INDIA AND PAKISTAN: THE POLITICS OF BRINKMANSHIP
According to a report by Dawn… “I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself… is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief… people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It is absolute. Therefore, I am deadly.” — The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
PRELUDE
The four-day “non-contact” war between India and Pakistan — May 7-10 — has already produced sizeable literature within and outside the region. Predictably, writings in India and Pakistan have sought to select their own facts to suit the notion of victory, while extra-regional commentary has oscillated between initial scepticism about Pakistan’s performance and begrudging acceptance of it after facts could no longer be ignored. That said, the Indians think that India won the war, while Pakistanis think they did.
How can two sides win a war?
Simple: when (a) they walk away from a conflict drawing different lessons; (b) neither can deliver a knockout punch; (c) when messaging to domestic constituencies is important; and (d) when you ignore the larger canvas and focus on bean-counting for reasons a, b and c.
While the tactical is important because that’s where the actual fighting takes place, the operational (the middle tier) and the politico-strategic (the top tier) are the levels where victory or defeat normally resides, because these two levels define the Zweck [the political objective] for which a war is fought.
If it’s not obvious, let me clarify. The factors listed above complicate notions of victory and defeat. If State X after aggressing against State Y returns from the conflict (war) without achieving its political objective, has it achieved victory? Logic 101 would dictate that it hasn’t, especially if the objective was/is to coerce State Y into accepting State X’s Zweck. This, as should be clear, is independent of any attenuation at the tactical level during the course of the fighting. And this is as true of short, sharp wars as it is of protracted, attritional ones.
It is also important to appreciate that any conflict (or war) between Pakistan and India takes place and will take place under the overhang of nuclear weapons. By the essence of the theory of deterrence, therefore, war should either not happen between this nuclear dyad or, if hostilities do break out, they must remain confined. This is one of the central themes I want to address later in this article. For now, I will just flag the point with a simple observation: if the essence of deterrence theory is correct, then a number of assumptions on which India’s current Zweck is perched can be challenged.
The purpose here is to move away from the piecemeal treatment of facts at the tactical level and the politics of spectacle and, instead, unpack India’s assumptions that guide its policy decision to undertake kinetic actions against Pakistan.
MAPPING THE TERRAIN
To this end it’s important to map out India’s policy. What drives India’s policy? Does it want to establish hegemony in the region by unsettling the balance of power between Pakistan and itself? Does it want to deter or, as some Indian analysts suggest, compel Pakistan? Does it have the capabilities necessary to achieve this politico-strategic objective, tactical gains or losses notwithstanding? Is this policy independent of India’s domestic politics or is it entrapped in the anti-Pakistan rhetoric that has become the political staple of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi, helping him to win elections?
These questions are vital because answers to them would determine whether this region is poised for more instability or, by some miracle, can change course and get out of the ‘Thucydides Trap.’
INDIA’S ZWECK, OR IS IT?
The central tenet of India’s policy since 2016 is clear: it will hurt Pakistan in every way. The details are known so I won’t list them. Inflicting pain will involve kinetic and non-kinetic options: diplomatic, covert (sub-conventional) and overt (conventional hostilities).
Clear also from Mr Modi’s speech to the Indian people in the aftermath of the war is the fact that India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’ hasn’t ended — it has been paused. In other words, India is in a state of suspended war with Pakistan. Two, India will consider an attack in Occupied Kashmir as sponsored by Pakistan and does not need to prove it through any evidence. This entails automaticity. Three, India will not differentiate between the so-called “terrorists” and their “sponsors”. Essentially, that Pakistan is the sponsor regardless of any evidence. Finally, that any attack will be an act of war, to which India will respond by attacking Pakistan.
These four points are instructive in that India is (a) trying to create space for kinetic actions in the future and (b) shaping the narrative to couch its aggression in the language of self-defence — an attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK) will be an act of aggression, to which India will respond. This is straight out of the Zionist entity’s playbook.
The question, however, is: can India work this policy of coercion?
From India’s perspective, its strategy is not about disproving nuclear deterrence between India and Pakistan. The presence of nuclear weapons is a fact. Instead, the strategy aims at exploiting any gaps and testing Pakistan’s thresholds. In other words, nuclear parity at the strategic level creates a perverse stability that allows for more instability at the lower, sub-conventional level (eg sub-conventional subversion, border skirmishes and limited conventional strikes).
DOES COERCION WORK?
Coercion can come in two forms: deterrence (through denial or punishment) and compellence. Deterrence says to the adversary, don’t change your behaviour, stay in your lane or my retaliation will inflict unacceptable pain. The adversary nods and stays in its lane. Deterrence is established by coercing the adversary into not changing his behaviour. As American political theorist Thomas Schelling put it, “the deterrent threat only changes the consequence if the act in question — the one to be deterred — is then taken [by the adversary].”
