Thank you guys so much for coming out and thank you so much for hosting me.
I have gained many grey hairs in the course of writing this book.
So let me just say a little bit of background at myself.
I'm not a political scientist, so I'm always nervous when I actually hang out with people who have real degrees.
So my Ph.D. is in the humanities. So I the questions that I'm interested in are questions I think political scientists are broadly interested in.
But the methods and the data that I use are typically different from however I do cooperate and clearly very closely with political scientists.
So towards the end of my talk, I'm going to bring in some of the quantitative work that I've done.
I'm kind of an oddball for being a humanities person. I also want to thank Sara Waseem, who is the fabulous artist who who did the cover.
It's kind of an interesting back side story to this is that the Pakistan army was so upset about
the cover that up Pakistan in their version could not run it with this cover which I think
tells you quite a bit that even Oxford University Press in Pakistan has to cater to the
Pakistan's army preferences apparently was very offensive that Musharraf is in tiger flip flop.
Okay. So here's my question. Why is Pakistan persistently revisionist and what do I mean by revisionist?
I really mean it in two ways. One, there is the territorial revisionism with respect to Kashmir.
India is a status quo state. It more or less wants to have the ELO, KB International border,
and Pakistan obviously wants to force India to acquiesce and give some concessions on the on the Kashmir issue.
But it's also revisionist. Pakistan is in a in a wider sense,
and that is that Pakistan sees as itself the only state that can and therefore should resist India's rise in the international system.
And so what I think is kind of puzzling is that Pakistan has fought several wars over Kashmir,
and it 71 was not fought over Kashmir, but it was fought with India.
It's lost every war. And yet Pakistan persists in this revisionism.
And its revisionism, as I said, has even widened in scope even more problematically, is that the tools that it's used to pursue,
this revisionism, heavily reliant upon jihad under its expanding nuclear umbrella, is actually in peril the state itself.
So what I mean by that, what's called by shorthand, the Pakistani Taliban, the TTP,
it wouldn't exist if there hadn't been previously an Afghan Taliban, a Cathal Ansar, a Harvard of Jihad Islami,
and the whole zoo of Deobandi militants that the Pakistan intelligence and agency,
the ISI and the army is created to pursue their objectives in India, but also in Afghanistan.
So we expect states to abandon or revise policies that don't work even modestly,
and we certainly expect them to revise or abandon policies that undermine the very viability of the state.
Yet this is not what we're seeing with Pakistan. The conventional wisdom that animates certainly U.S. government policies towards Pakistan.
And from what I have seen,
the UK policy is that Pakistan is a security seeking state and this means that there's something in our toolbox of national power that we
can do to securitise Pakistan to make Pakistan a secure state that will allow it to stop relying upon jihadi proxies in Kashmir and then,
by extension, Afghanistan. This gives rise to every time there's a new presidential candidate.
Barack Obama did this when he was a candidate. They revisit this idea of Kashmir that we need to have some grand bargain, that the United States,
working with our allies, can can put pressure on India to make some concession.
Once this issue is resolved, Afghanistan can become peaceful.
This happens all the time, every eight years or so.
Most recently, Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin argued this in a piece called basically was advocating for this notion of a grand bargain.
We fix Kashmir and then Afghanistan becomes okay.
And of course, Barnett Rubin is important because he was very close adviser to the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan,
I argue in the book. This is very pernicious because, one, it assumes that all of Afghanistan,
Pakistan issues resolve or can be reduced to the India-Pakistan security competition.
But most importantly, it legitimises Pakistan's claims that Kashmir and I'm going to say very categorically,
Pakistan has no legitimate claims to Kashmir. Now, I want you to be very clear that I'm not absolving India of its malfeasance in Kashmir,
but what I am doing is that I'm uncoupling the Kashmir issue from an international dispute between Rob Kennedy slash Islamabad and Delhi.
And I'm instead reframing it as a dispute between Delhi and Nagar, taking Pakistan out of the puzzle because it has no legitimate claims.
So not only. Do what we do politically, but also in terms of our assistance.
We treat Pakistan as a security seeking state.
