Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense and foreign affairs. I'm Carrie Anderson, membership editor here at War on the Rocks.
What you're about to hear is a special public release of Thinking the Unthinkable, our bi-weekly members-only podcast hosted by Ankit Panda. This show explores the evolving dangers of a new nuclear era, and it's available exclusively to War on the Rocks members. We're sharing this episode widely because of fast-moving events. India has just launched strikes inside Pakistan, responding to a deadly April 22 terrorist attack in Kashmir.
Thank you.
You're listening to Thinking the Unthinkable, the members-only show for War on the Rocks on all things nuclear weapons.
As always, I'm your host, Ankit Panda. I'm the Stanson Senior Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. On today's show, I return to South Asia, where India and Pakistan once again find themselves in the throw of a serious crisis that could very quickly take on a nuclear dimension.
Joining me to discuss the stakes in this crisis, the background, and more is Sameer Lalwani. You may have heard him just recently on the Warcast, but Sameer goes a lot deeper on many of the issues that he alluded to on that show. Sameer is the former senior expert in the Asia Center at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a non-resident senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
We talk a bit about India's approach to managing crises with Pakistan over the last 10 years or so, what the stakes in this current crisis are, how the Indians and the Pakistanis are both in different places than they were in 2019, which was the last time they encountered a serious crisis with nuclear stakes. And we talk a bit about the role of the United States and just how this crisis could really get out of hand. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
All right. Well, Samir, thanks a lot for joining me on Thinking the Unthinkable today. How's it going? It's going well. I'm looking forward to the discussion. Yeah, absolutely. I know. I think you'll be familiar to a lot of our listeners on this show as you were just on Warcast, the shorter members-only podcast for War on the Rocks talking about the India-Pakistan crisis. But just in case some of our members missed that show,
I'll just do a quick recap on why we're having this conversation. So we've talked about India and Pakistan a little bit on the show, but it's mostly been with regard to kind of forced posture shifts in both countries when it comes to their nuclear forces. But since I started this podcast, we fortunately haven't seen a major crisis between the two nuclear armed neighbors in South Asia. And of course, unfortunately, that is exactly where we are now on April 22nd.
India endured the single highest casualty attack on civilians since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were, of course, significantly greater in magnitude. This time, the death toll is now at 28 civilian deaths. That was an attack carried out on April 22nd. Really kind of terrible stuff. I mean, a targeted attack on tourists in a picturesque valley near the Kashmiri town of Pahalgam. And so...
As these things go, India-Pakistan crises tend to be given names based on geographic locations. So we've had, you know, Uri, Patankot, Gurdaspur, and Balakot, of course, Pulwama, and now Pahalgam has entered the lexicon. So a lot to talk about here. The expectation is, and I should say here, we're recording this conversation on May 2nd. There's a pretty good chance that by the time our listeners might be listening, the Indians will have done something in retaliation.
But Samir, let me turn it over to you now. Can you just lay out, I mean, you've been studying crises in this part of the world for a long time.
How do you interpret the severity of what's happened in Pahalgam? And how do you think that's going to really, or I mean, we've already seen a fair bit of evidence and how it's being received in India. But how bad is this? How bad can things get? Yeah, so this is a good question, Arquette. I was in India the day of the actual attack. Actually, there was a major US-India forum that was where a lot of Americans and Indians were sort of gathered together in New Delhi. We heard from Vice President Fiji Vance, who was in India at the time, a
addressed the audience and because the attacks had happened that afternoon, made mention of it in his remarks. It was sort of, it came up sort of consistently. But I would say that like during that conference, the first two days, it didn't really sink in sort of the severity and sort of that sense of crisis. I think all the facts were sort of still trickling in. Obviously, sort of like the death toll was sort of not really clear at the time.
