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Pakistan’s Land-Centric Defence Calculus Needs Overhauling
Author: Zaki Khalid*
The writer is a freelance national security and strategic affairs commentator based in Rawalpindi.
Key Points:
• Since its independence from British rule in 1947, Pakistan’s national security apparatus has viewed India as a nemesis and persistent existential threat.
• The years of counter-terrorism and counter insurgency operations carried out almost exclusively by Pakistan Army and its special forces, with the occasional support of Pakistan Air Force, kept its security matrix focused inland.
• The Pakistan Army has exclusively dominated higher-level strategic planning (JSHQ) despite the changing world order after 9/11, whereas, India improvised both its land-air strike capabilities (Cold Start) and naval force capabilities (Maritime Manoeuvre from the Sea).
• As Pakistan’s land and air forces were occupied in internal security operations within the mainland, India began to slowly but steadily lay out its influence network in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).
• Indian security establishment views CPEC not through the geo-economic lens but from a purely geostrategic and military-centric perspective. Thus, any maritime project by Pakistan involving the Chinese is viewed as an attempt to validate India’s perceived ‘String of Pearls’ theory. Any misunderstanding in the Strait of Hormuz could lead to a full-blown conflict, thereby impacting commercial marine traffic toward Gwadar.
• Countries along the IOR, excluding Pakistan, are shifting to a maritime-centric security calculus. For Pakistan to catch up with these realities, it is imperative that measures beyond development of sea-launched missiles be emplaced. Joint forces doctrines or policy directives, if any, should be revised to prioritise threats from the sea and maritime thinkers should be encouraged to provide overall strategic guidance for Pakistan Armed Forces’ direction in the coming 10 to 20 years.
Since its independence from British rule in 1947, Pakistan’s national security apparatus has viewed India as a nemesis and persistent existential threat. There is an undeterred conviction among the Pakistan Armed Forces on this core belief. India’s forced takeover of Jammu & Kashmir, Gurdaspur, and Hyderabad Deccan coupled with direct involvement in supporting the Mukti Bahini to liberate erstwhile East Pakistan has only strengthened its notoriety as the quintessential villain. Little wonder that the doctrinal essence of Pakistan Armed Forces’ operations is to maintain a credible defence force against a belligerent India in the land, air, and sea domains.
Confronting India during the 1965 and 1971 wars along with Kargil conflict at the dawn of the second millennium established leading relevance for land (primary) and air (secondary) forces within Pakistan. In a similar vein, the Pakistan Army’s overwhelming influence on national political discourse and leading efforts for Soviet expulsion from Afghanistan during the 1980s overshadowed the symbolic vitality of Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy, when viewed in hindsight.
The post 9/11 global security milieu, which was unilaterally shaped by the United States (US), had once again hyphenated Pakistan alongside Afghanistan, adding weight to the so-called ‘strategic depth’ policy. Pakistan Army, for its part, believed that the primary threats to the homeland originated from ground-based actors operating from the western and eastern borders. This mind set has been prevalent without interruption or revision. A similar paradigm has prevailed in the Pakistan Air Force; the undetected intrusion into Pakistani airspace by the US Special Operations forces in 2011 from the western border and Indian Air Force’s aggressive violation of Pakistani airspace in early 2019 from the east reinforce the assertion that hostile ground-based platforms are the enablers of aggressive force posturing.
The emergence and gradual disclosure of India’s proactive operations doctrine, dubbed as the ‘Cold Start,’ validated Pakistan’s concerns.¹ Unveiled in 2004 by then Indian Army leadership, this Cold Start doctrine enables India to carry out swift incursions into Pakistani territory through integrated operations with the Indian Air Force. It marked a fundamental shift away from the traditionalist Sundarji doctrine having defensive contours.²
Understanding the geostrategic environment of Pakistan at this time is paramount before Pakistan’s future strategic planning trajectories can be properly understood. The mounting pressure from the US and international community on Pakistan to assist in eradicating purported terror hotbeds in neighbouring Afghanistan including some pockets on its own soil, had incentivised modernisation of land and air forces for precision strikes in targeted areas, mostly in the north-west. With India posturing more confidently out of political advantage under the US umbrella, the Cold Start reinforced Pakistan’s belief that India would use its conventional might along its eastern border while its own troops are occupied along the western side. This is when the decision to develop Tactical Nuclear Weapons was taken as the last resort against a conventionally superior Indian military. In addition, the years of counter-terrorism and counter insurgency operations carried out almost exclusively by Pakistan Army and its special forces, with the occasional support of Pakistan Air Force, kept its security matrix focused inland.
