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nbr special report #61 | december 2016
pakistan’s
strategic culture
Implications for How Pakistan Perceives
and Counters Threats
By C. Christine Fair
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pakistan’s
strategic culture
Implications for How Pakistan Perceives and
Counters Threats
C. Christine Fair
A report from
the strategic asia program
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FOREWORD
T
he 2016–17 edition in the National Bureau of Asian Research’s Strategic Asia series,
Understanding Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific, is the second in a three-volume
project to assess the nature of geopolitical competition in the Asia-Pacific. Last year’s
volume examined the resources available to a range of major powers in the region and the
ability of each country’s political system to convert those resources into military and diplomatic
power. The 2016–17 volume builds on the first, examining the same seven states in order to better
understand how each country’s distinctive strategic culture affects its pursuit of strategic objectives
and national power.
In this NBR Special Report, which supplements this year’s Strategic Asia volume, C. Christine
Fair examines the strategic culture of Pakistan and its implications for U.S. policy. She argues that
Pakistan’s security perceptions are deeply rooted within the Pakistan Army, which perpetuates
the image of the country as an insecure and incomplete state bordered on one side by Afghanistan
(perceived as a source of instability) and on the other by India (perceived as a regional hegemon
that wishes to dominate or destroy Pakistan). This perspective has been engrained within the army
and conveyed to society at large.
Pakistan’s strategic culture has induced the state to use ideological tools to foster nationalism,
pursue strategic depth in Afghanistan by interfering in that state’s affairs, and utilize proxy fighters
in the struggle with India. These policies endure because U.S. efforts to induce Pakistan to adopt
a less destabilizing approach have not succeeded. Fair concludes that if the United States wishes
to force change in Pakistan, it must come to realize that enhanced pressure will not necessarily
destabilize the state, and that the benefits of more decisively inducing change in the country’s
strategic outlook far outweigh those of allowing the status quo to persist.
Alison Szalwinski and Michael Wills

The National Bureau of Asian Research
Pakistan’s Strategic Culture:

Implications for How Pakistan Perceives
and Counters Threats
C. Christine Fair
C. CHRISTINE FAIRis an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She can be

reached at <[email protected]>.
NOTE: S
ections of this report are adapted from the author’s work Fighting to the
End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
The reader is advised to consult this book for more detail on methods and data.
1
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report analyzes four key concepts undergirding the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture
and considers the implications for U.S. and Indian efforts to manage the threat from Pakistan.
MAIN ARGUMENT
Pakistan remains a staunchly revisionist state that both continues to assert territorial
equities in Kashmir and seeks to resist India’s rise in the international system. Its revisionism
motivated it to start wars in 1947–48, 1965, and 1999, all of which it failed to win, as well
as to sustain a proxy war in Kashmir, the most recent campaign of which began in 1989.
Pakistan has adopted several strategies to manage its security environment, including
ideological tools, the pursuit of strategic depth in Afghanistan, and the use of proxy fighters
under its expanding nuclear umbrella. Pakistan continues to pursue these strategies even
though they are very unlikely to succeed and have imposed a high cost on the state. Much of
its behavior, however, can be explained by the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army. This
culture is characterized by four beliefs: (1) that Pakistan is an insecure and incomplete state,
(2) that Afghanistan is a source of instability, (3) that India rejects the two-nation theory and
seeks to dominate or destroy Pakistan, and (4) that India is a regional hegemon that must be
resisted. The Pakistan Army controls most levers of power with respect to national security
and foreign policy, as well as domestic policies that influence these domains. Moreover, this
strategic culture is enduring and unlikely to change, as will be demonstrated by a study of
Pakistani military publications.
POLICY IMPLICATIONS
• Pakistan’s security perceptions are deeply entrenched within the army, which has
successfully cultivated support among wide swathes of Pakistanis.
• Past U.S. efforts to induce Pakistan to be less dangerous have failed principally because
they have relied on inducements that have actually rewarded the country for its reckless
behavior. The challenge for the U.S., therefore, is to devise a suite of compellent strategies
that can alter Pakistan’s cost-benefit calculus in using nonstate actors.
• For the U.S. to fail to adopt such compellent strategies would be to accept that Pakistan will
become ever more dangerous while being subsidized by U.S. taxpayers and multilateral
institutions.
P
akistan is a territorially revisionist state in that it seeks to secure control over all the
disputed territory of Kashmir even though Pakistan was never entitled to this territory
under the terms of partition set by Britain when it decolonized the subcontinent in 1947.1
Pakistan is revisionist in another sense, as well, in that it seeks to impede India’s rise
in the global system. India, in contrast, is territorially satisfied with the status quo but mildly
revisionist with respect to its place in the international system.2 Pakistan’s insistence on these
revisionist aims has implications for how the Pakistan Army uses instruments of force and other
elements of national power. Since 1947, Pakistan has remained locked in an enduring rivalry3
with India: it began (and failed to win) wars over Kashmir in 1947–48, 1965, and 1999 and has
sustained a proxy war in Kashmir in hopes of coercing India to abandon it.4 Pakistan’s revisionist
agenda not only has posed heavy costs on the state; in recent years it also has directly affected
the security of Pakistani citizens and even the stability of the state itself. Current members and
direct descendants of many of the militant groups spawned by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies
now target the country’s civilian, military, and intelligence institutions, as well as its citizens.5
Moreover, the pursuit of Kashmir has imposed significant economic costs on the Pakistani
state.6 Still, these revisionist goals endure despite the accretion of evidence that Pakistan cannot
achieve them even modestly at present and is less likely to prevail in the future as the power
differential with India continues to expand.7
Pakistan should have abandoned its revisionism long ago. After all, “good strategy
will…ensure that objectives are attained while poor strategy will lead to the ineffective execution
of a state’s power….It is also assumed that strategies that fail to attain a state’s objectives will,
in all probability, evolve or be abandoned.” 8 However, Pakistan remains resolutely revisionist,
even though persevering with this policy will impose greater costs on the state while increasingly
setting it up to fail. Given India’s ascent and Pakistan’s decline in the international system, game
rationality predicts that Pakistan should come to some accommodation with India sooner rather
than later, as conceding defeat earlier will be less costly than doing so in the future when the
power differential between them is even larger.9
The army’s strategic culture explains much—albeit not all—of this puzzling behavior. I focus on
the army rather than the Pakistan government or other sociopolitical formations because the army
dominates decision-making with respect to domestic and foreign policy and will likely continue to
do so for the policy-relevant future. In other words, this report posits that the strategic culture of the
1 Whereas some scholars may use the term “revisionist” with respect to the territorial status quo, I use this term in a more general sense to
denote a state’s desire not only to change borders but also to alter political orders.
2 C. Raja Mohan, “India and the Balance of Power,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006, 17–32.
3 An enduring rivalry is characterized as “conflicts between two or more states [that] last more than two decades with several militarized
interstate disputes punctuating the relationship.” See T.V. Paul, The India-Pakistan Conflict: An Enduring Rivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 3.
4 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947–2005 (London: Routledge, 2007); and C. Christine
Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
5 C. Christine Fair, “The Militant Challenge in Pakistan,” Asia Policy, no. 11 (2011): 105–37; Zahid Hussain, The Scorpion’s Tail (New York:
Free Press, 2010); and Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad.
6 Shahid Javed Burkie, “Kashmir: A Problem in Search of a Solution,” United States Institute of Peace, Peaceworks, no. 59, March 2007,
http://www.usip.org/files/resources/PWmarch2007.pdf.
7 Fair, Fighting to the End.
8 John Glenn, “Realism versus Strategic Culture: Competition and Collaboration,” International Studies Review 11, no. 3 (2009): 533.
9 Game rationality derives from the work of Thomas Schelling and posits that there is an ahistorical and acultural, universal strategic calculus
that guides a rational player’s decision-making based on available information. This theory implies that multiple actors would make the
same choices using this universal cost-benefit calculus and the same information to attain a stated objective. Thomas C. Schelling, The
Strategy of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).
PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

