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India’s conventional military capabilities continue to pull ahead of Pakistan’s while also falling behind China’s. Today, the CSS’s Prem Mahadevan examines the evolving military balance among these powers, to include the impact of cross-border terrorism and India’s naval ambitions in the South China Sea.
You’ve written that Sino-Pakistani collaboration is at the root of India’s security deficit. How has the nature of this collaboration evolved in the past year? Any prospects of a Sino-Pakistani split?
There will not be a Sino-Pakistani split. Beijing realizes that the real power center in Pakistan is the military and that, if it wishes to keep the bilateral relationship strong, all it needs to do is strengthen the military’s capacity to confront India. This it is continuing to do.
Despite the high hopes that some Pakistanis have about Chinese investment, China has been fairly clear that it will not underwrite a weak economy plagued further by political instability. The US invests nine times more in Pakistan than China does and has little to show for it. Beijing, by contrast, is being quite crafty in not allowing its expressions of friendship to get in the way of hard business sense. Furthermore, attacks directed at Chinese citizens in Pakistan have recently emphasized just how vulnerable foreign nationals are to jihadist violence.
On the plus side, China has taken operational control of Gwadar port, in Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan province. Many feel that this development could be significant, giving China access to a potential naval base near the Persian Gulf and reducing its vulnerability to a hypothetical American-led economic blockade at the Straits of Malacca. These qualifiers – ‘potential’ and ‘hypothetical’ – are necessary because a Chinese naval presence at Gwadar remains in the realm of speculation. Even so, it certainly gives heart to Pakistani generals who believe that their country’s strategic location – which they see as its main asset – could become a source of revenue, if and when Pakistan emerges as a trade corridor between the Middle East and western China.
India faces a situation that has been termed “nuclear-weapon enabled terror” – Pakistani-based terrorist groups operating across the border with India under an allegedly Chinese-supplied nuclear shield. How has India dealt with this complex challenge?
The Indian response to ‘nuclear-weapon enabled terrorism’ since 1998 has been incoherent at the strategic level. That was the year that India and Pakistan both conducted nuclear tests, establishing a new military reality in South Asia. With conventional warfare becoming increasingly unlikely, Pakistan increased its support to jihadist groups. Successive Indian leaders have since then consciously chosen not to retaliate covertly to such activities. They do not want to adopt Pakistan’s methods in order to push forward Indian strategic interests, even if these are limited to self-defense. It needs to be noted that reciprocation could always have been a policy option, since nuclear-weapon enabled terror can work both ways.
Instead, the focus of Indian counterterrorism has been tactical. Indian security agencies have excelled at busting terrorist cells. Even prior to and since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, they have had significant success at identifying and neutralizing jihadist networks. However, at the level of national security policy, India has placed its faith in Pakistani civilian leaders to cooperate against terrorism.
Only time will tell whether this was a wise policy, or a delusional one. So far, it has yielded no results because the political leadership in Pakistan is competing with the military for the favor of jihadist groups, which at the level of street mobilization, have acquired a distinct political voice of their own. Rather than being a fringe element, the jihadist movement in Pakistan is tapping into middle-class resentment at both civilian and military corruption. India can do little to influence this trend, beyond strengthening its own domestic security.
How does India’s military-strategic position vis-a-vis Pakistan and China compare to that of a year ago?
It is understood that a capabilities gap has long existed between India and China on the one hand, and India and Pakistan on the other. This trend has continued. China is pulling ahead of India, and Pakistan is falling behind India. Interestingly, the power in the most desperate position, Pakistan, is also the one with the least external challenges. Its problems are either self-inflicted or domestic. Both China and India, on the other hand, face long-term challenges to their regional predominance. China is worried about strategic encirclement by the US and its alliance-building efforts, which extend to India. India is worried about an increasingly radicalized Pakistan launching a ‘wild card’ attack, either by covertly sponsoring a terrorist assault or by triggering border clashes. India has to be prepared to face both of these scenarios without dropping its vigilance against China. The May 2013 border stand-off between India and China is a sign that New Delhi simply cannot assume that either of its two military adversaries will be quiescent, even if political relations are ostensibly normal. It is attempting to upgrade military infrastructure in forward areas, but these efforts are making slow progress, due to resource constraints which do not seem likely to disappear.
