Pakistan’s Balochistan Crisis and India’s Defensive Offense

Pakistan’s Balochistan province is burning. A sharp surge in militant attacks in the province amid a decades-old insurgency has destabilized the entire country. The issue is related to not only internal security but also the deep-rooted Pakistan-India conflict.

Pakistan believes that India is aiding and abetting insurgents in the Balochistan province, which is resource-rich and strategically important. There are reasons to think India might be providing support to militants in Balochistan in a concerted effort to raise Pakistan’s cost for sponsoring cross-border terrorism.

I discern it as New Delhi’s defensive offense strategy, which India’s influential national security advisor Ajit Doval, once a spy inside Pakistan, advocated many years ago. I argue that the strategy has paid important dividends for India by taking the conflict deep inside Pakistan without triggering a full-scale conventional war—but this can become a perilous gamble if a possible escalation is not avoided.

India’s “Defensive Offense” Strategy

Before defining India’s defensive offense strategy, I want to highlight its origins. Interestingly, New Delhi conceived and operationalized the defensive offense strategy in response to what it saw as Pakistan’s efforts to destabilize India internally. Experts believed that Pakistan fanned insurgencies to “bleed India” through “a thousand cuts”. This defined Pakistan’s asymmetric warfare against India.

For a long period, especially before 9/11, Pakistan pursued covert operations to destabilize India from within. Pakistan’s military and intelligence were suspected of backing insurgents in India, especially Kashmir, which Islamabad considers a disputed territory in line with United Nations Resolutions. Though Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri insurgents declined significantly in the post-9/11 period, sporadic attacks blamed on Islamabad continued.

The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack was a watershed event. It killed over 170 people in Mumbai, India’s economic hub, and was referred to as India’s 9/11. New Delhi believed that the attack was carried out because of “the support of some official agencies in Pakistan.” Though India’s immediate response to the Mumbai attack was cautious, the event marked a major shift in India’s strategic calculus vis-à-vis Pakistan.

It took a couple of years for India to define and execute a new strategy regarding Pakistan. Soon after Narendra Modi took charge as the Indian prime minister in 2014, the strategy was defined and put into play. The principal idea underpinning the strategy was deterrence below the threshold of a full-scale war. India understood that waging a conventional war in response to covert Pakistani operations was too risky because of the threat of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and Islamabad’s willingness to consider a first-use policy.

India understood that waging a conventional war in response to covert Pakistani operations was too risky because of the threat of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Covert war, through proxies and other intermediaries, would be the best strategic alternative for India – and the hallmark of India’s new strategic calculus vis-à-vis Pakistan. It is important to mention that no state would openly admit to adopting such a strategy – denial is paramount to preserve one’s image internationally and to avoid legal woes. Nevertheless, some evidence pointing to India’s covert war is now emerging. Last year, The Guardian interviewed two Indian intelligence officials who confirmed New Delhi’s role in carrying out assassinations inside Pakistan.

Tactics like assassinations are part of broader Indian strategy to foment internal unrest in Pakistan, especially in Balochistan. A speech delivered by India’s national security advisor Ajit Doval succinctly spelled out this new strategy. Speaking at a university event around a decade ago, Ajit Doval emphasized the need to have “defensive offense” rather than defense to offset what he defined as Pakistan’s support for cross-border terrorism.

“In the defensive mode, you throw 100 stones on me, and I stop 90 – still 10 will hurt me. And I can never win,” Doval said. “Once they know that India has shifted its gear from the defensive mode to the defensive offense, they will find that it is unaffordable for them. You can do one Mumbai, you may lose Balochistan.”

It is no surprise or coincidence that Doval had mentioned Balochistan. He signaled, as clearly as he could, that India would play the same game Pakistan had been playing. But India’s security tzar said India would play it better because, as he stressed in the same speech, “Pakistan’s vulnerability is many, many times higher than of India”. Such vulnerability is the gravest in Balochistan, owing to the deteriorating insurgency in the province.