3
army is functionally equivalent to that of Pakistan for most intents and purposes because the army
controls most of the levers of power that influence the country’s behavior in the international system
and has the dominant voice in domestic policy on critical issues of national security.10
One of the most enduring features of this strategic culture is that the army construes threats
in ideological and civilizational terms. Its claim to Kashmir is embedded in the pre-partition
“two-nation theory,” according to which Pakistan is the homeland of South Asia’s Muslims. To
effectuate fully the larger project of partition and the two-nation theory, Kashmir—the only
Muslim-majority state in contemporary India—must join Pakistan. This is reflected in the
common slogan Kashmir, Pakistan banega (Kashmir will become Pakistan). Equally important,
the army construes its conflict with India in civilizational terms in which “Muslim Pakistan” must
resist the designs and ruses of a devious “Hindu India.”
Four principal themes undergird the strategic culture of the Pakistan Army. One theme is its
enduring belief that Pakistan was born an insecure and incomplete state due to the ways in which
Britain executed the partition of the Raj. Second, the army regards Afghanistan as a source of
instability due to the intentions of the Afghan state both on its own and in collusion with India.
Third, it charges India with being implacably opposed to Pakistan’s existence and seeking to
undermine the ideological moorings of the state, if not the state itself. In extrema, the Pakistan
Army believes that India would destroy Pakistan if it could. Fourth, the army believes that India
seeks to be a regional hegemon and impose its will on Pakistan and neighboring countries. This
report details how the army operationalizes these strategic concepts as well as the tools that it has
developed over time to contend with these perceptions.
The remainder of this report is organized as follows. The first section describes how the
notion of strategic culture helps explain Pakistan’s obdurate revisionism and the policies that
ensue. It then develops in greater detail the four key concepts entrenched in the army’s strategic
culture discussed above. In the second section, I describe both the ways in which the Pakistan
Army operationalizes these concepts and the tools it uses to manage them. Finally, the report
concludes with a discussion of implications for U.S. and Indian efforts to contend with the
threat from Pakistan.
The Strategic Culture of the Pakistan Army

What Is Strategic Culture?
Proponents of strategic culture aver that the concept can explain the national security
objectives that states formulate as well as the choices that they make to actuate these objectives.11
This report employs a definition offered by Alastair Iain Johnston, which he derived from the
work of Clifford Geertz:
10 Fair, Fighting to the End. See also Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
11 International relations scholars debate whether and, if so, how culture matters in international politics. See, for example, Rudra Chaudhuri,
“Why Culture Matters: Revisiting the Sino-Indian Border War of 1962,” Journal of Strategic Studies 32, no. 6 (2009): 841–69; and
Michael C. Desch, “Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 141–70.
Scholars disagree about what strategic culture is and how it can be defined and operationalized. Even if one concedes that the notion is
intellectually justified, how does one demonstrate that state behavior (the dependent variable) is causally influenced by strategic culture (the
independent variable)? Others note with concern that it is easy to overly essentialize the subject of inquiry and produce crude, if not racist
or ethnocentric, caricatures. See, for example, George K. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica: RAND
Corporation, 1992); and Joel Larus, Culture and Political-Military Behavior: The Hindus in Premodern India (Calcutta: Minerva, 1979).
4 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

Strategic culture is an integrated system of symbols (e.g., argumentation
structures, languages, analogies, metaphors) which acts to establish pervasive
and long-lasting strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and
efficacy of military force in interstate political affairs, and by clothing these
conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem
uniquely realistic and efficacious.12
There are two constituent parts of Johnston’s “system of symbols.” The first concerns the basic
assumptions that the institution in question and its stakeholders hold concerning the strategic
environment. These assumptions provide important information that is shared among key
stakeholders and reduces uncertainty about the strategic environment. Importantly, they emerge
from “deeply historical sources, not from the current environment.”13 The second element of the
system of symbols is an operational understanding of the means that are the most efficacious
for managing threats, contingent on how the institution understands its strategic environment.
Johnston argues that while it is very difficult to relate strategic culture to specific behavioral
choices—in part because the evidentiary requirements are quite onerous—scholars should at
least be able to demonstrate how strategic culture limits the options available to the institution in
question.14 In the analysis that follows, I ask these questions of the Pakistan Army. My principal
data sources are decades of professional publications authored by Pakistani military officers.
The Four Key Features of the Pakistan Army’s Strategic Culture

From my extensive perusal of Pakistani military publications and memoirs of officers, I
delineate four persistent themes, summarized in Table 1.15
Enduring belief in Pakistan as an insecure and incomplete state. First and foremost, the army
understands Pakistan to be an insecure and incomplete state that was born from an inherently
unfair partition process in 1947. Thus, it views partition as an incomplete process. There are
several contentions that undergird this first perception. Pakistan was not an equal inheritor of
the institutions of the Raj, given that most of those institutions remained in what is now India.
Pakistan, being the smaller and poorer state, had to simultaneously craft the apparatus of
governing while also contending with a humanitarian disaster stemming from partition that was
far greater in magnitude than that experienced by India. Without evidence, the Pakistan Army
continues to gripe that the British conspired to carve up the Punjab Province with the intent of
allocating specific districts to India that would enable it to invade Kashmir with ground forces.16
The army believes that premeditated activities related to the formal division of the Raj, as well
as unplanned violent incidents stemming from partition, bequeathed to Pakistan insecure and
ill-defined borders, crippling human capital deficits, an intractable security competition with
India, and inadequate resources with which to contend with these myriad challenges.
12 Alistair Iain Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” International Security 19, no. 4 (1995): 46. See also Clifford Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
13 Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” 46.
14 Alistair Iain Johnson, Cultural Realism: Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 37.
15 This section draws extensively on Fair, Fighting to the End.
16 Shereen Ilahi, “The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Fate of Kashmir,” India Review 2, no. 1 (2003): 77–102. Pakistanis believe that
Kashmir should belong to Pakistan even though neither the Indian Independence Act of 1947 nor the Radcliffe Commission, which oversaw
partition, ordained such an outcome. Pakistanis rest their claim to Kashmir on the aforementioned two-nation theory, despite the fact that
the concept had no legal standing. Successive civilian leaders, as well as army chiefs (including the current one), assert that Kashmir is the
“unfinished agenda” of partition. See “Kashmir Is Unfinished Agenda Which Hinders Regional Peace: Gen Raheel,” Dawn, October 2, 2015,
http://www.dawn.com/news/1210468/kashmir-is-unfinished-agenda-which-hinders-regional-peace-gen-raheel.

5
ta b l e 1 The Pakistan Army’s system of symbols
Strategic beliefs about the Strategies for operationalizing

Tools to manage threats
threat environment these beliefs
• Instrumentalize Islam.
Defend Pakistan’s ideological and
Pakistan is an insecure and • Conduct asymmetric
geographic frontiers; finish the
incomplete state. conflict, war, politics,
“unfinished” process of partition.
and diplomacy.
• Maintain a forward vs. close
Afghanistan is source border policy with respect
of instability (often in Develop strategic depth. to Afghanistan.
collusion with India). • Use FATA/Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa as a buffer.
• Wage wars and conflict with
India as defensive jihad
India is opposed to the against kufar (nonbelievers).
Sustain public and military
two-nation theory and
appetite for indefinite • Misrepresent all wars
seeks to dominate or
civilizational war. with India.
destroy Pakistan.
• Cast Pakistan Army as
“Islamic warriors.”
View risk-taking (e.g., in Kargil • Threaten jihad under a
India is a hegemon that in 2001 and 2008) as always nuclear umbrella.
must be resisted. preferable to doing nothing, • Develop external ties.
which amounts to defeat. • Cultivate militants.
The belief that Afghanistan is a source of instability. A second core tenet of the army’s strategic
culture is its belief that it inherited the most dangerous frontier of the British Raj—the border with
Afghanistan—but received a small fraction of the Raj’s resources to manage this threat. Despite
popular commentary to the contrary, Pakistan’s quest for “strategic depth” began at independence
and was in fact inherited from British security managers.17 Through most of Pakistan’s history, the
concept of strategic depth has implied political—not physical—depth in Afghanistan by which the
army has sought to cultivate a regime in Afghanistan that is favorably disposed toward Pakistan
while hostile to India. This policy aimed to restrict Indian access to Afghanistan, fearing that India
could harm Pakistan’s interests if it were allowed a significant presence there. Only General Mirza
Aslam Beg (Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s army chief) conceived of strategic depth as a physical
place where Pakistan could emplace military assets to protect them from an Indian assault.18
While some analysts reduce Pakistan’s concerns in Afghanistan to its desire to restrict India’s
presence there and thus hinder any plan to destabilize Pakistan’s western restive border,19 these
apprehensions originate from the actions of the Afghan state in the early years of Pakistan’s
independence. For example, Afghanistan rejected Pakistan’s bid to join the United Nations;
17 Christian Tripodi, The Edge of Empire: The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier 1877–1947 (Farham:
Ashgate, 2011); Joshua T. White, “The Shape of Frontier Rule: Governance and Transition, from the Raj to the Modern Pakistani Frontier,”
Asian Security 4, no. 3 (2008): 219–43; and Rizwan Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan (Burlington:
Ashgate, 2005).
18 Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan.
19 See, for example, Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, “From Great Game to Grand Bargain: Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan,”
Foreign Affairs, November/December 2008.