the manner in which things were conducted. I mean, you talked about this as an attack on tourists. These are tourists from all across India. And the manner in which they were killed or attacked was particularly heinous. It sounds like from accounts that people were summarily executed, like individually, they were called out based on whether they could identify themselves as Hindu or Muslim. And if they were deemed to be Hindu or insufficiently Muslim, they were executed. I
or at least some were. There might have been some sort of particular very sort of selective and brutal violence involved in that. So,
So as the nature of this violence, that story has sort of taken hold around the country, as a recognition that like as the funerals have taken place for all these individuals who were killed around the country, you have a nation largely sort of gathering together, like a storm is gathering sort of within the country that was not evident on the first day. But I think by the time I left, it was pretty clear that while India had slapped some fairly sort of significant punitive measures in terms of diplomatic and economic measures, a water treaty that was sort of held in abeyance,
a kinetic action is coming. And I think that has sort of been, this is sort of of that level of previous crisis in 2016 and 2019, where a combination of spectacle and like sort of a level of violence sort of compels the government to believe that they have to take some sort of kinetic action. So I think that's what we're expecting. In the past, it's usually been sort of 11 to 12 days until sort of the government responds. I don't
I don't think that's sort of a formula, but I expect some kinetic action from India. And then the question is, what's that scale of response? What's the Pakistani retaliation for that? Last time there was a prepared response that I think took the Indians by surprise. Ironically, I was in town in New Delhi for that strike back in 2019. So I've sort of seen sort of the reactions on the ground. And then sort of where do we go from there in terms of escalation and escalation control?
put a lot on the table that I think really sets up the rest of this conversation very nicely. I do want to stay on the contours of the attack for a moment because, you know, as you said, this has been particularly heinous. And I think the reaction in the Indian press has obviously taken pains to just communicate the targeted religious nature of these attacks. Unsurprisingly, I think you've seen some in India, particularly on the
the Hindu nationalist right in the press kind of draw comparisons, if not in scale, in tenor to the October 7th attacks against Israel, calling then for a retaliatory response that resembles Israel's ensuing campaign against Hamas and Gaza, obviously not against a nuclear-armed adversary, but I think that just bears mentioning in terms of the escalatory impulses at play. Just zooming out a little bit for our listeners before we talk a bit about how the Indians might move,
This is part of a process now, right? So I mentioned some of those previous crises. The story, I think, begins, obviously, with Narendra Modi and the BJP coming to power in the 2014 general elections. Beginning in 2015, you have a series of sort of cross-border crises, right? Gurdaspur and Punjab being the first one that I really recall in that series, followed by the Patan Kot attacks in January 2016, the September 2016 Uri attack, which manifests in
surgical strikes, and then the Pulwama-Balakot crisis in 2019, which was the most serious crisis between India and Pakistan in a very long time. The first use of air power against Pakistan proper and India proper by both countries since their 1971 war. The first deliberate use of air power by any nuclear-armed state against another, if I'm not mistaken. And
And so the Modi government, I think, has – the way I've put it in the past is that they've tried to reset India's reputation for strategic restraint, right? This was part of the picture here. Why don't I turn it over to you to just talk a bit about that strategic restraint era and explain a bit about how the Modi government has sort of
recalibrated and tried to convey to Pakistan that it will be fundamentally a lot more risk tolerant in how it responds to these kinds of attacks. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the Modi government did start to reset expectations of what Indian responses would be, even in response to the Gurdaspur attack. I mean, that was a terrorist attack.
within the Kashmir, I can't remember, it was Punjab actually, right. And so I think their political responses were something distinct than what they had done in the past. I think they sort of cut off all engagements with the Haryat, which was kind of the political arm of the Kashmiri insurgent separatist groups. And so they kept on sort of moving the goalposts. Now, at the same time, one thing should be noted is that Prime Minister Modi
made a gesture, whether sort of symbolic or substantive in going to Pakistan in December of 2015, attending then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's daughter's wedding or niece's wedding or something like that. And so sort of made this gesture for trying to reset the relationship. And then less than a week or a week or two later, you have the Patan code attack, which is a terrorist attack on an Indian airbase in the mainland. And
And that results in India sort of very seriously considering military options, but then there's a joint sort of investigative process. So again, India holds its fire, decides to sort of like...
take some political and diplomatic actions, but also see if Pakistan is serious about actually investigating these attacks. And, you know, there's a reason for this, which is that Pakistan has a principal agent problem with its terrorists or militant proxies, right? Sometimes they authorize them to do stuff. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they say, do something, but keep it sort of under a certain limit, right?
oftentimes it's not even sort of a direction, it's like building the capacity and then there's some autonomy by these militant groups, whether it's Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is sort of the most well-known and sort of most successful of these groups, Jaish-e-Mohammed,
The current one is the resistance front, which sort of comes out in 2019 and is largely believed, I think, by most analysts to be sort of a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba. So not terribly distinct from these groups, but trying to frame it as like this organic resistance group within Kashmir. But really, I don't think anyone really buys that.
