22
One of the unanticipated outcomes of the 1965 Kashmir conflict was the growth of Bengali separatism in East Pakistan. The Pakistani military had long contended that the “defense of the east lay in the west” and so they chose not to deploy significant firepower in East Pakistan during the war. The Bengali population of East Pakistan realized that they had emerged mostly unscathed from the war thanks not to the Pakistani military, but rather to India’s sufferance. Within less than a decade, their growing dissatisfaction with West Pakistani dominance would culminate in a civil war and contribute to the third Indio-Pakistani conflict, the 1971 Bangladesh war.23 The Bangladesh war radically altered the region’s territorial division and created the conventional military environment that has largely continued until today.
When Pakistan held its first national election in October 1970, the Bengali Awami League won a majority of seats in the National Assembly. But the League’s demands for greater Bengali autonomy concerned Pakistani president Yahya Khan, who did not permit Awami League leader Mujibur Rehman to form a government. And Pakistan People’s Party leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto called for new elections, refusing to share power with Rehman. In response, large-scale rioting erupted in East Pakistan. West Pakistani troops, deployed to quash the violence, exacerbated the situation, slaughtering large numbers of intellectuals, Awami League members, and Hindus. Pakistan descended into civil war.24
These events unleashed a flood of refugees. Millions of East Pakistanis crossed the border into India to escape the violence, quickly exceeding India’s capacity to absorb them. The Indians therefore sought to the stop the civil war by severing East and West Pakistan. To that end, in October and November, India began backing East Pakistani rebel forces, known as Mukti Bahini (literally “liberation force”). Pakistan retaliated on December 3 by launching air strikes against Indian air bases. This triggered a full-scale war. India attacked East Pakistan with six army divisions, rapidly penetrating East Pakistani territory. Although the Pakistanis hoped for assistance from friendly states such as the United States or China, none was forthcoming, and Pakistan was left to face India alone. The Indians made quick work of East Pakistan, capturing the capital of Dhaka by December 16 and declaring a cease-fire the next day.25
The consequences of Pakistan’s loss were enormous. India had split Pakistan’s Eastern and Western wings, capturing thousands of square miles of territory and tens of thousands of prisoners. India’s overwhelming victory made clear that this was unlikely to happen in the future. Indeed, the Pakistanis would face the possibility of catastrophic defeat if they challenged the Indians again. This enhanced Indian confidence and undermined the Pakistanis’ sense of martial superiority, cultivated over centuries of Muslim military dominance. The war also demonstrated that the Pakistanis could not depend on friendly states to ensure its survival. Finally, Pakistan’s loss demonstrated that religion could not ensure state cohesion in South Asia. Ethnolinguistic differences had torn Pakistan asunder in 1971, despite the supposedly unifying force of Islam. Militarily, psychologically, diplomatically, and politically, Pakistan emerged from the Bangladesh war badly weakened.26
Indo-Pakistani relations became more stable following the Bangladesh conflict. Under the 1972 Simla Agreement, which reestablished diplomatic ties between the two countries following the war, India and Pakistan agreed to settle future disputes bilaterally and to respect the line of control separating Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. The Indians were satisfied with the post-Bangladesh settlement, which they believed would prevent the Pakistanis from involving outside parties such as the United Nations in the Kashmir dispute and from violently challenging Kashmir’s territorial division. The Pakistanis, for their part, remained unhappy with territorial arrangements on the subcontinent. They continued to view the division of Kashmir as illegitimate and were smarting badly from the loss of their Eastern wing. However, they were not wholly dissatisfied with the Simla Agreement, which they interpreted quite differently from the Indians. The Pakistanis believed that, despite its emphasis on bilateralism, the agreement did not forbid them from referring the Kashmir dispute to third parties such as the United Nations. In addition, they believed that the language of the agreement did not foreclose future discussion of the Kashmir issue. Indeed, according to the Pakistanis, the agreement expressly envisioned India and Pakistan revisiting the Kashmir dispute at a later date. Thus the Pakistanis did not view Simla as being completely inimical to their interests.27 Most importantly, following their crushing defeat in Bangladesh, the Pakistanis lacked the military wherewithal to challenge the Indians in Kashmir or elsewhere in the region. India and Pakistan did not fight another war for twenty-eight years.28
Despite the relative calm that prevailed in the wake of the Bangladesh war, Kashmir remained a serious, unresolved issue. Neither India nor Pakistan relinquished its claim to the territory. And over time the Kashmiri people became increasingly dissatisfied with Indian rule. During the 1965 war, Kashmiris were unwilling to take up arms against India, even when Pakistan offered them the opportunity to do so. But over the coming decades, Kashmiris’ frustrations mounted, finally coming to a head with the outbreak of a violent insurgency in 1989.
