India?s conventional military capabilities
continue to pull ahead of Pakistan?s while also
falling behind China?s. Today, the CSS?s Prem
Mahadevan examines the evolving military
balance among these powers, to include the
impact of cross-border terrorism and India?s
naval ambitions in the South China Sea.
You?ve written that Sino-Pakistani collaboration
is at the root of India?s security deficit. How
has the nature of this collaboration evolved in
the past year? Any prospects of a Sino-
Pakistani split?
There will not be a Sino-Pakistani split. Beijing
realizes that the real power center in Pakistan is
the military and that, if it wishes to keep the
bilateral relationship strong, all it needs to do is
strengthen the military?s capacity to confront
India. This it is continuing to do.
Despite the high hopes that some Pakistanis
have about Chinese investment, China has been
fairly clear that it will not underwrite a weak
economy plagued further by political instability.
The US invests nine times more in Pakistan than
China does and has little to show for it. Beijing,
by contrast, is being quite crafty in not allowing
its expressions of friendship to get in the way of
hard business sense. Furthermore, attacks
directed at Chinese citizens in Pakistan have
recently emphasized just how vulnerable foreign
nationals are to jihadist violence.
On the plus side, China has taken operational
control of Gwadar port, in Pakistan?s restive
Baluchistan province. Many feel that this
development could be significant, giving China
access to a potential naval base near the Persian
Gulf and reducing its vulnerability to a
hypothetical American-led economic blockade at
the Straits of Malacca. These qualifiers ?
?potential? and ?hypothetical? ? are necessary
because a Chinese naval presence at Gwadar
remains in the realm of speculation. Even so, it
certainly gives heart to Pakistani generals who
believe that their country?s strategic location ?
which they see as its main asset ? could become
a source of revenue, if and when Pakistan
emerges as a trade corridor between the Middle
East and western China.
India faces a situation that has been termed
?nuclear-weapon enabled terror? ? Pakistani-
based terrorist groups operating across the
border with India under an allegedly Chinese-
supplied nuclear shield. How has India dealt
with this complex challenge?
The Indian response to ?nuclear-weapon enabled
terrorism? since 1998 has been incoherent at the
strategic level. That was the year that India and
Pakistan both conducted nuclear tests,
establishing a new military reality in South Asia.
With conventional warfare becoming increasingly
unlikely, Pakistan increased its support to
jihadist groups. Successive Indian leaders have
since then consciously chosen not to retaliate
covertly to such activities. They do not want to
adopt Pakistan?s methods in order to push
forward Indian strategic interests, even if these
are limited to self-defense. It needs to be noted
that reciprocation could always have been a
policy option, since nuclear-weapon enabled
terror can work both ways.
Instead, the focus of Indian counterterrorism has
been tactical. Indian security agencies have
excelled at busting terrorist cells. Even prior to
and since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks,
they have had significant success at identifying
and neutralizing jihadist networks. However, at
the level of national security policy, India has
placed its faith in Pakistani civilian leaders to
cooperate against terrorism.
Only time will tell whether this was a wise
policy, or a delusional one. So far, it has yielded
no results because the political leadership in
Pakistan is competing with the military for the
favor of jihadist groups, which at the level of
street mobilization, have acquired a distinct
political voice of their own. Rather than being a
fringe element, the jihadist movement in
Pakistan is tapping into middle-class resentment
at both civilian and military corruption. India
can do little to influence this trend, beyond
strengthening its own domestic security.
How does India?s military-strategic position vis-
a-vis Pakistan and China compare to that of a
year ago?
It is understood that a capabilities gap has long
existed between India and China on the one
hand, and India and Pakistan on the other. This
trend has continued. China is pulling ahead of
India, and Pakistan is falling behind India.
Interestingly, the power in the most desperate
position, Pakistan, is also the one with the least
external challenges. Its problems are either self-
inflicted or domestic. Both China and India, on
the other hand, face long-term challenges to
their regional predominance. China is worried
about strategic encirclement by the US and its
alliance-building efforts, which extend to India.
India is worried about an increasingly
radicalized Pakistan launching a ?wild card?
attack, either by covertly sponsoring a terrorist
assault or by triggering border clashes. India
has to be prepared to face both of these
scenarios without dropping its vigilance against
China. The May 2013 border stand-off between
India and China is a sign that New Delhi simply
cannot assume that either of its two military
adversaries will be quiescent, even if political
relations are ostensibly normal. It is attempting
to upgrade military infrastructure in forward
areas, but these efforts are making slow
progress, due to resource constraints which do
not seem likely to disappear.