So yeah, India is moving the goalposts. 2016 is the surgical strikes. The surgical strikes were a little bit kabuki theater, right? There were probably some cross-border raids, which were actually a staple of the Indian military for the previous 25 years. You have these border action teams. I mean, the
The Indian-Pakistani sort of line of control, and the whole point of the line of control, it's really a belt because no one actually has control of it. It's like a little bit of no man's land through valleys and sort of like jagged mountainous terrain. And so you have cross-border incursions regularly happen.
there you have, sometimes it can scale into gunfire and artillery fire. But India basically has done these border action raids before where they cross over an ostensible border, take out some Pakistani posts, maybe some militant launch pads where they're operating from.
and then come back across the border, do it in the middle of the night and say, this is what we've done. In 2016, they say they did this on an enormous scale. And the Pakistanis say, we didn't say anything, nothing really happened, right? So it was a kind of a useful collusive secrecy. I imagine the Indians did something. I don't think they did as much as they actually claimed. I think the Pakistanis know something happened.
They're probably right that this was not a huge departure, but the whole point is that the Modi government branded this as this major game-changing surgical strike operation that Modi was brave enough to take the risks on. Got a Bollywood movie and everything. Yeah, exactly. That movie comes out, ironically, I was looking this up, January of 2019, leading up to Indian elections, but also a month before the next major terrorist attack that then sort of compels India to raise the bar even higher. So we can go into that more if it's useful.
So before we move forward, I want to kind of connect this to the nuclear balance between the two countries and kind of the nuclear strategy status quo as of, I guess, a few years ago between India and Pakistan, which I think
helps explain that shift from strategic restraint, right? Where 2008, you have the Mumbai attacks, which colloquially in India continue to be alluded to as India's 9-11, you know, massive attack, 175 deaths, 300 wounded, really, really huge attack. You have a completely different Indian government in office at the time. And of course, the nuclear question has hung over South Asia since 1998, since India and Pakistan broke out as nuclear powers. And Pakistan and India obviously have very different nuclear postures. Pakistan relying on India
a low threshold for the employment of nuclear weapons to offset its perceived conventional inferiorities vis-a-vis India. And so one of the reasons that India has, I think, felt frustrated and limited in its ability to manage this problem, which you might analogize as essentially death by a thousand cuts, I think you described the principal agent dynamic between Pakistani state and military intelligence agencies and these terrorist groups well, but
ultimately India hasn't been willing to run those risks because of the possibility that escalation could occur, a major conventional conflict could break out. I think what the Modi government has been entrepreneurial about since 2016 onwards, with a significant feedback loop in sort of India's democratic politics where I think the Indian public has welcomed this, has supported this, especially as they publicized the surgical strikes, a
has been to take more risks, has been to show Pakistan that this status quo cannot persist, that India will be able to take shots in retaliation. And here I think we get to 2019, right? This incredibly significant flare-up where, in a way, both sides walk away fairly unscathed, right? The Indians strike, the Pakistanis strike back.
We later learn that the potential for greater escalation was very much real, but the crisis, as so many nuclear crises in history, appears to de-escalate due to this entirely unpredictable series of events where any
An Indian pilot is shot down in the context of an air-to-air dogfight. He lands on Pakistan-controlled territory. He survives, and the return of that pilot ends up being the face-saving off-ramp that both sides need. Say a bit more about Balakot, Samir. I mean, what did the Indians find that worked at the time, and how might some of those lessons be shaping the ways in which
certain folks in the decision-making chain, in the prime minister's office, particularly in New Delhi, will be thinking about the right way to dose punishment for Pakistan after this crisis. So I think one thing I just wanted to say, going back to the way you were framing this, we're talking about essentially what is possible in this world of stability and stability paradox, right? So that sort of basically suggests that there's some stability at the nuclear level because both countries are nuclear arms. So the prospect of
you know, all out sort of conventional invasion is muted. And so as a result, you have some stability, but then you have stuff that sort of like below a certain threshold that might be permissible or not worth risking conventional responses because it can trigger sort of conventional and nuclear escalation. And so I
I think both sides have kind of figured out a dynamic where they could do these subconventional operations where Pakistani militants authorized by the ISI or other parts of the Pakistani military could conduct cross-border incursions and terrorist attacks on both military and sometimes civilian targets. And the Indian response could be whether it was sort of cross-border fire or border action teams, again, with their own sort of commandos going across the border and
targeting Pakistani, ostensible Pakistani militants or military targets, right? There's symmetry in that there's sub-dimensional response. I think what India is starting to push in 2016 is, no, we can actually do limited conventional operations, retaliatory operations that don't push the threshold of nuclear use. And that was something that I think had stayed the hand of India in 2001 too, when they had this mass mobilization in response to a terrorist attack and were contemplating sort of like a major conventional
military operation. And then even 2008, there was sort of a concern that like, maybe some concern both within India, as well as external actors like the United States pressuring India to sort of rethink this about a conventional response that could trigger runaway escalation that the United States certainly didn't want. But I think a lot of Indian policymakers were concerned about as well. Now, the Modi government is saying we can actually sort of pursue these limited conventional operations. They do it with sort of these border action groups, but like,
in a much larger scale that sort of resembles conventional rather than subconventional operations. And certainly in 2019, when you have
an airstrike package targeting a target not in the disputed territory of Kashmir, but in the mainland of Pakistan. That is a significant threshold that India crosses. So it crosses a threshold in terms of the capabilities of only to use air power, which is very restrained typically in doing that. It hasn't used air power on Pakistan since like the 1970s in a war. And then it goes into the mainland of Pakistan, hits a target that claims is a terrorist target with like 300 militants in there and claims splendid success, goes back across the border and
And then there's sort of like, you know, celebrations in New Delhi. And it was like there, as I said, and you could just hear this palpable sense of redemption within Delhi. And then the next day, the Pakistanis have a response, even though India has combat air patrols in the region.