rejected the Durand Line as the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan; made irredentist
claims on large swathes of Pakistani territory in Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province,
and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA); and aided and abetted Baluch and Pashtun
separatists, among other provocations. Pakistani writers both in and out of uniform have
attributed Afghanistan’s intrepidity to India’s instigation.20 This conviction about the intertwined
nature of the Afghan and Indian threats and the ability of Afghanistan, either on its own or with
Indian assistance, to destabilize Pakistan has been a constant theme in Pakistani military and
even civilian discourses.21
Since 2001, under the security umbrella of the United States and NATO, India has re-established
its presence in Afghanistan. Given the enduring nature of Pakistan’s threat perceptions about
Afghanistan and its potential for collusion with India, it should come as no surprise that Pakistan
believes that “the active Indian presence in Afghanistan is pushing Pakistan for a two-front war.”22
It would be foolish to simply dismiss these apprehensions simply because Pakistan has failed to
marshal the requisite credible evidence to support its claims.
The belief that India is opposed to the two-nation theory and seeks to dominate or destroy
Pakistan. A third critical component of the army’s strategic culture is the unwavering conviction
that India, obdurately opposed to the two-nation theory, cannot countenance Pakistan’s existence
as a Muslim state and consequently seeks to dominate or destroy it. Ayub Khan offers some of the
earliest synthesis of this kind of ideation about India. Drawing from Pakistan’s partition-related
experiences, he avowed that India is unable “to reconcile herself to our existence as a sovereign
independent State. The Indian attitude can only be explained in pathological terms. The Indian
leaders have a deep hatred for the Muslims….From the beginning, India was determined to make
things difficult for us.”23 Ayub’s writings evince a belief that should Pakistan’s ideology fail, then
the state itself would fail as well. To ensure the success of this ideology, and thus of Pakistan
itself, his government had to actively promote it and secure its legitimacy within Pakistan. This
conviction that India seeks to undermine, if not destroy, Pakistan was given further ballast by
India’s decisive victory in the 1971 India-Pakistan War.24 This belief about India continues to
animate both the rhetoric and actions of the Pakistan Army. Lest one believe that this conviction is
obsolete or anachronous, in September 2016, amid rising bilateral tensions over India’s retaliatory
punitive strikes on Pakistani terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Public Relations declared that “Pakistan’s armed forces together with our resilient
20 For example, General Mohammad Ayub Khan wrote that Afghanistan was emboldened to challenge Pakistan due to “constant Indian
propaganda [that] Pakistan could not survive as a separate State. The Afghan rulers believed this to be true and decided to stake a claim
to our territory before Pakistan disintegrated…In this way the idea of an artificial State of Pkhtoonistan [sic] inside our borders was made
an issue by the Afghan rulers….In this claim the Afghans were backed by India whose interests lay in ensuring that in the event of a war
with us over Kashmir, the Afghans should open a second front against Pakistan on the North West Frontier….The Indians thought that
they would be able to hem us in and embarrass us by a pincer movement.” See Mohammad Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political
Autobiography (1967; repr., Islamabad: Mr. Books, 2006), 197.
21 See, for example, Fazal Muqeem Khan, The Story of the Pakistan Army (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1963); M. Aslam Siddiqi, “Can
Pakistan Stay Neutral?” Pakistan Horizon 11, no. 2 (1958): 70–78; and Israr Ahmad Ghumman, “Pakistan’s Geostrategic Environment and
Military System,” Pakistan Army Journal 31 (1990): 26–37.
22 Muhammad Khan, “Security Environment in South Asia,” Hilal 48 (2011): 19.
23 Khan, Friends Not Masters, 135. Elsewhere in the same text, Ayub asserts that “India’s hegemonic impulses, its implacable hostility to
Pakistan, and the intolerance of the Hindu priestly caste, the Brahmins, contends that India was not content with her present sphere of
influence and she knew that Pakistan had the will and the capacity to frustrate her expansionist designs. She wanted to browbeat us into
subservience. All we wanted was to live as equal and honourable neighbors, but to that India would never agree. It was Brahmin chauvinism
and arrogance that had forced us to seek a homeland of our own where we could order our life according to our thinking and faith…There
was [a] fundamental opposition between the ideologies of India and Pakistan.” Khan, Friends Not Masters, 194–95.
24 Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

7
nation have surmounted every challenge and will thwart any sinister design against integrity and
sovereignty of Pakistan in [the] future as well.”25
The belief that India is a hegemon that must be resisted. The fourth concept in the Pakistan
Army’s strategic culture concerns the existential threat from India directly, from its ability to
collude with its neighbors, and from its rise in the international system. Again, Ayub Khan gave an
early voice to this belief. He asserted in 1967 that behind all the Indo-Pakistan discord is “India’s
ambition to absorb Pakistan or turn her into a satellite….From the day of independence, Pakistan
was involved in a bitter and prolonged struggle for her very existence and survival….Indian
efforts in the field of foreign policy were all directed towards one aim, the isolation of Pakistan
and its disintegration.”26 Later writers echo this same concern. In 1971, Major Mohammad Aslam
Zuberi opined that “extremists [in India] still dream of Akhund Bharat [an undivided India].
Even moderates would like to see Pakistan in a position of India’s satellite” after which “Pakistan
would be reduced to a status of an innocuous spectator.”27 In 1985, Major Khalid Mehmud wrote
that “India has its peculiar perception of security for South Asia and wants to impose its security
and economic system upon the entire region.…It also wants to restrict the foreign policy choices
and options of its neighbours and wants them to make their policies compatible with the Indian
foreign policy objectives.”28 Another author writing in this vein suggested in 1988 that “India has
ambitions to play a much wider role than just being confined to South Asia. Many in India believe
that it is destined to have a global role, and some even visualize it as ranking immediately behind
the superpowers and alongside powers like China.”29
The implications of Indian aspirations (as they appear in Pakistani defense publications) are
ominous for Pakistan and the army. Writing in March 1990, Lieutenant Colonel Israr Ahma
Ghumman summarized Pakistan’s predicament as a small state confronting “multidirectional
threats to her security due to her geostrategic importance, national policies and ideological stance.
Pakistan remains sandwiched between an expanding ideology [the Soviet Union] and a hegemonic
neighbor [India] forcing it to live in a perpetual state of external conflict.” Ghumman believed that
India would inevitably become the “dominant regional power,” but “she finds Pakistan a much
smaller country, as the sole embarrassing stumbling block.” While this is of some comfort, he
further noted that “India is in modernization of her armed forces. Once the Indian military might
is developed, it is likely to be unleashed [on] Pakistan at a time of her choosing.” For Ghumman,
the “immediate threat to Pakistan emanates from hegemonic designs of hostile India, which
considers Pakistan as a stumbling block in her way to achieving a regional power status.”30 The
twinned narratives of India as a regional hegemon with nefarious intent and Pakistan as the sole
country to resist persist in Pakistani security discourse.31
25 Syed Samme Abbas, “Pakistan Fully Prepared to Respond to Any Threat: Gen Raheel,” Dawn, September 19, 2016, http://www.dawn.com/
news/1284742.
26 Khan, Friends Not Masters, 135–37.
27 Muhammad Aslam Zuberi, “The Challenge of a Nuclear India,” Pakistan Army Journal 13 (1971): 22.
28 Khalid Mehmud, “India’s Posture as a Regional Power,” Pakistan Army Journal 26 (1985): 4.
29 Farhat Khalid, “India’s Nuclear Capability and Delivery System,” Pakistan Army Journal 29 (1988): 2–7.
30 Ghumman, “Pakistan’s Geostrategic Environment and Military System,” 26–27.
31 See, for example, “Pakistan Only Hurdle to Indian ‘Hegemony’ in South Asia: Sartaj Aziz,” Business Standard, June 21, 2106,
http://www.business-standard.com/article/international/pakistan-only-hurdle-to-indian-hegemony-in-south-asia-sartaj-
aziz-116062100210_1.html; and Syed Sammer Abbas, “Pakistan Fully Aware of India’s Nefarious Designs, Gen Raheel Tells Modi,” Dawn,
September 2, 2016, http://www.dawn.com/news/1281375.