The context above suffices to explain the land-centric orientation of Pakistan’s geostrategic calculus. In actual, Pakistan had neither the opportunity nor the resources to critically examine sea-based threats. As Pakistan’s land and air forces were occupied in internal security operations within the mainland, India began to slowly but steadily lay out its influence network in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR); the release of Indian Maritime Doctrine (2004) was followed by operationalisation of annual Theatre Level Readiness and Operational Exercise (TROPEX) in 2005. During TROPEX-2007, the Indian Navy validated its own maritime version of Cold Start dubbed as the ‘Maritime Maneuver from the Sea’ to influence air-land battles and “deliver the punch” in a highly swift and protracted conflict environment.³
In the same year, publication of India’s Maritime Military Strategy (2007) provided a 15-year roadmap to ensure that fast-changing geopolitical, geo-economic and technological developments cannot adversely impact core maritime national interests. Fundamentally, the strategy enunciated that the maritime orientation of human activities (as also military power projection) would increase ‘exponentially’ (rightly so). More interestingly, it highlighted the foresight of Indian maritime thinkers in the following words:
the Maritime Security Strategy (2015).
In early 2018, former US Defence Secretary James Mattis formally renamed Pacific Command (USPACOM) to Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) to highlight the growing inter-connectedness among Indian and Pacific Oceans.6 It elevated the strategic value of the Indian Ocean at the obvious pretext of perceived Chinese expansionism, a shared concern between the US and India. The Area of Responsibility (AOR) for INDOPACOM remains unchanged despite the name change, spanning from the easternmost maritime borders of Pakistan (just CENTCOM AOR) to the western shores of North America.
The June 2019 Indo-Pacific Strategy Report claims that India and the US share a ’common outlook‘ on the region, underpinned by defence, economic and diplomatic agendas.7 The November 2019 Free and Open Indo-Pacific Report acknowledges that ASEAN forms the bedrock of political and security discussions in the Asia Pacific region but adds that ‘minilateral agreements’ with like-minded partners (such as India) offers Washington the opportunity to secure its unstated agenda i.e. containment of China. As recently as September 2019, members of the ‘Quad’ comprising the US, India, Japan and Australia pledged to cooperate outside on security and connectivity issues. These developments contradict earlier remarks by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2018 Shangri-La Dialogue in which he rejected notions of joining a club of limited, like-minded members and accorded ASEAN its central role. As far as documented policies are concerned, India’s regional security calculus is aligned with that of the US.
While analysing Pakistan’s core geostrategic concerns, analysts and military thinkers alike have either studied the IOR or looked at the larger Asia-Pacific paradigm through the Chinese lens at the expense of a very critical reality; the expanse of Indian Ocean to the west of India’s landmass lies at the confluence of two separate American combatant commands. To be more precise, the Arabian Sea lies between CENTCOM and INDOPACOM AORs. While this observation may not merit significant attention, it forms the crux of Pakistan’s security dilemma from the larger geopolitical frame. Pakistan’s maritime threat spectrum is reactive to aggressive Indian Navy manoeuvring whose operations fall under another American AOR. Essentially, any Pak-India naval standoff automatically involves NAVCENT on the one hand (vis-à-vis Pakistan) and Pacific-based Marine Forces/Fleet (vis-à-vis India) on the other. India has onrecord criticised the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on multiple occasions at the political and diplomatic levels. Its security establishment views CPEC not through the geo-economic lens but from a purely geostrategic and military-centric perspective. Thus, any maritime project by Pakistan involving the Chinese is viewed as an attempt to validate India’s perceived ‘String of Pearls’ theory. In fact, a former Indian Navy chief views Gwadar port as an ‘arc of maritime influence’ which essentially covers India’s entire western seaboard till down south.11 From the Indian maritime security perspective, any Chinese forays into the IOR are a matter of national security concern.
The confusion regarding Western IOR does not end here. If members of the Warsaw Process proceed with efforts to boost naval force deployments against Iran in alliance with certain Gulf states, NAVCENT enters coordinated posturing against a country (Iran) with whom its core Indo-Pacific ally (India) has inter-dependent interests via Chabahar port project. Thus, it is evident that Western IOR poses a complex situation not only for Pakistan but for India itself. These complexities indicate strategic-level policy flaws within the US higher defence organisations.