Pakistanis sort of come across with a strike package of their own. They drop some munitions very close to a brigade headquarters, but where a general officer, maybe a three-star, had just been. They don't actually hit any military targets, but they hit sort of like empty fields adjacent to them. I think that was intentional by most sides, but there was always a risk they could have missed and actually killed some pretty significant military targets. And then they go back across the border. There's a dogfight in pursuit by the Indian Air Force. A MiG-21 shot down.
This pilot apparently went rogue and sort of was not either not listening to his ground communications or just like disobeyed his orders. He shot down, it's captured. This is a bargaining chip. But in that process also, India shoots down one of its own helicopters because it's a friendly fire. And so they shoot down sort of, I think, six of their own
troops as well. Again, an incident that I think early on could have been attributed to Pakistan and said, this is an escalation they've come across. So there's a lot of fog and a lot of friction in this incident. And we don't even get to learn until later on, like three weeks later, what's going on at sea. You have Indian naval assets that are already at sea because of an exercise. They start to try to hunt Pakistani submarines. They can't find one of them. They're
kind of laying out all these pieces. And then the part that we also learned later on is that there's a call between, I think, the Indian National Security Advisor and the Pakistani ISI chief where the Indians threaten missile retaliations if the POW, the Indian POW is not returned in X amount of time. I can't remember if it was like 48 hours or something like that. The Pakistanis believe that the Indians are readying these missiles. It's possible the reason they believe that is because the Chinese provide imagery intelligence that perhaps misreads the situation as what India is actually mobilizing versus what they...
were claimed to be mobilizing on the ground. The Indians also flush out the Arihant. That's India's, at the time, those India's sole operational sea-based undersea nuclear capability. Which is in theory a second strike capability. So there were all sorts of assets moving and it's almost like miraculous that things were able to be settled down very quickly because of this unique bargaining chip. We're a couple of American analysts who work on escalation and strategic stability issues in South Asia. And it's miraculous to us, but of course...
When you talk to, I think, a large number of analysts who are even former officials who lived through this period,
They don't attribute the solution to this crisis necessarily to good luck, but really to the idea that more than a quarter of a century into their coexistence as nuclear-armed neighbors, India and Pakistan have established certain rules of the road, and they know how to throw punches and take punches without letting things get out of control. And I think what you just said really points out that that's one way to think about this. But of course, I think we have a very good bit of evidence from Balakot in particular that things could have gotten out of control very quickly. There's
There's also Modi on the campaign trail. So Balakot happens right before the 2019 Indian general elections. Then Modi on the campaign trail starts talking about, I think he says, Katalkirat, which is a night of murder. He says he was ready to commit a night of murder if the pilot had not been returned. He
He alludes to the circumstances under which India could have used its nuclear weapons, saying that these weapons haven't just been kept for Diwali, the Hindu celebration, and- Not just firecrackers. Not just firecrackers, yeah. So a lot of that loose talk, I think, has been particularly concerning. So we still aren't really getting into this crisis, but because I think a lot of this is really useful scene setting for many of our listeners who I don't think spend probably all their days thinking about South Asia, because South Asia does tend to fall off the agenda these days when
everybody's so interested in great power nuclear dynamics in particular. But I wanted to ask you a bit about, to reflect a little bit on the things that have changed, because I was writing a short article about this crisis. And in the course of doing that, I was just really struck by just the structural changes in
Pakistan domestically, India domestically, the role of the United States, it's a completely new world. We are watching an India-Pakistan crisis in conditions that I think are meaningfully very different from anything we've really seen since 1998. I think we've covered the Indian domestic piece a little bit. I want to ask you a bit about the Pakistan internal situation right now. Pakistan's gone through a rocky few years. We have very good data showing that 2025 is on track to be the most internally violent year in Pakistan since 2015.