And and I'm going to argue that it's not a security seeking state, that instead it is a greedy state, the or an ideological state.
And so I'm relying here upon the work of Charles Glazer, and you can read it.
But let me for those you can't I'm also very near-sighted, so I have difficulty reading it.
But he defines a purely ideological or greedy state as one which is fundamentally dissatisfied with the status quo,
desiring additional territory, even when it's not required for security.
What's funny about Pakistan, when it talks about Kashmir, it could if if one of us were writing an article,
why Pakistan might care about Kashmir, we might want to phrase it in terms of water security.
Actually, Pakistan doesn't do that. And when I talk about the evidence that I use in the study,
it's surprising how when Pakistan military talks about Kashmir, it's almost always ideological.
So when a friend of mine suggested that I read Glaser, I had this huge aha moment.
I think that's exactly what this is.
And the implications are pretty profound because if you treat an ideological or a greedy state like a security seeking state,
you actually incentivise worse behaviour. So in other words, the United States government over the last 13 years with its 30 plus billion dollars,
rather than making investments in a better Pakistan,
we've actually been incentivising it to continue doing what I would actually say is pernicious to our interests,
which is expanding their nuclear umbrella, both by pursuing tactical nuclear weapons or battlefield nuclear weapons,
and ever more investing in their zoo of militant groups.
So in other words, we've made it worse, not better. All the while,
our Congress has been told by our policymakers that they're doing things they're supposed to help Pakistan and help us pursue our interests.
So let me just very briefly talk a little about the methods. So I'm very interested, obviously, in this notion of revisionism.
And when I talk about this in the States, if we made a game called India and Pakistan and we set up here's the rules of the game,
here's what your national assets are, your instruments of power, and here's your objectives.
Your average 14 year old who got stuck with the Pakistan hand would give up.
Right. Your average rating if we just had the, you know, playing the game rationality.
Your average 14 year old would make some concession to India because any concession tomorrow is any closer than a concession today.
Now, Pakistan's not irrational. So clearly something else is going on.
And what I argue in the book is that it's the strategic culture that is flavouring,
the cost benefit calculus that what Pakistan is bringing to its cost benefit calculus is not, strictly speaking, game rationality.
It's bringing the weight of its history with India,
the weight of the way in which it interprets its relationships with the world to inform the payoff matrix for its actions.
When I did look at the political science literature,
one thing I also found that was kind of lacking was that political scientists seem to assume the state is revisionist or is not,
and then these behaviours fall out of those assumed categories.
I think very little discussion about why a state stays revisionist when the very viability of the state itself is imperilled.
And I found very few people that talked about changing state,
like becoming revisionist from status quo and vice versa with with one exception this fellow Zions type you a brief about my data.
So for some of you know me I had for many years gone to Pakistan actually since 1991 and had interacted closely with the military.
My argument always was that they should at least be able to present their point of view.
The problem with their point of view is it is not it doesn't frequently align with empiricism, with with empirical history.
I can put that less delicately. They make stuff up quite a bit, quite a bit, in fact, often all the time.
And so, you know, I do rely upon in moments salient conversations with specific individuals.
But one for all of you that have gone to Pakistan or interacted with Pakistan, the military in particular, the.
No, they're brief. They I can't speak to you all, but I can certainly speak to Americans.
The average American interlocutor engaging with a Pakistani counterpart does not know the history
of U.S. Pakistan relations and what the Pakistanis will do briefly in terms of the military,
I'm not talking about Pakistanis in general,
although many other ordinary Pakistanis have taken on this history because of the diffusion into Pakistan's textbooks.
It's all very stylised version of history. One of my favourites is We Were Your Ally and you didn't defend us in the 65 war.
Well, okay, the treaty was against communist aggression and he started the war.
And oh, by the way, under Cedo, you were supposed to go to Vietnam in Korea, and you did it right.
So they don't expect to. That kind of response. They get it for me.
But the average American both because we like to be liked, we want we won't be so nasty or more generally because we're ignorant.
Another one that they'll do with the F-16 drama. Oh, he worked aside for the F-16.