American and British security cooperation with and influence on Pakistan have pushed down efforts for any leading maritime security deliberations within policy planning circles. Even the Central Military Commission (CMC) of China, despite facilitating naval modernisation along with Turkey, has larger interests in counter terrorism and special operations capability development with Pakistan to counter turbulent territories along Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and Central Asia Republics (CARs). Thus, the concept of ‘territorial defence’ continues to eat away the constructs which define operational and strategic priorities for Pakistan at the expense of long-term maritime security interests.
When examined in hindsight, these examples can help understand why land forces have exerted uninterrupted monopoly on the appointment of the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), a 4-star rank officer who oversees policy planning affairs for the triservices. Since its establishment in 1976 during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s regime, the CJCSC effectively remains a ceremonial slot without any operational control over triservice force commands as enjoyed in neighbouring India through the Integrated Defence Staff Headquarters. Pakistan’s first CJCSC, Army General Muhammad Sharif had ominously desired rotational appointments among tri-services for the headship of Joint Staff Headquarters (JSHQ) to maintain desired synergy and jointness. On the contrary, tri-services affairs have been dominated by Pakistan Army with the exception of two Navy joint chiefs (Admiral Muhammad Sharif Butt and Admiral Iftikhar Ahmed Sirohey) and one Air Force officer (Air Marshal Farooq Feroze Khan).
The Pakistan Army has exclusively dominated higher level strategic planning (JSHQ) despite the changing world order after 9/11, whereas, India improvised both its land-air strike capabilities (Cold Start) and naval force capabilities (Maritime Manoeuvre from the Sea). Its strategic strike capabilities have also fared well in parallel.
As of yet, Pakistan’s conventional and unconventional threat spectrums converge upon countering the thrust of Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs) from the plains of Punjab and deserts of Rajasthan. The previous and incumbent BJP regimes led by Prime Minister Modi have added the component of special forces-based irregular operations involving so-called ‘surgical strikes’ below the threshold of war. It should be evident by now that through strategic deception, India’s higher defence organisations have ensured that Pakistan does not scrap its land-centric security calculus prioritising territorial defence.
India is persistently looking outward through assertive maritime posturing without impacting the higher budgetary allocations for its Army and Air Force. Officials from the US Department of Defence, Office of Net Assessment have also started to discuss India’s future role in the Indo-Pacific. Mid-career officers in the Indian Navy also hold aspirations for regional power status, suggesting deployments of carrier battle groups on either side of the Indian landmass.
The inauguration of Coalition Task Force (CTF) Sentinel in Bahrain to keep tabs on Iranian maritime aggression (CENTCOM AOR) and China’s continued strategic investments in East Africa and Sri Lanka to the chagrin of India disturb the equilibrium in Western IOR thereby raising the spectre of threats emanating from the sea. The possibility of power conflict in the IOR is high and cannot be ruled out altogether.
Any misunderstanding in the Strait of Hormuz could lead to a full-blown conflict, thereby impacting commercial marine traffic toward Gwadar. India will not remain oblivious to growing PLA Navy patrols in the Western IOR. As an ally of INDOPACOM, while it will exercise its right to active deterrence near East Africa and the Middle East, Pakistan will not be able to address these concerns through CENTCOM’s mediation because India is not covered in the latter’s AOR. Moreover, it is a stark absentee from the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), the only Indian Ocean forum supported by the US government.
In summation, we can see:
Through tremendous sacrifices and inland operations, Pakistan has managed to rid itself of organised terrorism. It is now time to focus outward on threats from the sea; Pakistan needs almost a decade of catching up to do.
Author: Zaki Khalid*
The writer is a freelance national security and strategic affairs commentator based in Rawalpindi.
Key Points:
• Since its independence from British rule in 1947, Pakistan’s national security apparatus has viewed India as a nemesis and persistent existential threat.
• The years of counter-terrorism and counter insurgency operations carried out almost exclusively by Pakistan Army and its special forces, with the occasional support of Pakistan Air Force, kept its security matrix focused inland.
• The Pakistan Army has exclusively dominated higher-level strategic planning (JSHQ) despite the changing world order after 9/11, whereas, India improvised both its land-air strike capabilities (Cold Start) and naval force capabilities (Maritime Manoeuvre from the Sea).