In the case of compellence, a state says to the adversary, listen, I am sick of what you do, so you change your present behaviour or I will extract a cost you won’t be able to pay. The adversary determines that the threat is credible and changes its behaviour. Compellence has worked. In other words, it is definite and time bound. Unlike deterrence, it can’t wait. To quote Schelling again, “We move, and you get out of the way. By when? There has to be a deadline, otherwise tomorrow never comes. And the action… must be brought to successful closure. The payoff comes at the end, as does the disaster if the project fails.”
Easy-peasy? Au contraire. Literature shows that coercion often doesn’t work, even in asymmetric power relationships. In the case of India and Pakistan, both are not only nuclear-armed, with near-symmetrical nuclear forces, but also matched conventionally. So how would coercion work?
The simple answer is, it won’t and it hasn’t. Robert J. Art and Kelly Greenhill’s 2018 paper for Political Science Quarterly, ‘The Power and Limits of Compellence: A Research Note’, and Abby Fanlo and Lauren Sukin’s 2023 paper for Security Studies, ‘The Disadvantage of Nuclear Superiority’, are two outstanding examples of how and why coercion is so difficult to achieve and how even weaker (inferior nuclear) states can show greater resolve.
As Fanlo and Sukin argue, “Our theory suggests neither state (in the case of nuclear weapons states) should be able to very credibly threaten nuclear escalation. As a result, nuclear superiority should largely be irrelevant.” Art and Greenhill imply that Thucydides’ ‘Melian Dialogue’ is often misunderstood. “Thucydides recognised not only the limits of compellent power alone to dictate outcomes but also the dangerous tendency of the powerful to fall victim to an exaggerated faith in, and over-reliance on, the ‘power of power’ to bend others to one’s will.”
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi pictured during a visit to Adampur Air Base in Jalandhar on May 13, 2025: it was clear from Modi’s speech to the Indian people in the aftermath of the war that India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’ hasn’t ended — it has been paused | Indian Prime Minister’s Office
This being what it is, what in Darwin’s name is India’s play?
WE KNOW THERE ARE NUCLEAR WEAPONS BUT WE ARE RISK-PRONE
From India’s perspective, its strategy is not about disproving nuclear deterrence between India and Pakistan. The presence of nuclear weapons is a fact. Instead, the strategy aims at exploiting any gaps and testing Pakistan’s thresholds.
In other words, nuclear parity at the strategic level creates a perverse stability that allows for more instability at the lower, sub-conventional level (eg sub-conventional subversion, border skirmishes and limited conventional strikes).
As I have mentioned in a previous assessment in these pages, the ‘instability-stability paradox’ is highly destabilising in the Subcontinent’s context because, unlike the Cold War contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, there’s no periphery in geographic contiguity — unless covert actions at the sub-conventional level can become a metaphoric periphery. India is involved in that activity but it also wants overt action to establish its status externally and, more importantly, for the BJP’s domestic constituencies.
To that end it argues that it can exploit the space below the strategic level. The calculus or the argument, if you will, is that, while Pakistan’s nuclear weapons deter an all-out conventional war that could potentially threaten Pakistan’s existence, they do not necessarily deter limited, punitive conventional strikes aimed at specific “terrorist” targets, especially if such strikes are non-contact and the target set(s) do not involve degrading Pakistan’s military capabilities.
The May war has changed some of these assumptions. India is moving from working within a band to widening the band. Second, Pakistan’s successful counter-air operation forced India to change its strategy: the target sets changed and India engaged Pakistan’s ground air defence systems and also targeted Pakistan Air Force (PAF) bases.
This is what the literature describes as the danger of firebreaks. Escalation begins to happen in steps, with firebreaks between them (eg from signalling of intent to diplomatic moves, to threats to sub-conventional actions to limited conventional war to widening of the conflict at the conventional level, to all the way up the ladder to nuclear exchange. The brinkmanship by India, which is expressed through normalisation of conventional strikes and widening the band for them shows that (a) it is constantly probing and pushing against these firebreaks and (b) the process runs the risk of making them weaker and more diffuse.
The danger is that, in reality, escalation is not a linear process — ie adversaries may not go up rung by rung. They could skip two or three rungs and decide to operate at a much higher rung. In fact, this is one of the critiques of military theorist Herman Kahn’s ‘escalation ladder’ metaphor.
This has consequences for deterrence. But what is deterrence? Is it a scientific concept or is it dynamic and psycho-perceptual?
DETERRENCE: SCIENTIFIC OR PSYCHO-PERCEPTUAL?
Going by Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘Falsifiable Principle’ — that for a theory to be scientific it must be possible to conceive of an observation or experiment that could prove it false — deterrence is not a scientific theory.
