February 2025 marked six years since the Pulwama-Balakot crisis between India and Pakistan, which was arguably the most perilous nuclear crisis since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Never before had two nuclear-armed states engaged in tit-for-tat air strikes, and in the South Asian context, it was for the first time since 1971 that India and Pakistan used air power against each other.
While a thin margin averted South Asia’s gallop towards what could have been an apocalyptic conflagration, the Indian leadership gathered two significant takeaways from the crisis: 1) India has called out Pakistan’s nuclear bluff; 2) limited military force can be used against Pakistan under nuclear overhang without escalation to the nuclear level. Consequential as they are, the two takeaways would likely shape the dynamics of any future crisis between India and Pakistan and thus merit phlegmatic scrutiny.
To assess Indian leadership’s claims to have called out Pakistan’s nuclear bluff, it is logical to evoke the objectives that Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence is purposed to achieve. Pakistan has maintained from the very onset that its nuclear program is aimed at deterring both nuclear and conventional threats – the latter include full-scale wars as well as limited ones.
From a military standpoint, India’s dropping of ordinance in Balakot can, at most, be categorized as a limited hit-and-run attack. India ostensibly customized the hit-and-run tactics commonplace around LoC using airpower to target mainland Pakistan. While the air power entails high escalatory risks and the Balakot attack constituted a grave breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty, stretching the scope of its nuclear deterrence to encompass such limited attacks would be an abysmal lowering of the country’s nuclear threshold – tantamount to pulling out a machine gun to shoot a mosquito. Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence was never purposed for and is not purposed for deterring such limited attacks.
According to Naeem Salik, the minimum threshold for Pakistan to accord “serious consideration” to the possible employment of Nasr is multiple “Cold Start type” incursions. This explains why Pakistan’s strategic messaging during the Pulwama crisis did not feature any noteworthy nuclear signaling, except for the military spokesperson’s two-line mention of convening the National Command Authority (NCA) meeting and what it entails. Interestingly, the NCA meeting did not follow the customary press release; Pakistan either wanted to maintain the trademark ambiguity or did not want to underscore the nuclear dimension of the crisis.
The efficacy of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence can further be evaluated by reflecting on the radical transformation it has induced in the India-Pakistan strategic equation. Besides countervailing India’s nuclear weapons, Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence caused the incremental foreclosing of India’s options to leverage its conventional superiority. From the ambitious goal of slashing Pakistan into two halves under the Sundarji doctrine to waging a limited war under Cold Start to finally undertaking a limited hit-and-run attack at Balakot, the graduated narrowing down of India’s conventional options is the desired achievement of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence, not failure and hence, couldn’t be regarded as calling out of the nuclear bluff.
In South Asia’s transformed strategic reality, India finds itself in a strategic gridlock vis-à-vis Pakistan. The hit-and-run attack at Balakot appeared to be an attempt to break free from the strategic gridlock, but by implication, it equaled an acknowledgement by India that full-scale or limited war option against Pakistan has become redundant — credited exclusively to Islamabad’s nuclear deterrence.
It is worth underscoring that in limited encounters, it is the quality of weaponry, not quantity, which enables attaining an upper hand, as proved during the 27 February 2019 Beyond-Visual-Range (BVR) combat. Responding to the previous day’s attack, Pakistan — under its “Quid-Pro-Quo Plus” policy — returned India the favor plus a bit. Pakistan’s prompt and rather intrepid riposte reflected confidence in its conventional capability, thus restoring the credibility of its conventional deterrence. Pakistan demonstrated that if Indian leadership deduces that a new norm has been established to use limited force under the nuclear overhang, Pakistan has introduced into the equation its own new normal: any limited Indian attack would be promptly retaliated, plus an extra bit.
On the face of it, the evolved situation suits both countries: India launches a limited hit-and-run attack against Pakistan, which responds in kind, plus an extra bit, and both sides find off-ramps to de-escalate. Particularly, the Indian side — driven by the misplaced confidence of achieving escalation dominance vis-à-vis Pakistan — has been peddling the idea of controlled escalation to normalize limited attacks. However, given the qualitative military equation between India and Pakistan, wherein Pakistan maintains “almost parity” and, in some domains, might have the upper hand, India achieving escalation dominance or escalation control remains impracticable.
As Lt. Gen. (R) Khalid Kidwai underscored, Indian leadership must appreciate that if they climb the first rung of the escalation ladder, the second rung will always belong to Pakistan, and if India decides to escalate to the third rung, Pakistan will inevitably escalate to the fourth rung. This could unleash an unintended and undesirable swift slide towards a wider conflagration, potentially escalating to the nuclear level.
During the Pulwama crisis, India and Pakistan were fortunate to have found off-ramps on critical occasions. However, as Naeem Salik argues, one odd incident during the fog and friction of events could have led to unintended escalation. In particular, the Indian plan of firing missiles at Pakistan had intrinsic and inevitable risks of dramatic escalation. Pakistan could not have held back in the face of the missiles’ barrage, and given the towering escalatory risks associated with a missile exchange between two nuclear-armed states, the lightning-fast gallop up the escalation ladder could have started with minimum chances to find off-ramps, potentially bringing nuclear weapons into play sooner rather than later.
The return from the brink during the Pulwama crisis drives home the point that the Indian leadership’s takeaway of having found space for limited operations under nuclear overhang remains fraught with intrinsic and inevitable risks of nuclear escalation.
In a future crisis, policymakers in New Delhi should consider how far they want to drift while flirting with the risk of nuclear escalation. The erroneous sense of complacency to have called out Pakistan’s nuclear bluff and the misplaced belief to be able to exercise escalation control supplemented by the domestic stimuli to climb one rung up compared to Balakot could incentivize the Indian leadership to act more risk-prone and thus trigger an even bigger conflagration. To add is the rapid induction by both India and Pakistan of new technologies and weapon systems, particularly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Conceptually, UAVs entail fewer escalatory risks than manned aircraft or missiles and thus might be an attractive option for offensive operations in the next crisis. Nevertheless, how the new weapon systems might shape the qualitative military equation between India and Pakistan, and thus the contours of the next crisis and escalation dynamics, poses a conundrum – an aspect that policymakers on both sides must accord serious consideration.
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