Indian plan to deter Pakistan more myth than reality

A strategy developed by the  Indian military to fight a lightning and limited war with  Pakistan without crossing nuclear red lines has stirred  concern across the border and in the United States, but the  plan is years, if not decades away from battle readiness. 

Cold Start involves the deployment of battle groups inside  Pakistan within 72 hours of a Mumbai-style attack to carry out  a punitive operation without threatening the survival of the  Pakistani state and triggering a nuclear confrontation. 

It flows from the Indian government's slow-footed response  to an attack on parliament in 2001, which was also traced back to Pakistani militant groups, when it took months for the  large, lumbering army to deploy on the borders.  

By then, the element of surprise was long gone, and Delhi  had come under intense international pressure to climb down. 

Pakistan says the Indian battle plan is at the heart of  its refusal to move forces away from the Indian border to  fight militants on the Afghan borderlands, hindering the US  war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. 

It has drawn concern in the Pentagon too, which worries  about any disruption of its long supply line for troops in  Afghanistan that runs through Pakistan. 

But as the US ambassador to Delhi said in secret cables  published by Wikileaks and corroborated by independent  military experts, the Indian army's Cold Start doctrine is a  mixture of myth and reality. 

The military has neither the manoeuvrability or the  firepower to rapidly deploy and fight the air and land battle  envisaged in the strategy, and it is not even clear whether  the civilian authorities have signed off on the plan.  

Above all, the idea that you can fight a conventional war  without risking a nuclear confrontation between two neighbours  with a troubled history for more than 60 years is a vast  gamble, say military analysts.  

"It has never been and may never be put to use on a  battlefield because of substantial and serious resource  constraints, but it is a developed operational attack plan  announced in 2004 and intended to be taken off the shelf and  implemented within a 72-hour period during a crisis,"  Ambassador Tim Roemer wrote in a February 2010 cable.  

Indeed, as Roemer notes, if the Indian government really  intended to implement Cold Start and thus risk "rolling the  nuclear dice", the Mumbai attacks were an opportunity.  

"First, the GOI (government of India) refrained from  implementing Cold Start even after an attack as audacious and  bloody as the Mumbai attack, which calls into serious question  the GOI's willingness to actually adopt the Cold Start option." 

Roemer also questioned Pakistan's sincerity in drumming up  fears over the Indian military plan, saying it had failed to  deter Pakistani mischief inside India even though they had  known its existence since 2004. 

On Tuesday, a bomb went off in a holy Indian town, killing  a child and wounding several Hindu worshippers, an attack that  reinforced concerns that India remained vulnerable, and that  ties with Pakistan could quickly unravel if acts of violence  were linked to militants based there. 

Pakistan has warned that the Indian battleplan further  de-stabilised regional security, and that it would take  measures to counter the strategy. Retired Pakistani army  general Talat Masood said it was a fallacy to think the two  countries could fight a limited war without the risk of  escalation.  

"So the potential of a nuclear conflict as a result of  Cold Start doctrine is very much a possibility and surely, it  will result in escalation to the conventional level," he said. 

 
OPERATIONAL PLAN 

But there is no denying that the Cold Start plan exists in  some form and there are proponents in the Indian security  establishment who think they can fight a limited war without  crossing Pakistan's nuclear threshold.  

"I would say that Cold Start is in the experimental state  of development, having moved beyond pure speculation but more  than a decade or two away from full implementation," said  Walter Ladwig, a South Asia security affairs expert at Oxford  University who has written a seminal paper on Cold Start. 

Ladwig said the army had yet to organise itself into  integrated battle groups envisaged under the plan and the tank  corps are not fully operational.  

Only 20 per cent of armoured vehicles had night vision  capabilities and the artillery had less than 10 per cent of the  self-propelled guns that ground forces would require for a  rapid thrust across the border.  

The army also did not have enough attack helicopters and  the transport helicopters that it had could barely lift 15  per cent of the troops and armour required for such an operation.  

Pakistan was well aware of the shortcomings of the Indian  army and for all its protests over the plan, it was not as  concerned as made out to be, Ladwig said.  

"What it has done is handed Islamabad and Rawalpindi a  propaganda coup," Ladwig said.  

"Although Cold Start is explicitly a response to  Pakistan's support for terrorism, leaders in Islamabad have  managed to portray India's pursuit of a limited war capability  as evidence of New Delhi's 'hostile intent' and 'hegemonic'  designs that will 'destabilize the regional balance'."  

Retired Indian army brigadier Gurmeet Kanwal who heads the  Centre for Land Warfare Studies in New Delhi says the doctrine  was essentially an attempt to address the problem of  mobilisation of the 1.1 million-strong army. It is also aimed  at taking the battle into Pakistan. 

"It is essentially a pro-active deterrence strategy with  the clear implication that the Indian armed forces will take  the initiative and the next war in the plains will be fought  in the adversary's territory," he said.