Steve Coll on Nuclear Stand off in South Asia in 2002

The New Yorker
Q & A: The Nuclear Edge
Issue of 2006-02-13

This week in the magazine, Steve Coll examines the moment, in 2002, when India and Pakistan almost went to war—with the potential for the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict since Nagasaki. Here, with Amy Davidson, he discusses the tensions on the subcontinent, the role of jihadis, and the nuclear black market.

AMY DAVIDSON: You call the stand-off between India and Pakistan in 2002 “the first nuclear crisis of the twenty-first century.” How close to war did they come?

STEVE COLL: They came very close to a conventional war, perhaps as close as they’ve been since 1971. The Indian leaders from that time told me that the decision was a very close thing. What they had in mind was an invasion of Pakistan. The danger was that, once the conventional war began, it would spin out of control. While the Indian leadership felt that the war wouldn’t go nuclear, the Americans watching the crisis thought there was a significant risk that it would.

Because the Pakistanis would push it in that direction?

Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine rests on the idea that they are a smaller state than India, with a smaller military, and that they need nuclear weapons to defend their national existence, their sovereignty. Their generals have said that if, during a conventional war, they feared that Pakistan might no longer be viable, or that its military might be destroyed by invading Indian forces, they would have no choice but to escalate to the nuclear level in order to preserve Pakistan’s national existence. The danger was that neither side understood where that line was, and that India, thinking it was fighting a limited war, might accidentally go so far as to convince Pakistan that it had to escalate to the nuclear level.

You talk about a nuclear war to preserve national existence. Traditionally, we’ve thought of nuclear war in terms of mutually assured destruction—something all-out. What would a nuclear war between the two countries have looked like? Is it possible to conceive of it as a limited exchange, or would it not stop until each side had destroyed the other’s cities?

It’s an interesting question, and one that the Indians and the Pakistanis debated during the crisis, as they considered their options. I think most people believe that any use of nuclear weapons in hostility would, first of all, invite an exchange, and that in the exchange the scale of death and devastation and environmental degradation and illness would be vast. In almost any scenario, the estimate of how many dead and how many affected by fallout run into the hundreds of millions. Still, there were scenarios seriously discussed by both sides—similar to scenarios discussed by American and Soviet generals back in the nineteen-fifties, before mutually assured destruction was established as the premise of deterrence—in which nuclear weapons would be a kind of battlefield weapon. In particular, there were scenarios in which people speculated that the Pakistanis might use one weapon on Indian troops in the field, almost as a demonstration, a warning, and that such a limited use on a battlefield might not create the political space for India to escalate. But most people believed that after the first weapon was used the war would escalate to a much more serious exchange.

You write that the crisis was characterized by a very modern problem: stateless religious networks with millenarian ideas. How did that fit in?

Well, this is where the crisis began. You have two young nuclear states that are trying to deter each other from war—from war of any kind. And after a long, rough history that has included three wars, they’ve only recently brought their nuclear arsenals out into the open and tried to establish a system of mutual deterrence. It’s worked for conventional armies, but then there are jihadi groups—operating mainly out of the disputed territory of Kashmir, some of them with support from the government of Pakistan—which have ambitions of their own. One of these groups came into the heart of the Indian capital and carried out a brazen attack—an assault on Parliament House, the seat of India’s legislature. That made war something that India’s democratically elected government had to consider, if it wanted to stay in office.

Is Kashmir a national question or a religious question?

It’s both. The rebellion against India’s government in the part of Kashmir that India controls began in the late eighties as a largely secular nationalist movement, but within the rebellion there was a religious element. Since then, the religious element has become stronger and stronger, to the point now where the original national secularist element has been essentially overrun. The dominant groups among the insurgents today are jihadi, with ambitions beyond Kashmir, and with ideologies that resemble in some ways that of Al Qaeda.

The crisis began, as you mentioned, with the attack on Parliament House, on December 13, 2001. What role did the United States play in defusing it?

At the time, the United States was deeply involved in the war in Afghanistan, and there were hundreds of American troops operating from Pakistan. A war between India and Pakistan would have directly involved the United States. So, for that reason, and as a result of its desire to prevent any use of nuclear weapons, the United States got heavily involved in the diplomacy. It worked almost continuously from the time of the Parliament House attack until it became clear, later in the summer of 2002, that the Indians had decided not to launch an invasion.