Operationalizing and Managing the Threats
This section first explains how Pakistan operationalizes the four security perceptions that
are deeply rooted in the army’s strategic culture and, second, details the tools that the army has
developed to manage these threats. Table 1 (p. 6) summarizes these conclusions using Johnston’s
rubric of “system of symbols.”32
Pakistan Is an Insecure and Incomplete State

The Pakistan Army operationalizes its partition-rooted apprehensions in two ways. First, the army
must defend Pakistan’s ideological and geographic frontiers. Second, it must “finish” the process of
partition, which means seizing Kashmir and fulfilling the promise of the two-nation theory.33 It is
imperative to understand that the two-nation formula was not merely part of a strategy for achieving
an independent Pakistan; rather, this concept persists as a strong ideological basis for contemporary
Pakistan despite the battering it has endured.34 The Pakistan Army’s professional journals continue
to refer to the two-nation formula as a critical element of the so-called ideology of Pakistan, of which
the Pakistan Army is the defender. While the prominence of this concept is often attributed to the
Islamizing efforts of Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, in fact its importance predates him. Pakistan’s first
military leader, General Ayub Khan, explained in his autobiography:
[Man’s] greatest yearning is for an ideology for which he should be able to lay
down his life….Such an ideology with us is obviously that of Islam. It was on
that basis that we fought for and got Pakistan, but having got it, we failed to
order our lives in accordance with it. The main reason is that we have failed to
define that ideology in as simple and understandable form. 35
He devotes an entire chapter to discussing how he understands Islam as an ideology of and

for Pakistan.36
Khan saw reliance on Islam as a means of overcoming the various weaknesses of the Pakistani
state that stem from the divisive ethnic aspirations among the peoples who found themselves
trapped within it, often against their will.37 He explained this role for Islam as follows in 1960:
Prior to 1947, our nationalism was based more on an idea than on any territorial
definition. Till then, ideologically we were Muslims; territorially we happened
to be Indians; and parochially we were a conglomeration of at least eleven
smaller, provincial loyalties. But when suddenly Pakistan emerged as a reality,
we who had got together from every nook and corner of the vast sub-continent
of India were faced with the task of transforming all our traditional, territorial
and parochial loyalties into one great loyalty for the new state of Pakistan. 38
Islam was to be that “one great loyalty.” Khan believed that should this ideology fail, then the
Pakistani state would fail as well. To ensure the success of this ideology, and thus of Pakistan itself,
32 Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture.”

33 Ishtiaq Ahmed, “The Unfinished Partition,” Friday Times, October 23, 2015, http://www.thefridaytimes.com/tft/the-unfinished-partition.
34 For further discussion, see Fair, Fighting to the End; and Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan.
35 Khan, Friends Not Masters, 221–22.
36 Ibid., 209–51.
37 Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005).
38 Mohammad Ayub Khan, “Pakistan Perspective,” Foreign Affairs 38 (1960): 549.

9
his government actively promoted his vision of Islam as a national ideology and worked to secure
its legitimacy within Pakistan.39 Notably, all subsequent military dictators would appeal to Islam
in various ways to justify their regimes and concomitant policies, including Agha Mohammad
Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and even Pervez Musharraf.40
Various authors in Pakistan’s military journals argue that this ideology offers several strategic
benefits: building national character and thus attracting better recruits to the armed forces,
producing better “Muslim” soldiers who would be more competent to fight the ever-more numerous
Hindu foes, and inspiring citizen soldiers to defend their country’s ideological and geographic
frontiers.41 Equally important, writers in Pakistan’s professional journals also use Islam, the
ideology of Pakistan, and the two-nation theory to sustain popular appetite for unending conflict
with India and the army’s continued dominance over Pakistan’s internal and external affairs
because the army alone has retained a pure commitment to Islam.42 These authors also depict all of
Pakistan’s conflict with India as “defensive jihads,” which implies that each of Pakistan’s wars with
India has been defensive and that India is steadfast in its efforts to destroy Pakistan.43
According to the narrative established by the army and promulgated throughout Pakistani
society, India is an inexorable foe. The jihad that Pakistan must fight is not merely soldiers’
work; rather, it “is a sacred duty” that “is obligatory for every man, woman and child. It has
to be an all-encompassing, cohesive effort of the entire nation, manifested through its Armed
Forces.”44 Many of Pakistan’s defense writers go to great ends to situate Pakistan’s war with
India within a larger landscape of Islamic battles. Thus, the Pakistan Army is not just fighting
for its own parochial interests; rather, it is defending Islam itself. Several authors believe that
indoctrinating soldiers on the basis of Islam would raise fighter morale and prepare soldiers for
the endless battles ahead.45
The way in which the army has instrumentalized Islam buttresses the principal tool with which
it seeks to seize Kashmir and fulfill the promise of partition: the use of nonstate actors employed
in a variety of ways. As is well known, Pakistan has used Islamist proxies in India since 1947 and
39 Rubina Saigol, “Becoming A Modern Nation: Educational Discourse in the Early Years of Ayub Khan (1958–64),” Council of Social Sciences
Pakistan, Monograph Series, no. 3, 2003, http://www.cosspak.org/monographs/monograph_rubina.pdf; K.K. Aziz, The Murder of History:
A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publishing, 2010); A.H. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim, “The Subtle
Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan: Urdu, English, Social Studies and Civics,” Sustainable Development Policy
Institute, 2003, http://www.sdpi.org/publications/files/State%20of%20Curr&TextBooks.pdf; Marie-Carine Lall, “Educate to Hate: The
Use of Education in the Creation of Antagonistic National Identities in India and Pakistan,” Compare 38, no. 1 (2008): 103–19; Iftikhar
Ahmed, “Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education: An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan,” Current Issues in
Comparative Education 7, no. 1 (2004): 39–49; and Fair, Fighting to the End.
40 See Stephen P. Cohen, The Pakistan Army (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and
Military; and Pervez Musharraf (presidential address to the nation, September 19, 2001), available at http://presidentmusharraf.wordpress.
com/2006/07/13/address-19-september-2001.
41 For more on these strategic benefits, see, among others, Muhammad Bashir, “National Character,” Pakistan Army Journal 3 (1961): 47–55;
Syed Shahid Abbas Naqvi, “Motivation of Armed Forces: Towards Our Ideology,” Pakistan Army Journal 15 (1973): 58–63; Mohammad Ali,
“An Analytical Study of Situation in Sindh,” Pakistan Army Journal 32 (1991): 78–87; Inamul Haq, Islamic Motivation and National Defence
(Lahore: Vanguard, 1991); Asif Mahmood, “Significance of National Integration in Nation Building,” in Pakistan Army Green Book 2000:
Role of Pakistan Army in Nation Building (Rawalpindi: Pakistan Army General Headquarters, 2000), 110–22; and Jamshed Ali, “India—A
Super Power! Myth or Reality,” Pakistan Defence Review 2 (1990): 96–107.
42 See, among others, Khan, The Story of the Pakistan Army; Mahmud Akhtar, “Need for National Integration in Pakistan,” Pakistan Army
Journal 34 (1993/94): 108–15; and Asif Duraiz Akhtar, “Nation Building,” in Pakistan Army Green Book 2000, 1–3.
43 For more on these depictions, see, for example, Syed Nawab Alam Barhvi, “Iqbal’s Concept of Jihad,” Pakistan Army Journal 32 (1991): 87–97.
See also Qaisar Farooqui, “Islamic Concept of Preparedness,” Pakistan Army Journal 33 (1992): 10–24; Saifi Ahmad Naqvi, “Motivation Training
in Pakistan Army,” in Pakistan Army Green Book 1994: Training in the Army (Rawalpindi: Pakistan Army General Headquarters, 1994), 179–85;
and Syed Shahid Abbas Naqvi, “Motivation of Armed Forces: Towards Our Ideology,” Pakistan Army Journal 15 (1973): 58–63.
44 Farooqui, “Islamic Concept of Preparedness,” 23.
45 Farrukh Jamshed Chohan, “Morale-Motivation,” Pakistan Army Journal 41 (1998): 43–62; Bashir Ahmad, “Morale: From the Early Muslim
Campaigns,” Pakistan Army Journal 5 (1963): 6–13; Haq, Islamic Motivation and National Defence; and Pakistan Army Green Book 1990: Year
of the Junior Leaders (Rawalpindi: Pakistan Army General Headquarters, 1990).

