Who Controls Pakistan's Nuclear Assets?

Who Controls Pakistan’s Nuclear Assets?

Amongst the many ambiguities of this stretched out election season, it is undeniable that national security is the plank on which this general election rests. There are many other important issues, but perhaps none quite so emotive.

The Opposition is upset that the fates threw Pulwama, subsequently Balakot, and the naming of Masood Azhar as an international terrorist at long last into Narendra Modi’s lap.

But there are perhaps some deeper issues revealed in this ostensible game of the fates.

Why did Prime Minister Narendra Modi decide to jettison the decades long doctrine of “strategic restraint” and call Pakistan’s “nuclear bluff”? Is it because nuclear war is a zero sum game of mutual annihilation and is therefore unthinkable?  

There is another hypothesis that has long been lurking in the shadows. It suggests the gear-shift is calculated on very refined intelligence received from America and China and revealed to us for their own reasons. 

Intelligence, along the lines that the Pak nukes, paraphernalia and command and control structures are supervised by embedded CIA operatives, ever since 9/11. In the immediate aftermath of the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour, Pakistan was presented with no choice.

It is believed that the CIA, that trained the Pakistani ISI in the first place, has placed itself squarely within Pakistan’s elite Strategic Plans Division (SPD) that controls its nuclear weapons.

Today, it also has Chinese operatives in its fold, as Beijing is equally anxious to protect its considerable financial and strategic investments in Pakistan.

The Pakistan Army and ISI are not very comfortable with these arrangements, but are amenable to inducements.

And to provide covering fire, the political establishment in Pakistan is encouraged to do some nuclear sabre-rattling every now and then, so that the domestic audience, as well as most people across the border in India, are none the wiser.

And from the perspective of  Modi’s informers, better the Indians, who live next door, to tackle Pakistan, rather than the US, presently trying to pull out completely from Afghanistan.

Or the compromised Chinese, with their $60 billion China-Pakistan economic corridor (CPEC) investment, and their own restive Muslims in Xinkiang Province. Not to mention a large raft of other global ambitions.

But both countries, truth be told, do want the epicenter of global terrorism to be stopped in its tracks. It’s just that they don’t want to get their own hands dirty.

This, notwithstanding the Pakistan Army and ISI citing the old saw about India posing a perpetual “existential threat”.  

In fact, India is much more concerned with how to grow and prosper. It is the Pakistan Army and ISI that needs to keep the India bogey going. And there is an angle of widespread religious fanaticism injected by Saudi Wahabism.

But, as far as the US and China go, in 2019, they want no part of  it.Ironically,  the US wants to use India to contain China. And China wants to make common cause with India on a number of matters in order to push back.

Modi, probably made privy to this information by both China and the US, acted on it. He authorized an audacious US/Israeli style ground attack using Indian Special forces in 2016.  

India’s retaliatory “surgical strike”, went deep into PoK and left truckloads of Pakistani terrorists and Pak Army regulars dead over a considerable number of  “launch pads”. This was accompanied by a big push to eliminate as many terrorists in country as possible on an ongoing basis.

This kind of political risk, where failure of the mission would have gone badly for this government, had never been undertaken before. But, having said that, no other nuclear power had ever attacked another nuclear power either.

And then, the next day, the mission results were announced to the whole world in a move reminiscent of  the publicity given   to the elimination of Osama Bin Laden at Abbotabad.

In 2019, Modi authorised an airstrike involving as many as 12 upgraded Mirage fighter jets. These went deep into Pakistan undetected, armed with Spike missiles from Israel, and struck hard at Balakot - within 50 km of  the Pakistani capital at Islamabad.

The Balakot airstrike wiped out everyone at the JeM training centre for terrorists, numbering at least 250 people.  

Before giving the go-ahead to the Balakot airstrikes, reports say India informed the US, and obtained their concurrence on the preemptive action. China didn’t say much about it after.

It is clear from both these events that the strategic perception of the nuclear threat from Pakistan  has changed.  And this, despite the Pakistani announcement, as recently as in 2015, that they now had tactical mini-nukes to be used in the event of war with India   

 India held back from crossing the LoC or the international border after the attack on Parliament, the war at Kargil, and even the carnage of 26/11. But on the day after the Balakot strike it threatened to launch as many as a dozen missiles at Pakistan if its downed pilot was not returned forthwith. America reacted to this by insisting Pakistan comply.

The sub-continental nuclear story began in the hot summer month of May, over 18 years ago. India under the first BJP Prime Minister AB Vajpayee  conducted five underground nuclear explosions on the 11^th and 13^th of May 1998 without the American satellites getting wind of the tests.

And Pakistan, with Nawaz  Sharif as Prime Minister, carried out its own, one-up with six explosions in all, five on the 28^th and one more on the 30^th May 1998.

India and Pakistan both went overtly nuclear, without permission of the powers that be. And they in turn were left wondering how to control these two adversarial countries that had already had short conventional wars in 1965 and 1971, and even an armed disagreement over Kashmir in 1947-48.

And then there was the possibility of proliferation.  As feared, Pakistan’s bomb quickly began to be called the “Islamic Bomb”, acquiring massive prestige in the Arab world and other Muslim nations. Though, in fact, its nuclear programme was largely Chinese and North Korean aided.

India was content to keep a low profile. It stoically endured the Western sanctions imposed on it.  But its nuclear know-how was home grown, and its first nuclear mini-bomb was tested more that two decades before, in May 1974.

 The Pakistani programme, in both plutonium/ uranium enrichment, and missile building, led to a degree of proliferation - to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, before it was nipped in the bud.

India meanwhile has been given de facto Nuclear Suppliers Group(NSG) status for its impeccable record on non-proliferation by the George W Bush administration. This, even though formal induction is still blocked by China.

Over the last five years, India has also been invited into other exclusive  groupings that rule “dual-use technology”.

Pakistan  is going through an acute financial crisis that has practically bankrupted it. The future therefore indicates even less autonomy for it with regard to its sovereign decisions. It will have to give up on its ambitions to take on India over Kashmir and jettison its policy of a “thousand cuts”. This has hit an impasse because India has made clear it will cross the Rubicon and retaliate against all major terrorist attacks in future. It has also underlined that its “no first use” doctrine has lapsed via a few nuclear threats of its own.

Given the changed circumstances, it is possible that the troubled sub-continent is now headed towards an era of peace, if not cooperation.

 (1,249 words)

May 5, 2019

Gautam Mukherjee