The core claim of deterrence is that the possession of nuclear weapons by State A prevents State B from taking a hostile action. Put another way, deterrence is not supposed to fail or, as political scientists Reid Pauly and Rose McDermott argue in ‘The Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship’ in International Security, “When two sides engage in rational decision-making, the chance of strategic nuclear exchange should be zero.”
We will return to this theme subsequently but, at this point, the question is: how does one test this? The core claim makes the theory unfalsifiable.
So, why do policymakers and strategists find the concept compelling? The argument is that deterrence operates on a different epistemological plane than science, that it is a complex and dynamic game of signalling, perception and risk-taking. It is psycho-perceptual.
Deterrence is not a law of nature. It’s a theory about human decision-making. It relies on assumptions about rationality, risk-assessment, and the value an adversary places on its own survival. But a number of situations can move the needle from risk-assessment to extreme uncertainty. And uncertainty is just that, uncertainty, and doesn’t allow for assessment.
This also mean that deterrence is a continuous process of signalling, maintaining credibility, and managing perceptions. The lines above from Conrad’s The Secret Agent are instructive. The issue is not whether the professor will push the button but that people must believe he would. That’s what made him deadly.
Proponents also point to specific historical crises (the Cuban Missile Crisis being the prime example), where the presence of nuclear weapons is widely believed to have forced extreme caution on both sides, thereby confirming the theory.
An Agni-V intercontinental ballistic missile being launched by India in 2013: the India-Pakistan contest has become a live lab for the most dangerous aspects of nuclear deterrence theory | AFP
SHOULD WE REST ASSURED?
And yet, no one really knows at what point deterrence could fail. This is the central terror of the concept.
The decision to use nuclear weapons would likely not be a cool, calculated application of a theory. It would be made under conditions of extreme stress, panic, possible misinformation (eg faulty radar readings), and the catastrophic failure of conventional defences. The theory seeks to provide a framework for preventing that decision point from ever being reached through what American national security analyst Joe Cirincione has recently described as “nuclear policy-babble.”
In a September 11 article, ‘Why Are Democrats Pushing for More Nuclear Weapons?’, Cirincione writes: “As fans of Star Trek know, whenever the writers needed a technological fix to the plot dilemma they had created, they would write into the script ‘Scotty says some techno-babble.’ To anyone who has engaged in debates on nuclear weapons policy this phenomenon is all too familiar.” Trust me, he is spot-on! I have previously called it nuclear jabberwocky!
So, what is that decision point and would it always be rational and advertent? In the Cuban Missile Crisis episode, things could have gotten out of control at multiple points during those 13 days. US President John F. Kennedy could have decided to respond to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s hard letter instead of his soft letter. He could have followed US Air Force chief of staff Curtis LeMay’s proposal to bomb Cuba and take out the Soviet missiles. The Soviet submarine that the US destroyers were forcing to surface by dropping depth charges could have fired the nuclear torpedo, starting an inadvertent escalation.
In terms of perceptions, ‘red lines’ present their own problem. For instance, it doesn’t matter what Pakistan’s actual red lines are; what matters is what India believes they are and India might just misread them. The situation becomes even more destabilising if India begins to test to map out Pakistan’s thresholds, which it obviously is doing.
A good example of this is what I would call the stress test for Pakistan’s doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Deterrence’ (FSD). As I have previously noted in this space, FSD was Pakistan’s response to India’s ‘Cold Start Doctrine’, later rechristened ‘Pro-Active Ops’ (PAO). India’s PAO envisaged independent battle groups for short, sharp strikes within Pakistan. Pakistan plugged that gap by developing a range of nuclear weapons of different yields (low to high) and different delivery systems (ballistic missiles, cruise missiles) to be used at every potential level of escalation — from the battlefield (tactical nuclear weapons, like the Nasr missile) to strategic strikes against cities.
While Pakistan perceived Nasr to be a deterrent rather than a war-fighting option, India (and others) perceived it to be a system that would actually be employed through dispersal and decentralised control in the field. The PAO never got off the ground and the Feb 2019/May 2025 strikes did not involve physical land ingress into Pakistan. But it has given India the false perception of having called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff.
This is very different from Pakistan’s perception — ie Pakistan will use proportional conventional means to demonstrate resolve and capability, without crossing the nuclear threshold. For Pakistan, this means maintaining the credibility of its deterrent by not being forced to use it, while still punishing the provocation. [NB: I have eschewed going into my own criticism of FSD as a policy here.]
India’s approach through repeated attacks is to force Pakistan to answer a critical question: if not this, then what would trigger a nuclear response? This is a real problem because, in theory, if Pakistan does not respond to a limited strike or ingress with nuclear weapons (which it hasn’t), India could determine that Pakistan’s threshold is much higher than claimed, and the band for conventional strikes is much wider.