in Afghanistan since the late 1950s. The country’s defense journals demonstrated an early focus on
the utility of guerilla warfare.46 Ironically, Pakistan honed its interest in this form of warfare while
undergoing training with U.S. forces, which were keen to have Pakistani fighters assist the United
States in waging counterinsurgency operations.47 Throughout the 1960s, Pakistani defense writers
focused on several interrelated but distinct concepts, including the importance of infiltration, the
need to develop a people’s army for both defensive and offensive operations against India, and the
utility of a people’s war.48
By 1971, defense writers began explicitly linking Pakistan’s revisionist goals with the
acquisition of nuclear weapons. Zuberi asserted that the best way to fend off Indian hegemonic
designs was to develop a basic nuclear deterrent.49 Prior to the 1971 war and India’s 1974
detonation of a nuclear device, such writings were relatively rare. In the years that followed,
Pakistan’s defense writers began positing that the nuclear environment created opportunities
for Pakistan to employ low-intensity conflict with greater impunity. In 1984, Stephen Cohen
observed that a Pakistani nuclear weapon, “besides neutralizing an assumed Indian nuclear
force, would provide the umbrella under which Pakistan could reopen the Kashmir issue.”50
Pakistan’s defense literature offers numerous examples of this thinking as well. Writing in 1988,
Anwari recommended that Pakistan develop nuclear weapons and means of delivery to “avoid
being presented with a fait accompli” by India.51 He also suggested that “guerrilla warfare”
should be part of Pakistan’s deterrence package and that India must be aware of this capability.
Major General Asif Duraiz Akhtar, writing in the 2000 edition of the Pakistan Army Green
Book, opined that the “nuclear explosions of 1998 have brought a semblance of equilibrium in
the region...[and have] put the conventional all-out war scenario on the back burner.” He added
that “this situation leaves the room open for low intensity conflict (proxy war) or the war with
limited aims restricted to confines of disputed areas, e.g. Indian-held Kashmir and Siachin.”52
Brigadier Muhammad Ifzal extends this conception of limited war under the nuclear umbrella:
“While retaining the capability to undertake large-scale limited conventional operations both
defensive[ly] and offensive[ly], Pakistan’s army concept for limited war will fundamentally
hinge on asymmetric warfare and nuclear deterrence against India.”53 Ifzal, understanding that
India has its own redlines, cautions Pakistan to prosecute low-intensity conflict with care, so
as not to exceed the “tolerance threshold of the Indians” while at the same time “disallowing
Indians to reach the patience threshold of the Kashmiris.”54
46 C.H.A. East, “Guerilla Warfare,” Pakistan Army Journal 1 (1958): 57–66; and Edward F. Downey Jr., “Theory of Guerrilla Warfare,” Military
Review 39, no. 5 (1959): 45–55.
47 Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan.
48 S.A. El Edroos, “Infiltration: A Form of Attack,” Pakistan Army Journal 3 (1961): 3–15; A.A.K. Niazi, “A New Look at Infiltration,” Pakistan
Army Journal 6 (1964); Muhammad Akram, “Dien Bien Phu,” Pakistan Army Journal 13 (1971): 29–37; Reuben D. Parker, “Infiltration as
a Form of Maneuver,” Pakistan Army Journal 6 (1964); Shamsul Haq Qazi, “A Case for Citizen Army,” in ibid., 18–25; Mohammad Shafi,
“The Effectiveness of Guerilla Warfare,” Pakistan Army Journal 5 (1963): 4–11; and Aslam Siddiqi, A Path for Pakistan (Karachi: Pakistan
Publishing House, 1964).
49 Zuberi, “The Challenge of a Nuclear India.”
50 Cohen, The Pakistan Army, 153.
51 Masood Navid Anwari, “Deterrence—Hope or Reality,” Pakistan Army Journal 29 (1988): 47.
52 Akhtar, “Nation Building,” 1.
53 Muhammad Ifzal, “Concept of Limited War,” in Pakistan Army Green Book 2004: Limited War (Rawalpindi: Pakistan Army General
Headquarters, 2004), 17.
54 Ibid., 17. For a similar argument see Shaukat Iqbal, “Present and Future Conflict Environments in Pakistan: Challenges for Pakistan Army
and the Way Forward,” in Pakistan Army Green Book 2008: Future Conflict Environment (Rawalpindi: Pakistan Army General Headquarters,
2008), 43–50.

11
We now know that when Anwari was recommending that Pakistan develop nuclear weapons,
it either had already developed a crude nuclear device or was close to doing so.55 Irrespective of
what capabilities Pakistan possessed, the key enabling concept that seemed to motivate Pakistani
defense analysts was the notion of ambiguity. General Zia-ul-Haq himself explained this in the late
1980s, when he said “that ambiguity is the essence of deterrence.”56 General Beg similarly explained
that a “state of uncertainty and ambiguity…serve[s] as a meaningful deterrence.”57 Cultivating this
ambiguity, and thus strategic instability, is a central element of what Paul Kapur describes as the
“instability-instability paradox” that characterizes Indo-Pakistan security competition and allows
Pakistan to rely on nonstate actors to conduct attacks in India with impunity.58
Pakistan’s most recent innovation has been the pursuit of so-called battlefield nuclear
weapons. According to Zulfiqar Khan, a senior analyst in Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence,
Pakistan is inducting tactical nuclear weapons and deploying them along its borders with
India to induce “restraining effects that are based on the fear of nuclear war.”59 This will afford
Pakistan escalation dominance in a crisis with India, perhaps to deter a crisis in the first place
or—if necessary—to prosecute and win a conflict. Given India’s conventional forces, Khan
argues that “Pakistan should focus on maintaining the balance of terror with appropriate
strategy…instead of indulging in [a] conventional forces number game.”60 Furthermore, “any
transparency [in Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine]…would only undermine Pakistan’s ability to deter
India’s calibration of ‘Cold Start Strategy’ or limited conflict thinking, to its peril.”61 This too
contributes to Kapur’s instability-instability paradox.62 Greater instability at the strategic level
plays to Pakistan’s advantage and permits it to engage in destabilizing activities at lower levels of
the conflict spectrum with complete impunity.
Afghanistan Is a Source of Instability