The discontent resulted from a combination of political mobilization and institutional decay within Kashmir. The policies of both the Kashmiri National Conference and the Indian central government resulted in a proliferation of educational institutions, increased literacy rates, and greater access to mass media in Kashmir.29 The Kashmiri population became far more politically sophisticated than it had been previously. Even as this was occurring, however, Kashmiri politics became increasingly deinstitutionalized, thereby reducing opportunities for legitimate political activity. In Kashmir, the National Conference monopolized power, preventing the emergence of any political opposition in the territory. And the Indian government dealt with Kashmir in an authoritarian manner, dismissing duly elected Kashmiri leaders, implementing heavy-handed antiterrorism laws, and centralizing power in New Delhi. When the National Conference conspired with the Indian government to fix the 1987 Kashmiri state assembly elections, Kashmiris were outraged, and the territory began its slide into violence. Demonstrations, strikes, and attacks against government targets erupted in 1988 and became more frequent in 1989. By 1990, Kashmir was in the throes of an all-out insurgency against Indian rule, forcing India to dissolve the Kashmiri state assembly and place the territory under governor’s rule.30
The Kashmir insurgency was an indigenous phenomenon that resulted largely from Indian misrule in the region; Pakistan did not create the insurgency. The Pakistanis, however, were quick to take advantage of the opportunity that the Kashmiri uprising created for them. Pakistan began actively supporting the militancy, providing anti-Indian forces with training, arms, and infiltration and exfiltration across the line of control. This soon became a central element of Pakistani foreign policy and had a profound impact on the insurgency. It also inflicted substantial costs on India. The Pakistanis’ strategy enabled them to threaten India’s hold on Kashmir and attrit Indian resources. And it led India to implement draconian counterinsurgency measures that have damaged its international reputation. Approximately ninety thousand people have died in the insurgency, and despite recent improvements in the Kashmiri security situation, hundreds of thousands of Indian troops remain deployed in the region.31 The Kashmir dispute had already given rise to periodic Indo-Pakistani conflicts. With the eruption of the insurgency, it also became an ongoing proxy war between India and Pakistan-backed forces.
The Indo-Pakistani relationship has thus been characterized by severe historical animosity dating from the founding of the two countries, numerous wars, and a festering territorial dispute that since the late 1980s has driven a low-intensity conflict between Indian forces and Pakistan-backed militants. Given this turbulent background, the international community found the notion of India and Pakistan acquiring nuclear weapons extremely worrisome.
The second reason for international concern over the possibility of nuclear proliferation in South Asia was that India and Pakistan pointedly refused to renounce their right to acquire nuclear weapons. During the 1960s, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China became deeply worried by the possibility that countries beyond their small group might acquire nuclear weapons. They created an international nonproliferation regime to prevent this from occurring. The centerpiece of the regime was the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty forbade states from receiving, manufacturing, or seeking assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices.32
The NPT attracted a large number of signatories; by 2000, 187 states had acceded to the treaty. This included countries that were seriously considering the development of a nuclear weapons capacity but chose to abandon their ambitions and sign the NPT,33 as well as states that had already developed nuclear weapons capabilities and decided to dismantle them in order to join the treaty.34
India and Pakistan, however, were among a small group of states that insisted on retaining their right to develop nuclear weapons and refused to sign the NPT. The two countries began actively pursuing nuclear programs soon after achieving independence. Despite Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s public opposition to nuclear weapons, the Indian government established a Department of Atomic Research in 1954. India’s crushing defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War, China’s 1964 nuclear test, Chinese threats to intervene in the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, and the existing nuclear powers’ refusal to grant India a security guarantee, ultimately led the Indians to abandon their antinuclear posture. The Indians refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and they tested a nuclear device soon thereafter, achieving a fifteen-kiloton peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE) on May 18, 1974.35
Pakistan established its Atomic Energy Commission in 1957. Pakistani efforts initially focused on the production of civilian nuclear power. However, Pakistan’s nuclear programs took on a military bent after the mid-1960s. Following the stalemated 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, the United States cut off arms transfers to Pakistan, and India began to achieve conventional superiority. Faced with this eroding military position, the Pakistanis refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Pakistan embarked on a full-fledged nuclear weapons program in 1972 after its devastating loss to India in the Bangladesh war.36
India and Pakistan’s refusal to join the NPT and foreclose the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons was not based solely on strategic calculations. Their position was also rooted in history. The two countries, previously ruled by Great Britain, had thrown off the colonial yoke only a few short decades before. Thus Indian and Pakistani leaders were loath to sign away their right to the security and status they believed nuclear weapons could bring them. They believed that Western efforts to prevent India and Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons resulted from a condescending, even racist, worldview. Indeed, Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh famously labeled Western nonproliferation efforts “nuclear apartheid.”37
