A_Gupta wrote:Treating Chinese nukes & missiles to Pakistan as a blocker issue, which preempts any work on the critical issues, is a big mistake. Unlike software projects, national diplomacy can both walk and chew gum at the same time.
Arunji, as a (mildly) facetious observation, most precepts on business "strategy" owe their origins to military and geopolitics!
Anyhow, nation states do not have the luxury of dealing with issues in "ringfenced" terms..So when we deal with the Pak problem, we cannot be oblivious to the effects of our actions on thousands of other important variables..Policymakers in a democracy do not have the luxury of arbitrary "ranking" of priorities either...No politician in India would be able to make a Maoist "what of nukes - they will get 300 million, we will still have 700 million more" or a Bhutto-esque "eat grass to build nukes" comment..We have realised that many times...Latest was during Parakram, when the mobilisation triggered widespread travel advisories by US/Europe, thereby impacting India a lot more than it impacted Pak...
The Kargil episode somehow set a precedent in our strategic thinking..The scrupulous adherence to LoC had its benefits...Mostly in terms of sanctifying the LoC as a de facto, if not de jure border...Which to me is a huge gain...But it hasnt moved on from there..Parakram was a classic instance, wherein we seemed to think that there is nothing between doing nothing and a full scale all-out war...and the latter was just not feasible...
Shyam Saran (and many others) make a valid point - there has to be a space created below full-scale war...Currently the only "option" in that space seems to be "breaking off talks"...that too is a good strategy for starts, but it has to progress into something more..
Which is why an obsession with Paki conventional weapon imports make little sense..We are not being able to fight a war where those weapons are anyway used...And Shivji, the argument that those weapons are more effective in dealing with Baloch or Pakhtun insurgeny is also less-than-valid...No inurgency has been ever pacified by force of conventional arms - F16s, M777s or BVRAAMs...Successful CI ops are basically police-intel ops - recall Punjab, recall NE, or recall the more recent US ops in Iraq...
In fact if anything, we should hope and strategise for Pak spending some MORE money on some of its shiny toys..Defence exp as % of GDP for Pak is realtivelky high (~5%), but really not high enough...(Though it is a very high proportion to its budget, which is "good")...SU for example was estimated to have 30% of its GDP on defence when it broke up...With Pak we can make it happen for much less..some of the more houghtful Pak strategists see the point (Ejaz Haidar for example), but most of the Army estblihment doesnt...If we are to be truly Chankyan, we should have Pak buy a squadron or two MORE of F16s - remember, the more upscale your capital equipment, more is the recurring expenditure too on operating and maintaining the setup....
On the other hand, its a bit surprising for me that we havent tried to evolve a limited India-Iran-US axis on Afghanistan yet..Its a difficult proposition, but if someone can do it, it will be us..Pak's biggest leverage on the US is its location vis a vis Afghanistan...We have invested quite a bit of time and money on the alternative Chabahar route..Is there a game in getting the US interested in the same? It would mean the US collaborating with the "enemy", but they have done it once before, with the same enemy!
Maybe its not as implausibe as it seems?
In a nutshell, we need to choose our battles carefully, and never let the big picture slip (and big picture is that we are detined for much greater things than a sub continental scrap with Pak)..