This isn't actually the truth. But even George Bush fell for the F-16 drama and he made his opening gambit to Musharraf.
We we're going to fix that F-16 situation. So they have a very effective way of Stylising history.
And what essentially does is it is it creates this expanding,
ossified sense of obligation that the Americans are so unreliable and we have to constantly do more to win them over.
So it means that the cost of every next engagement is ever more expensive because they have this false history of how we've let them down.
And by the way, I'm not executing Americans by any means.
If you read the book, I'm incredibly critical and scathing of how my country has enabled many aspects of the military.
We didn't bring about the coups, but we've enabled them every time, albeit for strategic reasons.
And so we've actually stifled this process of democratisation by virtue of always allying with the military.
So I don't rely is my principal source of data upon these interviews, which makes us both different from, say,
some of the books of my peers who are flown out by the Pakistan army and go hunting with them in the guise of doing research.
So instead the primary and I'm not joking, that's how it happens.
So my primary evidence is really these publications, these are not meant for me or you.
They're really conversations amongst themselves. These are not doctrine.
Now, what's interesting was the Pakistan army knew that researchers were beginning to use these resources.
They've now become part of their CIA. So if you start reading halal magazines, they now know that people are on to this.
You'll see stories that are meant for us.
There was an interesting fictitious news report about the Green Books about a year and a half ago where they were misrepresented.
His doctrine and Pakistan is changing the way it sees things from a conventional army to a counterinsurgent army, blah, blah, blah nonsense.
But I am relying primarily upon these text and I think collecting them since about 1999.
So thousands, thousands and thousands of pages I scanned.
And as my when necessary, I also rely upon some of this other qualitative data that I've collected.
I do a lot of survey work in Pakistan,
so my work is definitely mixed methods and I rely upon some of this Lashkar stuff that I've collected as well appropriately in the book.
All right. So let me just go through Zion's framework and explain its appeal, but also why it was inadequate.
So as I was trying to explain why some states are what he calls unreasonably revisionist and reasonably reverse now,
so an unreasonably revisionist say it would be Nazi Germany.
Right. He just persisted with this revisionism until it was destroyed.
Iran in the Iraq war is another example. He goes of unreasonable revisionism.
In contrast, Iraq in the Iran Iraq war, was he, per his classification, a reasonably revisionist state?
It gave up when it realises, when it realised that the marginal cost wasn't compensating,
the marginal benefit of the policy wasn't compensating for the marginal cost.
And so he his structure that he lays out is sort of obvious.
But you talking about domestic structures and when you have an autocratic regime, if mediated through this thing that he calls elite ideology,
he doesn't problematise elite ideology, which I think for me becomes a focus of my work.
If it's a pragmatic elite in theology, you get reason, revisionism, if it's ideological, unreasonable, it's the names.
And if you have a democratic regime, it goes through domestic politics that the public opposes the policy.
You get reasonable revisionism, no public opposition, unreasonable revisionism.
So at first blush, this thing of the peeling, but obviously he's looking at single plays,
you looking at you look at particular conflicts with a very limited duration in time.
He's not looking at any case of revisionism that last 60 plus years.
And of course, Pakistan is a mixed regime type. So I noodled it and sort of rethought it.
And this is why I came up for Pakistan. So I think we can agree that Pakistan's never been truly democratic.
Even in the fifties after independence, it was really a military bureaucratic condominium.
And Ayesha Siddiqa is sitting in it, sitting in the audience.
And her book, I think, really speaks to these different kinds of regime types, how they've evolved with it.
With the exception of the early years of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto period,
we really haven't seen a Democratic leader running the show and he didn't run the show for that long.
So we generally have either an army controlled democracy like we have right now,
which is that the army can use different constitutional arrangements where when when they don't have this thing called 58 to be,
they use the street politics like they're doing right now or working with the.
Supreme Court to keep the brake on democracy or we have direct Army role and when we can army control democracy.
In theory, they should go through domestic politics. And this is where we have an observational problem.
The civilians, when they're in power, they almost always align with the preferences of the army.
So we can't see if they want a different world.
