araz
PDF THINK TANK: CONSULTANT
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- Jun 14, 2006
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Interesting line of thought. My own(and it remains my own!)line of thinking is the Pakistani establishment brought out the Nukes right from the word go. IAF had lost all steam for another tet a tet after the mauling they got through their own stupidity and over confidence. Now the army does not want to venture in as the AF is on the back foot so attacking without top cover would be stupid.Back in 1965, after 17 days of war, we lacked the knock-out punch. We lacked the resources to continue fighting for very long. India had suffered a lot more losses in man and material but they had a lot more left to spare, both in terms of munitions, spares and fuel. Ours were dwindling fast.
The embargo imposed by the US and the French had also hurt us big time back then.
Same would have been the case now (might be even worse) as our economy is in a much worse shape than it was back then.
If we had done more damage to them than what we already had, then India could not have lied about it and would have been forced to escalate the encounter to a longer duration and broader scoped and extended conventional conflict.
Such a conflict will always suit India, which has a lot more man power, equipment, munition, fuel and money to engage in a long drawn conflict.
So we had two choices ...
Or
- Either continue and then later be forced to resort to nukes (due to dwindling stockpile of fuel, spares and conventional munitions) and ensure mutually assured destruction
We chose the latter, quite wisely.
- Create a favorable situation where the deescalation with the upper hand would provide a strategic timeout to restructure/rejuvenate the economy and prepare for an eventually imminent war in the future.
The only option left open to Indian polity/forces was missile attacks. As I have said many a times before no side is going to wait to find out if the missile approaching from the adversary is Nuke tipped or not. The message Pak side conveyed to the Indian side was if you start going down this route we will finish this fight once and for all. The other problem in this narrative would have been that the Indians would have been the aggressors so internationally they would also have lost out on the narrative front.
The critical assessment in all of this is who stands to loose more and the answer is always going to be our larger neighbour as they are more affluent, have more money invested in their infrastructure. Truely speaking Pakistan has got nothing much left to lose.
If you think about it objectively this is why we have peace overtures from the other side. I think now is the time to forcefully convey our wish for Kashmir settlement and from a diplomatic front not allow India to escape the responsibility of tackling this burning land. How this shapes up is to be seen and if we manage to execute this coup de grace we would have insured Pakistan's prosperityand peacefulness for the next 10 years. I cannot predict what is going to happen beyond that.
This is totally my analysis so feel free to disagree/dissect it apart.
A