Lessons for next India-Pak war
New Delhi, May 27 -- At this point, most avid consumers of the news have probably read 1,001 post-mortem analyses of the India-Pakistan conflict, desperately searching for some new insight that helps explain this brief, but intense clash between the two South Asian rivals. In this sea of commentary, an essay by scholar Joshua T White simply titled, "Lessons for the next India-Pakistan war", stands out both for its analytical clarity and its wisdom.
To talk more about his essay and the larger lessons learned from the conflict, White was featured on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. White's essay was published by the Brookings Institution, where White is a non-resident fellow with the foreign policy program. He is also professor of the practice of international affairs at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. White has extensive experience working in the US government, having served at both the National Security Council and the Pentagon.
White spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about the shifting global debate on "attribution", troubling new precedents about military target selection, the depth of Pakistani information operations, and the widespread use of drones and unmanned aerial vehicles in the recent conflict.
At the outset, White noted that the recent conflict marked a new chapter in the decades-long rivalry between the two nuclear-armed nations. "Modi and his team came in with a belief that inaction in the face of terrorism was just intolerable - not just because they saw themselves as tougher than the last guys, but because they had seen the persistence of terrorist attacks. And they'd seen it at a time when India was doing its best to ignore Pakistan and focus on other things," he said.
White said that while the Modi government, like past Indian governments, faced a problem in designing an appropriate response to terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan, namely that the space available for undertaking a conventional ground force campaign seemed too constrained.
The scholar remarked that Pakistan's development of tactical nuclear weapons was designed to shut that kind of Indian campaign down, to make it infeasible and to make it just too risky for an Indian Prime Minister to attempt.
Therefore, White stated, "India since 2016 and the Uri crisis has found increasingly creative and risky military responses to avoid big army movements, but these are responses designed to try to punish Pakistan, degrade terrorist groups, and show resolve to the Indian people."
He noted that even if one argues that these responses only accomplished the third of those objectives, there has nevertheless been a stepwise increase in complexity and risk-taking.
"What we saw recently with Pahalgam is, in some ways, an old story. It is terrorist attacks in India prompting a retaliation against Pakistan. But in some ways, it's a new story, because India is probing new Pakistani weaknesses. It's taking new kinds of risks, and it's setting a higher bar in each crisis for how it is going to respond to the next," noted White.
White remarked that the Indian government's decision to waste minimal time on the "attribution" question of who exactly was responsible for the attacks, while understandable, could have longer-term consequences. "The Prime Minister has set expectations that will make Indians question any future attempt to conduct investigations or will make it more difficult to roll out diplomatic or economic or other kinds of responses that aren't as flashy as military responses," explained White.
According to the scholar, this dynamic could increase pressure on the Indian government and could have the result of speeding up the next crisis or, ironically, making it difficult for the government to find other creative responses to terrorism....
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