And I think that probably affects the ways in which the Pakistani military feels, at least in terms of its internal security and stability, that could shape the way in which the Pakistani military in particular reacts to this crisis and Indian escalation. Now, say a bit about that. I mean, how do you sort of read the Pakistani internal situation? Yeah, the description that you hear from Pakistani analysts or analysts who study Pakistan is that they've been sort of in the midst of a poly-crisis for several years. That's a combination of an economic crisis, which frankly has been perpetual with Pakistan, but it's been acute over the last few years between Pakistanis
balance payments crises, inflation, just instability in the markets, like the rupee has really plummeted. So there's that element of Pakistan's economic instability, which is having real pain in Pakistan over the last few years. And it got more acute with COVID. You have a political crisis, a civil military crisis, where a very popular elected government was thrown out after some missteps post the Russian invasion of Ukraine,
and really clash with the military. The military is obviously sort of like really, they rule, but they don't govern is a sort of apt way of describing. They always rule, but they're not necessarily sort of like the face of that rule. They allow for civilian governments. In this case, Imran Khan, who is the prime minister, got elected
Got a little ahead of his skis, started to pick fights with the military, was thrown in jail, has been convicted. There was an attempt on his life, but he has really challenged the military's centrality as sort of the guardians of the country. This is more than any time I can think of, the military's prestige has really taken a number of hits. It's sort of akin to the period when General Musharraf was at his lowest point in 2007, where he basically was forced out.
because sort of the people had sort of worn tired of his military dictatorship. And then the third thing is you have this resurgence of terrorism, which is also resembles like sort of the 2007, 2009 period where you have two major explosions of terrorists or insurgency in Khyber Pakhtunia, which is sort of the Pakistan Taliban country. And then you also have a Baloch nationalist insurgency taking place in Balochistan,
but they've become much more capable. They're using suicide bombings, using women as suicide bombers, or attacking Chinese engineering targets or Chinese engineers, foreign nationals as targets. So it's causing a lot of chaos. And then on top of that, the thing that Pakistan had bet the last 20 years on was that they would have a stable border with Afghanistan if the Taliban were in power. It turns out,
they bet wrong. And the Taliban, whether over the course of time or always, have very different objectives than the Pakistani ISI and are creating all sorts of problems for them. The Pakistanis had to conduct airstrikes on Afghan territory. You get this for the claim that they're harboring
terrorists or insurgents and have safe havens, right? So this is, in a way, I don't think there's any sympathy for that in the United States, but it creates a lot of dilemmas for the Pax Dei military. So in a way, you could see a logic where this is Pax Dei military is gambling for resurrection. They're down economically, even though this relationship with China was supposed to deliver a game-changing economic opportunity. They're down politically because they just look bad to
taking a fight with one of the most popular nationalist civilians. And they're down strategically because they're really not doing a very good job protecting the country from terrorist and insurgent attacks. As I said, it's the highest point in over a decade of Pakistan Taliban resurgence. So what better way than to create some sort of diversionary sort of crisis where when the military stands up to big bad India,
and maybe is as successful as it was in 2019, where it kind of came off looking pretty good, shooting down an Indian MiG-21 and sort of looking like it stood up in that crisis. Maybe that redeems sort of the military's credibility and identity in the face of the public, restore their position within society and within the state.
