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ABSTRACT
Why does combat success sometimes fail to produce a stable and durable post-war settlement? In the 1965 war, India successfully defended against a Pakistani invasion, but did not improve the long-term security of Kashmir or establish deterrence against Pakistan. I argue that, to deter rivals after war, states must couple battlefield success with credible signals of resolve, such as retaining captured territory or risking a wider war. In 1965, India used both denial and punishment strategies, but both failed to establish post-war deterrence because it judged the necessary signals of resolve to be too costly.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank an anonymous reviewer, Rudra Chaudhuri, Sumit Ganguly, and Srinath Raghavan for very useful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For the background and overview of the 1965 war, see S.N. Prasad and U.P. Thapliyal, The India-Pakistan War of 1965: A History (New Delhi: Natraj 2011); Harbakhsh Singh, War Depatches: Indo-Pak Conflict 1965 (New Delhi: Lancer 2011); R.D. Pradhan, 1965 War, The Inside Story: Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan’s Diary of the India-Pakistan War (New Delhi: Atlantic 2007), and Mohammad Musa, My Version: India-Pakistan War 1965 (New Delhi: ABC Publishing 1983).
2 On the bargaining model of war, and especially commitment problems, see James D. Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’, International Organization 49/3 (Summer 1995), 379–414; Dan Reiter, ‘Exploring the Bargaining Model of War’, Perspectives on Politics 1/1 (March 2003), 27–43; Dan Reiter, How Wars End (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009), especially Chapter 3 on commitment problems, and Suzanne Werner, ‘The Precarious Nature of Peace: Resolving the Issues, Enforcing the Settlement, and Renegotiating the Terms’, American Journal of Political Science 43/3 (July 1999), 912–34.
3 Reiter, How Wars End, 42–47.
4 Reiter, How Wars End; and Werner, ‘Precarious Nature of Peace’.
5 Elli Lieberman, ‘The Rational Deterrence Theory Debate: Is the Dependent Variable Elusive?’ Security Studies 3/3 (Spring 1994), 384–427; Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, ‘Enduring Rivalries: Theoretical Constructs and Empirical Patterns’, International Studies Quarterly 37 (1993), 147–71; and T.V. Paul, ‘Why has the India-Pakistan Rivalry Been so Enduring? Power Asymmetry and an Intractable Conflict’, Security Studies 15/4 (October–December 2006), 600–30.
6 This is the narrative in the authoritative memoir of India’s overall operational commander, General Officer Commanding (GOC) Western Command, Lt. Gen. Harbakhsh Singh, War Despatches; and even in the Indian official history published as Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War.
7 Srinath Raghavan, ‘Civil Military Relations in India: The China Crisis and After’, Journal of Strategic Studies 32/1 (2009), 149–75; and Rudra Chaudhuri, ‘Indian “Strategic Restraint” Revisited: The Case of the 1965 India-Pakistan War’, India Review 17/1 (Jan–Feb 2018), 55–75.
8 Yogesh Joshi and Anit Mukherjee, ‘From Denial to Punishment: The Security Dilemma and Changes in India’s Military Strategy towards China’, Asian Security (2018) DOI: 10.1080/14799855.2019.1539817.
9 Department of Defense, Indo-Pacific Strategy Report: Preparedness, Partnerships, and Promoting a Networked Region (Arlington, VA: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1 June 2019).
10 For concise discussions of deterrence, see Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press 2004); and Michael J. Mazarr, Understanding Deterrence (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2018).
11 Reiter, How Wars End; and Werner, ‘Precarious Nature of Peace’.
12 Lieberman, ‘The Rational Deterrence Theory Debate’.
13 Reputations are highly contextual – see Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1996). At best, they are likely to develop in the context of a specific enduring rivalry – see Paul K. Huth, ‘Reputations and Deterrence: A Theoretical and Empirical Assessment’, Security Studies 7/1 (Autumn 1997), 72–99.
14 Glenn H. Snyder, ‘Deterrence and Power’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 4/2 (1960), 163–78.
15 For example, Robert A. Pape, ‘Coercion and Military Strategy: Why Denial Works and Punishment Doesn’t’, Journal of Strategic Studies 15/4 (December 1992), 423–75, and Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1996).
16 Snyder, ‘Deterrence and Power’, 167.
17 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1999), 163, and Robert Jervis, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma’, World Politics 30/2 (January 1978), 167–214, 194–95.
18 Schelling, Arms and Influence, 105–09.
19 In this, the logic of the fait accompli, a state seizing new land places the onus of reprisal back on the adversary – see Dan Altman, ‘Advancing without Attacking: The Strategic Game Around the Use of Force’, Security Studies 27/1 (2018), 58–88.
20 Schelling, Arms and Influence, 172.
21 James D. Fearon, ‘Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands Versus Sinking Costs’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 41/1 (February 1997), 68–90.
22 I use resolve to mean a determination to pursue goals in the face of obstacles – see Joshua D. Kertzer, Resolve in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016).
