Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakistan
Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakistan
Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine options for Pakistan
What is this thread about?
It is to discuss, Indian policy options for the state of Pakistan. It seeks to discuss Indian objectives, plans and methods and its underlying assumptions. It may touch upon various aspects of Indian policies, plans and methods as it relates to foreign policy, defense, economic and social aspects of this policy vis-a-vis the state of Pakistan.
Please post materials that the Indian state can hope to consider, within a meaningful time frame.
What is not Kosher for this thread?
- TSP news and discussions (we already have a very active thread for it. Let us keep the discussion about what TSP is and is not, out of scope for this thread)
- Islamism and its effects on the region
- Blatant partisan politics
- Personality/group oriented discussions in the India-TSP context
- India-Pakistan History (detail historical discussions)
- Current events, news and analysis
An emphasis on state-state or its major institutions’ goals and objectives for each other is encouraged.
There are multiple views by many “experts” on TSP and India’s policy options. I believe, that people on BRF are one of its foremost experts out there and request them to participate.
There is a debate in policy circles around this issue and as expected there is no “consensus”. Let us capture and contribute to that debate.
Thanks.
What is this thread about?
It is to discuss, Indian policy options for the state of Pakistan. It seeks to discuss Indian objectives, plans and methods and its underlying assumptions. It may touch upon various aspects of Indian policies, plans and methods as it relates to foreign policy, defense, economic and social aspects of this policy vis-a-vis the state of Pakistan.
Please post materials that the Indian state can hope to consider, within a meaningful time frame.
What is not Kosher for this thread?
- TSP news and discussions (we already have a very active thread for it. Let us keep the discussion about what TSP is and is not, out of scope for this thread)
- Islamism and its effects on the region
- Blatant partisan politics
- Personality/group oriented discussions in the India-TSP context
- India-Pakistan History (detail historical discussions)
- Current events, news and analysis
An emphasis on state-state or its major institutions’ goals and objectives for each other is encouraged.
There are multiple views by many “experts” on TSP and India’s policy options. I believe, that people on BRF are one of its foremost experts out there and request them to participate.
There is a debate in policy circles around this issue and as expected there is no “consensus”. Let us capture and contribute to that debate.
Thanks.
Last edited by ShauryaT on 25 Nov 2011 04:24, edited 2 times in total.
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
This was exactly the purpose of the "Managing Pakistan's failure"! Why not contribute to that thread?!
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
Pakistan: The Turmoil Within
Welcome Remarks: Brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal (Retd), Director, CLAWS
Pakistan is passing through turbulent times and is at a dangerous strategic crossroads or a tipping point. If Pakistan continues this way, it is bound to end up as a failed state. With creeping Talibanisation and TTP kind of terror, the area will eventually become lawless. Recent developments include the turmoil in Karachi and also the turmoil within the Army post Osama‟s killing. The Pakistan Army is evidently unwilling to fight terrorism or unable to. This seminar will delve deeper into these issues.
Keynote Address: Amb Kanwal Sibal
Discussion
It is difficult to predict what would happen in the coming two decades. The structural deficiencies in Pakistan are not likely to change and massive restructuring is needed for a better future.
Imran Khan is a light weight in Pakistani politics and his bluff will soon be called. One cannot take him seriously or hope for much change because of his involvement in Pakistani politics.
It is important for India to reach out to Pakistan in order to make it feel secure.
Mr Sushant Sareen, Senior Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation
Pakistan is a soft talibanised state which accepts Talibanisation as a social political order within which they have to survive. The top political leadership may have changed their mindset against India but Pakistan Army has never done so.
Pakistan Army is comfortable with talibanisation while we in India are concerned with a talibanised Pakistan. In Pakistan the fight is not between moderates and Islamists; the fight is between hard and soft talibanisation. One may conclude that transformation of Pakistan towards radicalisation is complete .We must look at the larger realities of the country before we make up our mind to speak to the civil society in Pakistan.
Dr Mohan Guruswamy
Discussion
The Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status granted to India by Pakistan recently, is not a disadvantage to India. We must trade with everyone for better opportunities. The status would have been granted with a pinch of salt and resistance by Pak Army but it appears to be a calculated move.
Trade between India and Pakistan has been taking place through Dubai but now direct trade will reduce the cost for Pakistan. The economic slide in Pakistan is likely to create the problem of population migration but our security agencies can effectively handle the issue of illegal migration.
