Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  Organization of This Volume

  In this volume, I set forth my arguments over 10 subsequent chapters. The second chapter makes the case for Pakistan’s persistent revisionism. It presents a framework of Pakistan’s political structure, based on the work of Zionts (2006), to explain how both military and civilian regimes execute the army’s preferences. The chapter also presents a discussion of the literature that I use in conjunction with Zionts’ model to derive and detail Pakistan’s strategic culture. To this end, Chapter 2 briefly reviews some of the lingering debates that divide scholars of strategic culture. Having put forth a definition of the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture, I proffer a justification for reducing Pakistan’s strategic culture to that of the army. I conclude with a review of data sources and analytical methods employed in this study. This work is primarily intended to be empirical. As a nonpolitical scientist trained in South Asian languages and civilizations, I do not attempt to adjudicate the varied disputes about state behavior in international relations theory. Instead, I use strategic culture as a heuristic tool to help explain Pakistan’s enduring revisionism and proclivity for conflict. My principle sources of data are texts authored by Pakistani military personnel and, in most cases, printed and distributed by the army. I use these writings to infer how Pakistan assesses its strategic environment and its objectives within that environment as well as how Pakistan understands the use of force and its alliances to secure these interests.

  In Chapter 3, I discuss the importance of colonial India’s Partition and inheritance in shaping the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture. Here, I offer a brief account of Pakistan’s independence movement and the concomitant mobilization of communal politics as well as the ultimate division of the subcontinent generally and the army in particular. This separation gave rise to the enduring security competition over Kashmir. It also left indelible marks upon the Pakistan Army’s perception of its nemesis, India, and its intentions. The independence movement is rooted in the arguments of the two-nation theory, the founding principle of the state. This movement spread communal conceptions of the religious Other, which deeply affected the Pakistan Army. The Pakistan Army believes it is its duty to protect Pakistan’s ideology of Islam and the two-nation theory. In some sense the religious ideology that the army embraced was a product of the process of Partition.

  Chapter 4 addresses the various roles of Islam in the Pakistan Army, particularly the concept of the two-nation theory. This theory holds that Muslims constitute a separate nation from Hindus and thus deserve their own homeland. This conception locks India and Pakistan in a civilizational struggle: Pakistan must defend Islam and the two-nation theory against what many Pakistanis believe to be an India dedicated to undermining it and thus the very legitimacy of the Pakistani state. These intertwined subjects of Islam—Islamism7 and the two-nation theory—create considerable alarm beyond Pakistan and, on occasion, among Pakistanis, some of whom long for a state in which religion and state are more distinguished if not more distant. Anxiety about the role of Islam in the state and the army is exacerbated by the fact that Pakistan’s army has long been associated with Islamist militant groups operating at its behest. In recent years, Islamist militants have infiltrated the army. Given Pakistan’s track record on nuclear proliferation, rightly or wrongly analysts fear that Islamist militants could acquire nuclear weapons from the army through subterfuge or with the consent of some part of the organization.

  Analysts and scholars who fear the influence of Islam in the Pakistan Army simultaneously understate and overstate the problem. Contemporary analysis minimizes the problem, suggesting that this concern is relatively recent, dating to the tenure of Zia ul Haq in the 1980s. In fact, the army was an ideological army almost from the beginning, and it instrumentalized Islam for a number of reasons. Analysts also exaggerate the army’s mobilization of Islam because they do not understand the myriad and complex reasons behind it.8 As I argue here, the army has long seen itself as the protector of Pakistan’s Islamic ideology and has come to frame its conflict with India in civilizational terms. Understanding the various roles that Islam plays in the army is fundamental to understanding how Pakistan views the threats it confronts and the available tools at its disposal to confront them.