There might be some memoirs that they write after the fact, but was that really what they were thinking?
So we really can't see. The only thing that we can see is did they do things that were different from the army?
And with very few exceptions. The answer is no.
And basically the civilians do what the army wants them to do, and we could do the experiment.
Well, what if the army wasn't constantly, you know, tapping them on the shoulder, reminding them of who's in charge?
Well, where that has happened and there's been a few periods when that's happened, the army intervenes and we go right back here to direct Army.
And then I'm going to argue this gets mediated through the strategic culture of the army,
which, by the way, does inform considerably domestic politics.
There's been a lot of diffusion. Why is that?
Because when the army is in charge, they have a lot of say over the Ministry of Education, the ministry, information, media and so forth.
So the curriculum that Pakistanis read in school align very much with the fictions that the Pakistan
army believes in or wants us to believe that they believe not going to argue is a result of my study,
that this is an ideological, strategic culture, and we get this revisionism.
It's not a pragmatic strategic culture.
What's really interesting is that of all the things that I read will be an example of a pragmatic, strategic culture of the Pakistan army.
Pragmatism would say we should have some kind of normalisation with India because some kind of normalisation with India will be good for our economy,
which means we can continue to invest in our military expenditures while not blowing the cap
on the percent military investments and the percentage of GDP spent on military investments.
On never seen an article in an official Pakistani military publication that argues for any kind of normalisation with India.
And I mean, never I mean, not one, not two, I mean zero zero.
Literally the number zero. That's why I have is X here.
And it's absolutely gobsmacking that of all the stuff I've read from these guys,
thousands of pages over six plus decades, the answer is zero and not a single one.
It's I don't I don't even know how to emphasise the word zero enough zero.
Okay. So I'm aware that there is this debate in strategic culture.
Some people don't think it's valuable. Some people think it is valuable.
Proponents say it's how do we explain when states don't behave per game rationality,
opponents will say, well, you can't isolate the divi from the ivy.
That's true. But I do a lot of quantitative work. Indigeneity happens.
This is kind of it's a nice goal to aspire to that you can have a completely independent deviant.
I've but you know what? The world is infested with indigenous and all kinds of studies that we do.
So I don't want to I'm not interested in resolving this debate because I'm not a political scientist.
And, you know, there's nothing to be had by pissing off a bunch of smart people.
And I don't have tenure.
So I basically use Alistair Johnson's concept, and I call him Alistair because I'm not on the first name basis, I don't call and Ian never met him.
So I use his concept of strategic culture as a heuristic.
This is not a formal hypothesis testing for me, it's a heuristic.
And what I like about it is that he tries to be as rigorous as possible.
He, he, he thinks that you should be able to observe strategic from non strategic variables.
That seems very reasonable.
He argues that there should be a uniquely ordered set of of choices that comes out of this strategic culture that seems pretty reasonable to.
And he says that we should be able to observe the strategic culture in cultural objects and we should be able to observe its transmission.
So this is actually somewhat easy to do for a project like this. We're looking at the Pakistan army.
Now, why can I justify this reduction?
And I'm oh, what the heck happened there? So why can I justify reducing the strategic culture of Pakistan to that of the army?
I couldn't do this exercise in India. Right, because the military has no seat at the table.
So if I were to look at the strategic culture of the army, that would in no way have predictive power about what the Army does.
And I would argue there might be more value in a country like the United States where the Army is so effective.
We have, because of our military industrial complex, the army is very good at lobbying our Congress and because we tend to be a fairly pro army.
All the Army senior leadership just has to leak a report like Stan.
That's Daniel McChrystal. And the next thing we know, he's leading our president to a policy that even our president doesn't want.
So there there's a range. But you certainly couldn't just say the strategic culture of an.
Army predicts with any certainty what a country does in most places.
But Pakistan is exception to this with respect to the levers of policy that most of us care about.
The Army controls that portfolio. Pakistanis can be angry that the parliament doesn't control defence policies.
The decision to go to war, the Prime Minister doesn't have this either.
But the reality is the Pakistan army does this.
