Indian Politics & Policy Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 2018 | Page 43

Indian Politics & Policy
Stephen P. Cohen, “Is India Ending Its Strategic Restraint Doctrine?” Washington Quarterly
34, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 163-77; and Sarang Shidore, “India’s Strategic Culture and Deterrence
Stability on the Subcontinent,” in Deterrence Instability and Nuclear Weapons in South Asia, ed.
Michael Krepon et al. (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2015), 119-47.
12 For works focused on the India–Pakistan conventional military balance, see: Christopher Clary,
“Deterrence Stability and the Conventional Balance of Forces in South Asia,” in Deterrence
Stability and Escalation Control in South Asia, ed. Michael Krepon and Julia Thompson
(Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2012), 135-60, and Walter Ladwig, III, “Indian Military
Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38,
no. 5 (May 2015): 729-72.
13 Pakistan’s motives for launching the Kargil initiative are discussed in Feroz Hassan Khan,
Peter R. Lavoy, and Christopher Clary, “Pakistan’s Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil
Conflict,” in Asymmetric Warfare, ed. Lavoy, 64-91. Prior to the publication of Lavoy’s book,
many analysts argued that Pakistan’s aggression was emboldened by its newly overt nuclear
weapons capabilities, demonstrated in its May 1998 explosive tests. See, for example, Tellis,
Fair, and Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella, 48, 49 and Kapur, Dangerous
Deterrent, 115-31. Khan, Lavoy, and Clary rebut this argument, writing that the Kargil
planners “were not directly emboldened to undertake this operation because Pakistan’s nuclear
weapons capability was demonstrated in the previous summer. Nuclear deterrence was at best
a vague notion at this point in time” (90). Also see Lavoy’s “Introduction: The Importance of
the Kargil Conflict,” where he says, “Pakistani planners were not motivated by a calculation
that the risk of nuclear escalation would deter India from counterattacking” (11). However, in
a more recent analysis, Michael Cohen writes: “Much evidence suggests that Pakistani nuclear
weapons were central to the Kargil plans and that the intrusion was part of a nuclear weaponsemboldened
assertive foreign policy.” See his When Proliferation Causes Peace: The Psychology
of Nuclear Crises (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 133. This question
remains unresolved.
14 Lavoy, “Introduction,” 19. John H. Gill puts the “total number of intruders,” including escorts,
porters, and other support personnel, at “at least 1,500–2,000.” “Military Operations in the
Kargil Conflict,” in Asymmetric Warfare, ed. Lavoy, 96.
15 Gill, “Military Operations,” 99.
16 In April 1984, Indian military forces occupied the Siachen Glacier in far northern Kashmir,
just south of China’s Xinjiang province. Pakistani forces soon followed suit, and sporadic
battles have been fought between the two sides since June 1984. The glacier occupies some
1,000 square miles of territory in the Karakoram Mountains, much of which lies at elevations
above 17,000 feet. The question of which country is sovereign over the Siachen Glacier is
a dispute within a dispute; because both India and Pakistan claim all of Kashmir, each
country also claims complete control over the glacier. The Siachen conflict has its roots in the
vagueness of the 1949 Karachi Agreement, which demarcated the Cease-Fire Line between
India and Pakistan after the first Kashmir war. That pact delineated the ostensibly “temporary”
boundary between the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and Azad (“Free”) Kashmir and
the Northern Areas, both held by Pakistan. When the Cease-Fire Line was drawn, roughly 40
miles of the boundary leading up to the Chinese border was left undelineated, because the area
“was considered an inaccessible no-man’s land.” The issue remained unresolved by the Simla
Agreement of 1972, which replaced the Cease-Fire Line with the new LOC without addressing
the matter of the undrawn boundary. See Robert G. Wirsing, Pakistan’s Security under Zia: The
Policy Imperatives of a Peripheral Asian State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 143–94.
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