Analysis of pakistan's nuclear doctrine : IDSA

[relativiti]

Pakistan’s ‘First Use’ in Perspective


Ali Ahmed

May 12, 2011
Before and after Osama’s killing, the spotlight fell momentarily on Pakistan’s nuclear intentions. Prior to his death, the headlines dwelt on Pakistani tests of Hatf VIII and Hatf IX. Demonstrating plausible first use capability, these were intended to deter a conventional attack by India. After Osama’s death, in a verbal salvo, Pakistan’s foreign secretary warned of ‘catastrophic’ consequences in case any state (read India) chose to emulate the US. His reference was perhaps to escalation, with Pakistani nuclear first use as a grim possibility. What exactly are the chances of this?

That ‘first use’ is inherent in Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine is less indicative of what the doctrine contains and more the general consensus with regard to its nature. Pakistan has not declared its nuclear doctrine as India has done. The fact that it does not subscribe to NFU does not by default imply a first use doctrine. Therefore, it cannot categorically be said that Pakistan’s operational nuclear doctrine is one of nuclear first use.

Having acknowledged this, it has to be said that all indicators point to Pakistani ‘first use’. Firstly, Pakistan wishes not only to deter a nuclear attack but also a conventional attack by compensating for its conventional disadvantages through nuclear means. Second, it has not subscribed to NFU and as per Wikileaks revelations, General Kayani was not in sync with his president’s inclination towards NFU. Third, there are several statements from important personages on the Pakistani intention to escalate in case of conventional conflict. Fourth, since it is the military that has control over the nuclear button, the nuclear arsenal may be more attuned to developments in conventional warfare than would otherwise be the case. Lastly, Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent is operated under military control through service specific strategic commands. This indicates a greater readiness to follow through.

Pakistan is also ambiguous about the nature of its first use. One option is along the time dimension. For some, first use could be a Samson option - as a ‘last resort’. This may command greater legality in terms of extreme resort in self-defence. Alternatively, as the development of the ‘Nasr’ suggests, it may be taken early on when the conflict in a ‘low threshold mode’.

The second ambiguity is over the type of nuclear strike. The first type is a ‘higher order’ strike, attempting to disarm and degrade India’s strike back capability. This is more likely a last resort. The targets could be a mix of counter military, counter force and counter city. The second type is more likely a ‘middle order’ use option in which multiple nuclear strikes are used to blunt India’s conventional offensive capabilities, such as when India’s strike corps are delivering a grievous blow. These could be on counter military targets, and include targets within India - such as supporting air fields. The third is ‘lower order’ first use, as part of nuclear signalling such as demonstration strikes or low opprobrium quotient strike(s). These could include a strike or two -in the oft-discussed scenario of a strike on an advancing Indian armoured column - in Pakistani territory in a defensive mode. In graduated first use scenarios, this is how nuclear weapons may be introduced into the conflict.

Pakistan has demonstrated its tactical nuclear capability through the miniaturisation, low yield, short range and shoot and scoot capability of ‘Nasr’. This helps project a low threshold in the early use mode. This means it can attempt either demonstration strikes or employ these in greater numbers to derail India’s strike formations. This is not so much by physically stopping the pincers, as much as by slowing them down by the strategic, operational and logistics effects of transiting to the nuclear realm.

These weapons have not been delegated to operational formations. Instead, they are controlled by service specific strategic commands, indicating centralisation. This means that any of the options discussed above is available to Pakistan for execution, and it is not necessarily restricted to a default war fighting first use option.

Pakistan can be expected to reinforce its deterrent through an information campaign, surrounding a low threshold projection. This compensates for any weakness or lack of credibility relating to its deterrent, since the deterrent also covers the conventional level. Its projection of irrationality is in keeping with the ‘rationality of irrationality’ thesis - a part of nuclear deterrence theory. The idea is to keep India guessing and hopefully deterred.

To attribute a first use doctrine to Pakistan is to admit that India’s nuclear weapons do not deter adequately. This may not be true since Pakistan too is subject to the psychological effects of deterrence. Deterrence is heightened since first use implies a break in the nuclear taboo. There would also be no guarantee of success and the only certainty would be of costs - known and known unknowns as well as unimagined and unimaginable.

‘First use’ would be dependent on appreciation of gains and costs. Gains from projection of a first use are self-evident. Firstly, the existence of a ‘threshold’ forecloses any expansive options that India’s conventional might may enable. Secondly, it refines the stability/instability paradox in injecting instability at the nuclear level. It indicates a rejection of India’s deterrence as it is currently defined, as a one-step escalatory ladder. This will force India to reconsider its nuclear response strategy, if not its declaratory doctrine. It stabilises the conventional level in reinforcing Indian prudence, thereby opening up the sub-conventional level for proxy war. The paradox can therefore be extended to read instability/stability/instability.

