Shaping the new deterrent: The strategic shift in India-Pakistan conflict

Across the globe, countries confront the immediate challenge of deterrence. In Europe, Ukraine seeks to deter Russia. In the Middle East, Israel and its allies are finding it hard to deter myriad actors and proxies. In Korea, the South Koreans have trouble dealing with North Korean provocations. Elsewhere in Asia, Chinese belligerence and aggression on land and at sea is on the rise. For India, while deterring China’s aggressive manoeuvres along its land-borders is a challenge, blunting threats posed by Pakistan-backed terror outfits remains a concern. The Pahalgam attack reflects that sense of recklessness within the Pakistani state and once again re-ignites the debate on how to deter an adversarial state from undertaking wanton acts of terror on Indian soil.

 

 

Strategic shift 

Evidently, India’s deterrent policies have not worked to raise the costs and risks to Pakistan. In the past, India’s retaliatory strikes in response to Uri and Pulwama did not have the intended effect. However, India retaliated decisively this time, striking at several strategic airbases and sites, including terror infrastructure and its ideology. It is now actively shutting down the flow of water into Pakistan. Many observers are now asking what further retaliatory steps India could take against Pakistan. Whether these actions will induce compliance from Pakistan remains unclear.

 

A few aspects stand-out. India’s restraint has now translated into a sense of strategic intolerance. There has been a marked change in India’s military strategy, and in the complexity of its retaliatory strikes. By persisting with probing attacks, India demonstrated a strong inclination to undertake newer kinds of operational risks. With each retaliatory strike, India was setting a higher bar for Pakistan to respond. This successfully called their nuclear bluff, to offensively exploit the airspace. The strikes also pave the way for shallow incursions, if at all there is another provocative attack.

 

For the future, India will have to re-forge its long-term deterrent strategy. This will imply reorganising the internal security grid in ways that makes it impossible to carry out such acts. And if they still do, India should be in a position to launch retributive strikes, with minimal planning and preparation, within hours of the attack This will require more efficient deployment of troops, enhanced intelligence gathering and premeditated positioning of forces to strike back at Pakistan.

 

A rhetorical trap 

Deterring acts of terror tends to be much more difficult than just threatening an adversary. Any strategy to prevent blatant acts of terror have to begin with an assessment of the interests, motives, and imperatives of the Pakistani State. It demands shaping of instruments of force, that makes an adversary see other alternatives than war as more attractive.

 

However, India’s ability to assess Pakistan’s behaviour has been rather uneven. This has hindered our understanding of Pakistan’s intentions, motives and ability to inflict pain on the Indian state.

 

Three factors explain the success or failure of India’s deterrence strategies. First, it is the level of motivation of the adversary. Pakistan has acquired that unappeasable desire to keep the Kashmir cause alive, which makes it difficult to deter them. When a state believes that it is limited by its ability to push its agenda, it will be willing to accept many more risks.

 

More so, when their motivations stem from these and many other perceptions, including the blockage of river waters, and persisting military deficits. In such situations, the choice of being tough with an unsympathetic adversary becomes tricky. Notwithstanding the efficacy of recent strikes, India still has to figure out as to how much pain and suffering can help shape Pakistani’s behaviour.

 

Second, India has to be sure about the objectives of its strategy and what actions it must take as a consequence of a terrorist attack. If the objective is to stop Pakistan from undertaking blatant acts of terror, then any ambiguity in conveying a message in the backdrop of verbal accusations, the more chance of diluting the strategy. Sometimes unqualified threats can prove costly, because hostility or tensions can end up making conflict more escalatory. India will have to balance out these factors to make our intentions unmistakable, without sounding ambitious in its envisaged actions.

 

Third, the potential aggressor must believe that the defender has the will and the capacity to achieve what it wishes to achieve, how it wishes to achieve, and how soon it could act. Any perceived weakness in will or capacity can undermine deterrence. For that, India’s resolve to bear the cost will convince Pakistan that the threat will actually be carried out. But then military capacity can be a deterrent, only if it is rooted in a broad suite of capabilities that are strong enough to convince the perpetrator that he will have to pay a price for his actions. On the contrary, will is an abstract factor subject to perceptions and interpretations. Pakistan with a surfeit of terror outfits at its command can sometimes convince itself that India might not be inclined to respond, or might respond predictably. Therefore, making credible threats to an adversary might not be sufficient, when a clear national resolve and obligation to respond is not evident.

 

Making deterrence work 

Operation Sindoor demonstrated that clear resolve and its resounding success sets the tone for the next round. Pakistan will endeavour to put up a strong fight and try to impose costs, which eluded them this time.

 

China will hastily arm Pakistan, reverse the lacunae in indigenous weapon-platforms, and provide support to build military capability. China’s considerable military support to Pakistan including real-time intelligence proves that it is a staunch, unyielding ally of Pakistan.

 

For India, the challenge will be two-fold- deal with a well-armed Pakistan, and China using Pakistan as a proxy to tie down India’s resources on the western front. To deter Pakistan, India’s choices are pegged at two levels. First, the denial of operating space to terror outfits in Kashmir. Some of these are more virulent than they were a decade ago, making it more difficult to deter them. Indian security forces must proactively seek to decapitate and destroy these outfits, and deny their mentors and supporters the confidence to operate at will. For this to succeed, the involvement of resident forces and their intrinsic capacity to deter violence at the local level is vital, as they are the key to strengthening the degree of deterrence in sub-conventional contexts.

 

Traditionally, Rashtriya Rifles, JK Police- including SOG and CRPF- played a lead role during the peak militancy years, which is now somewhat lacking.

 

Over-use of special forces has pushed these forces to the background in terms of their pecking order, planning and operational visibility. At another level, hard-nosed human intelligence, which is more pedestrian in nature, has ceded space to technical intelligence, which while important when terror-outfits rely heavily on technology, should not become the gold standard. As they say, sometimes getting ‘back to basics’ can help reset operational deficits, which might have creeped in due to high operational tempo or exuberance with new technology.

 

Second, by imposing military costs. India will have to make some hard choices here. It will have to assess how much punishment is enough for Pakistan. While the retribution has to be sharp and instant, it will have to deal with each level of escalation. Ideally speaking, the response matrix will have to be on a twin format of pre-meditated and post-meditated strikes. The former would imply reflexive pre-meditated strikes, largely ‘off-the-shelf’, being executed within a few hours of the terror strike, without taking recourse to standard planning formats. These would require prior political approval and will have to be pre-positioned, for instant execution. This would put to test the current civil-military matrix in the country, but in view of several experts, this is entirely doable.

 

On the contrary, post-meditated strikes will have to be deliberate, in terms of acceptable political outcomes, place and time, to meet the aspirations of the state, while managing the risks of uncontrolled escalation. In a sense, these actions will have to be aimed at ‘off-ramping’ Pakistan on own terms. This will entail making India’s large and lumbering land-force more usable and agile for incursive actions every few hundred kilometres along the western frontier. Our past restructuring of the ground forces seems inadequate and might therefore need a serious re-thought.

 

Suffice to say that any strategy must factor-in these two response mechanisms, lest Pakistan remains motivated to still act. With continuing support from China, Pakistan is less likely to back-off, rather it could sooner or later test India’s patience and resolve.

 

And, while giving material support is a given, the Chinese can be expected to fight us till the last Pakistani, and that is what we need to analyse and think about. Therefore, the Indian armed forces might do well to dispel this notion of a two-front conflict, when the China-Pakistan combine is one collusive front along two strategic directions. 

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(The writer is a former corps commander)

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