The Pahalgam Panic

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:20

And I am Dr. Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Although, Jeffrey, I have to correct you on one thing. Oh, no. Listening and watching. We are on YouTube now. You're leaving out a very important thing.

Jeffrey 0:32

Yeah, and if you're watching, you can see I'm wearing my IAEA hoodie.

Aaron 0:36

There you go. You're repping. I think you were just in Vienna and Geneva. You were taking a tour through Central Europe.

Jeffrey 0:42

Yeah, that's right. I did two weeks. I did a week in Vienna. I was there for a IISS Missile Dialogue Initiative meeting, and then I spent two days in the IAEA's archives. Looking back at the ancient history of the IAEA's involvement with North Korea. Then I popped over to Geneva and was there for a little less than a week, splitting my time between a meeting at Unidear on demonstrative verification and eating fondue.

Aaron 1:15

And whenever you took pictures of yourself, I didn't even need your fancy software to geolocate you because you were in my sort of old haunts when I used to live there in Geneva for those two wonderful years.

Jeffrey 1:25

You actually look like you're wearing the same shirt you were wearing when I geolocated you using the reflection in your wine glass and you were wearing a checkered shirt.

Aaron 1:34

I call it my generic white guy shirt because everybody in Washington, D.C. or Washington, D.C. adjacent has to have one of these. And I am working at home. That's my background here. But I had some other meetings there. I had to look somewhat presentable, unlike you in the hoodie.

Jeffrey 1:47

Yeah, I almost, by the way, went to that bar and got a coffee. But I decided instead to pose for a picture 20 years later. There's a picture of me in the early 2000s looking young and smug. And so I positioned myself at exactly the same spot, a little different. The camera was different. So the focal length was different.

But, you know, same picture, 20 years apart. Geneva hasn't changed.

Aaron 2:15

So you know what happens basically a routine a couple of years apart all the time?

Jeffrey 2:21

Ah, are you talking about potential nuclear conflict in South Asia?

Aaron 2:27

Dun, dun, dun, dun. Yes, of course. We have the reoccurring. Frequent clashes between two nuclear-armed powers in South Asia, India, and Pakistan. We were going to do this last week, but you were gallivanting through different wine bars in Geneva, and so we are doing it this week.

Jeffrey 2:42

Yeah. Should we get our producer to stitch in a little bit of Led Zeppelin's cashmere?

Aaron 2:49

Sure, yeah, we'll do that. Yeah, don't cut that out either. Okay, so I think by now our listeners will know that there was a terrorist attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir, not to be confused with the song, leading to, let's call them tit-for-tat airstrikes, drone strikes, and artillery strikes.

Jeffrey 3:10

Sure, sure. I mean, you know, tits and tats, hard to know.

Aaron 3:18

But, you know, I think... Prompting lots of speculation, concern, fear, white knuckling about whether or not we being the international community or these two nuclear armed powers have crossed a certain threshold and that they are working their way up what we would call the escalation ladder to where nuclear war was feasible, possible, or even I guess what the likelihood of it was in this most recent go around.

Jeffrey 3:46

Yeah, I think the conversation that I really want to have is one that talks about how a deterrence functions, because I got a lot of calls where people seem to think of this as kind of some kind of deterrence breakdown. But this is a thing that happens pretty regularly in South Asia. And it's not that deterrence is failing.

It's that nuclear deterrence, I would argue, is enabling this kind of behavior. And so this is a feature, not a bug of deterrence on the subcontinent.

Aaron 4:24

I mean, yes, in that. I mean, I think what we should do is step back and say that analysts of this crisis point to the way in which particularly the Indian side responded to this as escalatory, which is sort of, let's say, a deterrence by punishment, i.e., in that they're treating the Pakistani government as sponsoring these terrorist groups or, you know, Let's say, having a good footsie relationship with these terrorist groups, and that in response to these terrorist activities, they're no longer just going to be contained to sort of, you know, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, but will extend Indian airstrikes or sort of cruise missile strikes into sort of Pakistan proper, and I think into Punjab, you know, which is close to Islamabad.

Jeffrey 5:10

Yeah, I mean, I guess the first thing to say is, to me, this is not Dramatically different than what we saw in 2019, when there was a terrorist attack in Kashmir, 46 policemen were killed, and then India does an airstrike against what it calls a terrorist training camp in Balakot. And then there are exchanges, the Pakistanis shoot down an Indian fighter jet, and there's a pilot who's captured.