I think that might be a gamble. And so in a way, I would say Pakistan military might be the one that benefits the most from this crisis if it goes according to plan. Yes. That last part I think we'll come back to when we talk about escalation. Because also, I could take what you just said and also point out the reasons why that could also lead to a place where if the Indians go bigger than the Pakistanis might be expecting in dosing punishment, it actually creates the conditions for Pakistan to behave
behave rather in escalatory manners of its own. I mean, just as the military is feeling besieged and weaker internally. But before we get there, I did want to ask you about the US because that's obviously the other big change, right? We're not in Afghanistan anymore. The relationship with Pakistan has completely changed. We're now two administrations later, and we have a second Trump administration that
appears to be posturing itself, well, in interesting ways globally, but certainly in South Asia in the days since this crisis. What are you seeing from the Trump administration and how they're sort of handling this at the moment? Yeah, so I mean, I think one, the interests are different, right? So certainly we're not in Afghanistan anymore, which means we don't have to rely on Pakistan for airlines communication and ground lines communication, which is historically, I think, for the last 20 years, well,
from 2001 to 2021 was the reason why the US would play this proactive crisis manager and peacemaker trying to bring the temperature down. In 2001, it was because we were conducting Operation Anaconda and we didn't want the Pakistani to move their forces out of that Western theater that was obstructing or theoretically obstructing sort of Al-Qaeda from flooding into Pakistan. We wanted them to stay there. And so we were trying to persuade the Indians to not start a fight with the Pakistanis. I think consistently, we've always been trying to be that manager. We're
we're not there anymore, right? We no longer have that stake in preserving that stability. We have a broader interest, you could say, I mean, there's like several equities we have in preserving or mitigating the prospect of all out conventional war or nuclear war. We have like
a million US citizens that live in the subcontinent. We have a stake in preserving the nuclear taboo, especially with two countries that potentially might be the first ones to use nuclear weapons since 1945. But we don't have those immediate stakes that we once did. And then the second big change, and it's hard to underscore this, is that we have heavily tilted towards India, even since 2019. I mean, there's been a relationship with India since 2005,
that's a strategic relationship, but I think it is really intensified since 2020 when India basically got into a conflict with China and
our whole system went into overdrive and sort of backing the Indians. And that led to a virtuous cycle of trust and defense cooperation and defense technology sharing that has sort of moved us much further to India's camp such that when you hear Trump administration responses, some of them are basically saying like we stand with India and they have the right to retaliate. Those are not the exact words. I don't want to sort of
misquote them. But the effect, I think, is heard as such. I looked at the language that the Indian Defense Ministry put out, and they basically said the call between Rajnath Singh and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsett basically was like, you know, sympathy for India and sort of endorsed their right to respond or sort of deter terrorism. I don't think the Pentagon put out quite a similar statement, but nevertheless, that was heard by the Indians. And
I think it's similar to language that was put out in 2019 by a national security advisor, Bolton, or it was put out by the Indians as to what national security advisor Bolton said, which was a similar, like essentially interpreted by the Indians as a green light to retaliate. So there's that. And at the same time, you have the state department trying to say, like, we want to sort of, you know, manage, you know, conflict on both sides, essentially trying to exercise some restraint. And I think Marco Rubio's outreach to both foreign ministers is also an effort to exercise restraint. So you have mixed messages going forward.
from the United States. But one, I think the Indians are definitely going to hold on to it and they will probably ignore the other. Yeah. So let's now get to the Indians and what they're likely to do in the coming days, potentially, including before this podcast makes it to the airwaves, which is, you know, Modi is pretty boxed in by his past behavior, by the nature of this attack, by the fact that the United States has created the conditions for a fairly permissive American retaliation. So it's pretty much baked in at this point that the Indians will do something. The question is what? And
And of course, managing escalation requires thinking about the kinds of thresholds that one is willing to cross. The Indians crossed a pretty big threshold in 2019 when they resorted to the use of air power, which, you know, by the way, I don't think we've said this yet, but even in their 1999 war over Kargil, the Kargil War, India and Pakistan maintained that limit about using air power against each other a year after breaking out as nuclear states.
Many of us in 2019, I think, anticipated the Indians would do something big because we knew about the surgical strikes, the reputational reset, but the use of air power was fundamentally a strategic surprise.
And so I think the most concerning scenario for me is that the Indians actually decide that this crisis gives them the opportunity to similarly resort to the use of precision conventional ballistic missiles, which they've been developing, deploying, and testing, talking about quite a bit. Given the kinds of well-known, I think, Pakistani anxieties about what that would represent, it's very easy to imagine that Pakistan reacts to that with missile strikes of its own.
I'm not predicting that that's what's likely to happen, but if strategic surprise is part of the Indian calculation, then that's really the thing they haven't done in the past. I think many in India will understand why that's a dangerous Rubicon to cross. But again, we have so many internal structural sources of change from 2019 and the political context within India that I don't think you can set that aside. That's sort of my kind of concerning scenario. I'm not sure what probability I'd assign to that kind of retaliation.