The Pakistani Army is professional like the Indian army but it has been radicalised to a large extent. The indoctrination of Army has been almost completed giving impetus to disciplinary problems in the organisation.
Lt Gen Dushyant Chauhan, AVSM, DG, DIA
Three scenarios emerge as an alternative future:
Scenario 1. Plodding along or muddling along. This would imply: Freeze of the Political System. Zero or low reform. Continued domination of the military over foreign policy and domestic
issues.
In this case, judiciary might be able to exert influence but it would not be able to change the flow of events; also systematic slowdown of the economy will worsen the situation and make it more dependent on foreign aid. TTP insurgency is likely to continue and there is a limited likelihood for an increase in governmental coherence. Pakistan will see a deterioration of law and order situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, FATA and western provinces of Balochistan.
Scenario 2. A Fragmented Pakistan. Here, the army grip loosens over Pakistan‟s policy making, but does not fail completely giving rise to sectarian problems. Three critical issues will come to light:
Governance Problems. Army will be directing the structural format for the state. A parallel economy will come into existence.
Pakistan will continue to experience demographic and social change and chaos will be dominated in the regional context of governance. The Pakistan Army might break-up and disintegrate leading to political turmoil, internal conflict and sectarian violence. There is a likely possibility of moderate military authoritarianism and an evolution of an economic gap leading to further dependence. Political institutions are most likely to suffer and there would be widening of the economic gap. Ethnic and sectarian violence is likely to continue.
Scenario 3. Rise of Democracy in Pakistan.This scenario is most unlikely. It remains to be seen if Pakistan collects itself and work in the direction of propagating and practising democracy with a strong fist against curbing terrorism from its land.In light of the current state of Pakistan the direction the armed forces take will dictate the manner in which the pendulum will swing.
While the world would not like to see a collapse of Pakistan, the country continues to suffer from „India centricity‟phobia which is inhibiting its focus on itself and its people.
Amb Satish Chandra
Three alternative futures emerge for Pakistan:
Business as usual approach: The current course will lead Pakistan to disintegration and dysfunction. Pakistan‟s current involvement and connection with the terrorist outfits need to change to bring about any change in outlook.
Metamorphosis of Pakistan into a Jihadi State.
More Normal State: External players most likely India and the United States can play a contributing role. Also if Pakistan could lessen terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy, there is a likelihood of Pakistan trailing back onto the normalisation path. India needs a more disciplinary approach towards Pakistan, mostly punitive. The US needs to shut down its military – economic assistance and follow a more coercive approach as it did after 9/11. The tightening of the visa regime for Pakistani elites and leadership along with allies of the United States like the United Kingdom will also help in getting Pakistan onto the path of normality
Brig Gurmeet Kanwal (Retd)
Pakistan‟s political and diplomatic strategy needs to change course, and the India-centric notion needs to see the light of new day. Pakistan needs to carefully calibrate its response towards the domestic jihadi outfits and insurgent groups like the Haqqani network, and reduce action and support to Kashmiri militant outfits. All counter-insurgency operations should have a prior sanction by the government, with a strict focus on training and equipment.
India should not expect a radical change in Pakistan‟s foreign policy and the Pakistan Army and ISI mindset, nor a strategic change of heart. Can a leopard can really change his spots, is the question that begs an answer.
India needs to change its stance and limits of its tolerance. Mumbai terror attacks have left a deep scar on the national psyche, and if it happens anytime again, people will demand military action. India needs to employ tough diplomatic and military options. These could take the form of punitive air-strikes destroying insurgent training camps, suspected hideouts, take on Muridke and other similar targets to crush the backbone of any potential threat from across the border.
India should also take on covert operations to eliminate targets like Hafiz Saeed, Azhar Masood and Dawood Ibrahim and not allowthem to rest peacefully anywhere in the world. India should look at the following four response options:
Reviewing the current Cease-Fire Trans-LoC/IB measures Pro-active strategic culture Intelligence Capabilities
Some questions we need answers for are:
The creeping Talibanisation has reached the borders of West Punjab. What impact will this have on India‟s Muslim community?
What will be the repercussions for India if Pakistan breaks-up or becomes a failed state?
Is the United States playing a waiting game with its short term support to Pakistan till its withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014 or will it continue to support Pakistan in the long-term?