To manage its fears of Afghan intransigence and Indo-Afghan collusion to destabilize Pakistan,
Pakistan has long relied on the policy of strategic depth. As noted briefly above, this policy has
generally implied political rather than physical depth. The tools that Pakistan has used to pursue
this concept resemble in many respects the political structures developed by the British in the
early nineteenth century. The British alternated between a more aggressive forward policy in
Afghanistan and a more internally focused “close border policy.” 63 The former involved more direct
military intervention while the latter focused on defending the borders of the Raj. This system
envisioned a series of concentric buffers.64 The Amu Darya was the hard boundary between British
55 Abdul Sattar, a former foreign minister, claims that Pakistan had a nuclear device as early as 1983. See Abdul Sattar, Pakistan’s Foreign Policy
1947–2005 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007). Feroz H. Khan, formerly of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Directorate, claims that Pakistan
possessed a “large bomb that could be delivered…by a C-130” as early as 1984. See Feroz H. Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani
Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 189.
56 Gregory F. Giles and James F. Doyle, “Indian and Pakistani Views on Nuclear Deterrence,” Comparative Strategy 5, no. 2 (1996): 147.
57 “Documentation: General Mirza Aslam Beg’s Major Presentations,” Defense Journal 17 (1991): 42.
58 Paul S. Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
59 Zulfiqar Khan, “Tactical Nuclear Weapons and Pakistan’s Option of Offensive-Deterrence,” in Nuclear Pakistan: Strategic Dimensions, ed.
Zulfiqar Khan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
60 Ibid., 3.
61 Ibid., 25.
62 Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent.
63 Fair, Fighting to the End.

and Russian interests, and Afghanistan was to be a buffer state. FATA constitutes another buffer
between Afghanistan and so-called settled Pashtun areas in the North-West Frontier Province. 65
Upon independence, Pakistan largely retained this strategy, and it only recently formally
jettisoned the name North-West Frontier Province in favor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. However,
Pakistan has retained the colonial-era FATA governance structure because it affords the state—and
the army in particular—numerous advantages.66 FATA has long hosted training sites from which
militants could operate easily in Afghanistan or deploy to Kashmir or other sites in India.
Pakistan also developed other tools to manage the politics in Afghanistan, namely political
Islam and Islamic militancy. Pakistan’s key allies were the Islamist political parties Jamaat-e-Islami
and the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam. They remain so to date. Over time, these groups became the army’s
partners in developing, promoting, and policing the ideology of Pakistan, first at home and
then abroad. By 1960, the country’s intelligence agencies, acting under the auspices of the army,
encouraged Pakistani Islamist parties to “pursue a forward policy of seeking ideological allies in
Afghanistan,”67 and these parties became the principal foes of the Afghan Communists.68
As noted above, Pakistan and Afghanistan had tense relations from 1948 onward when
Afghanistan rejected Pakistan’s inclusion in the United Nations. However, Afghanistan’s
tilt toward the Soviet Union and the efforts of the communist People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan disquieted Pakistan’s military and even civilian leadership, which were both
committed to an Islamic ideology. By 1973, events in Afghanistan had turned for the worst from
Pakistan’s point of view. In July of that year, Mohammad Daoud Khan ousted his cousin, King
Zahir Shah, and began a more aggressive modernization campaign and brutal crackdown against
Islamists, many of whom fled to Pakistan or Iran. Daoud Khan antagonized Pakistan, which was
under the thumb of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (Pakistan’s civilian autocrat), by supporting the Baluch
insurgency, rejecting the Durand Line, and supporting Pashtuns in Pakistan who were calling for
a greater Pashtunistan.
In 1973, Bhutto, exhausted with Daoud’s antics, ordered Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) to lead covert actions in Afghanistan.69 Bhutto’s forward policy relied on Islamist elements in
Afghanistan opposed to both Daoud Khan’s liberalizing regime and his efforts to expel them. The
decision to mobilize Afghan Islamists was driven by strategic considerations: the Afghan Islamists
did not support Kabul’s territorial claims on Pakistani territory, and they opposed friendly ties
with India.70 In that same year, Pakistan established training camps for them in North and South
Waziristan within FATA. Not only were these Pashtun-dominated agencies a virtual black hole
in which the press could not operate, but they were also conveniently located on the border of
Afghanistan’s eastern provinces of Paktia, Logar, and Paktika. There was already a large Pakistani
military garrison at Razmak (in South Waziristan), and troops were also stationed in Mohmand
Agency in FATA. The North-West Frontier Province units of the Frontier Corps—a paramilitary
organization whose recruits come from FATA but whose officers are seconded from the Pakistan
65 Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan; and Fair, Fighting to the End. Note that a similar structure existed
(and in some ways continues to exist) in Baluchistan as described in Tripodi, The Edge of Empire.
66 White, “The Shape of Frontier Rule.”
67 Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, 167.
68 Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
69 Khalid Mahmud Arif, Working with Zia: Pakistan Power Politics, 1977–1988 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 306–7.
70 Hussain, Pakistan and the Emergence of Islamic Militancy in Afghanistan, 79.

13
Army—were ordered to organize and train the Afghans, and the unit’s inspector general, then
brigadier Naseerullah Khan Babar, was placed in charge of the overall operation.71
Pakistan backed a series of Islamist insurrections in Afghanistan. While Daoud Khan
easily crushed these uprisings, he used them as an excuse to arrest even mainstream Islamists,
prompting even more Islamists to flee to Pakistan.72 Pakistan enlisted Afghan Islamists into the
Frontier Corps, while the ISI and the army’s elite Special Services Group trained them to keep
these efforts as covert as possible. Between 1973 and 1977, Pakistan’s armed forces trained around
five-thousand militants to fight the Daoud Khan regime.73 By the time the Soviet Union had
crossed the Amu Darya, Zia-ul-Haq’s army and the ISI had already created the key Islamist groups
that would become the cornerstone of the anti-Soviet jihad. Throughout 1978, Pakistan reduced
the 50 Afghan resistance groups into 7 militias, provided them with training, and deepened links
between Pakistani and Afghan Islamist groups.74 For more than a year after the Soviet invasion,
Pakistan “continued to support the Afghan resistance…providing it modest assistance out of its
own meager resources.” Pakistan’s motives were clear: “the Mujahideen would be fighting also
for Pakistan’s own security and independence.”75 General Khalid Mahmud Arif, Zia-ul-Haq’s vice
chief of army staff, similarly explained that “Pakistan adopted the…option to protect her national
interest and to uphold a vital principal” by providing “covert assistance to the Mujahideen.”76
Such machinations have become a staple of Pakistani strategy in Afghanistan. Pakistan has
long preferred Islamists to do its bidding because it believes that Islamists both will be more
sympathetic to its strategic concerns regarding India’s presence and will perhaps be less aggressive
in rejecting the Durand Line as the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Conversely, Pakistan has long
avoided empowering non-Islamist ethnic groups through financial assistance because it fears
that mobilizing Afghans along ethnic rather than religious lines will have adverse implications
for its own fractious Pashtun population, which has long harbored assorted grievances against
the state. This explains Pakistan’s conviction since the early 1990s that Afghanistan would
be less ill-disposed toward Pakistani interests under some degree of Taliban control. The key
takeaway from the foregoing exposition is that Pakistan’s threat perceptions of Afghanistan,
as well as the tools it has developed to manage these apprehensions, are long-standing and not
simply reducible to India.
India’s Opposition to Pakistan’s Existence and the Two-Nation Theory

