India believes it won the hostilities which followed the Pulwama attack in February 2019. According to New Delhi the attack on Balakot not only punished Pakistan for hosting terrorists on its soil but it set a new baseline for how to deal with future such events. Pakistan (which feels it prevailed in both the combat and diplomatic phases) faces a major reappraisal of its air defences. India’s new approach could lead Pakistan to draw some dangerous conclusions with potentially nuclear implications.
To the casual observer the Pulwama affair of February 2019 comprised a succession of small incidents between India and Pakistan over a period of 15 days; the sort of tectonic disturbances one might expect on the borders of two unfriendly powers. But, as more detail has trickled out over the subsequent five months, we can see that it was much more serious than realised at the time. It could have crucial and potentially disastrous implications for the inevitable next clash. The danger is that both countries could learn the wrong lessons from the experience.
The basic narrative was as follows. On 14th February 2019 some 40 Indian paramilitary police were killed by a bomb at Pulwama in Indian Held Kashmir-IHK). The attack was claimed by the terrorist group known as Jaish e-Mohammed (JeM). JeM is based in Bahawalpur in Pakistan and is dedicated to removing India from Kashmir. On 26th February the Indian air force mounted a bombing raid against a JeM target at Balakot inside Pakistan itself (not Pakistan Held Kashmir-PHK). During a Pakistani retaliatory raid the following day, an Indian Mig-21 was shot down and its pilot captured. On 1st March 2019 the Pakistanis released the pilot at the Wagah border post. The release provided the ladder down which allowed both sides to bring the crisis to an end. By this fortuitous chain of events the 16-day standoff finished without major conflict.
Since March, some crucial additional details have emerged in the media that, combined with background research, appear to be broadly accurate. Three revelations are of particular interest.
- When the Indian Air Force attacked the JeM camp at Balakot, it employed Mirage 2000 aircraft deployed from Gwalior, 6 of them armed with Israeli-made Spice 2000 bombs. To disguise the movements of this force, the IAF mounted a large diversionary effort over the prior 4 days and nights with multiple aircraft flying close to the Punjab border and the Line of Control in Kashmir.
- After the shooting-down of the Indian Mig-21 and the capture by Pakistan of the pilot, there was an exchange of telephone threats between the Indian National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, and the Pakistani Head of Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) Lt-Gen Asim Munir. Doval is alleged to have threatened to fire up to 6 missiles against terrorist targets inside Pakistan. Munir is said to have replied that Pakistan would reply three-fold to whatever India launched.
- There was a tense naval stand-off particularly as the Indian navy searched for Pakistan’s most advanced submarine, PNS Saad. The concern, for a time, was that it might have entered Indian waters. At one stage, a substantial proportion of India’s fleet was deployed along the edge of Pakistan’s territorial waters causing significant concern about their intentions in Pakistan naval headquarters.
Now that we know about these new elements, we should consider whether India’s initial “lessons learned” still stands up to scrutiny and we should consider how Pakistan might respond.
The most common claim by Indian officials and academics is that Balakot has established a “new baseline”. Until 2019, India had never struck back at Pakistan apart from minor “surgical strikes” by Special Forces. Some believe that following the Balakot attack, India should respond in a similar vein whenever it suffers terrorist attacks. This claim ignores some important facts. One is that there is a lack of good targets. Balakot was ideal because it was a rural setting, only just inside Pakistan; so the IAF barely needed to penetrate hostile airspace thanks to the Spice 2000’s glide capabilities. Most future targets will be deeper inside Pakistan and will potentially involve the loss of Indian aircraft and crew. If missiles were used instead of aircraft, the risks of an asymmetric Pakistani response would be even greater.
The “new baseline” concept disregards the fact that Pakistan will assess its own post-Balakot options. There is no doubt that Balakot was a serious shock to Pakistan. No country closes its airspace for months (at considerable cost) unless it has discovered major weaknesses in its air defences. For Pakistani air defence experts the spectre of the IAFs diversionary or swarm tactics was probably more alarming than the attack itself. For 4 days there was the prospect that one of the many feints by Indian jets might have become an attack into Pakistan’s Punjab Province where a number of high-value targets are just a few minutes flying time from India; for example the Sargodha airbase, the Kahuta nuclear laboratory or the JeM facilities in the bustling town of Bahawalpur.
Pakistan might reasonably conclude that passively tracking Indian air-force movements across the border and then failing to identify the main thrust of the attack, is not the way to proceed in future. With such a long national border with India (and the Line of Control in Kashmir) and such a thin homeland replete with targets, Pakistan may judge that its best means of defence is attack. Pakistan might also conclude that India has now justified the use of pre-emptive force across the international border by claiming pre-emption as part of its Balakot rationale.
The second Indian claim is that Balakot has shown that there exists some space between Pakistan’s use of terrorism as a foreign policy tool and its first strike nuclear policy. Previous Indian Prime Ministers have feared taking retaliatory action (such as after the JeM assault on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008) for fear of triggering a Pakistani nuclear riposte. Balakot showed that room still exists for conventional military activity.
This may be true. Balakot did show that such a space exists but it also demonstrated how small that gap is and how misjudgement and misinterpretation could narrow it even further. The calculations on both sides depended on accurate guesswork about the other side’s intentions. Pakistan assumed that retaliation for Pulwama was possible and that the payload would be conventional and delivered against a terrorist facility. That is why Pakistan judged, on this occasion, that the diversionary tactics did not presage a nuclear strike.
However, if India had used 6 missiles, as later threatened, against a variety of targets inside Pakistan and if Pakistan had responded with 18 of its own, the high probability is that nuclear planning would have begun. After all, there would be substantial casualties on both sides and much media clamour for retribution. The impossibility of knowing whether an incoming missile is conventionally or nuclear armed adds further scope for miscalculation. Once transferred to the naval domain these judgements become even finer. India has since announced (on 18th March) that its nuclear submarines “transited from exercise to operational deployment mode”. The wording suggests that the INS Arihant, India’s one ballistic missile submarine, may have been deployed, although it probably remained off India’s eastern coast.
The third point being widely made in India is that Balakot has ended Pakistan’s cloak of impunity. This is an emotional rather than a strategic point. Many Indians feel that Pakistan has never been adequately punished for tolerating terrorist groups which attack India. That may be so; but India needs to remember that Pakistan feels uniquely vulnerable to attack from India. The fact that so many of its key sites are so close to the border means that Pakistan will always adopt a hair-trigger mentality; particularly if there is any danger to its own nuclear weapons. They will always prefer to use than lose such capabilities.
General Khalid Kidwai the former head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Department (SPD) always insisted that there was no scope for conventional warfare and that the short-range Nasr nuclear-capable missile was intended to plug any perceived gap. The Indian discovery of space for conventional war suggests that Pakistan will take measures to close the gap. That can only mean a greater likelihood of using a tactical nuclear weapon earlier in a conflict.
Furthermore, Pakistan does not believe that the single use of one low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against, for example, an advancing Indian armoured brigade would lead to the “massive nuclear retaliation” that India has threatened. It seems too disproportionate as a response to constitute a real threat and thus serve as a deterrent. And yet Indian officials insist that the threat of “massive nuclear retaliation” is the only way to stop Pakistan using a tactical nuclear weapon. So, it is evident that the two sides neither understand nor believe each other’s doctrines.
The big danger post-Pulwama and Balakot is that India and Pakistan develop new plans for future conflict which fail to account for the thinking of the other side; and thus make that first fateful step towards nuclear use more likely.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey is Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, London and is a former senior British diplomat who served in the Subcontinent.
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