Doval’s message was clear: India could, and would, establish deterrence against Pakistan’s alleged covert war while ensuring that there was “no nuclear war involved” and “no engagement of troops”. But is this guaranteed? Perhaps no — I will explain why.

The Efficacy of India’s Strategy and the Risks

The principal risk associated with a strategy geared towards acutely jeopardizing the internal security of an adversary is that the target state sees it as an existential threat and thus feels compelled to respond with force.

For several years now, India’s new defensive offense has paid some important dividends. A primary dividend is that India has demonstrated that it can effectively climb up the escalation ladder, by starting with small arms and unconventional warfare, without starting a conventional war, and thus not risk a nuclear war. Because Pakistan is bogged down in the Balochistan insurgency, as well as militant threats elsewhere, opening a theater in the east—with India—is difficult to think of.

Pakistan’s policymakers understand what New Delhi is up to. They recognize that the signal from India is to deter Pakistan by punishing it. As a Foreign Affairs article explains, deterrence through punishment entails signaling, or demonstrating through action, that an adversary would be severely punished if it took certain actions.

So, through its defensive offense, New Delhi sends a strong message to Pakistan: do not even think of sponsoring non-state actors inside India because the consequences will be excruciating. By creating widespread unrest in Balochistan, India seems to be punishing Pakistan for its alleged involvement in attacks in Indian territory, including the Mumbai carnage as well as other subsequent attacks blamed on Islamabad.

However, India’s defensive offense is also dangerous because it goes beyond establishing deterrence by punishment. New Delhi, through its defensive offense, wants to achieve a second objective. To this end, one must assume that India wants to internally destabilize Pakistan so gravely that it is not capable of destabilizing India for the foreseeable future. However, this part of the strategy is too ambitious and entails taking dangerous risks.

The principal risk associated with a strategy geared towards acutely jeopardizing the internal security of an adversary is that the target state sees it as an existential threat and thus feels compelled to respond with force. When it becomes an issue of survival, all extraordinary steps are considered.

There are strong indications that Pakistan feels that it faces a serious existential threat. The unprecedented hijacking of a train carrying over 400 passengers by Baloch insurgents last month is a critical development. In the country’s deadliest train hijack, 33 attackers, and at least 21 soldiers and 10 civilians were killed. Reports of top-level policy deliberations following the attack suggest Islamabad is considering a major policy shift.

Pakistan has said that it will transform into a “hard state” against terror because it is fighting for its “survival”. This reflects that the state feels its survival is now in jeopardy. Moreover, in an indirect reference to India which is blamed for terrorism in Pakistan, Islamabad vowed to defeat not only terrorists but also their “facilitators”, an unmistaken reference to India.

Pakistan might thus respond to what it sees as an existential threat by attempting to climb up the escalation ladder. Since it is now considered a survival issue, all risks might be taken, including the risk of large-scale conventional war. This is a very perilous proposition, especially because both India and Pakistan have powerful militaries, advanced military technologies, and nuclear weapons. For India, this can insinuate going back to square one: risk of war—the eventuality India’s defensive offense was designed to avoid.

The Way Forward

 A great deal of distrust defines the current situation. Pakistan believes that it needs to respond because India’s alleged involvement in Balochistan is aimed at dismembering the country, just like it did in former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). New Delhi fears that if stability returns to Pakistan, it might use it as an opportunity to undercut India’s security, just as it did in Kashmir for decades.

The net result is a conundrum that can spiral out of control and lead to a war between two nuclear powers. This must be averted. Both sides need to tread carefully and mend their ways.

For New Delhi to feel that it no longer needs to establish deterrence by punishment, Pakistan must credibly indicate that it will not unleash any covert operations in India. For Islamabad to feel that its survival is not in jeopardy, India must guarantee that it will not meddle in Pakistan’s internal affairs.

For any de-escalation, which is critical from a security standpoint, both sides need to talk to build trust. Everything starts with communication, and conflicts are often resolved through communication. This might be tough, but peace requires tough decisions.