By BRUCE RIEDEL
After a hiatus of two years, the resumption of talks between Pakistan and India announced in February is good news. This was capped by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s brilliant move to invite his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani to attend the India-Pakistan cricket world cup semifinal last week.
Despite these diplomatic efforts, however, a huge challenge to peace is brewing: a nuclear arms race in South Asia. Pakistan’s arsenal of warheads, currently close to overtaking the fifth largest (the United Kingdom) in the world, is growing faster than any other. It’s on track to become the fourth largest in the world by the end of the decade, overtaking France and behind only the United States, Russia and China. So far India has held back but that restraint will become harder to maintain as Pakistan forges ahead.
An understanding of what Pakistan’s arsenal means for the subcontinent’s nuclear future begins with recognizing who manages that arsenal and to what ends. The army controls all aspects of the nuclear program, while the civilian administration exercises only nominal supervision. Having lost four wars to India since 1947, the Pakistani military sees the bomb as an equalizer and deterrent against its bigger neighbor—the primary reason it has spent scarce resources on this capability.
Pakistan’s arsenal also is managed in a different way than is common in Western nuclear states. While relative transparency and geographical concentration are the norm in places like the U.S.—Washington is fairly open about how many warheads it maintains and where it houses them—Pakistan’s program is marked by secrecy and dispersion. The Pakistani army makes every effort to prevent information about the locations of its weapons from falling into its enemy’s hands, and especially American hands.
Islamabad also has a somewhat different view of how to leverage its nuclear program than is found in more traditional nuclear states. Pakistan has used its nuclear program to deepen relations of a sort with various regimes. The country has both been the recipient of nuclear proliferation (from China) and a supplier of technology (to North Korea, Iran, Libya and possibly Saudi Arabia). A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s bomb, is thought to have been at the center of most proliferation activities.
The arsenal has also been useful in emboldening Pakistan to engage in provocative non-nuclear behavior against India. A year after publicly declaring and testing its nuclear program, Pakistan launched a limited war against India in Kashmir in 1999. Its intelligence service has sponsored terrorist groups that have attacked India’s cities, most famously Mumbai in November 2008. The FBI’s interrogation of the Pakistani-American David Headley, who masterminded the attack, established this connection, as has India’s own investigation.
While India is the main enemy that has driven Pakistan’s nuclear build-up, the army now also sees the bomb as a useful deterrent against Washington. Pakistani-American relations have become deeply troubled in the past few years, with both sides having little confidence in the other. Last fall, President Obama warned Islamabad, including its army chief Ashfaq Kayani, that another terror attack on the U.S. postmarked from Pakistan could lead to a profound crisis between the two countries. But Mr. Kayani understands that as long as Pakistan has a nuclear weapon, Washington will have to hesitate before using force.
Recent events in the Middle East have likely only heightened Islamabad’s view of this deterrent. With the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya last month, Pakistan now has watched America take military action against three Muslim countries in the past decade. Mr. Kayani will doubtless conclude that if Libya had maintained the nuclear program that A.Q. Khan had sold it—rather than scrapping that program after the 2003 invasion of Iraq—the U.S. would have been more reluctant to start air strikes. His army will be more determined to build up the arsenal.
If that build-up proceeds apace, New Delhi isn’t going to sit back. Mr. Singh has shown remarkable restraint in recent years: He tried hard to strike a deal with former Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf in 2006, resisted calls for military counterstrikes after the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and is now facilitating rapprochement. India’s nuclear arsenal has grown at a more relaxed pace since it conducted tests in 1998.
But India knows it can’t be left behind, not least because it must take into consideration the nuclear program of a larger and potentially more menacing neighbor, China. Relations between the two emerging giants have been rocky the past few years, thanks mainly to border disputes.
More importantly, it is unrealistic to expect New Delhi to trust Islamabad after four wars and terror attacks. It now knows that its smaller neighbor holding a bigger nuclear hand spells trouble. Pakistan has suggested earlier that it needs the bomb to deter the armored columns India can mobilize, but India is unlikely to reduce its conventional forces, just to help its neighbor wean itself off nukes. Rather, Indian economic growth will enhance its military superiority over Pakistan in the years ahead and feed into the latter’s paranoia.
Absent a diplomatic breakthrough, sooner or later India will have to ratchet up its weapons program. This will have implications for military planners in the region, including in Iran and China, and fallout for countries farther afield like Israel.
The renewed bilateral diplomacy seen this year is not likely to succeed in the face of years of hostility and mistrust. That makes it urgent for the world community, especially the U.S., to address the budding arms race. U.S. policy toward Pakistan in general and the Pakistani bomb in particular has oscillated wildly over the last 30 years between blind enchantment and unsuccessful sanctions. George Bush lifted sanctions after 9/11 and poured billions into the Pakistani army, much of it unaccounted for. But Mr. Bush’s civilian nuclear deal with India in 2005 left many Pakistanis angry at what they see as a double standard that gives India access to technology denied to them.
Washington now needs a policy toward Islamabad and its bomb which emphasizes constancy and consistency. It also needs to help Mr. Singh and Mr. Gilani address the root issues dividing the two nations. President Obama should encourage small steps at first like increased trade and communications, but press quietly behind the scenes to address Kashmir and other tough problems. The alternative, a full-blown South Asian arms race, will seriously threaten global security.
Mr. Riedel is a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. A former CIA officer, he chaired President Obama’s strategic review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009 and is author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad” (2011). -THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
