India and Pakistan: A Thin Line between War and Peace

India and Pakistan: A Thin Line between War and Peace

06/03/14

George Perkovich, Toby Dalton

Peacekeeping, India, Pakistan

While Nawaz Sharif's visit to New Delhi for the inauguration of Narendra Modi was encouraging, a single act of terrorism could spell disaster.

An early dividend of Narendra Modi’s election as India’s prime minister appeared on May 26, when Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited New Delhi for the inauguration. In his winning election campaign last year, Sharif had declared, “If India takes one step for good relations, Pakistan will take two. We even want to put an end to visa requirements between the two countries...We want peace with India.” Now the two South Asian leaders are mutually pledged to resume a peace process that Sharif and then-Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had begun in 1999.

However, the hoped-for peace process could turn to war—with huge implications for the United States—if militant actors in Pakistan attack India in hopes of provoking Modi to overreact. Something like this happened in 1999. Then, Pervez Musharraf and several colleagues in the Pakistan Army launched a clandestine incursion into the Kargil region of Kashmir, which triggered a limited, hard-fought war that India won, with diplomatic assistance from Bill Clinton. Today, the likely instigators would be the Pakistani Taliban or other militant groups who wish to divert the Pakistani state from cracking down on them.

Many Pakistanis loathe Modi as a belligerent anti-Muslim Hindu fundamentalist. What distinguishes the militants from other Pakistanis is an interest in provoking Modi into military action that would unite Pakistanis in a war against India instead of against the militants themselves. Given Modi’s reputation and self-image as a strongman, it is difficult to imagine he would not respond forcefully to violence emanating from Pakistan. As one of his top advisors put it recently, “Modi will have to respond to an attack or he will lose all his credibility.”

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