Despite Western concerns, India and Pakistan pushed forward with their nuclear programs, and by the late 1980s the two countries were approaching a de facto nuclear weapons capability. Although neither country possessed a nuclear arsenal or had tested nuclear weapons, both India and Pakistan probably could have assembled nuclear devices in short order if the need to do so had arisen.38 Some analysts believed that if such progress continued momentum toward testing and the development of overt nuclear arsenals would prove to be unstoppable.39 Others argued that de facto nuclear capabilities afforded India and Pakistan robust deterrence; the knowledge that India and Pakistan could quickly assemble nuclear devices would make attacking them prohibitively dangerous and ensure their security. Thus, such analysts argued, India and Pakistan would have no need to test nuclear weapons and develop an overt nuclear capacity.40
The Indo-Pakistani nuclear tests brought these debates to an end. On May 11 and 13, 1998, India detonated five nuclear devices and the Pakistanis responded on May 28 and 30 with six nuclear explosions of their own. Clearly, de facto nuclear deterrence was insufficient to meet India and Pakistan’s perceived political and security needs. Their governments wanted to ensure that their ability to inflict catastrophic damage on each other, or on any other adversary, was beyond question. Before long, however, a new controversy erupted over South Asian nuclear weapons. Now analysts argued over the impact that nuclear weapons capabilities were likely to have on the South Asian security environment. This discussion has been dominated by two main camps, labeled “proliferation optimists” and “proliferation pessimists.” The optimist camp argues that the presence of nuclear weapons is likely to stabilize South Asia. Optimists believe that states’ primary goal is to ensure their own survival and that states behave rationally, adopting policies designed to further their goals. Given these assumptions, optimistic scholars maintain that war between nuclear powers, which could result in the adversaries’ annihilation, is highly unlikely. Thus, in the South Asian context, nuclear weapons greatly reduce the probability of Indo-Pakistani conflict, despite the two countries’ antagonistic relationship. As Kenneth Waltz claims, both India and Pakistan “will be deterred [from aggression] by the knowledge that aggressive actions may lead to [their] own destruction.”41
Pessimistic scholars argue that nuclear weapons will probably destabilize South Asia because of political, technological, and especially organizational factors. For example, the military services that control nuclear weapons may pursue their own bureaucratic and professional agendas while ignoring the larger interests of the state that they ostensibly serve. They may adopt offensive doctrines that appeal to military officers but can reduce crisis stability. Or they may employ safety procedures that are easily routinized but provide inadequate security for nuclear arsenals. Scott Sagan claims that “India and Pakistan face a dangerous nuclear future. . . . Imperfect humans inside imperfect organizations . . . will someday fail to produce secure nuclear deterrence.”42
It is difficult to evaluate the relative merits of these positions. Scholars from the opposing camps have generally not grounded their work in the history and politics of South Asia. Indeed, they have explicitly downplayed the importance of such region-specific factors. For example, Waltz and Sagan believe that the behavior of new nuclear powers is likely to resemble that of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. According to Waltz, “Any state will be deterred by another’s [nuclear] second-strike forces; one need not be preoccupied with the qualities of the state to be deterred. . . . In a nuclear world, any state—whether ruled by a Stalin, a Mao Zedong, a Saddam Hussein, or a Kim Jong Il—will be deterred by the knowledge that aggressive actions may lead to its own destruction.”43 Similarly, Sagan acknowledges that “there are differences” between Indo-Pakistani nuclear behavior and the nuclear relationship that developed between the United States and the USSR during the Cold War. India and Pakistan “will not make exactly the same mistakes as their superpower predecessors.” However, he maintains that “while the differences are clear . . . the significance of these differences is not. . . . In both cases, the parochial interests and routine behaviors of the organizations that manage nuclear weapons limit the stability of nuclear deterrence.”44 Despite their differences, then, optimists and pessimists agree that proliferation’s impact on the behavior of new nuclear states has little to do with the specifics of the proliferating states themselves.
As a result, competing arguments must be evaluated from a largely deductive standpoint. However, deductively speaking, optimistic and pessimistic approaches to nuclear weapons proliferation are equally plausible; there is no purely logical reason to believe that either deterrence-based or organizational arguments are more powerful. In order to judge the arguments’ relative merits, one must carefully apply them to specific instances of nuclear proliferation and determine how well they explain observed phenomena. Does the behavior of nuclear proliferators in particular cases conform better to the expectations of the optimists or to those of the pessimists?
In the case of South Asia, a few recent works have taken such an approach, combining theoretical analysis with detailed, region-specific empirics. But these works have taken single positions in the proliferation debate; none of them have brought competing views together in a single volume, which would make it easier to compare their similarities and differences, and judge their relative strengths and weaknesses. In the pages that follow, we attempt to do so. Ganguly and Kapur offer opposing theoretical views of nuclear weapons proliferation, divergent descriptions of South Asia’s nuclear past and present, and very different predictions regarding the region’s nuclear future. In chapter 3, we discuss our opposing theories. Ganguly argues that nuclear weapons have contributed to stability in the region. By stability he means that neither side will now plan on carrying out a full-scale conventional war against the other for fear of nuclear escalation. Indian and Pakistani decision makers comprehend that nuclear weapons constitute a revolutionary breakthrough in warfare and see them solely as instruments of deterrence.
Kapur agrees that newly nuclear states should tend to behave rationally. He argues, however, that rationality is not enough to ensure stability in a nuclear environment. Indeed, nuclear weapons can create incentives for rational states to engage in highly destabilizing behavior. This, in Kapur’s view, is precisely what has occurred in South Asia, making a nuclear subcontinent extremely dangerous.