The Pakistan Army principally operationalizes the belief that India seeks to destroy Pakistan
by sustaining public appetite for an indefinite civilizational war. It should be noted that the army
materially benefits from this perception and consequently does much to ensure that ordinary
Pakistanis believe that India unyieldingly rejects Pakistan’s existence and is bent on destroying
it. After all, if there were to be no civilizational or ideological conflict, the two nations could
reconcile and peace would be possible. Under such circumstances, the Pakistan Army would have
71 Ironically, after the September 11 attacks, the United States sought to use the Frontier Corps as a tool to fight the Taliban, without
understanding its historical role in training Islamist militants. Author’s interviews with U.S. Department of Defense officials, 2008. The results
of Washington’s efforts were at best mixed. See C. Christine Fair and Seth G. Jones, “Pakistan’s War Within,” Survival 51, no. 6 (2009): 161–88.
72 Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
74 Sattar, Pakistan’s Foreign Policy 1947–2005.
75 Ibid., 157.
76 Arif, Working with Zia, 314.

little justification for its large conventional posture and little ability to sustain the argument that it
is the institution that can best guarantee Pakistanis’ security and well-being.
Pakistan has cultivated an array of ideological means to manage this foundational fear of
India’s intentions. First, it depicts all conflicts with India as “defense” and even “defensive jihad.”
It is quite remarkable that Pakistan is able to sustain this fiction given that Pakistanis are freely
able to access information from which they can learn that Pakistan began the wars in 1947–48,
1965, and 1999.77 Moreover, the army has cultivated the perception that these wars were waged
not simply to defend Pakistan but to defend the edifice of Islam itself. Pakistan makes heavy use
of Islamic terminology to imbue these wars with such status. For example, fighters in the conflict
against the kufar (nonbelievers) are ghazis (warriors) if they return alive or shaheed (martyrs) if
they are killed in battle. India is therefore not just an enemy country; it represents an ideological
and even theological foe that must be resisted at all costs.
The Pakistan Army’s Conviction That It Must Challenge India at All Costs
Finally, for the Pakistan Army, defeat comes only when it can no longer resist India. This means
that Pakistan is willing to take considerable risks in relations with India because doing nothing is
the sine qua non of defeat for the army. The two tools that the army developed to prosecute these
aims have been discussed at length above: namely, the training of militants and the promotion
of jihad under its nuclear umbrella. Part of the reason this set of options is so attractive is that
it is relatively inexpensive while being effective and offering plausible deniability. The cost of
employing militants is a fraction of Pakistan’s overall defense budget of nearly $7 billion. For this
reason, Pakistan has also used regular and paramilitary forces disguised as militants. Even the
best Indian countermeasures cannot prevent every attack, and Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent makes
a punishing Indian retaliation for even the deadliest outrage extremely unlikely.
At the same time, Pakistan uses its nuclear arsenal to blackmail actors such as the United
States to ensure that it is never truly cut off from international aid. In fact, Pakistan’s dalliance
with tactical nuclear weapons exacerbates U.S. fears about terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons,
materials, or know-how. While this strategy is unlikely to coerce India to make concessions, it
does provide Pakistan with diplomatic success. After each flare-up, the international community
implores both India and Pakistan to work toward peace, thus handing Pakistan a victory at home
and abroad by imposing a false equivalence between the two sides. The Pakistan Army then uses
such international statements to build domestic support for its tactics.
Conclusions and Implications

The preceding discussion reveals the enduring nature of the Pakistan Army’s strategic cultural
perceptions, some of which even pre-date partition. This is not to say that they have not evolved
over time. Indeed, one could argue that Pakistan’s reliance on nonstate actors evolved considerably
with the introduction of nuclear weapons, or at least the introduction of nuclear overhang.
Pakistan’s fusing of its nonstate actor policy with its concepts of nuclear deterrence has created
77 From the army’s point of view, it actually won the 1999 Kargil War, but the pusillanimous civilian government snatched the army’s defeat
from the jaws of victory. See Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamison Jo Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian
and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2001).

15
a strategy that is very difficult to defeat without accepting extreme risk. Similarly, Pakistan’s
perceptions of the Afghan threat quickly became imbricated with its concerns about India.
These strategic cultural perceptions leave very little room for reforming Pakistan. The traditional
U.S. approach toward the country has involved financial and military assistance, ostensibly guided
by the logic that such aid could help it feel less insecure and thus resolve its conflicts with India
and Afghanistan. This would permit Pakistan to put down the jihadi proxies and roll back its
policy of reckless proliferation. Such optimism, however, is ill-founded. Pakistan’s apprehensions
about India and Afghanistan are ideological as well as material. Eliminating Pakistan’s material
sources of disquiet cannot address the ideological concerns about its environment and even
rewards Pakistan for the behaviors it has adopted to manage these perceived threats.
For reasons that I noted above, even if Pakistan were to be truly governed by civilians, it is not
likely that the country would behave differently for the simple reason that the army has effectively
ensured that its core strategic beliefs and the tools to manage them are also embraced by ordinary
Pakistanis. This implies that a more genuinely democratic structure would not necessarily result
in Pakistan abandoning its revisionism toward India in Kashmir or beyond.
These conclusions, if even modestly accurate, leave policymakers with a serious dilemma:
how can the United States, India, or other interested parties dissuade Pakistan from relying on
Islamist militants under its nuclear umbrella as a principal tool of foreign policy? The tools that
policymakers tend to employ, such as economic and security assistance, do not produce positive
change and even incentivize Pakistan to continue with its current suite of behaviors. What policy
options devolve from this present analysis?
First and critically, it is important to understand that Pakistan currently faces no disincentive
to using Islamist terrorism under its expanding nuclear umbrella. Moreover, the country faces
no credible disincentive to curtail its pursuit of reckless nuclear technologies—such as battlefield
nuclear weapons—because they both raise the cost of Indian action and mobilize the international
community to intervene in a crisis, which shields Pakistan from the consequences of its behavior.78
The challenge to the international community therefore is twofold: compel Pakistan to desist from
employing Islamist militants as tools of foreign policy and remove the international community
from Pakistan’s nuclear coercion loop.79
While a comprehensive assessment of a compellence campaign that could achieve these twinned
objectives is beyond the scope of this essay, a number of options exist. These options rely on two
assumptions. The first is that Pakistan is a stable instability and is not in fact likely to fail, as is often
posited.80 The second assumption is that in the event of a conflict between India and Pakistan, China
will be as unengaged as it was during Pakistan’s wars with India in 1965, 1971, and 1999.81
First, the United States must remove itself from Pakistan’s nuclear coercion loop. Rather than
shouldering the burden of preventing proliferation to state or nonstate actors, the U.S. government
should encumber Pakistan with responsibility for securing its nuclear materials and technology.
Washington should make a declaratory statement that Pakistan will be responsible for any
78 Tellis et al., Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella.

79 Compellence means something very specific here, namely, the use of threats to coerce an adversary to do something. Deterrence, by
contrast, entails issuing threats to prevent an adversary from initiating undesired actions. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
80 C. Christine Fair, “Honor Our Fallen by Getting Real on Pakistan,” War on the Rocks, May 26, 2015, http://warontherocks.com/2015/05/
honor-our-fallen-by-getting-real-on-pakistan.
81 Tellis et al., Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella. The recommendations that follow draw on C. Christine Fair, “A New Way of
Engaging Pakistan,” Lawfare, April 11, 2016, https://lawfareblog.com/new-way-engaging-pakistan.

