Mar 1, 2013
By Sarah Weiner
What is the greatest nuclear danger facing the world today? Judging by the media’s coverage, one would likely say Iran (recently reported to have started [1] plutonium production) or North Korea (reportedly planning foradditional nuclear tests [2] this year). But the happy catch is that, at least for the time being, neither country seems capable of successfully launching a nuclear missile. North Korea’s December rocket launch and February nuclear test show the country may be closer to producing a deliverable nuke than previously believed, but Pyongyang has yet to demonstrate the ability to miniaturize a nuclear warhead and mount it on a launch-ready missile. And Iran, for all the consternation they have caused the international community, is still several steps away from turning its 20% enriched uranium into a nuclear bomb.
So if a nuclear war breaks out tomorrow, it won’t be on account of North Korea or Iran. According to many, the most precarious place in the world is not the Korean Peninsula or the Middle East but the Asian Subcontinent, home to one of the most intense—and now nuclear-armed—regional rivalries. Bruce Riedel discussed the dangers of the India-Pakistan conflict Tuesday at the Brooking Institution in a launch event [3] for his new book [4] Avoiding Armageddon: America, India and Pakistan to the Brink and Back.
The title is provocative, and intentionally so. Mr. Riedel emphasized that every U.S. president since Kennedy has had to deal with a crisis between India and Pakistan, and the past four have dealt with crises between nuclear-armed India and (since 1998) Pakistan. Each of these conflicts, he argues, had the potential to take the two nations to the brink of nuclear war and—without deft maneuvering by international interlocutors and sensible deescalatory gestures by the parties involved—beyond the threshold. In 1999, for example, India and Pakistan were fighting a small war in Northern Kashmir; we now know that India considered blockading Pakistan’s port of Kashmir and Islamabad began arming its nuclear weapons. A few false moves and these escalatory actions could have spiraled out of control.
In his talk, Mr. Riedel discussed a range of areas of concern, including territorial disputes over Kashmir, the growth of militant groups in the region, the Pakistani military’s conventional inferiority, and popular resentment of U.S. drone strikes. The divide between nuclear and non-nuclear issues is largely an artificial distinction, he argued, because all these trouble spots are interconnected and have the potential to escalate into a crisis between nuclear-armed states. The Pakistani military uses its nuclear build-up and “asymmetric warfare” (read as: state-sponsorship of extremists) to compensate for India’s conventional superiority. That causes crises to flare between Islamabad and New Delhi when India experiences terrorist attacks within its disputed or sovereign territory, especially when those attacks bear the fingerprints of Pakistan’s ISI. And the United States, which has tried to cultivate relationships with both countries through dialogue and military aid, will find it increasingly difficult to act as an effective mediator due to the euphemistically termed “trust deficit” with Pakistan created by U.S. drone strikes. Add decades of animosity and nuclear weapons to this tense mix, and you begin to understand why Mr. Riedel has labeled the region the most dangerous [5] place in the world.
So, what can be done to avert a nuclear crisis on the Subcontinent? Frustratingly, the path forward is not especially clear. But that should be expected; if devising a solution was easy, any number of past U.S. presidents, Indian prime ministers, and Pakistani leaders would have done it already. Mr. Riedel did have one overarching recommendation for the United States, India, Pakistan, and the range of international actors with a stake in maintaining stability in the region: approach the situation holistically. The United States is great, he noted, at conflict management. Washington has a tried and true template for addressing such one-off crises: deploy high-level U.S. diplomats and rally international partners to urge restraint. But putting out individual fires does not prevent them from breaking out in the future. Washington’s skill in conflict management is offset by its weakness in conflictresolution.
To truly resolve the tension between Pakistan and India will require regionally-initiated confidence building measures in immigration, trade, counterterrorism, disputed territory, nuclear postures, and other areas. The United States cannot force this dialogue to commence, and heavy-handed pushing is more likely to backfire than to succeed. But at the same time, Washington must understand that its policies on aid to the Pakistani military, regional counterterror operations, and warming relations with New Delhi are not isolated from these broader regional issues. The United States must be acutely aware of how an action in one sphere may affect others. These interrelationships have the potential to form both positive and negative feedback loops; the task now is to acknowledge that they exist and attempt to leverage cross-cutting issues as effectively as possible.
Sarah Weiner is a research intern for the Project on Nuclear Issues. The views expressed above are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Strategic and International Studies or the Project on Nuclear Issues.
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Links:
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9896389/Irans-Plan-B-for-a-nuclear-bomb.html
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/15/us-korea-north-nuclear-idUSBRE91E0J820130215
[3] http://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/02/26-india-pakistan-armageddon#ref-id=20130226_FP_Riedel1
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Avoiding-Armageddon-America-Pakistan-Brookings/dp/081572408X
[5] http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/01/04-pakistan-riedel
[6] https://csis.org/program/international-security-program
[7] https://csis.org/program/poni-debates-issues
[8] https://csis.org/program/project-nuclear-issues
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