Pakistani-American Scholar on US Role as Peace Broker in South Asia

[Riaz Haq]

Pakistani-American scholar Dr. Moeed Yusuf has examined the role of the United States in defusing South Asian crises since the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998.

In "Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia" by Dr. Moeed Yusuf published by Stanford University Press, the author analyzes American diplomacy in three critical periods: Kargil conflict in 1999; the stand-off after the Indian Parliament attack in 2001 and the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008.

Yusuf argues that the US-Soviet Cold War deterrence model does not apply to the India-Pakistan conflict and offers his theory of "brokered bargaining". In chapters that detail the US role during three India-Pakistan crises, it is clear that the US rejected India's insistence on bilateralism in resolving India-Pakistan disputes.  The author says that "in each episode, the concern about the escalation forced the United States to engage, largely unsolicited, and use a mix of rewards (or promises of) and punishments (or threats of) with the regional rivals to achieve de-escalation--ahead of its broader regional or policy interests."

It seems that Yusuf accepts the widely-held assumption that India enjoys insurmountable conventional military superiority over Pakistan. Many speculate that the difference between the conventional military strengths of the two South Asian rivals is so great that Pakistan would be forced to quickly resort to the use of nuclear weapons in the event of an Indian attack. Such assumptions and speculations are challenged by Professor Walter Ladwig of the War Studies Department at London's Kings College, Meenakshi Sood of Delhi-based Indian Army think tank called The Center for Land Warfare Studies, and other scholars.

Professor Walter Ladwig believes that Pakistan’s conventional deterrence against India in the near to medium term is "much better than the pessimists allege".  Pakistan's  NCWF (New Concept of War Fighting) developed in response to India's CSD (Cold Start Doctrine) is designed to "mount a counter-offensive even before India fires the first shot", according to Indian analyst Meenakshi Sood. Ladwig sums it up well: "Despite a growing technological edge (over Pakistan) in some areas, Indian policymakers cannot be confident that even a limited resort to military force would achieve a rapid result, which is an essential pre-condition for deterrence failure".

One could argue that Yusuf gives too much credit to the US efforts in de-escalating India-Pakistan crises. It creates the impression that brown leaders are less rational than their white counterparts in dealing with existential crises. It perpetuates the stereotype that only a select few nations in the West can be trusted with weapons of mass destruction.  It justifies the nuclear Apartheid being pursued by the United States in the form of nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).  Could it be that the author's research is heavily influenced by the fact that he works for the United States Institute of Peace which is a US government-funded Washington think tank?

Overall, Dr. Moeed Yusuf's "Brokering Peace in Nuclear Environments U.S. Crisis Management in South Asia" is a thought provoking book. It should stimulate serious discussion of how regional nuclear powers like India and Pakistan can engage with each other more deeply to maintain peace and stability in their neighborhood. This will require both parties, India and Pakistan, to have sustained dialog to resolve core issues like Kashmir that underly recurring crises. 

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[Riaz Haq]

US and China are playing geopolitical game in Pakistan over CPEC that could determine which country becomes the next superpower

http://www.riazhaq.com/2018/09/us-china-competition-in-pakistan-cpe...

[Riaz Haq]

#Pakistan’s Consolidating #Conventional Deterrence: Pakistan will not be forced to retaliate with #nuclear weapons as an initial response to a limited conventional incursion by #India. #ColdStart #SouthAsia https://southasianvoices.org/pakistan-conventional-deterrence-asses...

In the case of South Asia, India’s quest to explore the space for limited conventional war below Pakistan’s nuclear thresholds has shifted the strategic debate in the region to the merits of limited aim strategies, i.e. Cold Start, that might be pursued despite Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. In response to potential Indian proactive war strategies, Pakistan has introduced the low-yield, short-range ballistic missile system (SRBMs), (HATF-IX)/Nasr, with the intention of using it as a last resort against Indian forces in the case of impending failure of conventional defenses. In this way, Pakistan has adopted a cost-effective solution to Indian proactive war strategies that complements its conventional forces, neutralizes India’s growing technological edge, and bridges the conventional disparity between the two rivals.

In response to Pakistan’s introduction of Nasr, India has begun to shift away from the traditional logic of conventional deterrence towards the use of conventional weapons and dual-capable missiles to bolster its deterrence by punishment strategy. With the aim of destroying Pakistan’s strategic and high-value assets (such as exposed Nasr batteries), India is pursuing new conventional weapon technologies to form the basis of its counterforce capabilities, including precision guided munitions, missile defenses, stand-off weapons, and cyber operations.

