Introduction
New Delhi’s gamble is that calibrated punishment places the onus for escalation – and so the risk of further isolation – onto Pakistan.
There have been small, revisionist powers with a penchant for asymmetric warfare. And there have been small, nuclear-armed powers. But until Pakistan became nuclear-armed in the late 1980s, inching its way, one cold test at a time, to an air-delivered device a few steps ahead of its larger neighbour, there was no small, revisionist, nuclear-armed state in the world. Perhaps North Korea has since travelled a similar path, but its external provocations have had considerably less impact outside its borders than those of Pakistan. It has supported violent separatist movements, militant Islamist guerrillas and urban terrorist attacks in both Afghanistan and India, ramping up involvement as its nuclear shield matured through the 1990s. These proxies have failed to wrest Kashmir from India or guarantee a pliant Kabul, and have resulted in drastic blowback within Pakistan itself, in the form of more than 20,000 civilian deaths in the past decade alone But they have kept India off balance, forcing it to divert defensive resources away from China and highlighting the shortcomings of the state.
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