China remains an „all weather ally‟ of Pakistan with its massive support to Pakistan‟s military and nuclear facilities. What can India do to drive a wedge between these two neighbours?
The Indian Government is neither pro-actively seeking peace, nor preparing its military for an armed military action. Is the policy of drift the right approach for India to follow? How should India draft its short-term and long-term policy towards Pakistan?
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
I am hoping this is less about understanding the background and managing TSP and its "failure" and more about India's policy options. Think of one as context and background and this one as a discussion on response options. I understand that there is an overlap. However, there is so much on the background stuff that the policy aspects are lost. Hence felt the need for a targeted thread to discuss Indian policy.RajeshA wrote:This was exactly the purpose of the "Managing Pakistan's failure"! Why not contribute to that thread?!
However, I am open and do not mind either ways.
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
Link of the recent talk of Bharat Karnad at the NJ BRF meeting - recorded by Archan.
link to download Dr. Bharat Karnad's talk
[/quote]
link to download Dr. Bharat Karnad's talk
[/quote]
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
ShauryaT ji,
The naming of the thread as "Managing Pakistan's failure" was a psyops decision, as suggested by shiv saar.
But the thread was always about exploring Pakistan's weaknesses and looking for strategies on solving our Pakistan problem! In fact, looking at the posts in that thread, it is full of policy prescriptions!
The naming of the thread as "Managing Pakistan's failure" was a psyops decision, as suggested by shiv saar.
But the thread was always about exploring Pakistan's weaknesses and looking for strategies on solving our Pakistan problem! In fact, looking at the posts in that thread, it is full of policy prescriptions!
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
Pls send me an email on t dot shaurya at google. Let us take this off line. Thanks.
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
An Overview and Assessment of the Indian Army's. Cold Start Strategy.
It is a well-worn military axiom that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Cold Start is an example of creative military problem-solving in response to Pakistan’s support for terrorism and stated rejection of a no-first-use nuclear doctrine. By moving away from the Sundarji doctrine, the Indian Army believes that it is developing the ability to respond to a Pakistani proxy war with conventional force, while remaining below the nuclear threshold. While Cold Start represents a significant advance in India’s conventional capabilities, it is a concept that is poorly aligned with India’s broader strategic goals. In the near term, active pursuit of Cold Start could have a pernicious impact on India’s burgeoning relations with Pakistan. In the longer-term, if Cold Start were operationalized, it could risk provoking or escalating a crisis on the subcontinent that could breach the nuclear threshold.
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
RECONCILING DOCTRINES : PREREQUISITE FOR PEACE IN SOUTH ASIA
The recommendation is for a 'doctrinal balancing' between India and Pakistan on a strategic dialogue forum. A mutual and balanced doctrinal drawdown, involving Pakistan discontinuing its proxy war at the sub- conventional level, and India moving towards a defensive doctrine on the conventional level, is presented in this paper as the prerequisite for peace in South Asia. To make the nuclear overhang recede further, changes are necessary in the nuclear doctrine of both states also. This would foster conditions of security and managing of perceptions necessary for tackling outstanding issues between the two states.
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
Rethinking Pakistan : Bharat Karnad
“Cricket diplomacy” and the meeting of the Indian and Pakistan home secretaries are important because these were approved through the back channel maintained by Delhi with the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — the hub of power in Pakistan. Whatever one may think of the Pakistan Army, it is a professional force driven by cold calculation. If it thinks it can get away with some outré action or the other against India, it does not hesitate to prosecute it (think Kargil).
Equally, it will do an about-turn and sue for “honourable peace” if some adventurist action misfires (recall Pervez Musharraf’s prodding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to seek US intervention in the Kargil conflict, and his virtual mea culpa of January 12, 2002, after the December 13 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament the previous year, in order to pre-empt a punitive Indian response and potentially uncontrollable escalation).
Apparently, Gen. Kayani and his uniformed cohort believe that the policy of orchestrated terrorist outrages has run its course, at least for now, as the Pakistan Army, in the grip of excesses at home by the Tehreek-e-Taliban outfits, unremitting drone attacks by its ally US and of the pressure of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) forces in Afghanistan on the Pashtuns of North Waziristan that’s skewing the delicate tribal balance the Pakistani state has obtained over the years in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, needs relief on its eastern border. The question is can India capitalise on what seems to be rethinking underway in the Pakistan Army?
