Michael Kugelman, Dep Dir of Asia Program and Sr Assc for South Asia at Wilson Centre, US

Michael Kugelman, deputy Director of Asia Program and Senior Associate for South Asia at Wilson Center, US, has worked extensively on the region. He explains the implications of India’s air strike at Balakot to Pratigyan Das:

What is your take on the recent escalation of tensions between India and Pakistan? 

In retrospect, it was easy to see this escalation coming. Jaish-e-Muhammed has been increasingly active in J&K in recent months, and so an attack like the one on February 14 was sadly unsurprising. The scale of the attack, particularly the high death toll, made an Indian retaliation all but inevitable. And then, when India did the retaliatory strike, the fact that India launched air strikes across the LoC – a provocative act that hadn’t taken place for nearly 50 years – made a Pakistani military response quite predictable. So, we’re looking at a confluence of factors that made a climb up the escalation ladder – to a too-high-for-comfort level – easy to predict. We’re just lucky that the two sides appear to finally be coming down the ladder.

Is New Delhi establishing new red lines in the security paradigm with Islamabad? 

Clearly New Delhi’s intention, by hitting out at targets across the LoC, was to get Pakistan to believe that supporting India-focussed terrorists is the wrong thing to do because if India is hit by terror, New Delhi will gladly hit back hard with force. In other words, the aim of the Indian strike was to deter Pakistan. New red lines have indeed been established, in that India has telegraphed its willingness to launch air strikes across the LoC in the nuclear era – something that’s not been done before.

Will a preemptive strategy help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan?

I’m not sure it will. A single strike, like the one in Balakot, will not succeed in dislodging deeply entrenched Pakistani calculations about its relationships to India-focused terror groups. For this preemptive strategy to have a chance of working, it would need to be sustained and perhaps even intensified. The question is if India has the capacity and desire to do something like this. Among other things, the risk of a nuclear exchange rises significantly if you ramp up your use of conventional military force in Pakistan. Also as demonstrated, Pakistan will not hesitate to retaliate when it is hit.

Who is winning the perception battle?

Naturally each country thinks it has won the perception battle, in great part because each government has been praised domestically for how it has handled the crisis. Within the international court of public opinion, the perception battle is split. The Pakistanis got a lot of good international press for their decision to release the pilot. And the Indians got a fair amount of negative coverage for not being forthcoming about the details surrounding the strike in Balakot.

The India-Pakistan crisis also forced the international community to take a closer look at the violent and repressive tactics the Indian military carries out in Kashmir. And yet, with the crisis winding down (for now), you see more statements from foreign governments and op-ed analyses calling on the world to tackle the terrorism problem in Pakistan than you do highlighting the plight of the Kashmiris. This suggests a victory for India.

Will this change China’s position on Pakistan-based terrorism?

If China was going to finally give in to pressure and step back to let the UN Security Council designate Masood Azhar as a terrorist, then it would have happened soon after the Pulwama attack – and it didn’t. The only way Beijing will budge on this issue, in my view, is if Pakistan itself agrees that this move is the right thing to do – and that’s not out of the realm of possibility. At the end of the day, getting Azhar designated at the UN is a symbolic move more than anything else. It would appease India, and if Pakistan came out publicly and said it supported making the move, then it would also score some points with Washington. But if Pakistan does nothing, then I doubt Beijing will either.

How do you read Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s invitation to India?

The OIC is one of the few international entities that took a fairly even-handed approach to the crisis. Few countries or institutions expressed public support for Pakistan – not even its closest friends –but most quietly, and in some cases not so quietly, supported India when it staged its retaliatory strike. By contrast, the OIC took a very balanced approach by having India serve as a guest of honour at its summit, but then also issuing an extremely harshly worded statement against India. 

Clearly the OIC was trying to have it both ways. Many of its members have valued relationships with India. At the same time, these are Muslim-majority states that want to express solidarity with the plight of Kashmiri Muslims. In this sense, the OIC’s balancing act, though a bit jarring, is in some ways unsurprising.