The gain from executing first use is in attempting to escape paying a price that India may set out to exact by catalysing the international community’s intervention. It would also bring home to India grave dangers that it may have discounted in going in for a military showdown. But the costs are much starker.

India’s promise of assured retaliation cannot be ignored, in the light of India’s growing second strike capability. Even if India’s declared intent of visiting ‘massive’ retribution is seemingly lacking in credibility, assured retaliation may yet inflict ‘unacceptable damage’. Secondly, there are risks in a first use intent inviting a pre-emptive strike. India is going down the BMD route. It has a multiple satellite launch capability, which over time can translate into an MIRV capability.

The upshot of this discussion is: firstly that first use is useful only for projection. Secondly, strategic sense favours an operational nuclear doctrine that tends towards NFU. Equally, strategic sense, from Pakistan’s point of view, is in keeping this secret. It can therefore be inferred, that the greater the projection the less likely the intention.

Projection of first use is safe for Pakistan since it rightly counts on India’s strategic maturity. India has no intention of being deflected from its economic trajectory. Pakistan’s nuclear nonchalance therefore owes much to its largely accurate appreciation of its nuclear posturing going untested.

This is one assumption India will not challenge by departing from military prudence. Its recent distancing from Cold Start is not so much on account of the efficacy of Pakistani deterrence, but its own grand strategic economic imperative. Sensibly, even as India wishes to match step with Pakistan, it has no intention of accompanying Pakistan on its way downhill.

Pakistan

 

[relativiti]

Making Sense of ‘Nasr’

Ali Ahmed

April 24, 2011
News reports have it that Pakistan has successfully conducted a test of a surface-to-surface short range Hatf IX (Nasr), described as a multi-tube ballistic missile with a ‘shoot and scoot’ capability. The statement of the Director-General of the Strategic Plans Division, Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, that the flight consolidated Pakistan's strategic deterrence capability at all levels of the threat spectrum indicates that Nasr is nuclear capable.

To Pakistani analyst, Dr. Shireen Mazari, ‘It (Nasr) will act as a deterrent against use of mechanised conventional land forces. This was essential in the wake of India's adventurist war-fighting doctrine formulations, which envisaged the use of rapid deployment of armed brigades and divisions in surprise and rapid attacks.’ She believes, ‘Indian dreams of a limited war against Pakistan through its Cold Start strategy have been laid to rest. This will allow for a reassertion of a stable nuclear deterrence in the region.’ This article analyses if Dr. Mazari is right.

Pakistan is the weaker side in the India-Pakistan dyad. Recognising this structural factor, its military, which also runs the state, has been constantly innovative in addressing what it perceives as an asymmetry. It has resorted to external balancing in renting out its strategic location for geopolitical use by external powers. It has forged a close relationship with China to balance India and help China in its strategic purposes in relation to India. For over quarter of a century, it has tried to gain ‘depth’, forward of its defences, by rendering rear area security problematic for Indian forces through its proxy war. It has attempted internal balancing by reportedly training five lakh irregulars for making India’s stabilisation operations untenable, even at the risk and cost of the backlash it is currently enduring. This explains the utilisation of the development of Nasr for purposes beyond merely doctrinal.

Further, Pakistan employs information operations interestingly and to some effect. For instance, it claims to have equalised India’s number of nuclear tests at Chagai and insists that these give a variegated capability. It periodically claims success of missile tests from the point of view of deterrence signalling. The Nasr test, for instance, coincided with the launch of corps level Indian military manoeuvres, Exercise Vijayi Bhav, in the Rajasthan deserts. Pakistan’s nuclear related rhetoric is also designed to increase the salience of the nuclear overhang and addresses multiple audiences, in particular the US. Its prosecution of operations against the Taliban in FATA and Khyber Pakhtoonwa province has been marked by much sound and fury, particularly with respect to the displacement of people. Its deployment of nationalist strategic analysts to inform, rationalise, legitimise and influence has been proactive. All these resulted in a former US president once famously mistaking South Asia to be the most ‘dangerous’ place in the world!

This creditable record of information warfare requires to appropriately condition analyses of developments like that of the Nasr. Nasr’s flight test had both Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai and Dr. Shireen Mazari giving their opinions. This clearly indicates that even if Nasr is a forbidding reality by itself, the same needs underlining and highlighting for effect. Multiple aims are thus achieved. The purported aim is deterrence, which explains the timing to coincide with the Indian exercise. It could also be to get the US focus back on the eastern front in terms of making the admittedly delicate balance seem untenably unstable, in light of US keenness to get the Pakistani Army take on the Taliban in North Waziristan.