23 Lieberman, ‘Rational Deterrence Theory Debate’; and Uri Bar-Joseph, ‘Variations on a theme: The conceptualization of deterrence in Israeli strategic thinking’, Security Studies 7/3 (1998), 145–81.
24 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1976).
25 Rob Geist Pinfold, ‘Territorial withdrawal as multilateral bargaining: Revisiting Israel’s “unilateral” withdrawals from Gaza and southern Lebanon’, Journal of Strategic Studies (2019). DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2019.1570146.
26 Stacie E. Goddard, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010).
27 Charles L. Glaser, ‘The Security Dilemma Revisited’, World Politics 50/1 (October 1997), 171–201.
28 In other words, states’ decisions reveal a tacit choice between the deterrence model and the spiral model of war – see Jervis, Perception and Misperception, Ch. 3.
29 Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern India: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years (Ranikhet: Permanent Black 2010).
30 Sumit Ganguly, ‘Deterrence Failure Revisited: The Indo-Pakistani war of 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies 13/4 (1990), 77–93.
31 Rudra Chaudhuri, ‘”Just another border incident”: The Rann of Kutch and the 1965 India-Pakistan War’, Journal of Strategic Studies (2019). DOI: 10.1080/01402390.2019.1571996.
32 General Musa, the Pakistan Army chief, claims 7,000 (My Version, p36), while the Indian official history puts the figure at about 8,000 (Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 56).
33 P.V.R. Rao, India’s Defence Policy and Organisation Since Independence (New Delhi: United Services Institution 1977), 15.
34 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 51–74.
35 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 101.
36 Pradhan, 1965 War, 21.
37 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 131.
38 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 223–38.
39 The battle of Phillora if often referred to as the battle of Chawinda, and the battle at Asal Uttar often known as Khem Karan – because each battle occurred nearby to multiple geographic markers. I use the terms used by the Indian official history.
40 Rao, India’s Defence Policy and Organisation, 15.
41 C.P. Srivastava, Lal Bahadur Shastri: A Life of Truth in Politics (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1995), 228. This remains the definitive open-source statement of Indian war aims, and is repeated and cited even by the Defence Ministry’s official history – see Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 94.
42 Quoted in Srivastava, Shastri, 229.
43 Pradhan, 1965 War, 38.
44 Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. XLV, No. 19, 10 September 1965, column 5118. Emphasis added.
45 Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. XLVI, No.23, 16 September 1965, column 5956. Emphasis added.
46 I owe this observation to Srinath Raghavan – correspondence with author, 6 September 2018. As Schelling notes, in practice deterrence and compellence, especially in wartime, are often difficult to distinguish – see Arms and Influence, 80.
47 J.N. Chaudhuri, India’s Problems of National Security in the Seventies (New Delhi: United Services Institution of India 1973), 9–10, emphasis added.
48 Carl von Clausewitz, On War ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1976), 77. India had no intention to freely impose its will upon Pakistan – which, for Clausewitz, was the purpose of disarming the enemy – and it understood such an objective to be unfeasible.
49 Chaudhuri, India’s Problems, 9.
50 Chaudhuri, India’s Problems, 11–12.
51 CIA Intelligence Memorandum No. 2388/65, Outcome of India-Pakistan Warfare, 1 October 1965 – I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this source suggestion. Nitin Gokhale places the number at 450 tanks destroyed and captured – see Nitin A. Gokhale, 1965 Turning the Tide: How India Won the War (New Delhi: Bloomsbury 2015).
52 Singh, War Despatches, 273.
53 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 236.
54 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto speech to the United Nations Security Council, 22 September 1965, emphasis added. Available at: https://www.bhutto.org/1957-1965_speech21.php.
55 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, 238–9.
56 ‘Letter from Acting High Commissioner of India in Pakistan to Ministry of External Affairs. Karachi, 15 November 1965,’ in Bhasin, ed., India-Pakistan Relations, 1084–89, quote at p1085.
57 Nawaz, Crossed Swords, 303, and J.N. Dixit, India-Pakistan in War and Peace (London: Routledge 2002), 219.
58 He told a confidente, ‘Kashmir should be taken at any price, even the Sikh Punjab and turned into Khalistan’. Quoted in Navnita Chadha Behera, Demystifying Kashmir (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press 2006), 88.
59 Praveen Swami, India, Pakistan, and the Secret Jihad: The Covert War in Kashmir, 1947–2004 (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2007).
60 See Peter R. Lavoy, ed., Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009).
61 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 300.
62 V. R. Raghavan, Siachen: Conflict Without End (New Delhi: Viking 2002).
63 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 56.
64 Reiter, How Wars End, 42–47.
65 C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2014), 159–60.
66 Bertil Lintner, China’s India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2018).
67 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, ‘Still Under Nehru’s Shadow? The Absence of Foreign Policy Frameworks in India’, India Review 8/3 (2009), 209–33.
68 Fair, Fighting to the End.
69 Indeed, this argument was used by opposition members of parliament, when they spoke against the Tashkent Agreement’s requirement for India to relinquish its Kashmir gains – see Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. L, No. 3, 16 February 1966.
