Subcontinent Adrift: Strategic Futures of South Asia
By Feroz Hassan Khan
Cambria Press, UK
ISBN: 978-1621966487
280pp.

In a few sentences, Feroz Hassan Khan’s remarkable book Subcontinent Adrift: Strategic Futures of South Asia sums up Pakistan’s strategic culture and thinking, stating that Pakistan tends to view everything through an India-centric lens. Pakistan sees itself as the underdog and India as the hegemon itching to inflict a major military defeat on Pakistan.

At the same time, Pakistanis view their armed forces as the heroic vanguard against Indian and foreign encroachment and are generally sceptical of their elected civilian governments — four times in 75 years, civilians have welcomed the military’s seizure of power. They also view the state’s nuclear arsenal as a monumental feat of national resolve that has guaranteed its survival against a determined enemy.

Khan has had a long career in the Pakistan Army, serving in the strategic planning division and retiring with the rank of brigadier. He teaches at the United States Naval Postgraduate School in California and is the author of Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb.

In his new book, which offers an insider’s account of how Pakistan’s strategic decision making went awry almost from day one, Khan writes that Pakistan remains fixated on “seeking parity with its mightier neighbour” which, in turn, remains fixated on reducing Pakistan to “West Bangladesh” — a term coined by the late Stephen P. Cohen of the Brookings Institution, who taught and inspired a whole generation of South Asian scholars.

A former military man delves into Pakistan’s strategic culture and thinking with reference to India. The book is likely to remain an essential reference on South Asia for years to come

Khan’s book makes it clear that Pakistan was an experiment in the creation of a nation. Other than religion, there was no glue to hold it together. He writes that the army stepped in to save the nation from failing but, in my opinion, that is a fallacy, since the country broke up on the army’s watch in December 1971. Quoting Cohen, Khan writes that the army was successful in preventing the civilians from governing the country, but not imaginative enough to transform the country into an Asian tiger.

India exploded five nuclear bombs in May 1998; Pakistan followed up with six bombs in the same month. Khan states that nuclear weapons have not prevented the two countries from going to war, but they have contributed to an arms race that has seriously hurt the economic development of both. Furthermore, the “triggers that could set off a major military crisis under the nuclear shadow continue to multiply.”

The author argues that Pakistan sees everything through an Indo-centric lens, while India remains engaged in an arms race with China without worrying about how its armaments programme is creating paranoia in Pakistan. Each is engrossed in brinkmanship of the highest order, hoping to force the other to blink first.

According to Khan, the army holds the national reins of power, directing all major economic, military, technological and foreign policy decisions. Pakistan remains obsessed with seeking parity with India and, in the process, has “exhausted itself both economically and strategically.”

A surprising omission, though, is any reference to how the army has smothered the development of civilian institutions, thus crippling the realisation of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s dream of a secular democratic republic. Indeed, as Khan notes, the genie of religion let loose under Gen Ziaul Haq forever changed the country’s body politic.

Professor Scott Sagan of Stanford University introduced me to Khan when he was visiting the campus and I handed him a reprint of my paper that had just appeared in a British military journal. It was a critique of the army’s performance in its wars with India and, to my surprise, Khan took it with a smile.

We met again at the two Stanford conferences that Khan cites in his book. The intent of these conferences was to find ways of diffusing the tension between Pakistan and India that had been triggered by the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament. At one point, some one million troops were deployed on the border. This was very worrying, since both countries had demonstrated their nuclear weaponry in May 1998.

More than two decades have gone by. The standoff between Pakistan and India continues, as Khan painstakingly documents in the book. The US has yet to intervene. Would it even make a difference if it did intervene?

Cohen once told me that Kashmir may just be a symbol of the distrust between the siblings; even if a solution is found, the two nations will come up with other reasons to fight. The conflict is not just over territory; it’s over conflicting, overlapping identities.

As Harvard Law School professor Roger Fisher notes in his book Getting to Yes: How to Negotiate Agreement Without Giving In, most problems can be worked out; some can’t. The Pakistan-India issue seems to be one of the latter.

Khan is critical of the oversized role the army has played in Pakistan, citing Austrian philosopher Hans Kelsen’s Doctrine of Necessity. But he also criticises how civilians have governed the country, giving the army an excuse to intervene.

Pakistan’s wars — fought with India since Partition — have left it debilitated. Several were meant to wrest Kashmir from India, yet Kashmir’s status remains unchanged. The world is simply not interested in resolving the dispute. Many solutions have been offered, the most obvious being to accept the Line of Control (LoC) as the international border. While that would please India, it won’t please Pakistan.

Before it broke away in 1971, East Pakistan was economically far behind the western wing. Fifty years on, Bangladesh has surpassed Pakistan. Its policies are not India-centric, it doesn’t engage in costly, dangerous, neighbourhood races and it has fought no wars.

Pakistan’s former finance minister Shahid Javed Burki has stated that every time Pakistan came to an economic crossroads, “it took the wrong turn.” In the early 1960s, Pakistan’s economy was — to quote Walt Rostow, former US national security adviser — poised to “take off.” South Korean officials visiting Pakistan in the early ’60s copied the Pakistani model. In a few decades, South Korea became an Asian tiger, whereas Pakistan chose to fight a war with India, allowed economic decline to set in and ended up languishing in the backwaters.

In Looking Back: How Pakistan Became an Asian Tiger by 2050, Vice Chancellor of the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Nadeemul Haque, postulates a scenario of success resulting from a bottom-up movement of networks. Unfortunately, there are no signs that such a utopia is in the offing.

Subcontinent Adrift, meanwhile, postulates three future scenarios: the good, the bad and the ugly. If history is any guide, the most likely scenario will be the status quo — that is, the bad. But the ugly cannot be ruled out. To paraphrase American physicist Herman Kahn, we must continue thinking about the unthinkable.

On the US-USSR arms race, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said that the nations “often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision … Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time even two blind men can do enormous damage to each other.”

The dangers posed by the Pakistan-India arms race are much greater: they’re two of the world’s most populous countries, they’re right next to each other so there’s no room to ‘feel their way around’, and the bombs’ strike time is less than five minutes.

Unfortunately, Pakistan won’t let go. It wanted to have a bomb at all cost and, now that it does, it wants to match India by engaging in an endless nuclear arms race. In this context, Khan discusses the aerial skirmish that took place in the spring of 2019. Pakistan scored a tactical win and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi used that as an excuse to boost his popularity by purchasing 36 Dassault Rafale fighter jets from France.

Subcontinent Adrift is an edifying contribution to the Pakistan-India issue. The book has its limitations — Khan could have used a formal process of engaging with experts in the development of scenarios and listing all the references at the end would have been beneficial — but it will remain an essential reference on South Asia for years to come.

The reviewer is the author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan: The Price of Strategic Myopia. He tweets @ahmadfaruqui

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 12th, 2023