How advanced are Pakistani attempts to acquire a sea-based nuclear capability – and what impact would this have on the strategic balance?
Pakistan’s sea-based deterrent is a continuation of the overall policy of compensating for growing conventional asymmetry with more nuclearization. The Pakistani navy is much weaker than its Indian counterpart (the India-Pakistan capabilities gap is more pronounced at sea than on land or in the air). Hence the effort to install nuclear warheads on submarines seems to be intended partly for psychological effect. It is presently thought to be at an intermediate stage, with a new naval strategic command having been set up last year. Interestingly, China is offering to build a number of satellite navigation ground stations that would greatly improve the guidance systems of Pakistani submarines, thus adding to the potential effectiveness of the sea-based deterrent.
With regard to the strategic balance, Pakistan likes to imply that its nuclear arsenal is permanently on hair-trigger status – such that if Indian policymakers even thought of carrying out a cross-border counterterrorist raid, the result would be nuclear Armageddon. But if what Pakistan desires is a first-strike capability, there is little sense in having a submarine-based deterrent, whose main value would lie in its survivability to a first strike launched by India (and India has a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons). More than any change in the strategic balance, the real danger is that personnel vetting of Pakistani naval crews might not be rigorous enough to eliminate the possibility of adventurism on the part of individual commanders, in the unlikely event that a war breaks out and command and control arrangements are severely degraded.
What is the current state of India’s naval ambitions?
India is currently expanding its navy, the fifth-largest in the world, with the intention of projecting power across the Indian Ocean region. The navy has long aspired to true blue-water status, something that has eluded it due to budgetary constraints. Although acquisition and modernization programs are underway, it is unlikely that India will be able to become a maritime power anytime soon. This has largely to do with the fact that India’s main military threats are land-based, and that sphere will take priority over the maritime domain.
Even so, India has stepped up its naval engagement with East and Southeast Asian countries. It has conducted its first-ever naval exercises with Japan and trained Vietnamese crews in submarine warfare. Naval infrastructure is being expanded with the creation of new bases along the coastline and listening posts farther out in the Indian Ocean. Most important of all, India is growing increasingly involved in the South China Sea – a sign that it is willing to play China at its own game. Beijing has long held that the ‘Indian Ocean is not India’s ocean’. This neat wordplay can now be reversed to say that the South China Sea is not China’s sea, irrespective of whether Beijing labels it a ‘core interest’ or not. India has an advantage in this region because it is an Asian power, unlike the US which is still perceived in some quarters as an extraneous player in Asia.
How will the anticipated withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2014 affect the military balance between Pakistan, India and China?
Pakistan hopes that it can reinsert the Taliban into a position of primacy in Afghanistan. It will push hard in this direction, but will face some difficulties. In the late 1980s, Pakistani diplomats and intelligence officials put out the argument that an ultra-conservative Islamist government in Kabul would serve Western interests, by blocking Soviet expansion. They also claimed that Pakistan had a right to play king-maker in Afghanistan, after having played a leading role in forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops from the country. This time around, there are fewer takers for these arguments. The US will maintain a stronger regional presence via drones and Special Forces than it ever did in the 1990s. India, having invested massively in Afghanistan’s development over the past decade, is not about to accept a return to the 1990s, when it was completely pushed out of the country by Pakistan-backed Islamists. China, which has long been ambivalent about the Taliban, not least due to its own problems in Xinjiang, will play both ends. It will rely on Pakistan to restrain the Taliban from attacking Chinese economic interests in Afghanistan, but will also consult with India. Both India and China have a common interest in stabilizing Afghanistan, largely for the economic payoff that this would offer. Pakistan, however, has tended to see Afghanistan as a base area for training jihadist groups outside its own territory (thus maintaining plausible deniability for their activities) and as an irredentist threat (due to the long-festering border dispute over the Durand Line). Its interests would be served by ensuring a calibrated degree of instability in Afghanistan. Whether such calibration can be sustained remains to be seen.
