A losing gambit
India and Pakistan flirt with nuclear confrontation (again)
So far, the Indian and Pakistani publics largely dismiss fears of a conflict as well. The cover story in last week's India Today magazine, titled "What If . . .," had to start at the beginning, offering a detailed description of how people die from a nuclear blast and the resulting fallout. But the risks are real. India is still smarting from the May 14 assault by Pakistani militants on an Indian Army camp that killed 32 people, mostly women and children. Hard-liners in New Delhi are urging an attack into Pakistani-controlled territory to pursue the militants and destroy their training camps. Hundreds of bullet and mortar rounds are fired across the so-called Line of Control that separates the Pakistani- and Indian-controlled portions of Kashmir. Pakistan fears an attack by the much larger Indian Army, even instituting occasional blackouts in sensitive areas in Kashmir. Nerves in India were further rattled last week when Pakistan test-fired nuclear-capable missiles.
The State Department last week issued its strongest warning yet for Americans to leave the region immediately. Intelligence officials are watching closely to see if either side will move to assemble its nuclear weapons. "We have never come closer to deployment than now," says Feroz Hassan Khan, the director for arms control at the Joint Services Headquarters in Pakistan and a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
If India does launch a conventional assault--perhaps with the stated justification of rooting out terrorists in northern Kashmir--Pakistan refuses to rule out using nuclear weapons. "I want to make it clear that Pakistan has not made nuclear weapons to put them in a museum," says a Pakistani Army spokesman. "Definitely, if there is a threat to our country which could not be thwarted without the use of our nuclear weapons, we will go for it." For Pakistan, the threat to use nuclear weapons has become its main strategic response to the conventional advantages that India enjoys with its much larger Army. India, for its part, has pledged not to use nuclear weapons first, but its rhetoric has been similarly heated. "The very existence of Pakistan will become doubtful if India is attacked with a nuclear weapon," says the Indian Army chief, Gen. S. Padmanabhan. Neither of these threats should be idly dismissed, coming from nations that have fought three full-scale wars.
Perils of brinksmanship. This time around, the impending monsoon season, forecast to begin on June 30, might well rain out military moves by either side. But history suggests the cycle could quickly bring the two countries to the brink of conflict again within months. The Kargil conflict three years ago nearly sparked a war, as did an attack by Pakistani militants on the Indian Parliament last December. "How many times can this occur without something going terribly wrong?" asks Karl Inderfurth, the State Department's top South Asia expert in the Clinton administration, who now teaches at George Washington University. "This will happen again and again, and at some point, their luck will run out."
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