By Bradley Graham and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 1, 2002; Page A01
India's overwhelming military advantage over Pakistan adds further unpredictability to the standoff between the two countries and could increase the possibility of a war, according to U.S. government analysts and military experts.
In military terms, Pakistan is no match for India, which has a 2-to-1 advantage in ground and air forces. At sea, India has an aircraft carrier, while Pakistan has none, and India has more submarines and many more surface warships. The size of both countries' arsenals of deliverable nuclear weapons is secret, but India's is widely believed to be at least twice that of its smaller northern neighbor.
This disparity increases uncertainty and contributes to an escalatory situation in which both sides are tempted to take the offensive with preemptive moves, according to analysts. "It's kind of like World War I, with both sides mobilizing on automatic," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who watched India and Pakistan take a series of planned escalatory steps in 1999. "When they see an action on one side, there is a pre-programmed counterreaction, which makes it extremely dangerous right now."
While specialists have long worried about a conventional war or a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, these concerns have taken on a new urgency in recent weeks. The Bush administration has launched a diplomatic campaign to avert armed conflict, with Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage leaving for the region next week and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to follow him.
Most analysts said they still believe there will not be a nuclear war. But they also warned that conventional wars often spin out of control, and that once a conflict turns violent, predicting its outcome becomes impossible.
According to the Pentagon's count, India has stationed more than 250,000 soldiers across the 460-mile Line of Control dividing the disputed territory of Kashmir, while Pakistan has more than 180,000 troops on its side of the line. India has more than 1,500 artillery pieces in Kashmir, U.S. officials report, to Pakistan's 600. Likewise, India is thought to have about three dozen warplanes in the area, roughly triple the Pakistani number.
Both militaries appear poised to strike, according to U.S. officials. "There are a lot of forces on the borders, and they've been there for a while, so they've had a lot of opportunity to prepare," a senior Defense Department official said.
The first move, if there is one, is widely expected to come from India, which has grown increasingly upset over Pakistani military support for Islamic insurgents who are fighting to end Indian rule in Kashmir. Many analysts said they expect any Indian offensive to try to minimize the risk of all-out war by keeping the attack limited. Rather than a general offensive, or widespread airstrikes, the expectation among analysts is that India would dispatch a handful of warplanes or a small number of ground troops to hit suspected Islamic militant training camps in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir.
Under this scenario India would move quickly, seeking to achieve its aims, then perhaps announce it is unilaterally halting its forces and ask for a cease-fire.
Before agreeing to a truce, however, Pakistan almost certainly would respond, analysts said. The key question at that point would be how vigorously Pakistan acts. Some experts predicted it would simply carry out some demonstration actions – heavy cross-border shelling or small-scale raids – to punish India, and to show that the Indian attack did not go unanswered.
"What I worry about here is a miscalculation," said Zinni, who as the chief of the U.S. Central Command in the late 1990s dealt frequently with Pakistan. "The Pakistanis probably won't accept that [sort of limited raids], and it could start a chain reaction." Zinni serves as a senior State Department adviser on the Middle East.
"The danger lies in this tit-for-tat process," said Teresita Schaffer, a South Asia expert at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. "If both sides felt compelled to keep responding, they would risk losing control of the escalation ladder."
While Pakistan's military is smaller than India's, the gap is narrower in the parts of its armed forces that are best at projecting power, especially armored and mechanized army divisions. Some western military analysts said those key units have deteriorated badly over the past decade, as U.S. sanctions cut off the supply of spare parts and aid in training. But Zinni said that in his experience, the Pakistani army is skilled at maintenance and ingenious at manufacturing needed parts.
Also working in Pakistan's favor is the nature of the terrain along the Line of Control, which generally favors the defender. In the three wars that India and Pakistan have fought, a U.S. defense official noted, "the major military campaigns have had difficulty going beyond 20 or 30 kilometers."
With the monsoon season due in a few weeks, some U.S. officials have suggested that the weather could impose a break on any military plans. Indian warplanes, for instance, lack all-weather capabilities.
But Pentagon officials are not counting on heavy rains to wash away the risk of war. "The rain won't stop military operations if India believes its objectives are important enough," said one official who watches South Asia.
The wild card in the military balance that makes the standoff different from earlier Indian-Pakistani wars is that both countries now possess nuclear weapons.
Most scenarios for the conflict going nuclear start with a sense in Pakistan of an imminent crushing defeat. But regional experts acknowledged they have no firm idea what lines would have to be crossed for this to happen.
"The key point about nuclear weapons in the South Asian context is uncertainty," Schaffer said. "No one can be certain what would trigger a nuclear response."
There also is little margin for error. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, which had as much as 30 minutes to react between a suspected nuclear missile launch and impact, India and Pakistan would have less than eight minutes, given their proximity.
Estimates of the sizes of the nuclear arsenals vary widely, with some western military analysts calculating that India possesses 25 to 40 weapons and Pakistan 15 to 20, and others saying the likely size of each arsenal is double that.
The Defense Intelligence Agency said last week that a full-scale nuclear exchange could kill as many as 12 million people immediately and injure as many as 7 million. Millions more would die in related firestorms and from the long-term consequences of starvation and disease, the DIA concluded.
Correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran in New Delhi contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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