Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 35

Indian Politics & Policy
mained hard to assess, underestimating
them was a luxury that senior US policy
makers could not afford.” 213
One analysis completely discounts
the role of nuclear weapons and
deterrence in arguing that U.S. conflict
management was the cause of Indian
restraint during Kargil and Twin Peaks.
Mistry maintains that these “crises ended
because of non-nuclear factors rather
than because of nuclear deterrence. A
larger war was averted not because—as
supporters of nuclear deterrence theory
would suggest—the threat of Pakistani
nuclear retaliation deterred Indian military
action against Pakistan. Instead,
war was averted because of U.S. diplomatic
efforts that restrained the parties
from military escalation.” 214 It is difficult
to accept the idea that, in two major crises
within four years of India and Pakistan
conclusively demonstrating their
long extant nuclear prowess, nuclear
weapons would have had no discernible
effect at all on the perceptions and
strategic calculations of Indian decision
makers. Part of the problem with Mistry’s
analysis is that he repeatedly conflates
Indian planning that was not deterred
and escalatory possibilities with
actual military operations. His article is
littered with Indian military actions that
“could have” happened, “would have”
happened, were “likely to have” happened,
“came close” to happening, and
other similar formulations. 215 At one
point, he writes about the Twin Peaks
crisis: “Neither was India’s military deterred
from an attack against Pakistan.
India’s military came close to attacking
Pakistan on two occasions.” 216 (Emphasis
added.) Surely attacks either happen
or they do not, and nuclear deterrence
is about deterring action rather than
planning. In any event, Mistry contradicts
himself by offering a more tenable
posture in another 2009 writing: “The
[Kargil and Twin Peaks] crises did not
escalate to a major war. Nuclear deterrence
induced caution among security
planners on both sides and was one
factor that checked them from quickly
escalating to large-scale military operations,
although conventional deterrence
and international diplomacy also
contributed to this military restraint.” 217
The threat of escalation to the nuclear
level provided both the best reason for
Washington’s crisis management efforts
and the most compelling argument U.S.
interlocutors could use to ease the two
sides away from war.
A third causal factor in the pattern
of Indian moderation has been
New Delhi’s lack of favorable conventional
military options at key moments.
This might be framed as conventional
deterrence, but—here again—it is analytically
difficult to disentangle conventional
from nuclear inhibitions against
the Indian use of large-scale force. As
noted previously, Pakistan’s nuclear
weapons have taken away the option
that in South Asia’s pre-nuclear era was
India’s ace in the hole: a major conventional
assault across the India–Pakistan
frontier that would take advantage of
India’s superiority in armored strike
forces, attack aircraft, and overall material
resources to overwhelm Pakistan’s
armed forces. 218 For the last two
decades, India’s conventional military
advantage has rested not on glaring net
asymmetries between Indian and Paki-
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