“Agreements of peace shall be made with equal or superior kings. An inferior King must be attacked”. Chanakya Kautaliya. 350-283 BC (Arthashastra).
Pakistan, an ideological state, and for many a miracle on the world map, that happened on 14 august 1947; but a miracle threatened by a permanent threat – India, from its birth.
The father of the nation focused heavily on Pakistan’s defense strategy, and made it clear to the world that Pakistan is a peace-loving country, but the circumstances in which Pakistan got birth were not acceptable to the Indian Pundits.
In his early addresses, Quaid e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah signaled the need of a strong Air Force to thwart any threat from the Air. He also made a significant impact on Pakistan’s recent defense strategy, implying that it would threaten no one, but remain deterrent to cause any nefarious plan to fail. He also focused on a strong and balanced Navy that can defend its coast.
Shortly after independence, Pakistan faced Indian aggression on a full scale, that was not just border skirmishes or some sort of battle, but it was a large scale war to wipe out Pakistan. In 1948, our Armed Forces got a strategic victory; in 1965, it was again a scale war; in 1971, the flames from East Pakistan were thrown on the western border by India. All the time Pakistan kept getting existential threats from this adventurous rival.
India’s conventional superiority in weapons and numbers has also alarmed Pakistani strategists, but with the dawn of the nuclear weapons, and after acquiring them, there was a silence and a hope that India might change its stance on Pakistan, and would never ever threaten its sovereignty again. Both the countries are nuclear armed with sophisticated ballistic missiles. But the psyche of the Indian political Pundits remains the same, they tried and got help from other powers, and discovered new ways to disturb this strategic balance, by acquiring nuclear tipped missiles.
India got a Ballistic Missile Defense system, to detect, track, intercept and then destroy any Pakistani missile coming towards India in case of a nuclear war, and got the capability to eliminate Pakistani missile threats considerably.
After this imbalance, the Pakistani defense establishment devised other ways to eliminate and minimize the strategic imbalance. They studied models of nuclear armed states like the US and Russia, and embarked upon a strategy to pursue tactical nuclear weapons, also called battlefield nuclear weapons, that can target any moving threat along the borders, with a fast short range capability. Indian Generals were ever busy in maneuvering and utilizing their conventional superiority, and devised many plans too. With greater conventional superiority, they sometimes talked about a limited war, or of surgical strikes, sometimes of punishing Pakistan, once they were able to eliminate the Pakistani missile threat; and according to their General Sunderji’s theory, they will dissect Pakistan into two.
These were the developments that led Pakistan to develop a new and a very effective class of nuclear weapons, that can be termed as “doctrine busters”.
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