KARACHI, Sept 4: Recognition of Israel might be difficult for the government in Pakistan but it was the only way to neutralize its negative image in the US and beyond, said the visiting American scholar, Rodney Jones.
He was speaking on “Conventional military imbalance and strategic stability in South Asia” at the Area Study Centre for Europe on Saturday. He said that Pakistan did not enjoy that support among scholars and journalists in the US whose military had deep relations with Pakistan’s military.
Rodney Jones praised Gen Musharraf for moving people in a different direction and said that Pakistan ought to figure out how to deal with religious extremists.
He extensively deliberated on the conventional military balance between Pakistan and India and the nuclear factor in South Asian stability. He also described the main features of their respective military forces, the related military imbalances, and the strategic stability implications of those imbalances.
The visiting scholar was of the view that the conventional military balance was highly tilted in India’s favour than commonly understood, and this disparity continued to widen to Pakistan’s disadvantage, having destabilizing effects on their nuclear relationship.
In a nuclearized South Asia with unresolved dispute having the potential of becoming a nuclear flash point, Dr Jones believed that the important underlying issue was whether the conventional military imbalance between Pakistan and India would lead to the outbreak of another conventional war, and whether in such a war those imbalances would also accentuate the risks of nuclear war.
His thesis was that the pronounced conventional military imbalance between these two nuclear-armed rivals was politically and militarily destabilizing in their newly nuclearized environment.
Appreciating the on-going confidence building measures between the two countries, Dr Jones referred to the stand off between the two countries after limited war in Kargil and attack on the Indian parliament.
An aggravating factor in the tensions created by this confrontation was the fact that after the Kargil conflict, Indian officials and senior military officers had begun advancing arguments for the conduct of ‘limited war’ as a way of responding more effectively to the type of unconventional military intrusion Pakistan had covertly organized at Kargil.
He said that Kargil conflict reflected that Pakistan was willing to take risk with a superior military power and believed that neither Pakistan nor India was close to use of nuclear option. But India, he said, was willing to expand the war.
Dr Jones pointed out that in 2003-2004 India spent about 24 billion dollars. Its defence allocations increased when Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union but when the Kashmir insurgency started New Delhi’s budget allocations slid down, perhaps because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was not in a position to provide favourable credit line to India. Pakistan was actually spending less of its GDP, which he said was a good thing. China’s defence budget was believed to be 80 billion dollars.
He did not subscribe to the contention that the Indian military build-up was to ward off threat from China and said that about 90 per cent of India’s military might was directed at Pakistan. Most of India’s land forces were deployed in Punjab, Rajasthan and in Kashmir. He exhibited tables and graphs to show trends in armed forces size and major combat systems over time.
Earlier, the director of Area Study Centre for Europe, Dr Naveed Ahmad Tahir, referred to the recent developments with regard to the strategic situation in South Asia, especially the Indo-US defence agreement which had formalized the strategic partnership between the two countries.