Pooling PAK-US Interests in South Asia

Two great speeches in the US senate foreign relations committee

Olson raised the long term and genuine demand again that Pakistan will have to operate against all terrorist wings without any discrimination

The recent abrupt cuts in military and financial aid of Pakistan – America’s front line ally in war against terror — have deteriorated the bilateral calculus. The tilt of the US towards India, a country on which Pakistan’s foreign policy depends heavily, is adding fuel to fire. The concerns of Pakistan on the new US-India ‘love’ are not usual as some unusual agreements have been signed between both the states that directly affect Pakistan’s military and strategic interests in the region.

Last month, an agreement was signed by US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter and his Indian counterpart Manohar Parikar that would allow the two countries to use each other’s land, air and naval bases even though Washington assured Islamabad that the military logistics pact would not jeopardise the country’s strategic interests. Pakistanis also complains that the India-US nuclear cooperation agreement and similar international nuclear deals with India will place New Delhi in a superior position unless all stockpiles are eliminated. These deals permit India to import dual-use technology as well fuel for its nuclear reactors. Complemented by the strong US support for Indian inclusion in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the deals will integrate India into international markets for trade in nuclear fuel and technology.

But leaving Pakistan alone, again, and building ties with its foe can bring deadly consequences to the US interests here. India’s blooming strategic relationship with the United States and development of nuclear and advanced conventional military capabilities and doctrines have been and will remain drivers of Pakistan’s nuclear build-up. Experts are therefore understandably concerned that the 70-year security competition between India and Pakistan is becoming a nuclear arms race, albeit one in which the antagonists — unlike the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War — have fought four hot wars, still regularly exchange fire over contested territory, and quite possibly sponsor the activities of non-state actors who project violence across their shared border. Considering what we now know of the close calls experienced by US and Soviet nuclear forces during the Cold War, the nuclear situation in South Asia is cause for concern.

But the two recent speeches in the US Foreign Relations Select Committee have raised hopes in Pakistan that sane voices still exist. One was made by the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) Richard G. Olson who said that Pakistan had worked with the US to eliminate al Qaeda. Olson said that the Pakistan army had destroyed the hideouts of militants and terrorists in the country during Operation Zarb-e-Azb. He also spoke about relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan, stating that ties had improved significantly after President Ghani’s election and then subsequently deteriorated over important issues such as border management, refugees and counter-terrorism.

But he rightly said that Pakistan will have to prove that their homeland is not being used against neighbouring countries by terrorists. Pakistan wants a similar assurance from the US-led Afghan government as proof exists that the selective unrest in Balochistan and terror attacks in other parts of Pakistan including the recent ones in Quetta and Mardan were sponsored, executed and covered by Indian facilitated terrorists residing in Afghanistan.

Olson raised the long term and genuine demand again that Pakistan will have to operate against all terrorist wings without any discrimination. He said that Pakistan will have to play an important role in making Afghanistan a strong and peaceful country.

Earlier, last week, Toby Dalton, who is the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment and an expert on non-proliferation and nuclear energy, addressed the committee about the regional security challenges and the evolution of the global nuclear order.

He provided clear-eyed assessment of the challenges to US policy posed specifically by developments in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and what they mean for US interests in South Asia. Though obvious, it is worth underscoring the point that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program does not exist in a vacuum. Nuclear weapons are central to Pakistan’s security-seeking behaviour in a region it considers to be enduringly hostile.

He emphasised that any nuclear explosion would have catastrophic consequences, which is why it will continue to be in the US interest to sustain an ability to mitigate nuclear threats in South Asia even as its role and presence in the region evolves. The challenge with Pakistan is how to preserve patterns of cooperation and institutional relationships that facilitate US influence at a time when Pakistani behaviour in other spheres may be injurious to US interests.

US priorities related to nuclear weapons in South Asia have shifted over time. While the United States first sought to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in the region, the focus shifted to cap and rollback of the Indian and Pakistani nuclear programs after the countries’ nuclear tests in 1998 and then to ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and technologies.