That said, taking Nasr seriously at face-value helps arrive at its actual significance. The development of Nasr indicates that Pakistan views India’s Cold Start doctrine with concern. The Nasr is meant to deter India’s launch of Cold Start. Since Nasr is reportedly nuclear capable, short range and light weight, it could imply the use of tactical nuclear weapons were such a conflict to occur. Fearing a lower nuclear threshold, implied by availability of tactical nuclear weapons, India may be deterred from embarking on Cold Start. This would enable Pakistan to recreate the space it once had for continuing its prosecution of proxy war - a space that has been constricted by India’s formulation of a Cold Start doctrine, even though all the components of the doctrine such as weapons acquisitions, relocation of formations and change to a manoeuvre war culture are not yet entirely in place.

It has been assessed that Pakistani reliance on its nuclear cover would increase with India’s increasing felicity with Limited War doctrine. Pakistan is reportedly ahead of India in numbers of nuclear warheads and in a more variegated missile delivery capability. This, to one analyst, spells a strategy of ‘asymmetric escalation’. In the Pakistani logic, nuclear deterrence is also to operate at the conventional level. Nasr, to Dr. Mazari, makes for deterrence stability since it helps strengthen this dimension of nuclear stability. Dr. Mazari is right on deterrence stability, but gets her reason wrong - the reference to Cold Start being anachronistic.

India’s Army Chief has indicated that no such doctrine exists. It appears that the Indian military is looking to respond to subconventional provocations at the same level. This may be in the form of surgical strikes, Special Forces operations, border skirmishes, activation of the Line of Control, select punitive operations, etc. The Indian intent will be to convey a message of resolve as well as to punish and cause selective attrition. And the aim would be to address Pakistani cost-benefit calculations in such a manner as to coerce Pakistan into limiting its provocation below India’s ‘level of tolerance’. Such a course of action by India has internal political utility in letting off steam in terms of ‘something’ being done. It is also decidedly less expensive, preserving India’s grand strategy of economic rise from being unnecessarily buffeted.

The Indian move away from a default resort to Limited War places the onus of escalation on Pakistan. India’s conventional capability is to ensure that Pakistani reaction to such subconventional retribution is non-escalatory. Should Pakistan try to respond with conventional action, that would provoke a ‘Cold Start’ by India. Pakistan would thus be placed a second time round in a position of decision to escalate, this time by using Nasr. The prospects of Pakistan’s self-deterrence under such circumstances are higher. In the event, Pakistan will be forced to react defensively to India’s ‘contingency’ operations.

In case push comes to shove and Pakistan does resort to the use of Nasr, then this would more likely be on its own territory, rather than provocatively on Indian launch pads close to the border. India’s promised retaliation may not then necessarily be along the lines of its nuclear doctrine of ‘massive’ punitive retaliation (strategy having the privilege of departing from doctrine). The net result would be further nuclear impact(s) on Pakistani territory.

In other words, stability reigns not due to India being deterred, but Pakistan being self-deterred. Accountability for initiating both the conflict and a possible nuclear conflict would rest with the Pakistani military. The aftermath would surely find it decisively pushed off its commanding perch in Pakistan by an angered people.

In rethinking Cold Start as a default option and working towards proactive ‘contingency’ options, India is a step ahead in doctrinal shadow boxing. It appears to be playing by Schelling’s concept of Limited War as a ‘bargaining’ process:

‘It is in wars that we have come to call ‘limited wars’ that the bargaining appears most vividly and is conducted most consciously. The critical targets in such a war are the mind of the enemy…the threat of violence in reserve is more important than the commitment of force in the field… And, like any bargaining situation, a restrained war involves some degree of collaboration between adversaries.’ (Schelling, Arms and Influence (1966).

The challenge in South Asia is to ensure that the contest remains at the doctrinal level. Keeping it so entails getting into a doctrinal dialogue with Pakistan so that the ‘collaboration’, mentioned by Schelling, can be from a mutually intelligible script.

Making Sense of

 

[Luftwaffe]

Pakistan is the weaker side in the India-Pakistan dyad. Recognizing this structural factor, its military, which also runs the state.



In case push comes to shove and Pakistan does resort to the use of Nasr, then this would more likely be on its own territory, rather than provocatively on Indian launch pads close to the border.

hindustani writer assume it would likely be on its own soil delusional.

 

[ziaulislam]

i think what it means that nearly every country has no first use policy..remeber we only developed nuclear weapons after inia i , as a response..
so we would use nuclear wepons first in an event when we have somehow faile to stop a Indian aggression in a conventional war, that too obviously on the aggressor, first more likly on our own soil..