The India-Pakistan Cold War

The current stalemate between India and Pakistan should be viewed not as a pause between rounds of negotiation, but rather as part of a deliberate Indian strategy of disengagement. India will return to the negotiating table only after Pakistan dismantles, comprehensively and verifiably, its state-supported terrorist networks. NEW DELHI—For decades, South Asia was locked in a perpetual cycle of conflict management: brief military clashes between India and Pakistan would be followed by de-escalation and the resumption of formal peace talks, which eventually gave way to another bout of conflict. But this pattern has now been broken. No high-level dialogue has taken place since 2016. Rather than some temporary diplomatic tantrum, this reflects a paradigm shift in Indian foreign policy, permanently altering the subcontinent’s security architecture. The roots of this stalemate can be found in the structural failures of past diplomacy. In 1947, 1965, and 1971, Pakistan initiated conventional wars, none of which delivered the results it desired. The third resulted in the breakup of the country and the birth of independent Bangladesh. These experiences, together with the success of the US-backed mujahideen in their fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, prompted Pakistan’s military to embrace a new strategy, based on asymmetrical warfare—or, more bluntly, terrorism. From 1989 to 1993, as terrorist attacks caused significant civilian casualties in India, Pakistani officers crowed about “bleeding India to death by a thousand cuts.” Indian leaders were nonetheless convinced that, through structured dialogue, they could persuade Pakistan to abandon this strategy. It was this belief that, in the late 1990s, gave rise to the Composite Dialogue framework, a bureaucratic mechanism designed to segment contentious issues, ranging from Kashmir to trade and humanitarian concerns, so that friction in one area would not derail progress in others. Continue Reading