  Chapter 5 identifies one of the most enduring derivatives of Pakistan’s strategic culture: its obsession with forging strategic depth in Afghanistan, variously defined over time. While contemporary scholarship generally suggests that the army became interested in this concept in the late 1970s, I argue that in fact the Pakistan Army inherited this compulsion from the British. The entire British army was configured precisely to defend the empire from threats that were presumed to come into the subcontinent through Afghanistan. While Pakistan inherited the entire threat frontier, it had a meager fraction of the Raj’s resources. This chapter traces the historical features of strategic depth prior to, during, and after Partition. This chapter also examines the behaviors that the Pakistan Army has pursued as a consequence of its presumed need for strategic depth in Afghanistan. This pursuit not only has had implications for the ways the army manages Afghanistan but also has profoundly shaped the state’s policies toward and relations with ethnic Pashtun and Baloch Pakistanis who live in the areas bordering Afghanistan.

  Chapter 6 deals with the depiction of India and Indians in Pakistan’s defense literature. Pakistan’s defense publications consistently present highly stylized—if not outright faulty—versions of its engagements with India and the outcomes of these conflicts. What becomes apparent from a perusal of Pakistan’s defense publications is that the Pakistan Army is neuralgically obsessed with India. Long before Indian strategists articulated a place for India on the international stage, Pakistani defense writers were doing so. Pakistan’s apprehensions are not driven entirely by facts or empirical assessments; instead, its defense publications have sustained an ossified yet empirically erroneous account of its relations with India and even of India and Indians. Equally problematic, these narratives are thoroughly integrated into Pakistan’s educational materials, public and private media, and elements of Pakistan’s not-so-civil civil society. The result is that Pakistan’s national discourse surrounding India and defense policy is informed by a deeply flawed historical understanding that is resistant to amelioration.

  Chapter 7 focuses on the way Pakistan’s relationships with the United States and China figure in Pakistan’s strategic culture. Any frequent visitor to Pakistan will recognize the familiar refrain found in Pakistan’s defense writings: the United States is a perfidious ally that uses Pakistan for its strategic ends and then abandons it. China, in contrast, is described as an enduring friend. Pakistan has other important partners, such as Saudi Arabia and North Korea. However, its professional military publications rarely mention them in any significant detail, much less dedicate entire articles to them. Many American scholars (including this one) have long believed that the army has developed this rhetorical strategy to exploit US government officials’ relatively short memory of US–Pakistan relations to obtain lucrative rewards such as grant assistance; foreign military financing; access to desirable US weapon systems; and other financial, military, diplomatic, or political allurements. While this skepticism about Pakistan’s objective and subjective assessments is certainly justified, it is also true that on the whole Pakistani military personnel believe this narrative even if specific individuals have a richer and more evidence-based understanding of US–Pakistan relations.

  Chapters 8 and 9 explore the role of nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s strategic culture, especially in enabling Pakistan to increasingly rely upon a raft of Islamist militants to prosecute the state’s interests in India but also in Afghanistan. It is appropriate to treat the two subjects together because, as I demonstrate in Chapter 9, Pakistan’s nuclear program enables its use of militancy in Kashmir and beyond. These chapters both complement and expand on the work of Kapur (2007), who focuses on the Indo–Pakistan conventional crises th
at have been enabled by Pakistan’s creeping nuclear umbrella. They do so, in part, by discussing the antecedent conditions for Pakistan’s ability to expand the militant groups in terms of number, operational scope, and geographical area of operations as well as the contemporary Islamist militant landscape and the relationship that the state enjoys with the various actors therein.

  Chapter 10 begins by asking which, if any, elements of this strategic culture could evolve over any policy-relevant future. It considers the various empirically demonstrated sources of change within the army and concludes with a discussion of the implications of these changes for the future of the institution and, by extension, the stability of Pakistan and of the region. This chapter also describes the geographical recruitment base of the army and how it has expanded from several districts in northern Punjab to include many districts in militancy-afflicted Southern Punjab, much of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and even parts of Balochistan (Fair and Nawaz 2011).