incident involving nonstate actors and its nuclear materials. The international community is in a
good position to identify a putative Pakistani role because the country’s “nuclear signature“ is well
known. The U.S. government should also make clear to Pakistan that should the country engage
in first use of nuclear weapons on an adversary, that adversary will not be on its own in retaliating.
Further, Washington should consider undertaking countermeasures to subvert Pakistan’s
program, as it did with Iran, and even consider imposing the kinds of sanctions that crippled Iran
and brought Tehran to the negotiating table. Pakistan is not, has not, and will not be a responsible
nuclear state if left to its own devices because it has grown accustomed to using its program to
coerce the international community into supporting the state by fostering the belief that Pakistan
is too dangerous to fail.82
Second, the U.S. government must cease providing Pakistan with positive incentives to produce
“good jihadi assets” while fighting “terrorists of the Pakistani state.” Pakistan is engaging in simple
asset-banking: as long as there are terrorists in the country who must be killed, Washington will
continue remunerating Pakistan to do so. Instead, Washington should incentivize the country to
abandon Islamist terrorists as tools of foreign policy. This is admittedly easier said than done. To
do so, the U.S. government should stop reimbursing Pakistan for its domestic expenditures to
eliminate domestic terrorists.83 Pakistan should not be compensated to do what sovereign states
are expected to do. Additionally, Washington should stop furnishing Pakistan with strategic
weapon systems. Instead, it should provide a narrow set of platforms that have proven utility
in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations. None of these platforms should have
significant value in fighting India. The United States should also offer Pakistan military training
in these areas, as well other areas that fit squarely within the rubric of domestic security, such
as natural disaster relief. The United States should remain willing to provide counterinsurgency
and police training to Pakistani security forces, along with other forms of assistance to Pakistan’s
shambolic justice system, should it permit the United States to so and should the United States be
able to provide meaningful assistance to these organizations.84
Third, Washington must make clear that it will declare Pakistan to be a state sponsor of
terrorism. Such a declaration will impose sweeping and devastating sanctions. To preempt such
an outcome, the United States should provide a timeline of concrete steps that Pakistan must take
against the various militant groups it now supports. The first such step is ceasing active support for
these groups and constricting their space for operations and recruitment; ultimately, Washington
should demand the elimination of the remnants. Even if Pakistan is willing to do so, this will be a
long-term project akin to any disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program. Pakistan
has trained tens of thousands of militants, if not more. However, the United States should provide
no economic support for these efforts as long as Pakistan continues to actively raise, nurture,
support, and deploy so-called jihadis for state goals.85
82 Fair, “A New Way of Engaging Pakistan.”

83 The program under which the United States did this was known as Coalition Support Funds. See Susan B. Epstein and Alan K. Kronstadt,
“Pakistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance,” Congressional Research Service, CRS Report for Congress, R41856, July 1, 2013, https://www.fas.
org/sgp/crs/row/R41856.pdf. The United States has substantially revised the reimbursement mechanism in the current National Defense
Authorization Act. See U.S. House of Representatives, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016: Report of the Committee
on Armed Services, 114th Cong., 1st sess., report 114-102 (Washington, D.C., 2016), https://www.congress.gov/114/crpt/hrpt102/CRPT-
114hrpt102.pdf.
85 Ibid.

17
If Pakistan remains recalcitrant, the United States must develop negative inducements and
the concomitant political will to use them. It needs to be willing to target specific individuals
who are providing material support to terrorist groups and individuals. This means international
prosecution, designation and seizure of accounts by the U.S. Department of Treasury, and
visa denials. Pakistan’s civilian and military officials enjoy coming to the United States for
medical treatment, holidays, and educational opportunities for their children. There are two
UN instruments that can facilitate such negative inducements. First, UN Security Resolution
(UNSCR) 1373, adopted in 2001, obligates all states to prevent and suppress terrorists’ ability
to recruit, train, raise funds, and otherwise carry out terrorist attacks. This is a Chapter VII
resolution, which means that states that fail to honor this obligation may be subject to force by
the UN or member states. Following the Pakistan-sponsored attacks on Mumbai in 2008, the
United States and China conspired to protect Pakistan from the punitive measures merited by
UNSCR 1373. 86 A second instrument is UNSCR 1267, according to which persons designated
as providing support to al Qaeda and allied terrorist groups are precluded from travel, cannot
have a bank account, and are not entitled to possess weapons. Admittedly, the third deprivation
cannot be enforced when these individuals enjoy state sanctuary like that provided by Pakistan.
To derive the most benefit from these designations, the persons listed should be of operational
importance, such as being pivotal in moving money or recruiting personnel for militant
operations. Given that China may resist such efforts, the United States will need to make
diplomatic efforts to force China to explain why it shields terrorists.
Fourth, the United States should be willing to review all forms of bilateral economic support
as well the pressure it exerts on multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary
Fund, which continues to provide loans despite Pakistan’s repeated failures to make due on its
own commitments.87 Pakistan is heavily dependent on these sources of assistance, and the United
States and its partners should overcome their collective reticence to deploy punitive measures.
Although Pakistan has cultivated the impression that it is too dangerous to fail, the country is
more stable than is generally appreciated.
Fifth, even if the United States’ risk tolerance is too low to pursue the above options, it can
modestly curb Pakistan’s appetite for terrorist misadventures by depriving the country of the
principal benefit it seeks: international attention to Kashmir. Official U.S. statements that encourage
India and Pakistan to achieve “peaceful resolution of outstanding issues, including Kashmir,”
reward Pakistan for its malfeasance while treating India as an equal cause of conflict. India is in
fact a victim of Pakistani terrorism.88 By acknowledging Kashmir as a disputed area, the United
States demonstrates either an enormous historical ignorance of the issues or an intention to placate
Pakistan at the costs of facts, law, and history. Worse yet, it rewards Pakistan for the continued use
of terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere in India.89 Consistent with historical facts, Washington
should refuse to even mention Kashmir in its various statements with and about Pakistan. It
should also abstain from making statements that encourage India to engage with Pakistan on
the subject for the simple reason that such language could be perceived as legitimizing Pakistan’s
86 George Perkovich and Toby Dalton, Not War, Not Peace: Motivating Pakistan to Prevent Cross-Border Terrorism (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2016).
87 Ibid., 237.
88 “U.S., Pak Call for Resolving Kashmir Issue through Dialogue,” Indian Express, March 2, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/world/
world-news/us-pak-call-for-resolving-kashmir-issue-through-dialogue.

contention that it is seeking peace from India. While it would be preferable for the United States
to adopt strong language placing the onus of the conflict firmly on Pakistan, a middle ground may
simply be omitting such language altogether. Not only is Pakistan very sensitive to these kinds of
signals, this approach advances U.S. interests in discouraging Pakistani terrorism by depriving
Pakistan of this much-desired reward.
More generally, the U.S. National Security Council and U.S. Departments of State and
Defense, as well as the various intelligence agencies and other stakeholders, should consider
revising the United States’ official position on the Kashmir dispute. It may well be time
for the U.S. government to officially adopt support for converting the Line of Control into
the international boundary. Such a position would require India to forgo any claims on
Pakistan-administered Kashmir while allowing Pakistan to retain territory it currently controls.
Absent political will in Washington to accept greater risk and consider a different approach that
punishes Islamabad for its behaviors, policymakers in both capitals are left with the unpleasant
task of managing this issue, even though the costs of such management and the magnitude of
potential threats are likely to be larger in the future.
Given the enduring nature of the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture, the U.S. government
must abandon its worn policy approaches to Pakistan. The stakes are simply too high to continue
the past policies with the expectation that they will have different impacts. It is time for a new
approach to Pakistan.

19
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the national bureau of asian research

nbr special report #61 | december 2016

Charles W. Brady Richard J. Ellings Gordon Smith

Norman D. Dicks Tom Robertson

NBR Chairman’s Council and Board of Advisors

Front cover image: untitled p pixabay.

For further information about NBR, contact:

Alison Szalwinski and Michael Wills

Pakistan’s Strategic Culture:

C. CHRISTINE FAIRis an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She can be

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

The Strategic Culture of the Pakistan Army

4 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

The Four Key Features of the Pakistan Army’s Strategic Culture

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

Strategic beliefs about the Strategies for operationalizing

6 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

8 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

Pakistan Is an Insecure and Incomplete State

He devotes an entire chapter to discussing how he understands Islam as an ideology of and

32 Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture.”

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

10 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

Afghanistan Is a Source of Instability

12 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

India’s Opposition to Pakistan’s Existence and the Two-Nation Theory

14 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

Conclusions and Implications

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

78 Tellis et al., Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella.

16 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

82 Fair, “A New Way of Engaging Pakistan.”

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

18 NBR SPECIAL REPORT u DECEMBER 2016

PAKISTAN’S STRATEGIC CULTURE u FAIR

1414 ne 42nd street, suite 300

1819 l street nw, ninth floor

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