• As Pakistan’s land and air forces were occupied in internal security operations within the mainland, India began to slowly but steadily lay out its influence network in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).
• Indian security establishment views CPEC not through the geo-economic lens but from a purely geostrategic and military-centric perspective. Thus, any maritime project by Pakistan involving the Chinese is viewed as an attempt to validate India’s perceived ‘String of Pearls’ theory. Any misunderstanding in the Strait of Hormuz could lead to a full-blown conflict, thereby impacting commercial marine traffic toward Gwadar.
• Countries along the IOR, excluding Pakistan, are shifting to a maritime-centric security calculus. For Pakistan to catch up with these realities, it is imperative that measures beyond development of sea-launched missiles be emplaced. Joint forces doctrines or policy directives, if any, should be revised to prioritise threats from the sea and maritime thinkers should be encouraged to provide overall strategic guidance for Pakistan Armed Forces’ direction in the coming 10 to 20 years.
Since its independence from British rule in 1947, Pakistan’s national security apparatus has viewed India as a nemesis and persistent existential threat. There is an undeterred conviction among the Pakistan Armed Forces on this core belief. India’s forced takeover of Jammu & Kashmir, Gurdaspur, and Hyderabad Deccan coupled with direct involvement in supporting the Mukti Bahini to liberate erstwhile East Pakistan has only strengthened its notoriety as the quintessential villain. Little wonder that the doctrinal essence of Pakistan Armed Forces’ operations is to maintain a credible defence force against a belligerent India in the land, air, and sea domains.
Confronting India during the 1965 and 1971 wars along with Kargil conflict at the dawn of the second millennium established leading relevance for land (primary) and air (secondary) forces within Pakistan. In a similar vein, the Pakistan Army’s overwhelming influence on national political discourse and leading efforts for Soviet expulsion from Afghanistan during the 1980s overshadowed the symbolic vitality of Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy, when viewed in hindsight.
The post 9/11 global security milieu, which was unilaterally shaped by the United States (US), had once again hyphenated Pakistan alongside Afghanistan, adding weight to the so-called ‘strategic depth’ policy. Pakistan Army, for its part, believed that the primary threats to the homeland originated from ground-based actors operating from the western and eastern borders. This mind set has been prevalent without interruption or revision. A similar paradigm has prevailed in the Pakistan Air Force; the undetected intrusion into Pakistani airspace by the US Special Operations forces in 2011 from the western border and Indian Air Force’s aggressive violation of Pakistani airspace in early 2019 from the east reinforce the assertion that hostile ground-based platforms are the enablers of aggressive force posturing.
The emergence and gradual disclosure of India’s proactive operations doctrine, dubbed as the ‘Cold Start,’ validated Pakistan’s concerns.¹ Unveiled in 2004 by then Indian Army leadership, this Cold Start doctrine enables India to carry out swift incursions into Pakistani territory through integrated operations with the Indian Air Force. It marked a fundamental shift away from the traditionalist Sundarji doctrine having defensive contours.²
Understanding the geostrategic environment of Pakistan at this time is paramount before Pakistan’s future strategic planning trajectories can be properly understood. The mounting pressure from the US and international community on Pakistan to assist in eradicating purported terror hotbeds in neighbouring Afghanistan including some pockets on its own soil, had incentivised modernisation of land and air forces for precision strikes in targeted areas, mostly in the north-west. With India posturing more confidently out of political advantage under the US umbrella, the Cold Start reinforced Pakistan’s belief that India would use its conventional might along its eastern border while its own troops are occupied along the western side. This is when the decision to develop Tactical Nuclear Weapons was taken as the last resort against a conventionally superior Indian military. In addition, the years of counter-terrorism and counter insurgency operations carried out almost exclusively by Pakistan Army and its special forces, with the occasional support of Pakistan Air Force, kept its security matrix focused inland.