Dalton was of the view that today there are two priorities above others that should guide US policy. The first priority he said is the prevention of intentional or inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, which is most likely to occur during a military confrontation between India and Pakistan. Successive US administrations intervened with India and Pakistan — during the Kashmir crisis in 1990, the Kargil war in 1999, the crisis in 2001-02, and following the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008 — in order to contain the conflict before nuclear weapons could be deployed. Although the two states have implemented several nuclear and military confidence building measures, these are insufficient to temper their security competition.

What is known publicly about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is mostly what Pakistan wants India (and the world) to know for deterrence purposes. When it flight tests a nuclear-capable missile, the military issues a press release. When the nuclear command authority meets to discuss threats and policies, they issue a press release. But the other essential facts of the Pakistani nuclear program are fairly elusive.

In recent years, Pakistan has supplemented its fleet of medium-range ballistic missiles with a short-range battlefield missile, the Nasr. Pakistani government officials assert that it will carry a low-yield, tactical nuclear weapon in order to deter India from carrying out conventional military operations on Pakistani territory. Pakistan also has tested a longer-range missile, the Shaheen-III, which could target Indian military facilities as far away as the Andaman and Nicobar islands. And it has tested two nuclear-capable cruise missiles, linking these to concerns about an eventual Indian ballistic missile defense system. The conventional wisdom is that Pakistan does not deploy nuclear weapons in peacetime, that it keeps warheads and delivery vehicles separate. Whether and how long this non-deployed status will remain the case is an open question.

The recent US practice to put Pakistan in isolation, he said, has led many to believe that minimum deterrence of existential threats was insufficient for Pakistan’s security. Thus, in 2011, Pakistan began to talk instead about so-called “full-spectrum deterrence,” under which nuclear weapons will be used to deter not just a nuclear war, but also other threats such as an Indian conventional military attack. It is in this context that Pakistani officials have dubbed the Nasr — a tactical, battlefield nuclear weapon — a “weapon of peace,” because it is supposed to prevent India from seeking space for limited conventional military operations short of Pakistan’s nuclear red-lines.

The growth in Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and the broadening of its deterrence objectives raise thorny challenges for US interests to prevent a nuclear explosion and to maintain effective security on nuclear weapons and materials.

He emphasised that the stated Pakistani concerns about India’s offensive conventional military planning are not without merit. The Indian army has sought to formulate and exercise a proactive strategy, often called “Cold Start,” the point of which is to be able to rapidly mobilise sufficient firepower to overwhelm Pakistani defenses and inflict defeat on the Pakistan army. Even if the Indian military could carry out such an operation, many experts doubt that the Indian government would ever sanction it, given the inherent potential for conflict escalation. But for Pakistan, this threat — real or perceived — has provided ample justification for its nuclear build-up.

The senate committee was told that to be fair, Pakistan is not given sufficient credit for the nuclear security practices it has put in place. By most indicators, its security is probably quite good. Yet, he said, it is still in the US interest to support Pakistan’s fight against groups such as the Pakistani Taliban to the extent that these groups pose potential threats to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Here, the US role in the region has evolved in recent years. US–India relations have blossomed while US-Pakistan relations have become more troubled. In the past, Pakistan sought to catalyse US intervention as a way to internationalise the dispute over Kashmir, while India actively opposed any US policy interest in a resolution to the Kashmir issue. Meanwhile, most Pakistanis probably do not trust the United States to be an honest broker in regional disputes.

One possible opportunity, he said, is through membership in international regimes that both seek to join, and specifically the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). If there were a process to negotiate benchmarks for membership for both states, it could encourage them to take steps to temper impulses in their security competition that exacerbate the challenges described above. In this regard, the policy of the current US administration to support an unconditional and exceptional NSG membership path for India is problematic. This policy requires no commitments from India to bring its nuclear weapons practices in line with those of other nuclear states in return for membership. It also opens no pathway to membership for Pakistan that would incentivise it to consider nuclear restraint. It is not surprising that the US policy has encountered significant opposition from a number of other NSG members, not least China, who argue that the group should utilise objective criteria when considering the membership of states like India and Pakistan that have not signed the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

These two speeches at the highest US policy forum have raised the hope that the policy makers there will think about their current policy of leaving Pakistan alone again after it has killed 26,862 terrorists, has offered the blood of its 48,504 civilians, 45 journalists, 5,498 security personnel’s and when 951 of its civilians have been killed by the US drone strikes as collateral damage.