Was it just a matter of getting the two sides talking? You quote Richard Armitage, who was at that time the Deputy Secretary of State, as saying that he thought neither country really wanted a war, but they needed a third party to help them find a way not to do it.

The Indians and the Pakistanis have long experience with the West or with Russia coming into their disputes, and they’ve become quite sophisticated about how to manage this kind of intervention. They use it to achieve their goals. In this case, the Indians used American diplomacy to try to coerce Pakistan into reducing its support for jihadi groups. Equally, the Pakistanis used the Americans to put pressure on India to resolve the underlying problem of Kashmir, and also tried to make themselves indispensable to the Americans in Afghanistan. So there was a kind of a multiple-level chess game going on. And yet at the heart of it was a basic threat of war, which neither side ever relinquished; both India and Pakistan felt quite emotional about these issues even as they were manipulating the chessboard.

The Bush Administration has called Pakistan’s President, Pervez Musharraf, one of its top allies in the war on terror. But how good an ally has Pakistan been? You mentioned the support for jihadi groups; also, Osama bin Laden, by most accounts, is somewhere in Pakistani territory, a free man.

It’s a crucial and complicated question. The Pakistanis, under Musharraf, have clearly changed their policies on most jihadi groups since September 11th. They abandoned their support for the Taliban and they have put some pressure on domestic radical groups. However, Musharraf has not done everything possible to constrain the Kashmiri groups. He argues that he has done what he can, but most outside analysts believe that the Pakistani Army is quietly continuing to aid some of them. I think the generals see Kashmir as a case apart, as something different from the broader war on terrorism, or, at least, as a case that’s full of exceptions from their point of view, and the United States has not fully challenged that view to date.

Has the Administration had to make a trade-off between stopping nuclear proliferation and waging the war on terror?

The Bush Administration inherited the fact that both India and Pakistan had tested nuclear weapons, and decided not to resist it by arguing for a rollback. But there are tensions between the rise of open nuclear powers on the subcontinent and the war on terrorism. For instance, the jihadis have nuclear ambitions of their own, and there were concerns during this crisis—and after it—about how secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are. The question is whether some of those weapons or the technology that surrounds them might leak to jihadi groups or dissenting Islamist military officers.

The Bush Administration gave Musharraf a dossier showing that A. Q. Khan, formerly Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, had been involved in the nuclear black market. Musharraf claimed that his government was in the dark about those dealings. How credible is that? How much of a freelancer do you think Khan really was?

It remains a mystery in important respects, but the reporting that I did on this project took me a little bit of the way down the road, I think. I came to understand that there has been a specific mechanism within the Pakistani military to enable it to control its nuclear-weapons program, and that mechanism is an office that the Pakistanis call the Strategic Plans Division. It obtained control and authority over A. Q. Khan’s laboratory two years before Khan was stopped. It’s unclear how much the Pakistani Army knew about Khan’s activities, particularly in the later phase. But if they didn’t know anything, which is the claim that the Pakistani leadership has made, it suggests that their internal system of controls was very weak. And, if they did know, then it begs a whole different set of questions: what, if anything, the Pakistani Army thought it was accomplishing by permitting, for instance, the sale of nuclear-weapons technology to Libya.

How tight are the controls on the Pakistani arsenal now?

I interviewed a few generals who hadn’t talked to journalists before and who wanted to make the point that they have really stepped up their security regime, particularly since A. Q. Khan was exposed. They told me they have eight thousand people working in their security directorate, most of them soldiers and retired soldiers, all dedicated to guarding the fifty to a hundred weapons that Pakistan is thought to have manufactured. But I think if you step back and look at the Pakistani program you have to recognize or acknowledge that there have been very serious breakdowns in the past five years or so. A. Q. Khan is one case, but not the only one. It was discovered that two Pakistani nuclear scientists, of lesser experience than Khan but still significant, had become involved with a charity that had worked with the Taliban, and at least one of them had contact with Osama bin Laden. You had Pakistani nuclear scientists delivering lectures at universities in Islamabad, talking about international Islamist ideas and radical philosophies that most people in the West would find rather alarming. So there’s been both a physical breakdown in control, as evidenced in the A. Q. Khan case, and ideological breakdowns that, at least from the point of view of the potential targets of jihadis, are cause for concern.