What do you think is most likely, Samir, from where you're sitting? What do you expect the Indians to do here? So let me sort of start with saying like what I think the Indians are going to try to achieve before we sort of go into like, you know, types of options and platforms. But I think they have three objectives. So number one, this is about satiating sort of public anger and demand for retribution or retaliation. And so there has to be something that's maybe like
I wouldn't call it quite spectacular, but sort of like that's highly visible and maybe is something sort of like of a spectacle that flexes Indian conventional military capability. And that could be some novelty or a surprise, as we said, whether in terms of the platform or the sort of the strike option, whether this is sort of like a, you know, a missile strike from a sea-based platform, whether it's sort of like testing one of their new standoff capabilities, the
the Rafale fighter aircraft that they have recently acquired from France. It could be sort of a novel target, which again, in 2019, you had both novel platforms and targets simultaneously. But it's something that is spectacle and visible that the Modi government can sort of make a new Bollywood movie after down the road. The second though, is trying to impose some actual meaningful costs on the Pakistanis, right? And to that is to like, you want to impose costs because you want to try to
reset sort of deterrence, whether in terms of turns through interdiction by sort of taking out sort of significant number of terrorist targets or deterrence through punishments and sort of showcasing the weakness or vulnerability of Pakistani militias.
military air defenses, their inability to protect the country, protect the state. And you want to do those two things while simultaneously, I believe India does have this third concern, which is you want to manage or control escalation. You don't want this to get out of control. India has huge stakes in international system and they're starting to reap the rewards of their position in their national economy, especially as more pressure and tariffs are being applied on China. So you have all these companies that are coming in,
Apple has now talked about sort of moving their new iPhone production, 90% of it, to India. They want to start to scale domestic investment in manufacturing. And a large part of this is also being attracted to in sort of the Northern Indian sort of industrial corridor, all places that could be targets for missile strikes and a conventional war. So you don't want things to get out of hand for a variety of reasons, whether it's sort of investment stock markets or
other reasons. And so this is a trilemma, essentially, because I think in 2016, you had these surgical strikes that really optimized spectacle and escalation control, but didn't really impose any meaningful costs on Pakistan. In 2019, you optimized for some spectacle, but also some meaningful costs on Pakistan, at least in terms of
embarrassing the Pakistani military's inability to defend against deep Indian incursions. But then we got a little out of control in escalation. I think in hindsight, at least privately, the Modi government recognized things got sort of out of control in an unpredictable state that was not comfortable for the civilian government.
And then since, for the last three or four years, you have these stories coming out that where India's kind of taking credit for this, where they were able to impose meaningful costs and control for escalation by conducting a lot of covert operations against terrorist targets. These are shadow wars, right? This is like wars in the gray zone, mysteriously...
A couple dozen Pakistani sort of militant leaders at very high levels and ostensibly very safe places within Pakistan are killed through, you know, gang related violence, other terrorist attacks, mysterious like shootings in the night, including like a former ISI officer. I think I heard about in 2024, an ISI officer who was retired, but was sort of believed to be so affiliated with Pakistan.
approximately Milton. So you had a very effective covert operation program going for several years, but it did not get the visibility that is required in a crisis. So I think the Indians are really challenged as to what sort of they want to optimize for, and each one of them exposes them to some risk. My personal bet is that I think they're going to try to do something novel with a strike, but try to hit sort of an inert target where
there's not major casualties. And so that would sort of check off spectacle and controlled escalation. And then over time, continue to impose costs through covert operations, which have proven very effective at
targeting senior terrorist militants, again, deep in the heartland of Pakistan. I mean, something the Indians struggle with, too, with both the surgical strikes in 2016 and in 2019 was actually evidence for what they hit and demonstrating and persuading, especially the outside world, that they did inflict the damage they claimed. I mean, you talked a bit about the claim of the Balakot strikes, that it was 300 or something terrorists that they'd killed.
And then when the satellite imagery started to trickle out in Reuters and other places, there was no evidence that the Indians actually struck the target. And the target itself appeared to be a rather small structure that sort of belied the imagination that 300 terrorists would have been cooped in there all at once immediately in the aftermath of an attack anticipating Indian retaliation. So if they do something this time too, I would expect there to be potentially efforts at just being
being a little bit more persuasive that they did actually achieve the effects they did. The last thing I wanted to ask you is something I've been sort of wrangling with is this question. I think the way you sort of framed this trilemma and optimization problem is right. I think that's very persuasive. Part of the picture here, I think, is also the non-kinetic measures that India has taken. Some of that is obviously fairly, they've suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which has been on the table. They've alluded to that in the past as a potential retaliatory step. They've now crossed that Rubicon.