The context above suffices to explain the land-centric orientation of Pakistan’s geostrategic calculus. In actual, Pakistan had neither the opportunity nor the resources to critically examine sea-based threats. As Pakistan’s land and air forces were occupied in internal security operations within the mainland, India began to slowly but steadily lay out its influence network in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR); the release of Indian Maritime Doctrine (2004) was followed by operationalisation of annual Theatre Level Readiness and Operational Exercise (TROPEX) in 2005. During TROPEX-2007, the Indian Navy validated its own maritime version of Cold Start dubbed as the ‘Maritime Maneuver from the Sea’ to influence air-land battles and “deliver the punch” in a highly swift and protracted conflict environment.³
In the same year, publication of India’s Maritime Military Strategy (2007) provided a 15-year roadmap to ensure that fast-changing geopolitical, geo-economic and technological developments cannot adversely impact core maritime national interests. Fundamentally, the strategy enunciated that the maritime orientation of human activities (as also military power projection) would increase ‘exponentially’ (rightly so). More interestingly, it highlighted the foresight of Indian maritime thinkers in the following words:
’Pakistan’s attempts to force a military solution in Kashmir pulled the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force (IAF) into a war to “‘defend territory”. This rationale was to dominate Indian Military thinking for the next half century. Fortunately, territorial defence failed to distract any of India’s early maritime thinkers, and for that succeeding generations should be grateful. Maritime thinking continued to cast its net wider, possibly back to earlier eras when colonial trade had not distorted the Indian Ocean maritime picture. Despite the permanence of ‘territorial defence’ in the national mind set, the Indian Navy refused to lose hope and believed that a country as large and diverse as India would one day realize that it has substantial maritime interests.’
Subsequently, the creation of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium (2008) gave India significant stakes to influence the discourse around key regional maritime issues, and also boost its naval diplomatic integrity in the western seaboard. Indian Navy’s Maritime Doctrine (2009) marked a visible shift to outward-looking thinking, projecting a role away from merely aiding land and air forces to becoming the harbinger and guarantor of great power status for India. These indications were affirmed by then Congress leadership in 2011 and 2013 when they referred to Indian Navy as a ‘net security provider,’ in the IOR. The political leadership under BJP seems to have carried forward this belief as evident in
the Maritime Security Strategy (2015).
In early 2018, former US Defence Secretary James Mattis formally renamed Pacific Command (USPACOM) to Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) to highlight the growing inter-connectedness among Indian and Pacific Oceans.6 It elevated the strategic value of the Indian Ocean at the obvious pretext of perceived Chinese expansionism, a shared concern between the US and India. The Area of Responsibility (AOR) for INDOPACOM remains unchanged despite the name change, spanning from the easternmost maritime borders of Pakistan (just CENTCOM AOR) to the western shores of North America.
The June 2019 Indo-Pacific Strategy Report claims that India and the US share a ’common outlook‘ on the region, underpinned by defence, economic and diplomatic agendas.7 The November 2019 Free and Open Indo-Pacific Report acknowledges that ASEAN forms the bedrock of political and security discussions in the Asia Pacific region but adds that ‘minilateral agreements’ with like-minded partners (such as India) offers Washington the opportunity to secure its unstated agenda i.e. containment of China. As recently as September 2019, members of the ‘Quad’ comprising the US, India, Japan and Australia pledged to cooperate outside on security and connectivity issues. These developments contradict earlier remarks by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 2018 Shangri-La Dialogue in which he rejected notions of joining a club of limited, like-minded members and accorded ASEAN its central role. As far as documented policies are concerned, India’s regional security calculus is aligned with that of the US.
While analysing Pakistan’s core geostrategic concerns, analysts and military thinkers alike have either studied the IOR or looked at the larger Asia-Pacific paradigm through the Chinese lens at the expense of a very critical reality; the expanse of Indian Ocean to the west of India’s landmass lies at the confluence of two separate American combatant commands. To be more precise, the Arabian Sea lies between CENTCOM and INDOPACOM AORs. While this observation may not merit significant attention, it forms the crux of Pakistan’s security dilemma from the larger geopolitical frame. Pakistan’s maritime threat spectrum is reactive to aggressive Indian Navy manoeuvring whose operations fall under another American AOR. Essentially, any Pak-India naval standoff automatically involves NAVCENT on the one hand (vis-à-vis Pakistan) and Pacific-based Marine Forces/Fleet (vis-à-vis India) on the other. India has onrecord criticised the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on multiple occasions at the political and diplomatic levels. Its security establishment views CPEC not through the geo-economic lens but from a purely geostrategic and military-centric perspective. Thus, any maritime project by Pakistan involving the Chinese is viewed as an attempt to validate India’s perceived ‘String of Pearls’ theory. In fact, a former Indian Navy chief views Gwadar port as an ‘arc of maritime influence’ which essentially covers India’s entire western seaboard till down south.11 From the Indian maritime security perspective, any Chinese forays into the IOR are a matter of national security concern.
