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The
Realism
Fallacy
BY
ISHTIAQ
AHMED
The
India finds China a bigger threat than Pakistan and insists that it
needs to arm itself to thwart perceived Chinese aggression, but Pakistan
perceives a militarily stronger India a greater threat to its security
than before.
The Realism School of
International Relations is premised on the assumption that states do not
trust each other. They seek power and domination over others because
they fear that if they are weak and vulnerable, other states will attack
them. Consequently, the art of survival is to be always vigilant and on
the lookout for striking first. War can, however, be kept at bay or
postponed through the maintenance of a “balance of power”, or from
the advent of nuclear weapons, “balance of terror” between the most
powerful states. Such peace is temporary. Therefore, states must always
be preparing for war.
Such jargon is part of the everyday parlance that security analysts and
experts employ to urge greater spending on defence to ward off attack.
Not surprisingly, an arms race follows. As one side acquires better
weapons, the other side must try to offset that advantage by aiming for
better killing capacity and capability. As both or many states engage in
such a competition, forming alliances amongst themselves against common
enemies, the objective and subjective levels of insecurity go up,
because the new weapons, the training and preparation that is invested
in learning to use them incrementally provide a higher level of
destructive power than before. In other words, more and better weapons
do not lower the fear and anxiety of the enemy; they heighten it.
The India-Pakistan arms race represents such an equation; only it is not
determined entirely by their notorious rivalry. India finds China a
bigger threat than Pakistan and insists that it needs to arm itself to
thwart perceived Chinese aggression, but Pakistan perceives a militarily
stronger India a greater threat to its security than before. Since at
least the 1990s Pakistan has sought its weapons from China. Previously
it was the US from which Pakistan acquired its weapons by playing upon
the former’s fear of Soviet military might.
In any case the existing chain of reactions dates from 1962 when the
Sino-Indian border war took place. It is also true that even when
Pakistan began to receive in the mid-1950s military aid from the US, it
was not until the 1965 war between India and Pakistan that they
seriously began to try to outdo each other in terms of a serious arms
race between them.
One would have imagined that when both sides demonstrated their ability
to explode nuclear devices in May 1998, a “rational level of mutually
assured destruction” had been reached. Both were in a position to
inflict massive injury and therefore did not need to keep on spending on
arms and armaments. However, the Chinese factor complicated that
situation. The recent Indian hike on defence spending has made Pakistan
nervous and it will seek to balance that by cultivating Chinese military
hardware.
In the past, realism-driven arms races have usually ended up in war —
World War I and II are cases in point. Millions of human beings were
slaughtered by vain politicians and even vainer military generals. Then,
of course, the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union started as
hardcore realists began to define the relationship between the two
superpowers. A direct nuclear war never broke out between them although
the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 nearly drove them over the precipice.
It ended rather unexpectedly as the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991
under the deadweight of its sluggish command economy and a failed policy
on consumer goods, coupled with the lack of political freedom.
Returning to the India-Pakistan standoff, it can be argued that it
cannot go on interminably without dragging them into a war that neither
will win but in which both will suffer unimaginable harm and damage, or,
one of them will disintegrate because of overspending on weapons while
unemployment and poverty aggravate. Even the latter outcome will gravely
undermine the stability of the South Asian region. I would not venture
speculating which of the two possibilities is more likely. Both need to
be prevented from transpiring.
The rival liberal-internationalist school of international politics
asserts that although states are the normal units of the international
system, they stand to gain more from collective security. Professor
Aswini K Ray (2004, Western Realism and International Relations: a
Non-Western View, New Delhi: Foundation Books), formerly of the
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, has very forcefully argued that
the Cold War could have been averted had the liberal-internationalists
been able to define US foreign policy after the death of President
Franklin D Roosevelt in April 1945. He argues that the system of
collective security that the UN had heralded in should have been
followed to solve the conflicts between the US and the Soviet Union
In the context of South Asia the notion of collective security can be
advanced in the form of regional security. It would mean strengthening
the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). India and
Pakistan could become the paramount powers sharing responsibility for
peace and prosperity in this region. Very often such reflections are
dismissed as idealism: who can think of regional security when
terrorists go around blowing up people for as irrational reasons as the
accident of wrong religious faith or sectarian affiliation? Who can
negotiate with non-state entities that live in secrecy and that only
seek to inflict pain and injury?
Indeed these are very legitimate concerns and neither India nor Pakistan
is likely to lower its traditional security. However, the problems of
water scarcity, global warming and overall environmental degradation
pose such serious problems that no war can ever solve them. Only
cooperation and solidarity among the nations of South Asia can help them
find solutions to these problems. Unfortunately, Europe learnt the
lessons of peace and solidarity only after millions of its people were
consumed by wars.
Given the fact of nuclear weapons it may even be impossible for India
and Pakistan to survive such a war and make a fresh new start based on
peace and solidarity. A recent estimate suggests that India will wipe
out Pakistan (120 million Pakistanis out of 170 million) in a nuclear
war but only after it loses 500 million of its own people. Does that
make any sense?
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The
author is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of
South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore on leave
from the University of Stockholm. He has published
extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on
a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg
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