January 5, 2010 ☼ army ☼ Foreign Affairs ☼ India ☼ military-jihadi complex ☼ nuclear deterrence ☼ Pakistan ☼ Security ☼ strategic stability ☼ United States

Spooked by an unfinished doctrine?

The Pakistani military establishment has its reasons to over-react to General Deepak Kapoor’s remarks

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

This time, it’s an obscure comment at an internal seminar about a new doctrine that the Indian army is working on. The doctrine is not even ready in draft form. It has not even been endorsed by the Army Headquarters. And, as we know from the story of ‘Cold Start’, the Army’s endorsement doesn’t mean that the other services, the defence ministry or the Cabinet Committee on Security has accepted it. That tells you something about how serious India’s political leadership is about defence strategy. It also tells you how ridiculous the Pakistani establishment looks when it goes into hysteria about a new Indian army doctrine that is still work in progress.

Now the army chief being the army chief merely said that the army will be ready to fight China and Pakistan simultaneously and quickly. This shouldn’t be news to anybody. The fact that both China and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and that this makes large-scale war unlikely, doesn’t mean that the armed forces in those countries don’t prepare for conventional war. In the India-China and the India-Pakistan context, where bilateral relations are hardly like those between the United States and Canada, for instance, the conventional military balance across the border is important, and itself acts as a deterrent to outright conflict.

Furthermore, till the time the Pakistani military-jihadi complex remains intact, it makes abundant sense for India to possess the necessary military capacity to conduct swift, decisive operations across the border. No army wants to go to war, and to some extent, the prospect of having to fight the Indian army will discourage the Pakistani military leadership from using jihadi groups for acts of terrorism.

All this, though, is not some bold new innovation in military strategy. So why is the Pakistani establishment in such a state of excitement?

At one level, given the history, war hysteria is understandable. But it serves two key purposes: first, it rallies the Pakistani people behind the military-jihadi complex. Second, it allows the Pakistani establishment to inflate the ‘Indian threat’ to audiences in the United States, both as an explanation for its reluctance to allocate more resources to the border with Afghanistan, and also to justify its use of US financial assistance to purchase military assets for use against India.

We saw this happen after the 26/11 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. And we’re seeing it again now.

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