Syed Ali Zia Jaffery

In his book titled Limited War in the Nuclear Age, Morton H. Halperin argued that fears of expansion from local to central wars pressurise decision-makers into contracting or terminating wars. That said, the pressures reduce when both states are convinced that the strategic balance is impervious to tactical and theatre-level operations. Halperin’s analysis is right in-line with Glenn Snyder’s famous Stability-Instability Paradox.

The concept that attributes violence at lower rungs of the escalation ladder to stability at the higher ends of the conflict spectrum has been a vital part of the strategic discourse in South Asia in regard to its applicability. The contextualisation of the concept in the South Asian theatre is difficult due to the difference between the Indo-Pak dyad and the US-USSR one during the Cold War.

However, post-1998 South Asia has been typified by instances of crises involving the use of force. This phenomenon has merited a great deal of scholarship and inquiry from across the globe. The subject of disquisition has revolved around the stability of bilateral deterrence between India and Pakistan, given each side’s proclivity to resort to the application of force under the nuclear umbrella. While nuclear deterrence continues to feature prominently in the dyad’s deterrence calculus, it is not the be-all and end-all of deterrence in South Asia.

Conventional deterrence is another element that deserve more attention and scholarship than it is getting now. The value of conventional deterrence cannot be understood in its entirety without assessing the politico-military landscape of South Asia, and the role that nuclear weapons have played in the region.

A Crisis-Prone Theatre

Lying in close proximity to the Central Asian Republics (CARs) and at the heart of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), South Asia is an ideal regio