  The final chapter revisits the framework laid out in Chapter 2 of this volume and identifies the implications for Pakistan’s behavior over the near term. It argues that Pakistan is a “greedy state” in the parlance of Glaser. Thus, policies of appeasement (e.g., helping to secure a resolution of Kashmir) may encourage further Pakistani revisionist pursuits rather than vitiate them. This chapter concludes with the ominous suggestion that the world must be ready for a Pakistan that is willing to take ever more dangerous risks because, in the view of the Pakistan Army, it has everything to lose by not doing so. For the army, to be defeated is not to lose on the battlefield; rather, defeat is to forego the opportunity or ability to keep resisting India and the agenda that Pakistan ascribes to its eastern nemesis.

  CHAPTER 2

  Can Strategic Culture Explain the Pakistan Army’s Persistent Revisionism?

  In this chapter, I first lay out the characteristics of Pakistan’s persistent and even expanding revisionist goals.1 Next, I present a framework of Pakistan’s domestic politics derived from the work of Zionts (2006) to help explain how both military regimes and civilian governments alike pursue the army’s revisionist agenda. Third, I briefly recount some of the salient debates in the scholarly literature about strategic culture and exposit how I apply Johnston’s (1995a, 1995b) formulation of strategic culture to the Pakistan Army. Fourth, I offer a justification for reducing this puzzle of Pakistan’s strategic culture generally to that of the army in particular. Then I give an overview of the Pakistan Army; this is fundamental to understanding how the strategic culture of the army is reproduced and sustained. I conclude with a brief discussion of methods and sources I use in this effort.2

  Pakistan’s Enduring and Expanding Revisionism

  Pakistan is revisionist, or anti–status quo, in that it desires to bring all of the disputed territory of Kashmir under its control, including the portion currently governed by India.3 As I describe in Chapter 3, while Kashmir never belonged to Pakistan in any legal sense, acquiring it is integral to Pakistan’s national identity. Pakistan is revisionist in another sense in that it seeks to actively thwart India’s rise in the region and beyond. Pakistan insists that India and the rest of world view and treat it as India’s equal. Resisting India’s rise is both an ideational and ideological goal of the Pakistan Army; however, doing so also has implications for how the army uses instruments of force and other elements of national power. For example, recent Pakistani reliance on Islamist militants in Afghanistan such as the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and even Lashkar-e-Taiba has as much to do with limiting India’s presence there as it does with shaping a regime in Kabul that is friendly to Pakistan. In contrast to Pakistan, India is territorially satisfied with the status quo, but it is mildly revisionist with respect to its place in the international system (Mohan 2004, 2006).

  Pakistan first tried to seize Kashmir in 1947. As British decolonization of South Asia loomed, the sovereign of Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh, hoped to keep the country independent of either of the two new states, India or Pakistan. As Singh held out, marauders from Pakistan’s tribal areas invaded the territory of Jammu-Kashmir in hopes of taking it for Pakistan and were supported extensively by Pakistan’s nascent provincial and federal governments. This attack expanded into the first war between India and Pakistan. When it was over and the cease-fire line was drawn, Pakistan controlled about one-third of Kashmir, and India controlled the remainder. Although the war ended in a stalemate with international intervention, Pakistan may have rightly concluded that the strategy of using irregular fighters succeeded. After all, Pakistan had claimed at least some part of Kashmir, which it would not have had otherwise. Moreover, because of the war, Kashmir was the subject of several United Nations Security Council resolutions, and it was recognized as a “disputed territory” rather than a territory over which India exercised incontestable sovereignty.

  Since 1947, Pakistan has remained locked in an enduring rivalry with India and has been steadfastly committed to seizing control of the entire territory of Jammu-Kashmir.4 After the first war, Pakistan sustained a low-level proxy war in Kashmir in hopes of making India’s possession of the territory so costly that India would simply abandon it altogether (Swami 2007). By the late 1950s, articles in Pakistan’s professional military publications were already arguing for the viability of initiating and sustaining guerilla operations within the implied theater of Indian-controlled Kashmir.