And You know, that crisis, much like this one, felt very similar where Narendra Modi was talking about how, you know, he would have used if they hadn't if the Pakistanis hadn't returned the pilot, he would have conducted a larger missile strike against Pakistan. And he called it a night of murder. And to me, this is sort of pretty consistent with.

All the stuff we have seen. Running up through the past. I remember in 2008, the Mumbai terrorist attacks, where that got very, very, very dangerous. I remember the Kargil War. I mean, there have been plenty of incidents where the Pakistanis engage in violence against the Indians, and then the Indians... Feel compelled to respond. I just, to me, this does not feel different than any of those previous crises.

And so I got calls from reporters saying, you know, well, this is really unprecedented. And I was thinking like, well, I can think of like six precedents. And they've all happened in my lifetime. And I, you know, I would love to have Michael Krepon, who's, you know, no longer with us, still here to probably remember some cases that, you know, I have forgotten about.

Aaron 7:07

Yeah, I mean, I think – and I think this comes from reporting from the New York Times, right? Is that the Trump administration had – I'm trying to come up with the right adjective here. Let's say sort of a cold start to the – to their reaction with diplomacy here. And that the first reaction, J.D. Vance was actually in India, I believe.

It was sort of like we're behind you and you got to do what you got to do, right? Yeah. Then sort of the State Department kicked into action, was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't want this thing to go sideways. But then I'm just going to read the relevant parts from this New York Times article. Which is that the U.S. began to significantly increase its diplomatic engagement as the fighting seemed to be escalating, in that the Pakistani and Indian air forces had begun to engage in quote-unquote serious dogfights, and that Pakistan had sent 300 to 400 drones into Indian territory to probe its air defenses.

But, and this again is quoting directly, the most significant causes for concern came late Friday when explosions hit the Nur Khan Air Base in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad. And most importantly, the base is a key installation, one of the central transfer hubs for Pakistan's military. Yada, yada, yada. But, and this is the sort of kicker, it's also just a short distance from the headquarters of Pakistan's Strategic Plans Division, which oversees the country's nuclear arsenal.

So some have sort of extrapolated that this was a potential decapitation strike on Indian nuclear, I mean, sorry, on Pakistani command and control.

Jeffrey 8:49

Yeah, I'm going to call bullshit on this. This is like a Sanger-Haberman special where I am sure that they got told some version of this story and they're just doing stenography and they're repeating it. But like, I expect more from the New York Times. Like, that's absurd. The idea that, first of all, like we have seen satellite images of the damage to that base.

It is not dramatic. It seems like...

Aaron 9:20

I mean, what does one mean? A small cruise missile salvo and maybe a couple?

Jeffrey 9:24

It is like a slap, right? Yes. This is a... This strike is as much a symbol, right, as it is real damage. And, you know, to say like, oh, well, they hit this airbase and this airbase is near this other thing. And if they'd hit this other thing, yeah, well, if they'd hit the other thing, then you'd have a point.

But they, like, didn't. And there's no, you know... If this is the story that the administration told itself, then I think they got themselves worked up into a lather. And I think the Pakistanis manipulated them pretty effectively. But, you know, like, come on.

Aaron 10:06

Well, I mean, some people will say, and I think one of the things that makes this challenging is that I still don't know what's true or not. Like, that opening day, like, is it one Rafale fighter that was shot down or five? It's between one and five, right? Does it matter if it's five versus one? What does that suggest?

I've seen even speculation that the Pakistanis fired a ballistic missile at India that was intercepted by an S-400 and that that could have gone sideways. And I guess the last one is that in addition to this proposed strike is that strikes on air bases because the Indians undeniably hit a bunch of air bases.

Jeffrey 10:41

Yes. They hit buildings at air bases.

Aaron 10:43

Building at air bases.

Jeffrey 10:45

I say this because on Twitter, you get these pro-India accounts. They're like, the base was totally destroyed. And it's like, I don't know, man. Yeah, one building got hit.

Aaron 10:58

It's hard to destroy air bases. They're very large and concrete is very hard.

Jeffrey 11:01

I mean, as Israel just pointed out when the Iranians hit it 40 freaking times and they destroyed one building.

