When trying to learn about mechanisms to avoid unintended escalation, it’s usually a good idea to listen to people with operational experience. In South Asia, this means trying to meet with the Director-General Military Operations of the Pakistan and Indian Army. DGMOs have many important tasks and one peripheral assignment: they serve as the point persons for military confidence-building measures. DGMOs have their own hotline. They are supposed to talk routinely every week, as well as on an “as needed” basis.
The “as needed” part doesn’t work so well, as was clarified to me by a DGMO named Pervez Musharraf, who held this post from 1993-1995. Back then, the Line of Control dividing Kashmir was lit up by artillery, mortar and small arms fire. Posts along the LoC were occasionally overrun, captured, and reclaimed. In other words, there was presumably much for the DGMOs to talk about.
During a visit, I asked General Musharraf how things were going along the LoC, and he gave me a long litany of complaint. “So,” I asked, “did you pick up the phone?” “No,” he said. “It would give him [the Indian DGMO] more satisfaction than it would give me.” Complaints are registered by diplomats, not DGMOs.
The DGMO who didn’t receive Musharraf’s phone call was V.R. Raghavan. Meeting him was harder than getting to Musharraf because civilian gatekeepers in South Block are jealous of their prerogatives, which include keeping candid military officers away from inquiring minds. Raghavan, who served as DGMO from 1992-1994, cut this red tape and received me in his office, the spitting image of starched reserve and formality. This was the first, tentative co-mingling of our different worlds. No, not Close Encounters of the Third Kind, just the beginning of a lasting friendship and learning experience.
Stereotyping is a common substitute for personal encounters. In my experience, it’s hard to meet the stereotypical senior Pakistani and Indian military officer because they are such a diverse lot. Raghavan certainly is one of a kind, deeply immersed in military history, the complexity and chance of military operations, geo-politics and spiritual inquiry. How often do you get to meet a deep thinker whose resume includes service behind enemy lines during India’s 1962 war with China? Raghavan may also be the only person to have written a book on the world’s most famously militarized glacier [Siachen: Conflict Without End (1992)] after being posted there.
Upon retirement, Raghavan was a central figure in founding the Delhi Policy Group, which helped change the landscape of Indian NGOs working on security issues. From November-December 1996, the Stimson Center was fortunate to host him as a visiting fellow. In my view, he wrote one of the most important essays ever to appear in The Nonproliferation Review, “Limited War and Nuclear Escalation in South Asia,” (Fall-Winter 2001). Some shoebox-worthy quotes:
“The stability of deterrence between two countries runs the risk of being affected by the uncertainty produced by clashing views about who is ‘ahead.’ Nuclear reality between India and Pakistan is therefore of an uncertain quality. It is neither based on deterrence stability, nor a desire to seek it. Pakistan appears to seek continued deterrence instability as a means of pressure aimed at achieving its desired political outcomes… The reality of nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan is one of considerable instability.”
“The reality of limited war is that the limits set on it make it difficult to gain a military victory, and war termination without a victory closely resembles a defeat.”
“As fortunes in war rise and fall, both objectives and the means to achieve them not only change but tend to reach a higher threshold. War by its nature favors escalation… Escalation is inherent in war both because the desire to win, and the need not to lose.”
“Escalation involves crossing saliences that define the current limits of a war. Since there is no mutually agreed set of limitations between India and Pakistan on a future war – as there were none in past wars – neither side has control over the other’s saliencies. As a consequence an escalatory spiral is ever ready to come into being.”