Pakistan’s strategic threats and responses

Thursday morning at the Carnegie Center, two scholars discussed Pakistan’s security and nuclear weapons development. Mansoor Ahmed is a lecturer and Muhammad Tehsin is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. Toby Dalton, deputy director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, moderated.

Muhammad Tehsin: Pakistan has an internal security problem. At the same time, the government is in a grip of confusion and demonstrating a lack of resolve.  Pakistan is becoming a weak state. Government response has been ritualistic, rhetorical, and conventional. In this situation we are compelled to turn our attention to Pakistani strategic culture. Can it remain oblivious to the grave internal security problem?

Strategic culture has two main purposes: to identify a threat and to figure out what to do about it. It also has two sources: political culture and the strategic environment. The political culture includes the ideas, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors of the political elite. The strategic environment is the regional strategic threat perception evaluated within a regional cost benefit analysis. In the case of Pakistan, the political culture includes the Islamic outlook on political leadership and the role of the military in political decision-making. Pakistan’s strategic environment is focused on the regional security complex. The primary concerns are India and Afghanistan.  To mitigate them, the main elements of strategic culture are nuclear deterrence and sub-conventional warfare, respectively. Pakistan’s strategic culture should adapt to the new strategic environment by launching a counter-narrative to Islamism and should adopt a concrete counterterrorism policy.

Since the internal security problem of Pakistan constitutes a strategic threat, it should elicit a strategic response. This strategic response would have operational application for counterterrorism policy and a larger thematic prescription for strategic culture. The first response of counterterrorism should be reconstruction and development with any military responses leaving a light footprint. The focus should be internal security measures to prevent sectarianism. For example, sectarian polarization should not be allowed to permeate law enforcement agencies.

Finally, a word of advice on US-Pakistani relations. US military support should be focused on counterterrorism, while US civil support should be on education, science, innovation, and inculcation of good governance.

Mansoor Ahmed: Pakistan’s nuclear program is a story of technological determinism, defying sanctions, bureaucratic politics within the nuclear establishment, and of indigenously building a basic level of nuclear capability. It is also about individuals in important positions generating myths, which led to certain decisions being made. Ultimately, this put Pakistan on the path to a nuclear capability.

We can draw lessons from looking at the history of Pakistan’s nuclear program, such as when Pakistan was sanctioned after India’s nuclear test in 1974. One of the lessons is that sanctions are ineffective in preventing a country from acquiring a basic nuclear capability. This is particularly the case if the country has a strong political motivation, a critical mass of paid manpower, and if it turns to indigenization instead of procurement. That is what we see in Iran. Similarly, Pakistan turned to innovative improvisation.

Pakistan has very little parallel to any other country in the world with its unique story of nuclear success in the face of adversity and domestic rivalries. Its nuclear weapons development is primarily a security-driven program with prestige as one of the aspects. However, security remains a paramount driver for continuing the program. To some, security concerns still exist and to some they don’t. Nevertheless, nuclear capability has helped maintain peace in South Asia, as was witnessed in the 2002 and 2008 India-Pakistan standoffs.