FORUM (Spotlight Weekly)

South Asia's Volatile Security Situation

By SHABAZ, Director General (Disarmament-P), Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Islamabad

The continuing volatile security situation in a nuclearised South Asian should be a matter of concern to the entire international community. Evidently, while the post-Cold War international relations are in the process of constructing new paradigms for a new wold order, South Asia is stuck in a time warp. More than one billion people of this region thus continue to live in wretched war-like conditions of instability and under-development. Should Pakistan and India fail to adapt to new global trends, and that too, urgently, the prospects for a stable and prosperous South Asia would remain distressingly bleak.

But the ground realities cannot be wished away. Pakistan's security concerns have not been alleviated following the end of the Cold War. The strategic environment in South Asia continues to be conflict prone. This instability is founded on India's recurrent use of force to resolve disputes e.g. its forcible occupation of Hyderabad, Junnagabad and Kashmir in 1947 and the Portugese colony of Goa in 1961. During the last 52 years, Pakistan and India had fought two wars over Kashmir and continue to exchange live fire even today across the line of control which runs through the disputed territory. The fact that this issue continues to be at the heart of their mutually deep animosity, efforts aimed at bringing about a viable peace in the region, with a fair settlement of the Kashmir issue, are bound to be self-defeating. With the injection of a nuclear dimension into the security calculus of the region, the next war between the two countries may not necessarily be conventional. The situation is, therefore, worrisome; there is no room for complacency, nor for half-baked solutions.

To preserve the prevailing fragile peace in South Asia, both Pakistan and India need to move towards establishing strategic stability instead of involving themselves in a destablizing arms race. And as for the attainment of the larger objective of nuclear disarmament, this is, from Pakistan's perspective, unquestionably tied to a resolution of all bilateral disputes, especially the Kashmir issue, in a fair and just manner. Efforts envisaging short-cuts ignoring the ground realities, will inevitably result in disappointment and, hence, not worthy of pursuit.

Just as durable peace cannot be built around the possession of nuclear weapons, the goals of strategic stability, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament in South Asia, or for that matter in any other part of the world, cannot be attained by proposing questionable political solutions or imposing harsh coercive actions. We have learned from history that nations, if they want to survive honorably, should never compromise on their genuine security requirements. The international community will always find Pakistan amenable to fairness and reciprocity. But, under no circumstances would we be prepared to sacrifice our genuine security interests.

Strategic stability through strategic restraint

The fateful events of 1971 prompted Pakistan to pursue a strategy of self reliance whose salient features are: maintaining a conventional military equilibrium by inducting advanced weapon systems, diversifying acquisition of arms from external sources and greater indigenisation of its defence requirements. Pakistan's nuclear weapons capability, which has been acquired against immense pressures and steep odds is largely a result of the threat that it faced to its security at the hands of militarily superior India which had demonstrated its nuclear capability in 1974. The large disparity between India and Pakistan in terms of conventional forces, as well as of areas, population, technological infrastructure and financial base and the imposition of specific sanctions by western countries who had been the main suppliers of military hardware to Pakistan, have pushed Islamabad to develop and rely on its nuclear weapons capability. For Pakistan, nuclear weapons represent the only means to retain a broad strategic equilibrium with India, to counter India's overwhelming conventional capability, and to have an effective deterrent in view of India's belligerent posture over Kashmir. This policy paid off when it is believed that it was the possession of nuclear weapons by Pakistan which played a decisive role in averting the outbreak of hostilities in 1987, when India carried out a very aggressive military exercise code named "Brasstacks" next to the international border, and in 1990 over Kashmir. By the same logic, it is argued that the 1965 war could not be averted to the absence of a nuclear deterrent in the power equation between the two countries.

The pre-test deterrent regime which had ensured the absence of war between the two adversaries was severely destabilized by the Indian nuclear tests by once again highlighting the asymmetries in the Pakistan-India that had been the foundation of peace and stability in South Asia. And it could have had potentially devastating consequences had not Pakistan demonstrated its own capability. The Pakistani tests reduced the asymmetries in the strategic equilibrium and restored the power balance. Nuclearisation has cost India the edge it once held over Pakistan.

(Excerpts of the paper presented at the 12th Regional Disarmament Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Region. Views expressed in this article are purely those of author's)