Pakistan’s Conventional Developments

Although Pakistan’s full-spectrum deterrence doctrine has succeeded in deterring an Indian full-scale military attack in the past, the persistent conventional imbalance and India’s revisions to its conventional doctrines have pushed Pakistan to modernize and upgrade its conventional capabilities.

Besides Nasr, Pakistan is improving its existing conventional platforms to deter (by denial) Indian proactive conventional war strategies and any potential conventional counterforce aims. To this end, it is updating its conventional strategies, conducting military exercises, improving its weapons systems, and seeking new defense partnerships. For instance, Pakistan developed an offensive-defense “Riposte” strategy after 1989. The strategy calls for a Pakistani Army strike corps to launch an offensive in an event of war, with the aim of occupying Indian-territory near border while holding back the initial hostile advances. To supplement this doctrine, Pakistan has reorganized its strategic reserves, i.e. the Army Reserve North and Army Reserve South. In addition, Pakistan’s six defensive Corps are situated in close proximity to Indian territory; these are the country’s initial defenses against Indian conventional aggression. In addition, conventional military exercises—such as Azm-e-Nau, New Concept of War Fighting (NCWF), High Mark, Strike of Thunder, and Sea Spark—are positioned to enhance the synergy of Pakistan’s three military services and combat readiness along the eastern border.

To further consolidate conventional deterrence against India, Pakistan is actively engaged in negotiations and contracts for upgrades and procurement of conventional armaments from various suppliers. Initiatives in the conventional domain such as additions to and/or modernization of its cruise missile program, air defenses, unmanned aerial vehicles, and surface and sub-surface fleet (see below table) will help Pakistan implement a limited or large-scale conventional military operation against India if the need arises by denying the Indian Air Force the ability to achieve air superiority over Pakistan. Furthermore, improvements in air defenses will enable Pakistani ground forces to conduct defensive and counter-offensive operations against Indian integrated battle groups (IBGs) or strike corps.

[Riaz Haq]

Massive Global Cost of India-Pakistan Nuclear War

https://youtu.be/O0ZPt60sZ0s

This is TED talk by Dr. Owen Brian Toon, professor of atmospheric and ocean sciences at University of Colorado at Boulder. He's citing research he did with Professor Alan Robock, professor of climate research at Rutgers University. Here's a link to more references regarding nuclear winter:

http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/

[Riaz Haq]

LESSONS FROM THE BRINK
Ejaz Haider Updated March 10, 2019 

https://www.dawn.com/news/1468744


India thought — and many experts agreed — that there was a band in which India could act militarily and punitively. That, if India were to play within that band, it would make it extremely difficult for Pakistan to escalate to the nuclear level because such escalation would be considered highly disproportionate and would draw international opprobrium and consequences. The argument was that the certainty of international diplomatic and economic isolation would force Pakistan to stay its hand and not escalate to the nuclear level.

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The banal equivalent of such a situation would be someone punching another person in a crowded bazaar and the victim, instead of keeping the fight to fisticuffs, chooses to draw and fire a pistol. Not only would such a person lose the sympathy of the crowd, he would also invite the full coercive and normative weight of the law.

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The interesting assumption in all this, and one that should not be missed is this: the first-round result. Every subsequent assumption flows from what India could achieve militarily in the opening hand.


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It is precisely for this reason that the opening round is so crucial for the aggressor, in this case India. To recap, as noted above in the list of assumptions, every subsequent assumption flows from the success of the opening round.

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what is important is not whether Indian planes came into Pakistan (original claim), whether they struck in a stand-off mode (i.e. when aerial platforms are used from a safe distance, away from defensive weapons, and use precision munitions such as glide bombs to attack a distant target without actually coming upon the target and swooping down for a bombing run) or even whether they could or could not make a hit. The important and crucial point was that India had challenged Pakistan and Pakistan needed to put an end to the “new normal” talk. Pakistan chose its targets, struck to show resolve and capability and then also won the dogfight.

Later, we are told that India had thought of using missiles to hit nine targets in Pakistan. But Pakistan readied its missiles and informed India that it will hit back. That forced India to back off. If this is true — and it comes to us from a briefing by Prime Minister Imran Khan — then it seems that Modi had nursed the idea of playing a very dangerous hand, which he couldn’t because that would have meant exchange of missiles between a nuclear dyad — a development which has remarkable escalation potential. Missilery between nuclear powers is a big no. There’s no known technology in the world that can determine whether the incoming missile has a tactical or a strategic (nuclear) warhead and that can lead to response miscalculation.