  Pakistan’s second major military attempt to change the territorial status quo took place in 1965, when Pakistan dispatched regular and irregular troops disguised as local fighters to Indian-administered Kashmir in hopes of igniting an insurgency there and of bringing international attention to the dispute. No uprising materialized, but the misadventure did slide into the second Indo-Pakistan war over Kashmir when India opened a second front across the international border. Indian and Pakistani accounts of their own performance diverge with respect to their losses of men and territory and the losses they inflicted upon the other (Nawaz 2008a). Scholarly accounts maintain that the war ended in what appeared to be a stalemate. However, there is strong evidence that India could have continued the war to deliver a decisive defeat to Pakistan had poor civil–military coordination not led India to accept the UN ceasefire prematurely (Raghavan 2009).

  The war ended in a draw, but scholars note that Pakistan fared worse than India. For one thing, the war resulted in a cessation of American aid to both combatants. Pakistan was more dependent on American assistance than was India and thus was more adversely affected. Second, India “achieved its basic goal of thwarting Pakistan’s attempt to seize Kashmir by force,” whereas Pakistan “gained nothing from a conflict which it had instigated” (Kux 1992, 238). When the war ended, it was obvious that India was in a position to severely damage, if not capture, Lahore in Pakistan’s Punjab, which “lay virtually defenseless” (Wolpert 1993, 375). In addition, India also controlled the strategically important Uri-Poonch bulge in Kashmir (Wolpert 1993). Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed’s account of the 1965 war, which General Headquarters approved for publication in 2002, describes it as a “watershed in the military history of the subcontinent. It marked the turning point in the balance of power in South Asia. After 1965, the Indian military power grew by leaps and bounds while Pakistan’s strength declined appreciably” (530). This was, in his view, Pakistan’s last opportunity to resolve the Kashmir dispute through military force in the twentieth century.

  The 1965 war brought particular shame to the Pakistan Army in part because many Pakistanis were under the belief that their country was winning the war due to the misinformation broadcasted on Pakistani media throughout the conflict. During this war, Pakistan was under Gen. Muhammad Ayub Khan’s military rule. Consequently, “once the euphoria produced by the official propaganda during the war had died down in Pakistan, people realized that Ayub Khan and the military leadership had failed the nation militarily” (Nawaz 2008a, 239–240).

  In 1971 the t
hird war between Pakistan and India began, but unlike the previous two conflicts, which were fought over Kashmir and in which Pakistan was the obvious aggressor, this one began as a civil war in East Pakistan. Pakistan’s Bengali citizens there, frustrated with West Pakistan’s extractive policies and unable to achieve full citizenship within a united Pakistan, eventually chose to secede. As refugees flowed into India, India seized the opportunity to intervene. When the war was over, Pakistan had lost East Pakistan, which emerged as independent Bangladesh. Pakistan’s army was disgraced because it lost the war along with half of the country’s territory and population, but also because the country was under military governance when the war took place. While Pakistan and India were relatively quiescent in the years following that war, Pakistan did not acquiesce to India’s rise. Pakistan’s “determination to protect its national identity and policy autonomy did not decline after the 1971 military debacle at the hands of India. If anything, its disposition stiffened” (Rizvi 2002, 314). Pakistan emerged committed to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability to steadfastly resist Indian hegemony.

  In spring 1999, Pakistan again sought to change maps in Kashmir through military force, less than a year after Pakistan and India became overt nuclear states. In that conflict, known as the Kargil War, Pakistan dispatched Northern Light Infantry paramilitary personnel along with regular Pakistani Army personnel to seize territory in the Kargil–Dras sectors of Indian-administered Kashmir. By the end of summer 1999, India had vanquished the Pakistani intruders, albeit at a high cost in personnel and after introducing air power into the conflict. Pakistan emerged from this crisis as a reckless, conflict-prone, nuclear-weapon state. The army in particular fared poorly because its chief, Musharraf, did not fully inform Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif about the operation and its implications. Instead, he undertook planning for the operation because Sharif was prosecuting an important diplomatic effort with India’s prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In contrast, India received accolades for its forbearance and measured response to the outrageous maneuver. The Kargil War occasioned an important American shift away from Pakistan toward India and eventually paved the way for the US–India strategic partnership that unfolded during the tenures of US president George W. Bush and Indian prime minister Vajpayee (Fair 2009b; Lavoy 2009; Tellis et al. 2001).