How advanced are Pakistani attempts to
acquire a sea-based nuclear capability ? and
what impact would this have on the strategic
balance?
Pakistan?s sea-based deterrent is a continuation
of the overall policy of compensating for growing
conventional asymmetry with more
nuclearization. The Pakistani navy is much
weaker than its Indian counterpart (the India-
Pakistan capabilities gap is more pronounced at
sea than on land or in the air). Hence the effort
to install nuclear warheads on submarines seems
to be intended partly for psychological effect. It
is presently thought to be at an intermediate
stage, with a new naval strategic command
having been set up last year. Interestingly,
China is offering to build a number of satellite
navigation ground stations that would greatly
improve the guidance systems of Pakistani
submarines, thus adding to the potential
effectiveness of the sea-based deterrent.
With regard to the strategic balance, Pakistan
likes to imply that its nuclear arsenal is
permanently on hair-trigger status ? such that if
Indian policymakers even thought of carrying out
a cross-border counterterrorist raid, the result
would be nuclear Armageddon. But if what
Pakistan desires is a first-strike capability, there
is little sense in having a submarine-based
deterrent, whose main value would lie in its
survivability to a first strike launched by India
(and India has a no-first-use policy on nuclear
weapons). More than any change in the strategic
balance, the real danger is that personnel
vetting of Pakistani naval crews might not be
rigorous enough to eliminate the possibility of
adventurism on the part of individual
commanders, in the unlikely event that a war
breaks out and command and control
arrangements are severely degraded.
What is the current state of India?s naval
ambitions?
India is currently expanding its navy, the fifth-
largest in the world, with the intention of
projecting power across the Indian Ocean region.
The navy has long aspired to true blue-water
status, something that has eluded it due to
budgetary constraints. Although acquisition and
modernization programs are underway, it is
unlikely that India will be able to become a
maritime power anytime soon. This has largely to
do with the fact that India?s main military
threats are land-based, and that sphere will take
priority over the maritime domain.
Even so, India has stepped up its naval
engagement with East and Southeast Asian
countries. It has conducted its first-ever naval
exercises with Japan and trained Vietnamese
crews in submarine warfare. Naval infrastructure
is being expanded with the creation of new
bases along the coastline and listening posts
farther out in the Indian Ocean. Most important
of all, India is growing increasingly involved in
the South China Sea ? a sign that it is willing to
play China at its own game. Beijing has long
held that the ?Indian Ocean is not India?s
ocean?. This neat wordplay can now be reversed
to say that the South China Sea is not China?s
sea, irrespective of whether Beijing labels it a
?core interest? or not. India has an advantage in
this region because it is an Asian power, unlike
the US which is still perceived in some quarters
as an extraneous player in Asia.
How will the anticipated withdrawal of US
forces from Afghanistan in 2014 affect the
military balance between Pakistan, India and
China?
Pakistan hopes that it can reinsert the Taliban
into a position of primacy in Afghanistan. It will
push hard in this direction, but will face some
difficulties. In the late 1980s, Pakistani
diplomats and intelligence officials put out the
argument that an ultra-conservative Islamist
government in Kabul would serve Western
interests, by blocking Soviet expansion. They also
claimed that Pakistan had a right to play king-
maker in Afghanistan, after having played a
leading role in forcing the Soviet Union to
withdraw its troops from the country. This time
around, there are fewer takers for these
arguments. The US will maintain a stronger
regional presence via drones and Special Forces
than it ever did in the 1990s. India, having
invested massively in Afghanistan?s development
over the past decade, is not about to accept a
return to the 1990s, when it was completely
pushed out of the country by Pakistan-backed
Islamists. China, which has long been
ambivalent about the Taliban, not least due to
its own problems in Xinjiang, will play both
ends. It will rely on Pakistan to restrain the
Taliban from attacking Chinese economic
interests in Afghanistan, but will also consult
with India. Both India and China have a
common interest in stabilizing Afghanistan,
largely for the economic payoff that this would
offer. Pakistan, however, has tended to see
Afghanistan as a base area for training jihadist
groups outside its own territory (thus
maintaining plausible deniability for their
activities) and as an irredentist threat (due to
the long-festering border dispute over the
Durand Line). Its interests would be served by
ensuring a calibrated degree of instability in
Afghanistan. Whether such calibration can be
sustained remains to be seen.
Prem Mahadevan is a senior researcher at the
Center for Security Studies in Zurich.
Source: http://www.defence.pk/forums/indian-defence/264947-military-dynamics-south-asia-source-idrw.html
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Public release date: 15-Jul-2013
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