The two sides are back to the ‘old normal’ — artillery and small-arms duelling across the LoC. The attempt by an Indian submarine to enter Pakistan’s territorial waters was also deftly picked up by Pakistan Navy, with the sub forced to return. It could have been sunk but Pakistan, in keeping with its policy of not escalating, chose not to make a hit.

From here on, there’s nothing more for India but to understand the imperative of positive engagement through a sustained dialogue. The framework for such engagement is already in place. There is no alternative to talking and walking that talk. But that will not happen until we see the electoral contest in India and its results.

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At the same time, Pakistan must not underestimate India based on these limited rounds. While India could not coerce Pakistan militarily at this moment, if the growth differential between Pakistan and India continues to grow, the technological asymmetry will increase to the point where strategies of coercion could kick into play. That scenario could see very different results on the ground. For instance, India will possess the anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) S-400 system by 2020.

[Riaz Haq]

Time for #India and #Pakistan to walk the talk. Was what President Clinton did #mediation? Or was it intervention? #Trump gave India a preview on February 28, before Abhinandan was freed by Pakistan, of what was coming. Was it mediation? #Kashmir #Balakot https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/its-time-for-india-and-pakis...

It took more than 10 years after Simla to group the subjects that India and Pakistan would sporadically talk about, and even then the two countries have been going around in circles. It is reasonable to assume that nowadays Pakistan talks more about India and Kashmir to the U.S. than to India. Terrorism was one of the subjects that the two nations emphasised they would bilaterally discuss, but the 2011 Mumbai blasts shattered that premise. Since then India has been talking about Pakistani terrorism not so much with Pakistan as with any country willing to listen. This is probably why U.S President Donald Trump revealed at the Oval Office on July 22 that he and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan would be “talking about India”. “I think maybe if we can help intercede and do whatever we have to do,” he said. “But I think it’s something that can be brought back together.”

Clinton’s role during Kargil
President Trump may have been overstating it, but when the Simla Agreement was violated in Kargil, it was an American President who helped push the Pakistani troops back into Pakistan. As the Kargil War began to get bigger, a worried President Bill Clinton, who called the region “the most dangerous place in the world”, reached out to both Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, urging Mr. Sharif to pull back from the Line of Control (LoC) and Vajpayee not to widen the war front.

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Was what President Clinton did mediation? Or was it intervention? Or meddling? Or was this all a shining example of bilateralism envisaged in the Simla Agreement? President Trump gave India a preview on February 28, before Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was freed by Pakistan, of what was coming when he said: “We have some reasonably decent news. I think hopefully that’s going to be coming to an end. It’s been going on for a long time, decades and decades. There’s a lot of dislike, unfortunately. So we’ve been in the middle trying to help them both out, see if we can get some organization and some peace, and I think probably that’s going to be happening.” Was that mediation or the Simla Agreement at work? Nobody pointed out to President Trump that only the Ministry of External Affairs or the Pakistani Foreign Office or the Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations were allowed to make such announcements.

We have to recognise that the world has changed since the Simla Agreement was signed. After the 1971 war, India returned land taken in battle on the western border, to create lasting peace. The LoC is now more firmly established than ever before. There is no talk any more of United Nations resolutions. Most of the subjects in the ‘composite dialogue format’ like Siachen, Sir Creek and Wullar Barrage have been discussed threadbare. Some of them have been ready for political signatures for years. If the way forward is bilateral, then surely it is time to prove it?

[Riaz Haq]

The US intelligence community is carrying out a sweeping internal review of how it assesses the fighting power of foreign militaries amid mounting pressure from key lawmakers on Capitol Hill who say officials have failed twice in one year on the two major foreign policy crises faced by the Biden administration in Ukraine and Afghanistan.

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday sent a classified letter to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Defense Department and the CIA pointing out that the agencies broadly underestimated how long the Ukrainian military would be able to fend off Russian forces and overestimated how long Afghan fighters would hold out against the Taliban last summer after the US withdrawal from the country, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. They questioned the methodology behind the intelligence community's assessments, and the underlying assumptions behind them, the sources said.
CNN has learned that one smaller intelligence agency within the State Department did more accurately assess the Ukrainian military's capability to resist Russia. But while that assessment was shared within the US government, it did not override the wider intelligence community's predictions.


https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/13/politics/us-intelligence-review-ukra...

Current and former intelligence officials acknowledge that only looking at military "capabilities" leaves out the quintessentially human factors that could prove decisive. Assessing a population's will to fight is an art, not a science, that defies purely data-driven analysis, the senior State Department official said. But, the official said, it is a key element to determining how successful a military will be in a fight.
"The basic challenge is, you can see what you can count: so you know something about the armaments they have and you can maybe see something about the training they have," said Treverton.
"But the things that matter are all intangible," he said. "You just don't know how good they're going to be and how willing they're going to be to fight. I've never seen us have much by way of a good method for doing that."

