{"id":34933,"date":"2018-10-31T14:29:10","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T08:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=34933"},"modified":"2018-10-31T14:29:10","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T08:59:10","slug":"diary-of-a-very-long-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/diary-of-a-very-long-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Diary of a very long year:\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/todays-paper\/tp-opinion\/diary-of-a-very-long-year\/article19754674.ece\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Diary of a very long year<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><b>Context<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The article analyzes the impact on India-Pakistan relations after the surgical strikes, the challenges and India\u2019s role as a regional stabilizer.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Importance of surgical strikes<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has been one year since the special forces of the Indian Army carried out surgical strikes to destroy terror Launchpad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The surgical strike from India was a point that the Line of Control is not a line that cannot be breached.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Impact on India-Pakistan relations after the strikes<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is important to take stock at this point on how India-Pakistan bilateral relations and the regional security situation have evolved over the past year since the strikes.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The future direction of the foremost regional forum, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), remains unclear after India dropped out of the 2016 Islamabad summit in the wake of the Uri terror attack.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The regional security situation remains, because of confused American policies in South Asia, continuing turmoil in Afghanistan, heightening India-China rivalry, and the India-Pakistan hostility.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From a regional stability point of view, the surgical strikes do not seem to have had much of an adverse impact.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The fact that Pakistan neither acknowledged the attacks nor responded in kind shows that the general deterrence between the South Asian nuclear rivals remains intact.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is easy to talk about nuclear use and threaten nuclear retaliation, as Pakistan has been doing for long. It is, however, not easy to translate such talk into action. In that sense, the surgical strikes have called Pakistan\u2019s nuclear bluff. And that certainly is good news for regional stability.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But such higher-level stability seems to have come with heightened lower-level instability and that is the bad news.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What are the challenges?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are two sets of challenges that are more apparent today, one year after the surgical strikes.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One, the India-Pakistan escalation ladder has become far more precarious today it has ever been in the past one and a half decades, i.e. since the ceasefire was agreed to in 2003. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The recurrent, and almost daily, occurrence of border battles between the two militaries in Jammu and Kashmir today have a worrying potential for escalation to higher levels. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The border stand-offs often lead to, as is evident from the data from the past 15 years, military, political and diplomatic escalation as well as contribute to escalating an ongoing crisis.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While this was common even prior to the surgical strikes, the September 2016 operation has made ceasefire violations more worrisome in at least two ways: first, Pakistan has been retaliating ever since the surgical strikes by increasing the pressure on the frontlines; and second, surgical strikes have reduced the critical distance between ceasefire violations and conventional escalation.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While stealthy surgical strikes may not qualify as conventional escalation, they certainly reduce the psychological distance between sub-conventional violence and conventional escalation in the classical sense. That is bad news for regional stability.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The second challenge is more practical than theoretical. Surgical strikes could easily offset the logic behind such familiar and analytically elegant scenarios.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The perils of preventive strikes are unpredictable. Preventive strikes are pregnant with immense potential to lead up to a \u2018competition in risk-taking\u2019, a tendency already prevalent on the frontlines of the India-Pakistan border in J&amp;K.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Preventive strikes in hyper-nationalist bilateral settings could defy our expectations and go out of control, with disastrous implications.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Have the surgical strikes helped the country\u2019s overall national security environment?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There are two reasons why the strategy of punishment may not have worked. For one, a strategy of punishment requires consistency and commitment.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The momentum achieved by the surgical strikes was not followed up (despite several attacks thereafter), nor was the government committed to its declared determination to respond firmly to terror strikes, thereby lacking in both consistency and commitment.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Second, and more importantly, Pakistan\u2019s responses thereafter of supporting insurgency in Kashmir, aiding infiltration across the border, and allegedly supporting attacks on the Indian army convoys and bases continued without much reaction from New Delhi.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This has led to a visible lack of credibility on New Delhi\u2019s part which makes one wonder whether, bereft of domestic political use, there was any strategic planning behind the September operation.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Surgical strikes may have been a tactical victory for New Delhi, but its strategic value is far from settled.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Concerns and the bigger picture<\/b><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With two hostile neighbors on either side, terror attacks against India on the rise, and the South Asian neighborhood unsure of India\u2019s leadership any more, New Delhi has a lot to be concerned about the continuation of its pivotal position in the region and the nature of its future engagement with it.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The events since September last year have further contributed to South Asia\u2019s regional \u2018insecurity complex\u2019.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For a country that has traditionally been the regional stabilize, New Delhi seems to be quickly embracing the virtues of geopolitical revisionism.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The costs of aggression, self-imposed regional exclusion and an absence of strategic altruism are bound to become starker sooner or later.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diary of a very long year:\u00a0 Context The article analyzes the impact on India-Pakistan relations after the surgical strikes, the challenges and India\u2019s role as a regional stabilizer. Importance of surgical strikes It has been one year since the special forces of the Indian Army carried out surgical strikes to destroy terror Launchpad in Pakistan-occupied&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/diary-of-a-very-long-year\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Diary of a very long year:\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704816940},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}