Competing interpretations of the stability–instability paradox: the case of the Kargil War

ABSTRACT

The stability–instability paradox is a well-established concept in the nuclear-security literature, which scholars use to explain sub-strategic militarized conflicts between mutually deterred, nuclear-armed adversaries. Despite its ubiquity, there is a confusion in the literature as to the precise causal mechanism underpinning such conflicts. Competing interpretations of the paradox differ in states' perceptions of nuclear escalatory risk as well as whether the balance of military power or the balance of resolve determines outcomes in these sub-strategic conflicts. Testing their respective explanatory powers in a case study of sub-strategic conflict between nuclear powers—the 1999 Kargil War—demonstrates that these two competing models are mutually exclusive.

KEYWORDS:

• Deterrence
• India
• Pakistan
• South Asia
• Kargil
• stability–instability paradox

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Michael Cohen and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1 Michael D. Cohen, “How Nuclear South Asia Is Like Cold War Europe,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2013), pp. 433–51.

2 Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 31.

3 Glenn Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in Paul Seabury, ed., The Balance of Power (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), pp. 184–201.

4 S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 35–36 (emphasis original).

5 Cohen, “How Nuclear South Asia Is Like Cold War Europe,” p. 435.

6 See, for example, Rajesh M. Basrur, South Asia's Cold War Nuclear Weapons and Conflict in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 58–62; Michael Tkacik, “Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons Program and Implications for US National Security,” International Relations, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2010), pp. 179, 205 (note 25); Peter R. Lavoy, “The Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: A Review Essay,” Security Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1995), 739–40; Austin Long, “Proliferation and Strategic Stability in the Middle East,” in Elbridge A. Colby and Michael S. Gerson, eds., Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 2013), p. 385; Sumit Ganguly, “Toward Nuclear Stability in South Asia,” Strategic Analysis, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2009), p. 382.

7 Mario Esteban Carranza, South Asian Security and International Nuclear Order (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009), p. 80. See also James J. Wirtz, “Strategic Conventional Deterrence: Lessons from the Maritime Strategy,” Security Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1993), pp. 138–40; Robert Powell, “Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power,” International Organization, Vol. 69, No. 3 (2015), pp. 589–626.

8 See also Powell, “Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power.”

9 See, for example, Michael Krepon, The Stability–Instability Paradox, Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, 2004); Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 32–36; Rajesh Rajagopalan, What Stability–Instability Paradox? Subnational Conflicts and the Nuclear Risk in South Asia (London: South Asian Strategic Stability Unit, 2006); Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947–2004 (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 203–4.

10 See, for example, Robert Rauchhaus, “Evaluating the Nuclear Peace Hypothesis: A Quantitative Approach,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2009), pp. 258–77; Mark S. Bell and Nicholas L. Miller, “Questioning the Effect of Nuclear Weapons on Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 59, No. 1 (2015), pp. 74–92; David Sobek, Dennis M. Foster, and Samuel B. Robison, “Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945–2001,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2012), pp. 149–62.

11 See Morton H. Halperin, Limited War: An Essay on the Development of the Theory and An Annotated Bibliography (New York: AMS Press, 1962); Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957), esp. pp. 132–73.

12 A death toll of 1,000 being a common benchmark for classification as a war: Meredith Reid Sarkees and Frank Wayman, Resort to War: 1816–2007 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2010), pp. 39–79.

13 Lavoy, “The Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation,” 739.

14 Robert Powell, “Nuclear Deterrence Theory, Nuclear Proliferation, and National Missile Defense,” International Security, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2003), p. 90.

15 Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” pp. 198–99. See also Rajagopalan, What Stability–Instability Paradox? Subnational Conflicts and the Nuclear Risk in South Asia.

16 Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” p. 197.

17 Ibid., p. 198.

18 Ibid. (emphasis original).

19 China also controls Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract.

20 Sarkees and Wayman, Resort to War, p. 184.

21 Brahma Chellaney, “South Asia's Passage to Nuclear Power,” International Security, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1991), pp. 43–72; Samina Ahmed, “Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons Program: Turning Points and Nuclear Choices,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 4 (1999), pp. 178–204; Hedrick Smith, “A Bomb Ticks in Pakistan,” New York Times, March 6, 1988; Feroz H. Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 174–90.