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Ukraine crisis: Could India cut its defence ties with Russia?


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61274042

"There's strong reason to believe that... Russia will be unable to fulfil its contractual commitments to India with delivery of all of the S-400 system," says Mr Lalwani.

He also believes that the losses Russia has incurred in Ukraine could mean it may not be able to meet India's needs "because it will be desperate to use all the spares to replenish its own forces".

Why is Russia losing so many tanks in Ukraine?
And he says Indian policymakers may be taking note of some of the issues that have faced Russian battlefield equipment and munitions in Ukraine.

Could India manage without Russian arms?
That looks unlikely at the moment.

A US Congressional report in October last year said that the "Indian military cannot operate effectively without Russian-supplied equipment and will continue to rely on Russian weapons systems in the near and middle term".

The report noted that Russia offers its weapons at relatively attractive prices.

Sangeeta Saxena, editor of Delhi-based Aviation and Defence Universe, says the Indian army in particular will continue to keep buying from Russia.

[Riaz Haq]

Early in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it wasn’t just Moscow that believed its offensive could succeed quickly. In February, even U.S. officials warned Kyiv could fall in days.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-simple-ratio-came-to-influence-m...

Russians had numbers on their side, or more precisely a number: the 3:1 rule, the ratio by which attackers must outnumber defenders in order to prevail. It is one of several “force ratios” popular in military strategy. Russia, it seemed, could amass that advantage.

The war in Ukraine has brought renewed interest in force ratios. Other ratios in military doctrine include the numbers needed to defeat unprepared defenders, resist counterinsurgencies or counterattack flanks. Though they sound like rules of thumb for a board game like Risk, the ratios have been taught to generations of both American and Soviet and then Russian tacticians, and provide intuitive support for the idea Ukraine was extremely vulnerable.

“I would imagine that most of them are thinking in those terms, that you need something on the order of a 3:1 advantage to break through,” said John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor whose work focuses on security competition between great powers. “It’s clear in this case that the Russians badly miscalculated.”

Modern versions of the 3:1 rule apply to local sectors of combat. A Rand Corp. study determined a theater-wide 1.5-to-1 advantage would allow attackers to achieve 3:1 ratios in certain sectors.

Overall, Russia’s military has quadruple the personnel and infantry vehicles, triple the artillery and tanks, and nearly 10 times the armored personnel carriers, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the London-based think tank.

With 190,000 Russian troops concentrated to invade in February, and Ukraine’s military spread across the country, (only 30,000 troops, for example, were estimated to be in Ukraine’s east near the Donbas region) it appeared Russia had the numbers to overwhelm Ukraine.

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Ratios don’t account for Western intelligence and materiel support, for Ukrainian resolve, for low Russian morale, for Russia’s logistical struggles, or for severe Russian tactical errors, like leaving tanks exposed in columns on major roadways, Mr. Biddle said.

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These ratios originate from 19th-century European land wars.

In his seminal 1832 text on military strategy, “On War,” the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz proclaimed: “The defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offensive.” By the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Prussians distilled this to requiring triple the attackers. Prussia decisively triumphed; maybe they were on to something.

World War I, with years of stalemate in the trenches as combatants struggled to break through defenses, lent further credibility to the idea.

English Brigadier-General James Edmonds, writing shortly after World War I, recorded an early version of the rule: “It used to be reckoned in Germany that to turn out of a position an ebenbürtigen foe—that is, a foe equal in all respects, courage, training, morale and equipment—required threefold numbers.”

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Still, he said of Ukraine: “It’s obvious in this case, the force ratio, the number of static units, are a very poor predictor of what’s going to happen on the battlefield.”

To Mr. Epstein, force ratios exemplify a quip from the writer H.L. Mencken—and a lesson Russia is learning the hard way:

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible and wrong.”

[Riaz Haq]

#India, #Pakistan came close to a #nuclear war, claims ex US Sec of State Mike Pompeo. His Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj called, told him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack after #Balakot strike in February 2019 & India ready to retaliate

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/india-pakistan-came-close-to...


Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed that he was “awakened” to speak to his then Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj who told him that Pakistan was preparing for a nuclear attack after the Balakot surgical strike in February 2019 and India is preparing its own escalatory response.

In his latest book Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love that hit the stores on Tuesday, Mr. Pompeo says the incident took place when he was in Hanoi for the U.S.-North Korea Summit on February 27-28 and his team worked overnight with both New Delhi and Islamabad to avert this crisis.