I'm wondering if you think that some of these measures, they've taken sort of five big steps. One is revoking the treaty, suspending the SARC visa exemption scheme, canceling previously issued visas for Pakistanis, expelling Pakistani military advisors. And I think the last one is border closing, which we've seen before. But in aggregate, do you think some of these non-kinetic measures help the Indians potentially let out a little bit of the pressure to do something bigger on the kinetic side?
Or do you think this is really just an ancillary part of the broader retaliation for this attack? I bet there's probably internal polling going on on that right now. I don't think anyone will admit that. But my sense was that that response happened, I think, the next day, like on the Wednesday after the terrorist attack. And my
my guess was one, they want to sort of show some firm response, but also probably to sort of get a temperature check on like, will this address some of the concerns? And I think really four of the five are really just diplomatic signals that don't have a whole lot of meaning, frankly. It's the Indus Water Treaty one, which I think the Indians are hyping up, which is this could really cut off the flow of
And it's not like they're going to totally be able to divert waters immediately, but it's just the threat of holding at risk Pakistan's farming and agriculture output, which is salient because it's food production. There's a lot of poor farmers who rely on this subsistence, but it's also the homeland of a lot of wealthy landlords who also happen to be serious politicians. And so it can hurt in a variety of ways, both for near term and sort of spark some internal dissent.
I think the thing that India has not yet done that could still be on the table, and this is something you saw in 2019, which is that resort to the economic and financial punitive measures, which they can't just do on their own. They have to sort of leverage the international community. But in 2019, I think one of their successes was getting the international community to really punish Pakistan
economically. I think it took a while for them to negotiate the IMF deal. They got Pakistan put on the gray list for a financial action task force that essentially was a huge constraint. And I think it costs, I mean, there's estimates of what it costs Pakistan economy, but it just really limits because of sort of global money laundering rules. It really limits like the access to capital and the price of capital. So like raises your lending rates, lowers your rating
And so that was a real challenge for the Pakistani government. Now, they came off that gray list, I think, in 2022 or 2023. There's a case for India to be making right now if they sort of present the evidence that Pakistan should go back on that gray list. And that would hurt a whole lot more now when it doesn't have the backing of the United States like it did to some degree back in 2019, 2020. You could do that. India has been building relationships with a lot of Pakistan's key financial patrons with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. I mean, Prime
Prime Minister Modi was in Saudi Arabia at the time of this attack and had to sort of cut short the trip, which probably upset both him but also the Saudis who have a huge financial interest in India, whether it's sort of the India-Middle East corridor, whether it's investments in India. They see it as sort of a rising sort of economic opportunity.
opportunity. And so putting some pressure on them to constrain Pakistanis that I mean, that's like, they have assets in Pakistan, they have financial holdings within sort of banks, Pakistan to help them sort of maintain their payments, those could all be pressures applied, they could lean on the United States or sort of like, request the United States to pressure the IMF to withhold a
subsequent tranches of the IMF loans that are going to Pakistan, which they just got last fall. So there's a lot of financial hurt that they can impose on Pakistan that I think could be quite effective because I think that is Pakistan's Achilles heel at the end of the day. I
They can use the sort of the control of information in the country to limit the perceptions of, you know, either their own failures or sort of like the isolation in the world. But the financial markets in the economy, they can't control. They don't have the wherewithal to. And that might be where India might be able to punch the hardest. But that takes sort of, you know, months. It's not an immediate effect.
No, I think that's all well said. I mean, the problem with all of that stuff is that it's much harder to tell a compelling story to the Indian public about the extent of damage being inflicted. You still need the kinetic part. Absolutely. You're not going to get a great Bollywood movie out of IMF back channeling with the Americans. Well, they have called them financial surgical strikes, but I don't think that's as compelling a story. Exactly. Well, Samir, I want to thank you for going deep on this particular crisis. I mean...
I made that observation earlier that, you know, India and Pakistan kind of fall off the agenda a bit in Washington until we have these crises. There's a very small group of people in town who, you know, you are one of them that spend time thinking about the relations between these two nuclear-armed neighbors day in and day out. But I think this continues to be a reminder that South Asia is still very much relevant in this third nuclear age, that the dynamics between India and Pakistan, I think, have changed pretty dramatically in the last five to 10 years in particular. So I
Yeah, I think there's a pretty good chance that by the time listeners are listening to this, the Indians will have struck. So I guess we shall see how our predictions and assessments hold up. But I think it's pretty clear that we're not out of the woods yet on this crisis. But thanks a lot for taking the time to join me. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening to this free episode of Thinking the Unthinkable. If you'd like to listen to more episodes, check out warontherocks.com slash membership.
© BF-WATCH TV 2021