Aaron 11:11

And then the last thing is that if you are hitting air bases or buildings with air bases, there could be nuclear weapon storage sites at those air bases because it has nuclear – Pakistan has nuclear weapons dispersed. So you add this all to the sort of fog and friction of war, layered on top of extreme disinformation, and so you can have unintended escalation.

Jeffrey 11:33

Look, I want to be clear. Clear. There is always some risk here. That's the whole name of the game. So it's not, it's not that I don't think that there's no risk. And I do think that if India and Pakistan insist on doing this every five to seven years, eventually like they're going to go too far. Somebody is going to miscalculate or get it wrong because they kind of guess where each other's red lines are, but they're sort of probing and exploring and they're trying to figure it out.

And like,

Aaron 12:00

Well, what they tell us in these meetings is that they instinctively know each other pretty well. And so it's you Americans or insert European, you know, who gets invited to these things, who are more worried than we are because we kind of just know.

Jeffrey 12:14

So I think, by the way, A, that's somewhat true. Me too. We're more worried than they are. But I think, you know, like these are like famous last words, you know, where you're like, oh, I know the Indians perfectly. Like, no, you don't.

Aaron 12:28

So I agree too, but I also agree that they also know better than we do what those red lines are. And so like, it's like, I don't know, 50%, right? 70%, right? And we are more worried than they are, but that's okay.

Jeffrey 12:42

Like they're overconfident, but we're completely hysterical. So, you know, like I think they can do this another 10 times before they really louse it up. Yeah. So this could go on for another 50 years. That said, it's not that there's no risk here. But this goes back to the talk I gave at the EA Global Conference and our op-ed about Ukraine and just generally my recurring theme.

This is how deterrence functions.

Aaron 13:19

That's worth teasing out because that is sort of where we want to take the podcast. It is worth teasing that out.

Jeffrey 13:25

Yeah, like Pakistan knows that there are limits to what India can do for fear that it will cross this Pakistani red line and there will be a general nuclear war. So Pakistan gets a level of security from its nuclear weapons because of the risk that creates for India. Now, what I think is really interesting, and it's what we worried about with North Korea, although actually, weirdly, it's not exactly been true.

You kind of have two choices if you're the Pakistanis. You can take your newfound security and just enjoy it. You can live it up.

Aaron 14:05

You can go to Geneva and have some white wine by the lake. Or you can spend it. You can spend it.

Jeffrey 14:11

You can spend it. Right. You spend it by taking advantage of the fact that you are fine at your old risk level and you can go back to that risk level by being just much more aggressive with India. So you can do things like when they terrorist attack the Indian parliament. When they rampaged through Mumbai, when they killed all those Indian policemen and then what they just did.

Right. Like the fact is, Pakistan feels enabled or empowered to do this because it is convinced that there is a limit to how much India can escalate.

Aaron 14:47

And India, by virtue, to stick the all is down. Is hemmed in, but also wants to probe where exactly that red line is, which is why every single response is slightly escalated. But importantly, and I thought this was really interesting, is that they signaled throughout, in the beginning, were just responding. I'm paraphrasing here, but they were cognizant of crossing Pakistan's red line.

And Pakistan in response too, right?

Jeffrey 15:15

But I think the Pakistanis like, and this is what I don't like about the New York Times story, like they're delighted To manipulate that fear in Washington.

Aaron 15:27

Right.

Jeffrey 15:27

Oh, you got to get the Indians under control. It could be a nuclear war. Who knows what we'll do? I mean, they are doing a very classic thing, which is they are manipulating risk for foreign policy goals. I think we have this idea that nuclear weapons only exist to deter other nuclear weapons. And I would like that to be the case.

But in fact, nuclear weapons are about setting a risk level so that you can achieve other foreign policy goals.

Aaron 15:58

And I heard a really interesting take, and it was an off-the-record thing, so I don't want to cite him by name, but – You know, so this isn't my original idea, but is that in the sort of readout from the Trump administration, the hyphenation, India, Pakistan together about the Kashmir question, rather than it just being an India sort of US specific dialogue, it's getting them back into the conversation as the hyphen so that they're on co-equal status.

So this becomes a bilateral problem for the US to try and resolve, even though I think neither side would admit that they needed a US mediator to try and get in the way.

Jeffrey 16:33

Right. Well, you know, I don't know that they did need one, but the Pakistanis want one precisely for this reason. Right. Like the Pakistanis want to internationalize this crisis. And I think the Pakistanis have been really effective at manipulating our sense of risk. Which is weird because. I mean, I don't want to be blasé, but like we're what we should not care more about a nuclear war in South Asia than the parties themselves.

