Ishtiaq Ahmed

India finds China a bigger threat than Pakistan and insists that it needs to arm itself to thwart perceived Chinese aggression, but Pakistan perceives a militarily stronger India a greater threat to its security than before

The Realism School of International Relations is premised on the assumption that states do not trust each other. They seek power and domination over others because they fear that if they are weak and vulnerable, other states will attack them. Consequently, the art of survival is to be always vigilant and on the lookout for striking first. War can, however, be kept at bay or postponed through the maintenance of a “balance of power”, or from the advent of nuclear weapons, “balance of terror” between the most powerful states. Such peace is temporary. Therefore, states must always be preparing for war.

Such jargon is part of the everyday parlance that security analysts and experts employ to urge greater spending on defence to ward off attack. Not surprisingly, an arms race follows. As one side acquires better weapons, the other side must try to offset that advantage by aiming for better killing capacity and capability. As both or many states engage in such a competition, forming alliances amongst themselves against common enemies, the objective and subjective levels of insecurity go up, because the new weapons, the training and preparation that is invested in learning to use them incrementally provides a higher level of destructive power than before. In other words, more and better weapons do not lower the fear and anxiety of the enemy; they heighten it.

The India-Pakistan arms race represents such an equation; only it is not determined entirely by their notorious rivalry. India finds China a bigger threat than Pakistan and insists that it needs to arm itself to thwart perceived Chinese aggression, but Pakistan perceives a militarily stronger India a greater threat to its security than before. Since at least the 1990s Pakistan has sought its weapons from China. Previously it was the US from which Pakistan acquired its weapons by playing upon the former’s fear of Soviet military might.

In any case the existing chain of reactions dates from 1962 when the Sino-Indian border war took place. It is also true that even when Pakistan began to receive in the mid-1950s military aid from the US, it was not until the 1965 war between India and Pakistan that they seriously began to try and outdo each other in terms of a serious arms race between them.

One would have imagined that when both sides demonstrated their ability to explode nuclear devices in May 1998, a “rational level of mutually assured destruction” had been reached. Both were in a position to inflict massive injury and therefore did not need to keep on spending on arms and armaments. However, the Chinese factor complicated that situation. The recent Indian hike on defence spending has made Pakistan nervous and it will seek to balance that by cultivating Chinese military hardware.

In the past, realism-driven arms races have usually ended up in war — World War I and II are cases in point. Millions of human beings were slaughtered by vain politicians and even vainer military generals. Then, of course, the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union started as hardcore realists began to define the relationship between the two superpowers. A direct nuclear war never broke out between them although the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 nearly drove them over the precipice. It ended rather unexpectedly as the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 under the deadweight of its sluggish command economy and a failed policy on consumer goods, coupled with the lack of political freedom.

Returning to the India-Pakistan standoff, it can be argued that it cannot go on interminably without dragging them into a war that neither will win but in which both will suffer unimaginable harm and damage, or, one of them will disintegrate because of overspending on weapons while unemployment and poverty aggravate. Even the latter outcome will gravely undermine the stability of the South Asian region. I would not venture speculating which of the two possibilities is more likely. Both need to be prevented from transpiring.

The rival liberal-internationalist school of international politics asserts that although states are the normal units of the international system, they stand to gain more from collective security. Professor Aswini K Ray (2004, Western Realism and International Relations: a Non-Western View, New Delhi: Foundation Books), formerly of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, has very forcefully argued that the Cold War could have been averted had the liberal-internationalists been able to define US foreign policy after the death of President Franklin D Roosevelt in April 1945. He argues that the system of collective security that the UN had heralded in should have been followed to solve the conflicts between the US and the Soviet Union

In the context of South Asia the notion of collective security can be advanced in the form of regional security. It would mean strengthening the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). India and Pakistan could become the paramount powers sharing responsibility for peace and prosperity in this region. Very often such reflections are dismissed as idealism: who can think of regional security when terrorists go around blowing up people for as irrational reasons as the accident of wrong religious faith or sectarian affiliation? Who can negotiate with non-state entities that live in secrecy and that only seek to inflict pain and injury?

Indeed these are very legitimate concerns and neither India nor Pakistan is likely to lower its traditional security. However, the problems of water scarcity, global warming and overall environmental degradation pose such serious problems that no war can ever solve them. Only cooperation and solidarity among the nations of South Asia can help them find solutions to these problems. Unfortunately, Europe learnt the lessons of peace and solidarity only after millions of its people were consumed by wars.

Given the fact of nuclear weapons it may even be impossible for India and Pakistan to survive such a war and make a fresh new start based on peace and solidarity. A recent estimate suggests that India will wipe out Pakistan (120 million Pakistanis out of 170 million) in a nuclear war but only after it loses 500 million of its own people. Does that make any sense?

Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg