Both of these projects are directed by the office of the prime minister. India's Atomic Energy Act and its Official Secrets Act have placed everything linked to the country's nuclear program under wraps. In the past, those who tried to find out more about these activities were bludgeoned into silence.
According to Gary Samore, an Obama-era White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, "India intends to build thermonuclear weapons as part of its strategic deterrent against China. It is unclear when India will realize this goal of a larger and more powerful arsenal, but they will." Once manufactured, however, nothing would block India from deploying them against Pakistan. "India is now developing very big bombs, hydrogen bombs that are city-busters," commented Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy. "It is not interested in [producing] nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield; it is developing nuclear weapons for eliminating population centers."
In other words, while India has long been in a nuclear arms race with Pakistan, it is no longer sticking to the same race course. In late March, Modi announced that India recently launched a rocket successfully shooting down one of its satellites. This creates the possibility that, in a future nuclear war with Pakistan, it could preemptively "blind" the Pakistanis by destroying their space-based communication and surveillance satellites. A race of another kind could be in the offing.
The central motive that drove Pakistan to develop its nuclear arsenal, however, remains unchanged. It was the only way Islamabad could deter New Delhi from defeating it in a war waged with conventional weapons. India's 2.14 million-strong military, equipped with 5,967 artillery pieces, 4,500 tanks, and 2,216 aircraft, is significantly larger and better armed than Pakistan's 1.55 million soldiers, 3,745 artillery, 2,700 tanks, and 1,143 aircraft. In addition, New Delhi's annual defense budget of $55.9 billion is more than five times Islamabad's $10.8 billion.
Little wonder that, in his February 28th televised address, while announcing the Indian pilot's release, Prime Minister Khan suggested that the two sides "should sit down and resolve our problems through dialogue." He claimed that his own political party, Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (the Pakistan Movement for Justice), and the country's powerful military were "all on one page" in wishing to mend fences with India.
Pakistan's Belated Suppression of Violent Jihadists
In late February, India handed over to Pakistan a dossier with information on Jaish-e Mohammad, its top leadership, and their involvement in several terror attacks. Islamabad initially said that the dossier was being "examined." However, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi added that his government could act against Masoud Azhar only if New Delhi provided "solid, inalienable evidence" strong enough to convince the country's judiciary.
And yet on March 8th, the Pakistani government acted, launching a crackdown on leading terrorist groups. Among other things, it outlawed the Jamaat-ud Dawa (Society of the Islamic Call), or JuD, a welfare organization that raised funds for Lashkar-e-Taiba. It sealed the banned organization's headquarters in Lahore as well as more than 200 schools, seminaries, and hospitals it ran. It also banned its chief, Hafiz Saeed, from leading Friday prayers on the sprawling JuD complex and kept him under surveillance.
One key factor that spurred such action was a warning the Pakistani government received on February 22nd from the Paris-based intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF). It threatened to add Pakistan to its blacklist of non-cooperating countries if, by May, it failed to take specific steps against the financing of terrorism. To be added to the FATF blacklist could mean being sanctioned by most Western nations, a development only likely to deepen Islamabad's current financial crisis. (Recently, it has had barely enough foreign reserves to pay for two months of imports or service a huge loan it secured from the International Monetary Fund in 2013.)
In January 2018, President Donald Trump had already cancelled plans for Washington to give Pakistan $1.3 billion in military aid and had imposed sanctions on the country for its support of terrorist groups, including the Afghan Taliban. On Twitter, he accused Pakistan of "providing nothing but lies and deceit." Soon after, the FATF placed Pakistan on its "gray list."
Still, none of that proved sufficient to compel Pakistan's powerful military high command to cede its traditional monopoly on national security and foreign policy decision-making, including its covert backing of anti-Indian extremist groups through the ISI. Only when pressure continued to build, bolstered by fresh urging from Washington, London, and Paris, was a critical mass reached that made those generals finally fall in line with recently elected Prime Minister Khan's more conciliatory stance toward India.
Now, the international community can only hope that the carnage and chaos of February was the last in a tragic series of encounters between nuclear neighbors that could otherwise lead South Asia to devastation and the world to nuclear winter.
Dilip Hiro is a TomDispatch regular and the author of 37 books, including The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry between India and Pakistan . His newest book, Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Struggle for Supremacy, has just been published.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 Dilip Hiro
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