A territorial dispute with global consequences

A highly volatile and dangerous situation is shaping up between India and Pakistan, centered around the perennial source of conflict, the Kashmir. During the past 50 years the two nations have fought nearly continuously over this contested territory. Since May 1998, when both states demonstrated their possession of nuclear weapons for the first time, the conflict has taken a decidedly ominous turn. While the wars of the past were conventional in nature, the war of the future might very well be nuclear.

The ostensible reason for the most recent increase in tension between the two states is the attack on the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13 carried out by an Islamic extremist group said to be financed by the Pakistani intelligence service. In an effort to defuse the ensuing tensions, General Musharraf, the Pakistani leader, announced a crackdown on fundamentalist terrorist organizations within Pakistan. The difficulty with this action, though necessary diplomatically to placate the Western powers concerned with Islamic terrorism, is that India is not fundamentally concerned with this attack. It is fundamentally concerned with the Kashmir, thus conciliation on this terrorist front is unlikely to placate India unless it has the potential to translate into territorial gains. India will most likely use this incident to exert pressure on Pakistan to concede to certain demands, most notably to weaken the Islamic militants fighting on Pakistan's behalf. Their isolation both financially and militarily from Pakistan would be a great advantage to India, especially in the regions of the Kashmir it controls.

Pakistan, however, must know this and also that India will perceive any conciliatory gesture as weakness and press for even greater advantages. India realizes that the attack is especially ill timed due to the U.S. war on terrorism and its reliance on Pakistan to help fight this war.

In addition to this pressure there exist two other military background pressures. The first is the overwhelming superiority of India's military to that of Pakistan. In a full-scale conventional war, India would most certainly crush Pakistan. Thus, Pakistan has little ability to hold Kashmir if India decided to take it with full force.

Pakistan does, however, have a deterrent to India's conventional forces, and that is its nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, this deterrent is minimal at best due to India's nuclear arsenal, which exceeds that of Pakistan. The primary difference between the bilateral nuclear parity of the Cold War and the Kashmir crisis is that in the former no side could win a nuclear war, so neither side wanted to start one; in the latter, one side could potentially win. One side also has much more to lose, as Pakistan has only 160 million people, while India has 1.2 billion. Were nuclear weapons to be exchanged, India would most likely survive very much intact, while Pakistan would be decimated.

Both states have short range and intermediate range ballistic missiles — India's longest range missile, the Agni III, has a range of 3,500 km, while Pakistan's, the Ghauri, has a range of only 1,500 km. Pakistan cannot reach every point in India; however, given the right positioning, India can strike anywhere in Pakistan. A greater disparity exists in the number of nuclear weapons — India is projected to have anywhere from 85 to 90 warheads, while Pakistan has only 25. Furthermore, Pakistan lacks any depth defense against air attacks, does not have missile sites or airfields out of range of Indian attacks and is far inferior to India in terms of air combat. Neither side possesses any second-strike capabilities, hence deterrence is weakened, for neither side can assure the safety of its nuclear weapons in a post-first-strike environment.

It is thus conceivable that India could win a nuclear war and might even benefit from starting one. Using a combination of air strikes and nuclear weapons, India could potentially incapacitate Pakistan's nuclear forces and still maintain enough nuclear weapons in reserve to engage in what may be termed coercive diplomacy. Even if Pakistan were to retain a few of its nuclear weapons after such a strike, India has demonstrated through the prolonged Kashmir conflict a willingness to accept significant casualties in the name of its cause. Pakistan might be able to inflict severe damage on some of India's cities but not enough to be an effective deterrent. Further-more, with Pak-istan's nuclear forces nullified, the relationship be-tween the two countries would revert to a unipolar one in favor of India. India would be able to coerce Pakistan into relinquishing its claims to Kashmir without Pakistani resistance. Should Pakistan attempt to continue fighting the war, India could very well liquidate a Pakistani city. Continuously threat-ening to hurt or actually hurting Pakistan would conclude the Kashmir crisis in India's favor.

Furthermore, there is always the possibility of a conventional war escalating out of the Kashmir crisis as has happened twice already. If one side were to gain a distinct military advantage, would the other hesitate in rectifying the balance by using nuclear weapons? Suppose India were on the brink of recapturing all of Kashmir. While a strict cost-benefit calculation would hold that Pakistan would not initiate a nuclear war that it might lose, a strict cost-benefit calculation would hold that neither side should have spent so much money and casualties for Kashmir in the first place.

Even if India were not actually willing to initiate a nuclear war, Pakistan would still realize its relative inferiority, and this translates into even greater advantages for India in the future. The current situation only makes war — and nuclear war — ever more possible. Dan Ostrow is a politics major from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at dtostrow@princeton.edu.