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The eternal India-Pakistan conflict is heating up, again. A car bomb at a tourist attraction in Delhi killed 14 people yesterday. Today a car bomb in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad killed 12 people. India and Pakistan are both blaming each other for the respective attacks, and credible open-source intel accounts on Twitter are reporting large mobilizations of troops heading towards the border.
To me it seems that relations between the countries have been on a downward slide for the last ten years. While I’m not certain that this particular incident will be the big one, the increasing regularity and intensity of the skirmishes is on a worrying trend down.
This doesn’t come at a good time for Pakistan, which is increasingly having a hard time holding its western mountain territories against the Taliban. India has recently been cultivating ties with the Taliban, seeking their own proxies of militant crazies to counterbalance the ones Pakistan has in Kashmir. In the event of a war Pakistan could find itself sandwiched between the Indian army and the Taliban forces in the mountain regions.
Counterintuitively, this kind of lousy poker hand could make Pakistan more likely to seek a major conflict. There are many, many conflicts throughout history that were instigated by a party that was in a bad situation, because it’s better to roll the dice now before your position gets even worse.
And of course there are probably 400 or so fission weapons between the two, in the several-hundred kiloton range. I believe the subcontinent is the single likeliest place on earth to see a nuclear conflict start, more than Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
I am not sure that Pakistan even has money for saber rattling at the moment let alone full scale war. There is no rolling of the dice - this is Russian roulette with glock 17
But consider, does India inspire this level of Patriotism?
I think not.
Patriotism is great thing when combined with air superiority, artillery, logistics and outnumbering and outgunning the opponent 3 to 1. Otherwise it is good way to convert empty bodybags to full.
Unless you have a large enough mountain range and/or jungle. In which case you win. On the flipside, it's hard to say if there have been many successful wars waged without patriotism.
In context of Pakistan, Lahore (their 2nd biggest city) is an afternoon stroll away from the Indian border. No mountains or jungles in sight.
That’s what concerns me the most, in the event of any major conventional attack there could be significant pressure to “use or lose” the nukes, especially since Pakistan’s are pretty forward-deployed compared to India’s.
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