India’s actions show why Pakistan felt it needed FSD — to deny India a safe space for conventional war. Yet, those same actions test its credibility, forcing Pakistan into a difficult position, where it must respond effectively without triggering the very war its weapons are meant to deter.
The paradox is that the way the game of brinkmanship is being played both validates and challenges FSD. In essence, because of India’s insistence that there’s a band and it will act to probe the size of that band, the India-Pakistan contest has become a live lab for the most dangerous aspects of nuclear deterrence theory, where the concepts of thresholds, credibility, and the stability-instability paradox are not academic abstractions anymore.
SIGNALLING AND PERCEPTIONS
If, as noted above, deterrence is a complex and dynamic game of signalling, perception and risk-taking, then for it to work, the adversaries must share some common understanding — ie signalling by one should be understood by the other. This should also impact perceptions. Empirical evidence, however, does not support this assumption in many cases. Let me list three, gleaned from different works in military literature.
In 1961, as part of its “forward policy”, India began moving troops into border areas where neither China nor India had maintained military presence. In Ladakh, Chinese troops (PLA) surrounded some Indian forward pickets and cut them off from their supply routes. After a few days, they withdrew. For its part, China was signalling resolve but also giving India an out: move back without loss of face.
India, for its part, perceived the PLA’s withdrawal as weakness, and determined that Peking (Beijing) was not prepared to press its tactical advantage. It doubled down on its forward policy and, by June 1962, Indian authorities reported that the country had gained 2,000 square miles of territory via this forward policy.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s then prime minister, and his coterie of close cabinet ministers had convinced themselves that Peking would not start a war and be branded an aggressor by the non-aligned bloc. Later events showed that India had seriously misjudged China’s resolve.
As the political scientist Richard Ned Lebow has written: “The Chinese, who were unaware of the nature and extent of India’s illusions, behaved in a way damaging to deterrence by reinforcing in Indian minds the very expectations about themselves they sought to forestall.”
Take Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. Japan did not want to pull the US into a war against itself. If anything, it had correctly assessed that the US joining the war in the Pacific would stack the odds against Japanese forces. But Tokyo also needed to do something about the US oil and materials embargo, which was hurting its war effort.
The attack on Pearl Harbour was an effort to destroy the US Pacific fleet, to force the US out of the Western Pacific theatre. The assumption was terribly flawed, as subsequent events showed. If anything, the Japanese attack brought the US into the theatre actively.
The 1965 decision by the US to send a light marine division ashore in Vietnam instead of a heavy army division was to signal to Hanoi that Washington’s objectives were limited. The US was also aware of escalation a la the Korean War if it mounted a ground invasion of North Vietnam. Even during the bombing of North Vietnam, the US used bombing pauses to signal to Hanoi that it did not want escalation but that it would also ensure its protection operation in support of South Vietnam. For North Vietnam, however, the central issue was the US deployment itself and bombing, not what kind of troops were being deployed or whether there were bombing pauses.
As Lebow noted, “Carefully calibrated signals most often fail to make the desired impression because they are based on distinctions that seem obvious to the sender but to which the receiver is oblivious.”
To this I would add that signalling often fails because X’s priorities are not Y’s priorities and the difference also creates the differential. Put another way, information is imperfect and finding a common bargaining framework is often very difficult at the exact moments when it is most desirable.
EPILOGUE
Outside of think tank gobbledygook and political rhetoric for domestic reasons, India’s presumed Zweck means nothing, since it can neither deter nor compel Pakistan. However, the battles India wants to fight to an unachievable end have the potential to destabilise the region. Testing red lines to find space for violence is innately unstable because escalation is “a step of any size that crosses a saliency.”
In his 1991 book Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks, US political scientist Barry Posen has listed a number of “causal patterns” which could entangle conventional and nuclear forces and destroy command, control and communication centres that are used by both conventional and nuclear forces, thus inadvertently degrading a state’s capacity to employ its nuclear-weapons capability and getting it to escalate to that level in a use-it-or-lose-it scenario.
There’s also the temptation to strike nuclear forces/platforms with non-nuclear strategic weapons, forcing the other side to jump multiple rungs on the escalation ladder.
This is not an exhaustive list nor an exhaustive treatment of a policy pursued by India that has ‘DANGER’ written all over it. In fact, the very inability of India to coerce Pakistan could lead it to go for options that could result in inadvertent escalation.
Pakistan, for its part, has to be prepared. Given the psycho-perceptual make-up of the current Indian dispensation, anything else would be considered timidity and may end up bringing upon that which we want to forestall. That’s unfortunate but it’s also a fact.
The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider
Published in Dawn, EOS, September 28th, 2025 complete report is on below link. Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1944998/india-and-pakistan-the-politics-of-brinkmanship