I think we have client-itis.

Aaron 17:08

I wouldn't go that far. I would say that people, they are probably worried themselves. This is where I get worried. Are they lulled into false confidence in that they all know each other? In air quotes, you know what I mean? They all are working off the same sheet of music. They think they know the red line. They're probing around a red line.

That perhaps one day Modi wakes up in the morning and says, you know what? I'm tired of this. We're going to seriously escalate and we're going to dare them to sort of execute or follow through on their nuclear threats because I don't believe it.

Jeffrey 17:44

Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I think they're engaged in the manipulation of risk and there is always a chance that they will get it wrong. My only argument is that we should not be more worried about the consequences than they are. Because then we, I think, get locked into this unhealthy relationship.

Aaron 18:06

And we don't want that. We want California vibes and sunshine.

Jeffrey 18:08

I mean, I just, this is not my problem, man.

Aaron 18:13

Well.

Jeffrey 18:16

It just is not my problem.

Aaron 18:18

I mean, there are parallels, I mean, in the way in which nuclear weapons are used to manage and manipulate risk. Absolutely. Towards what we see in Ukraine with the Russians. The Russians are constantly flirting with this.

Jeffrey 18:32

Oh, yeah. Look, as a case study, I think this is incredibly valuable. You know, for the longest time, I worried this is what would happen with North Korea, that North Korea with nuclear weapons would become more aggressive. Weirdly, Kim Jong-un is just living it up.

Aaron 18:48

Yeah, he seems to be doing just fine. His gout seems to be taken care of. He seems to be eating well. Everything seems good.

Jeffrey 18:55

I was very worried, and I was wrong, but I was very worried that Kim would spend the benefit of nuclear weapons on being more aggressive. And, you know, he's not. Like, he even abandoned unification, which, you know, contrary to what some other people think, I think is really good. You know, he said he's not going to use force to reunify the peninsula, that South Korea is his enemy.

He doesn't care what they do. He just wants to have his, you know, little little dictatorship protected by nuclear weapons. And like, that's fine. I still wonder what will happen if Iran gets nuclear weapons. You know, Iran really likes using proxy forces.

Aaron 19:34

It's true. But we got Stevie Witkoff from the last episode we were talking about.

Jeffrey 19:39

Well, they made him walk that back, didn't they?

Aaron 19:43

Yeah, but Rubio yesterday, now we're going off the rails, but Rubio yesterday didn't contradict him, basically speaking in front of the Senate. So I don't know what's going on in Oman.

Jeffrey 19:54

But I just, I think the thing that people, people have this idea that nuclear weapons somehow prevent violence. And they don't. They introduce risk Which can be manipulated. You can manipulate that risk in order to prevent an attack, which is what we classically think of deterrence, but you can manipulate that risk to do other things, right? The Russians manipulate that risk to try to discourage us or really compel us to end assistance to Ukraine.

Aaron 20:31

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 20:32

And, you know, the Pakistanis use that risk to constrain India's response so that they can bleed them to death. You know, the example that I kind of like, which turns out like the the underlying scholarship is wrong. But Sam Peltzman was this economist at the University of Chicago, and he made this argument about seatbelts. You know, when seatbelts first went into cars, there was at least initially not a big drop in auto fatalities.

And the theory was people were buckling it up and then just driving faster. Right? So it's called risk substitution or risk compensation. Go ahead.

Aaron 21:14

I won't chime in with my sort of intricate knowledge of old Volkswagen's, and I don't think that's the case.

Jeffrey 21:19

Well, so I think Peltzman was wrong as it turned out, but we do see in auto statistics a lot of this kind of stuff. Like when zebra crossings get put down for the first time, people just walk out assuming cars will stop and cars are not acclimated to them and they like hit people.

Aaron 21:38

Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey 21:39

So, you know, the point about the seatbelts is When a state has the additional security from nuclear weapons, just as you have maybe security from seatbelt, or maybe for you it would be a ski helmet.

Aaron 21:52

That's a good one.

Jeffrey 21:53

Yeah. Right? You can either enjoy the level of security or you can spend it. And go faster. Yeah. The thing that we have, I just keep coming back to this idea that nuclear weapons are fundamentally about risk and bargaining, right? And so it isn't like, well, I build nuclear weapons until war ends. It might literally be the case, which we see in South Asia, and I think we could start seeing in other places.