The confusion regarding Western IOR does not end here. If members of the Warsaw Process proceed with efforts to boost naval force deployments against Iran in alliance with certain Gulf states, NAVCENT enters coordinated posturing against a country (Iran) with whom its core Indo-Pacific ally (India) has inter-dependent interests via Chabahar port project. Thus, it is evident that Western IOR poses a complex situation not only for Pakistan but for India itself. These complexities indicate strategic-level policy flaws within the US higher defence organisations.
American and British security cooperation with and influence on Pakistan have pushed down efforts for any leading maritime security deliberations within policy planning circles. Even the Central Military Commission (CMC) of China, despite facilitating naval modernisation along with Turkey, has larger interests in counter terrorism and special operations capability development with Pakistan to counter turbulent territories along Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and Central Asia Republics (CARs). Thus, the concept of ‘territorial defence’ continues to eat away the constructs which define operational and strategic priorities for Pakistan at the expense of long-term maritime security interests.
When examined in hindsight, these examples can help understand why land forces have exerted uninterrupted monopoly on the appointment of the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), a 4-star rank officer who oversees policy planning affairs for the triservices. Since its establishment in 1976 during Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s regime, the CJCSC effectively remains a ceremonial slot without any operational control over triservice force commands as enjoyed in neighbouring India through the Integrated Defence Staff Headquarters. Pakistan’s first CJCSC, Army General Muhammad Sharif had ominously desired rotational appointments among tri-services for the headship of Joint Staff Headquarters (JSHQ) to maintain desired synergy and jointness. On the contrary, tri-services affairs have been dominated by Pakistan Army with the exception of two Navy joint chiefs (Admiral Muhammad Sharif Butt and Admiral Iftikhar Ahmed Sirohey) and one Air Force officer (Air Marshal Farooq Feroze Khan).
The Pakistan Army has exclusively dominated higher level strategic planning (JSHQ) despite the changing world order after 9/11, whereas, India improvised both its land-air strike capabilities (Cold Start) and naval force capabilities (Maritime Manoeuvre from the Sea). Its strategic strike capabilities have also fared well in parallel.
As of yet, Pakistan’s conventional and unconventional threat spectrums converge upon countering the thrust of Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs) from the plains of Punjab and deserts of Rajasthan. The previous and incumbent BJP regimes led by Prime Minister Modi have added the component of special forces-based irregular operations involving so-called ‘surgical strikes’ below the threshold of war. It should be evident by now that through strategic deception, India’s higher defence organisations have ensured that Pakistan does not scrap its land-centric security calculus prioritising territorial defence.
India is persistently looking outward through assertive maritime posturing without impacting the higher budgetary allocations for its Army and Air Force. Officials from the US Department of Defence, Office of Net Assessment have also started to discuss India’s future role in the Indo-Pacific. Mid-career officers in the Indian Navy also hold aspirations for regional power status, suggesting deployments of carrier battle groups on either side of the Indian landmass.
The inauguration of Coalition Task Force (CTF) Sentinel in Bahrain to keep tabs on Iranian maritime aggression (CENTCOM AOR) and China’s continued strategic investments in East Africa and Sri Lanka to the chagrin of India disturb the equilibrium in Western IOR thereby raising the spectre of threats emanating from the sea. The possibility of power conflict in the IOR is high and cannot be ruled out altogether.
Any misunderstanding in the Strait of Hormuz could lead to a full-blown conflict, thereby impacting commercial marine traffic toward Gwadar. India will not remain oblivious to growing PLA Navy patrols in the Western IOR. As an ally of INDOPACOM, while it will exercise its right to active deterrence near East Africa and the Middle East, Pakistan will not be able to address these concerns through CENTCOM’s mediation because India is not covered in the latter’s AOR. Moreover, it is a stark absentee from the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), the only Indian Ocean forum supported by the US government.
In summation, we can see:
- • Pakistan is under CENTCOM AOR and cannot interfere with INDOPACOM AOR affairs • India enjoys freedom of navigation in both CENTCOM and INDOPACOM AORs
- • Pakistan is not a member of IORA which focuses largely on Indian Ocean affairs and is recognised by the US
- • Indian and Chinese geostrategic planners have already accounted for threats from each other’s maritime forces
Through tremendous sacrifices and inland operations, Pakistan has managed to rid itself of organised terrorism. It is now time to focus outward on threats from the sea; Pakistan needs almost a decade of catching up to do.