22 See Erik Gartzke and Matthew Kroenig, “A Strategic Approach to Nuclear Proliferation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2009), p. 154; Alexander H. Montgomery and Scott D. Sagan, “The Perils of Predicting Proliferation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2009), p. 308; Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent.

23 Pervez Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 97–98.

24 Khan, Eating Grass, pp. 185–86.

25 Ashley J. Tellis, C. Christine Fair, and Jamison J. Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella: Indian and Pakistani Lessons from the Kargil Crisis (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001).

26 Sumita Kumar, “The General's Delusion,” Strategic Analysis, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2007), pp. 179–91.

27 Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walter, 2007), 209; Khan, Eating Grass, pp. 230–31.

28 Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequence of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 147.

29 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning: The Kargil Review Committee Report (New Delhi: Sage, 2000), p. 66.

30 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 501.

31 Sanjay Dutt, War and Peace in Kargil Sector (New Delhi: APH, 2000), p. 243; Mario E. Carranza, “An Impossible Game: Stable Nuclear Deterrence after the Indian and Pakistani Tests,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1999), p. 16; Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 77.

32 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 243.

33 Beg cited in Krepon, The Stability–Instability Paradox, Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia, p. 5. Beg cited in Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia (New York: Colombia University Press, 2010), 43; Scott. D Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), p. 115.

34 Sattar cited in Krepon, The Stability–Instability Paradox, Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia, p. 5.

35 Dutt, War and Peace in Kargil Sector, p. 243; Carranza, “An Impossible Game,” p. 16; Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 77.

36 S. Paul Kapur, “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia,” International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2008), p. 76.

37 S. Paul Kapur, “India and Pakistan's Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe,” International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2005), p. 143.

38 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 225.

39 Ibid., pp. 193, 241.

40 Kapur, “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia,” p. 75.

41 Swami, India, Pakistan and the Secret Jihad, p. 179.

42 Ibid., pp. 172–205.

43 Ibid., p. 176.

44 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, pp. 89–90; Feroz H. Khan, Peter R. Lavoy, and Christopher Clary, “Pakistan's Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil Conflict,” in Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 64–91.

45 Ganguly and Kapur, India, Pakistan, and the Bomb, p. 50.

46 Timothy D. Hoyt, “Kargil: The Nuclear Dimension,” in Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 160–61; Khan, Lavoy and Clary, “Pakistan's motivations and calculations for the Kargil conflict,” p. 89.

47 Khan, Lavoy, and Clary, “Pakistan's Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil Conflict;” Tellis, Fair, and Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella, esp. pp. 13–15, 40.

48 Musharraf, In the Line of Fire, pp. 91, 97–98.

49 Hoyt, “Kargil;” Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 103.

50 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, pp. 224–25.

51 Ibid.

52 Tellis, Fair, and Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella, p. 38.

53 Hoyt, “Kargil,” p. 156.

54 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 226.

55 Hoyt, “Kargil,” pp. 159–61.

56 Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent, pp. 127–31.

57 Ibid., p. 128.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., p. 129.

60 Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning, p. 242. See also Rajagopalan, What Stability–Instability Paradox?

61 Feroz H. Khan, Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 471–512 (note 59).

62 Peter R. Lavoy, “Introduction: The Importance of the Kargil Conflict,” in Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 1–37; Peter R. Lavoy, “Why Kargil Did Not Produce General War: The Crisis-Management Strategies of Pakistan, India, and the United States,” in Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 171–206.

63 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, pp. 513–14.

64 Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 102. The author thanks Joshua Pollack for this insight.

65 Hoyt, “Kargil.”

66 Tellis, Fair, and Medby, Limited Conflicts under the Nuclear Umbrella, p. 15.

67 Khan, Lavoy, and Clary, “Pakistan's Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil Conflict,” p. 64.

68 Shaukat Qadir, “An Analysis of the Kargil Conflict 1999,” RUSI Journal, Vol. 147, No. 2 (2002), pp. 24–30; Nawaz, Crossed Swords, p. 518; Cohen, “How Nuclear South Asia Is Like Cold War Europe.”