If you have two nuclear-powered, two nuclear-armed countries, they may feel like they're entitled to just beat the shit out of each other at a much lower level of violence, which is what Glenn Snyder called the stability-instability paradox, which I get annoyed by because it's not really a paradox. Exactly. Right. No, exactly. Exactly. It's a choice. You want chocolate ice cream?

You want vanilla?

Aaron 22:49

Yeah. It's not a paradox.

Jeffrey 22:51

It's a choice.

Aaron 22:52

I was listening to somebody discuss their first experience in a Waymo.

Jeffrey 22:56

Oh, I love Waymo.

Aaron 22:58

I have yet to be in one. I love Waymo. But their big complaint was that the Waymo was too safe.

Jeffrey 23:03

The Waymo is super safe. As somebody who thinks a lot about risk, I am a very cautious driver. And I love how careful Waymo is.

Aaron 23:15

So the Waymo, what people are pissed off about is that it stops at every stop sign. And it drives the speed limit because as a personal driver, just to continue this thing, you know when to roll a stop sign because it's your neighborhood. And you know where you can punch the limit.

Jeffrey 23:30

And I do think that there are analogs to this. Well, some people spend safety on other goals.

Aaron 23:37

So I guess the model is that we've got to turn it over to self-driving automakers. Large language model.

Jeffrey 23:44

We have armed Waymo with nuclear weapons.

Aaron 23:47

Just give the nuclear weapons to Waymo and we'll be much safer. Waymo is not a sponsor of this show, although if they would like to, we are certainly open to it.

Jeffrey 23:57

No, but I do think we have to get back to... Not thinking of deterrence, not thinking of nuclear weapons and deterrence as being this just simple like, well, I have nuclear weapons. And so, you know, no one can do anything anymore to this more complicated model where what they do is they introduce risk and we use that risk in bargaining.

Aaron 24:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And every time we're presented with a case study, and I guess we'll wrap it up here, there's always this sort of Well, this has only happened in a certain number of cases, right? When two nuclear armed powers fight each other. And so the one that always comes up is the Sino-Soviet border crisis. When was that?

1969. 1969. So there's that one, right? And then it's India, Pakistan. But there's really no other sort of major issues here. And I always just come back to that and saying like, well, just because it hasn't happened or just because these case studies dictate that it can go that way doesn't mean that we need to ultimately rely on them to inform what future case studies will do.

And that maybe the India-Pakistan model as nuclear weapons spread is actually the more normative model. And that states actually kind of understand the red lines of each other, even if they have nuclear weapons. And so it does constrain certain actions, but not all. And that this is just the way the world works now.

Jeffrey 25:12

Well, and, you know, I again, so just so we don't sound too sanguine about this. This entire endeavor of risk is premised on the fact that it's not perfectly knowable and controllable.

Aaron 25:26

Yeah, and a little bit of jingoism, too. That we just don't think that these other countries are capable of managing their own stockpile and risk themselves.

Jeffrey 25:33

Oh, it's definitely the case. I mean, the Indians and the Pakistanis are right to detect a little whiff of colonial... A little?

Aaron 25:46

It's huge whiff. It's like, how cool are these people? Those people in the South Asian continent, they can't simply be as careful as we were. We had it all figured out during the Cold War.

Jeffrey 25:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, you know, there is always a risk of it going wrong. And without that risk, none of this works. And so I don't mean to be completely sanguine. Like deterrence is going to work pretty well for a while. It will not work forever.

Aaron 26:11

Yeah, no, I think that's the main takeaway is that we're not trying to be sanguine and sort of blasé about this. But it's not a deterrence failure.

Jeffrey 26:20

Yeah. Deterrence actually worked. It worked precisely the way it was supposed to, is it created a level of risk, and the Pakistanis took that risk, and they went to the store, and they bought a bunch of dead tourists.

Aaron 26:32

That's right. Jesus, come on.

Jeffrey 26:35

That's what they wanted. I would spend my security on other things, but no accounting for taste.

Aaron 26:42

Yeah, there's no accounting for taste. All right. That means we're off the rails. If you want to comment on this, just don't send it in our mentions or replies. Neither one of us really checks social media anymore. But you can sign up to support the show at patreon.com slash acwpodcast. Like the show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast.

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