Whether or not our policies have contributed to this. No doubt that that's the case.
But the reality is the army controls it. There have been a couple of exceptions when the politicians have opposed the military.
So, for example, Grenada in 98, excuse me, in 1988 signed the Geneva Accords without specifying an Islamist to be in power in Afghanistan.
That didn't last long. Zia was personally brought down the government as soon as he got the last tranche of U.S. monies.
Sharif in 1989 with Kargil, we know what happened there and I think we could also put an asterisk or a question mark.
Sharif in 2014. All right.
So I think most of you all know about military is I'm just going to pass through them unless you have questions about it in the Q&A.
Okay. So let me just go through some of the takeaways.
So actually, my husband peace, the opponent we were on what is a monty Python on a cold winter day and outfoxed to the scene from the black knight.
And my husband says, oh, my God, that's Pakistan, right?
1971 was just a flesh wound.
Anyway, so I owe this to my husband,
without whom my life would be so much more difficult because my husband is truly a saint and he just enables I have like a stay at home husband,
so I'm really, really lucky to have that. So he's alive for the prop to the spouse.
So let me just walk through some of the some of the takeaways.
And admittedly, these things, they overlap considerably.
But I think it's impossible to understate or overstate the degree to which the
legacy of partition animates the way Pakistan's military has come to think.
And in actually, this is this is a very fair critique that Pakistan has of its history.
When people talk about Pakistan being a failed state,
I actually get kind of annoyed with that because it's not it's kind of like that symbiotic twin that got cut off at the shoulder,
tossed in the waistband and it crawls out. I'm alive because in fact, it got very little from the Raj, right?
India kept almost all of the apparatus of state,
all of the bureaucratic and military training infrastructure in Pakistan had to recreate these ministries from scratch in the Muslim League,
unlike the Indian National Congress was not a grassroots party.
It had to leave its base in North India, and it had a choice between building the party or building the state.
So it's actually miraculous that Pakistan managed to limp along as it did.
And even in Indian historians will [INAUDIBLE],
concede that India did not want to give Pakistan's transfer of the wealth and it didn't want to proceed with the transfer of movable assets.
Now, the Indians would say, well, that's because the first thing the Pakistanis did was support a war with us.
So be it. As it may,
this does inform Pakistan's view towards India and of course the sanguinary nature of partition and the complete lack of security and the bloodshed,
particularly in the Punjab. These are all the things that I think are very real.
When I look at militant recruitment, it's not a coincidence that so much military militant recruitment is coming out of the Punjab,
and particularly those districts that are really that were very affected by partition and in the memories thereof.
This gives rise to another set of related issues pertaining to Pakistan's apprehensions about Afghanistan and strategic depth.
So as you know, the security architecture of the Raj was meant to contend with two competing empires, right?
The Russians and the Chinese. But from Pakistan's point of view,
they received what most would agree to be the most active threat frontier Afghanistan and fearing
north towards Russia with a fraction of the Raj with or with a fraction of the Rogers assets.
And very quickly, because of alliance relationships, the fear that came from Afghanistan via Afghanistan, from Russia also became infused with India.
Right, because Pakistan became allied with the United States, Iran and Turkey.
And because of that, the United States did not support or did not give a lot of aid to Afghanistan with them with a very limited period of time.
So Afghanistan becomes aligned with the Soviet Union, who was, of course, close to India.
So Afghanistan then becomes a secondary flank where its concerns about India are exposed.
But I don't want you to think that the Indo Afghan, the pack Afghanistan relationship is reducible to India.
It's not. As you know, Afghanistan first objected to Pakistan's admission to the U.N. It rejects the Durand Line.
It sort of it has irredentist claims on large.
Swathes of Pakistani territory on ever. It wants to make a scene.
It supports Baluch separatism in Baluchistan and by the way, part of the pristine lands that it claims are actually in Baluchistan.
And of course, that rabble rousers with respect to Pakistan's Pashtun population.
So this idea of strategic depth, it's not new, actually was inherited from the British.
I get very irritated when I see people ascribing it to Zia.