70 K. Subrahmanyam, ‘No-War Pact with Pakistan’, Strategic Analysis 5/10 (1982), 499–503.
71 Srivastava, Shastri, 334. Emphasis added.
72 Chaudhuri, India’s Problems, 12.
73 Quoted by Swaran Singh, in Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. L, No. 3, 16 February 1966, column 615.
74 Srivastava, Shastri, 350–83.
75 These are the essence of the first three articles of the Tashkent Declaration – reproduced as Appendix VII in Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 342–44.
76 Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. L, No. 3, 16 February 1966, column 625.
77 Mahesh Shankar, ‘Nehru’s legacy in Kashmir: Why a plebiscite never happened’, India Review 15/1 (2016), 1–21.
78 Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. L, No. 3, 16 February 1966, column 621.
79 Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. L, No. 3, 16 February 1966, column 626.
80 By the time of the 1971 war, the Indian government had decided that ‘the Tashkent Agreement failed to give us peace,’ and a commitment without security guarantees would be futile – see [New Delhi, India, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library], [P.N.] Haksar Papers [III Instalment], Subject File 173, ‘A note on India’s objectives in the current conflict with Pakistan,’ 9 December 1971.
81 General Musa claims the Army was sensitive to the contingency, but had no specific concerns, while the Foreign Office was convinced India would not widen the war – see My Version, 44.
82 These were the major formations in each Corps. Most of the infantry divisions also included integral artillery units, and the Corps each included several other smaller formations, such as independent infantry brigades and other miscellaneous units. Tally derived from Corps orders of battle in Singh, War Despatches, 93–95, 170–71, 218–21.
83 Singh, War Despatches, 85.
84 Lachhman Singh Lehl, Missed Opportunities: Indo-Pak War 1965 (Dehra Dun: Natraj 1997), 82–83.
85 Bhupinder Singh, 1965 War (Role of Tanks in India-Pakistan War) (Patiala: B.C. Publishers 1982), 235–36.
86 The concept of manoeuvre seeks to impair the enemy’s capacity to function as a system, by applying concentrated force against important enemy vulnerabilities. For an introduction to the concept, see Richard E. Simpkin, Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1985). Manoeuvre theory is often associated with, and overlaps with, the ‘indirect approach’ popularised by Basil Liddell Hart – see B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian 1991).
87 Singh, War Despatches, quote at 261.
88 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 313.
89 Singh, War Despatches, 18–19.
90 Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 88.
91 Musa, My Version, 28.
92 The official history makes clear that senior leaders’ concerns over the depletion of war stocks was based on faulty information – see Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War, 314–15.
93 Fair, Fighting to the End.
94 Singh, War Despatches; Prasad and Thapliyal, India-Pakistan War. See also Singh, 1965 War.
95 See, for example, Gokhale, Turning the Tide – which, it must be noted, was commissioned by the Indian Army’s official think tank, the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. See also Rachna Bisht Rawat, 1965: Stories from the Second Indo-Pak War (New Delhi: Penguin 2015), which was also commissioned by the Indian Army, to coincide with the war’s 50th anniversary.
96 Raghavan, ‘Civil Military Relations in India’.
97 Chaudhuri, ‘Indian “Strategic Restraint” Revisited’.
98 Walter C. Ladwig III, ‘Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38/5 (2015), 1–44. This echoes the case made by T.V.Paul in ‘Why has the India-Pakistan Rivalry Been so Enduring?’.
99 George Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 1992), especially 50–60.
100 Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta, Arming Without Aiming: India’s Military Modernisation (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press 2010).
101 Mehta, ‘Still Under Nehru’s Shadow?’ especially 229–31.
102 Reiter, How Wars End; and Werner, ‘Precarious Nature of Peace’.
103 Lieberman, ‘The Rational Deterrence Theory Debate’.
104 Joshi and Mukherjee, ‘From Denial to Punishment’.
105 Walter C. Ladwig III, ‘A Cold Start for Hot Wars? The Indian Army’s New Limited War Doctrine’, International Security 32/3 (Winter 2007/08), 158–90.
106 Nitin A. Gokhale, Securing India the Modi Way: Pathankot, Surgical Strikes and More (New Delhi: Bloomsbury 2017).
107 Arzan Tarapore, ‘Balakot, Deterrence, and Risk: How This India-Pakistan Crisis Will Shape the Next’, War on the Rocks, 11 Mar. 2019.
108 Srinath Raghavan, ‘Soldiers, Statesmen and Strategy’, Seminar, No. 611 July 2010.
109 Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore, ‘Countering Chinese Coercion: The Case of Doklam’, War on the Rocks, 29 Aug. 2017. In that particular case, it appears that India’s advantages were short-lived, as China proceeded to build other infrastructure nearby in the disputed area – see ‘China Trying to “Outflank” India’s Positions with Road in Doklam?’ Times of India, 20 Mar. 2018.
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Arzan Tarapore
Arzan Tarapore is a non-resident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research and an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University. He holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.