Alas, there is surprisingly less give here than is generally assumed. Rewind to the aftermath of Sharm el-Sheikh and how quickly Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced to backtrack on the issue of supposed concessions to his Pakistani counterpart. This is because India’s Pakistan policy is hostage to the petty calculations of the political class in the country and powerful ministries within the Indian government with vested interest in portraying Pakistan as menace. Pakistan Army’s nursing of terrorism as an asymmetric tool to keep India discomfited sustains this impression. But it does not over-ride the facts of the neighbouring country being economically weak, politically in a pitiful state and destabilised by unending violence and internal strife perpetrated by Islamic extremists. Nor does it preclude the need for a realistic assessment of the “Pakistan threat” given the sheer disparities. Pakistan’s gross domestic product, for instance, is less than one-quarter of the market capitalisation of the Mumbai stock exchange!
The trouble is that for the Indian politician ties with Pakistan are an externalisation of the sometimes tense Hindi-Muslim relations at home and both are manipulable for electoral gain. This is crass cynicism at work but the “Pakistan threat” also powers the Indian military’s existing force disposition and structure. Thus, the Army’s main force is deployed in the west, the short-legged Air Force is attuned mostly for contingencies involving Pakistan and the Navy has its stock North Arabian Sea orientation. Then again, how else can three strike corps worth of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and towed artillery accounting for 26 per cent to 32 per cent of the defence budget be justified if not with reference to Pakistan? Meanwhile, the far more substantive and credible threat emanating from China is only minimally addressed.
The nine Light Mountain Divisions desperately required as offensive capability to keep the People’s Liberation Army ensconced on the Tibetan plateau honest is nowhere as glamorous as armoured and mechanised formations. Like the IAS that ensures its group interests are never compromised come hell or high water, “cavalry” generals too are loath to see a reduction of armoured strength sufficient only to thrust and parry against a weak adversary’s limited capability.
Indeed, Pakistan is now the touchstone to get the government to wake up to even strategic deficiencies that are far more telling vis a vis China. Rapid Chinese strategic nuclear buildup was met with passivity, but recent press reports about Pakistan surpassing Indian nuclear weapons strength galvanised the government into ordering some remedial action.
Such Pakistan-centricity is ironic in light of the severely controlled wars of manoeuvre India is politically compelled to wage against Pakistan owing to the organic links of kinship and shared religion, culture, language and social norms binding the two countries. There is, moreover, the factor of the politically conscious Muslim electorate wielding the swing vote in almost half the Lok Sabha constituencies, who may countenance bloodying Pakistan but not its destruction. Such systemic constraints are not acknowledged by either side but have been in force from the 1947-48 Kashmir operations onwards. In any case, which Indian government would order a military dismantling of the Pakistani state resulting in 180 million Muslims, pickled in fundamentalist juices for half a century, rejoining the Indian fold?
The home ministry, intelligence agencies and Central and state police organisations, animated by an institutional habit of mind, are, likewise, Pakistan-fixated and feed the popular paranoia of a rogue Pakistan always preparing for the next terrorist spectacular on Indian soil. As the 2002 Operation Parakram showed, the right response to Islamabad-supported jihadi actions is not mobilising field armies but instantaneous retaliatory airstrikes on terrorist installations in Pakistani Kashmir in tandem with targeted intelligence operations elsewhere in that country. Combine the stick of such pressure with the carrot of incentives to wean Pakistan from its hostility, such as unilateral easing of the visa regime, and offer of open trade and investment. It is a policy mix Delhi has not seriously pursued.
But, surely nuclear Pakistan poses a threat? Short of total demolition, which India has not intended even with conventional military means, Pakistan will be offered no excuse for going nuclear. However, if despite the nuclear taboo the General Staff in Rawalpindi contemplates nuclear weapon use for any reason, including in what passes for “wars” in these parts, they’ll be ultimately dissuaded by an “exchange ratio” prohibitively stacked against their country. Loss of two Indian cities is not recompense enough for the certain extinction of Pakistan. It is simply a bad bargain.
Re: Indian Policy, Objectives, Doctrine: Options for Pakista
ShauryaT, I do not see a need for this thread. Please move the posts to appropriate threads (enough of them on Pakistan). Thread proliferation makes life difficult for the already-stretched mods.