A surprising quote in your piece comes from a senior Indian official who says that his country’s democracy makes it harder to avoid war. What do you make of that? The hypothetical threat we usually hear about is the mad dictator with a bomb. And, despite some of the recent election results in the Middle East, one would like to think that democracy makes the world safer.

What the Indian official was referring to is the effect that repeated terrorist strikes on Indian soil have on the rhythm and the decision-making room available in democratic Indian politics. In other words, such attacks—which are seen, on the Indian side, as being supported by Pakistan—have the potential to create a kind of national wave in favor of doing something about the Pakistani problem once and for all. And even if an Indian leader judges that war is too dangerous or too ineffective a tool to use against the problem of Pakistani-sponsored terrorism, an elected government in a noisy, competitive democracy like India’s may feel extraordinary pressure to act, or face the loss of office. It would be a particularly stalwart leader who would be willing to lose office because he was determined to resist this kind of popular war fever. We saw in the United States what happens to a culture when it comes under attack, particularly in an unexpected way and on a great scale.

So are democracies dangerous when there’s a nuclear weapon involved?

It’s not so much nuclear weapons as the problem of terrorism and how, as a national culture, you react to provocations, and what the mechanisms are for restraint within a democracy, as well as the mechanisms for action. I think that’s something that India, in recent years, and the United States, after September 11th, have in common.

Was the experience of coming so close to the edge in 2002 clarifying for India and Pakistan? Did they learn their lesson?

It depends on whom you talk to. Some people on both sides of the border felt that they had learned their lesson, that the experience of having come so close to war—considering all of its ramifications, all of its uncertainties, and the shadow of a potential nuclear exchange—had an effect similar to that of the Cuban missile crisis on the United States and the Soviet Union, and would lead to a new period of restraint and reflection and patience in the conflict between these two countries. At the same time, there’s evidence that some in the leadership on both sides learned the wrong lessons from this crisis. For instance, the Indian military, or sections of it, came away with the lesson that they need to be able to attack quickly after a terrorist event, so they don’t create the time for outside powers to intervene diplomatically. They have started to recommend a new military doctrine called “cold start,” which would allow them to attack across the Pakistan border within days.

What lesson does this teach other countries that might aspire to be nuclear powers, especially ones like Pakistan, with more powerful neighbors?

I think that, realistically, the Pakistani experience, both in this crisis and broadly, would encourage some national leaderships in the developing world who have such aspirations. The Pakistani military and leadership truly believe that nuclear weapons have made them safer in the face of India’s larger military and industrial potential. I’m not at all certain that’s right, but it’s a lesson that they have a great deal of conviction about. When you look at India’s decision not to launch an invasion in response to a terribly provocative terrorist attack, it’s possible to reach the conclusion that some Pakistani generals have, which was that, in this case, nuclear deterrence worked.

So, in terms of proliferation, it was a fairly dangerous lesson.

I think so, especially when you combine it with the broader erosion in the international nuclear-proliferation regime in the past three or four years. Iran, North Korea, and other cases have tested the norms that prevailed during the long and dangerous Cold War period—norms that were rooted in the belief, even in developing countries, that nuclear weapons actually didn’t make you safer, they made you more vulnerable, and that they just weren’t worth it. Just ten years ago, when South Africa gave up its nuclear program, when Brazil and Argentina renounced theirs, when Ukraine and Kazakhstan gave back the nuclear weapons they had inherited from the Soviet Union, there was a belief that this norm had prevailed, and that it was only a matter of time before even the great powers would give up their nuclear weapons—that within a generation or two there would be at least a de-facto abolition, with perhaps very small arsenals left among the bigger powers. Ten years later, it doesn’t look like that at all. It looks a lot more like the world that President John F. Kennedy feared in the nineteen-sixties—a world, a few decades from now, of twenty or twenty-five nuclear-weapons states, and multiple forms of very complicated and dangerous deterrence equations.