That's just not true. And you see them talking about these different tools in some of the very first issues of the Pakistan Army Journal, for example.
And of course, the entire architecture of governing, that huge portion of Pakistan that abuts the West was just completely continued from the British.
It was called the North-West Frontier Province until just a few years ago.
It still uses a colonial era architecture to manage FATA.
Curiously, India also inherited this notion of strategic depth with respect to Meetha right, the northeast frontier area with respect to China,
but for whatever reason, and there's this one, one tantalising line in a piece that John Garver wrote, neighbour who jettisoned it.
He doesn't provide a source and I'm very clear you work on NIF.
I'd be very curious to sort of do a compare and contrast because everyone thinks that
Pakistan is the exception in pursuing this strategic depth that we now kind of deride.
And actually, maybe Pakistan isn't the exception,
maybe India was the exception that it basically jettisoned this entire colonial architecture that was built anyway.
So that's something I'm noodling around with with respect to my next project related to this concept of partition.
You cannot escape from the fact that the Pakistan army arrogate to itself the defence of the country's ideology as well as geography.
Some people again want to say that this only goes back to Zia is just not true.
I encourage you to read a piece that I you can wrote in 1954 in Foreign Affairs about the ideology of Pakistan and the role of the army in defending.
So this is the idea here is that Pakistan is formed in the basis of the two nation theory.
At first blush, this seems kind of innocent. Nation theory says as Pakistanis learn, there's actually much more complexity to it.
Talk about this in the Q&A.
But basically, Muslims are equal nations to that of Hindus, and they cannot live under a Hindu the tyranny of a Hindu majority.
And then that was used as the argumentation for a separate state.
So this means that Pakistan does not exist without this ideology and for a number of reasons related to Pakistan's internal politics.
Every army chief has had a different way of instrumental izing this two nation theory,
and I want to think that they're using it in exactly the same way.
When I Yukon wanted to instrumentalize Islam, he basically engaged the Sufis, the the the shrines.
So he would have shrines distribute Western medicine as a way of undermining and controlling their claim to deal with healing,
like through giving amulets and so forth. Zia He was much more interested in working with Deobandi and Jemmott.
And of course, Musharraf had his own idea of sort of enlightened moderation.
But all of these fellows were basically trying to retain in their portfolio control of defining what is Islam and the role of Islam to the state.
Because of course, there always are concern was this is something that obviously the Islamists would want.
So they're always trying to keep the Islamists on a leash or in their pocket through cooptation or whatever means necessary.
But the other reason why this is so important is that there is no legal claim that Pakistan has to Kashmir.
There was an instrument of a session. So if they want to make a grouse about that kind of clock, we can problematise his agreement to join Pakistan.
By the way, these arguments also undercut India's claim because India also did not accept junagadh as
instrument of a session to Pakistan or the desire of the Hyderabadi design to remain independent.
So these notions of a session instruments cut both arguments both ways.
It's a double edged knife for both of those countries. But the two nation theory is the ideological claim that Pakistan makes to Kashmir.
That and this is why they'll say Pakistan's a the premise of partition was unfair and it was incomplete because they didn't get Kashmir.
Now, you can also at this point make not only a strategic culture argument, but also a materialist argument or even institutionalist argument.
And that is they're all they're aqua finite.
They all come to the same place, which is the Army has a huge interest in maintaining what is essentially a civilizational conflict with India.
Right. Because if this conflict were to ever go away, how would they justify this enormous conventional footprint?
How would they justify being able to run the country whenever they want?
How would they justify basically taking whatever piece of the budget pie, letting the country fend for itself with the rest?
So.
You know, you multiple arguments sort of converge to the same place that the Pakistan army is heavily invested in conflict with India in perpetuity.
And I think we have enough evidence that whenever the civilians have tried to have some sort of rapprochement, the Army does something stupid.
You know, with all the shelling that's going on right now, that's got a couple of purposes.
One, heat up the jihad again to take some of the pressure off of the jihadis that are killing Pakistanis.
After all, the butter to kill Indians and Pakistanis make Nawaz Sharif live a complete fool
by by sort of spoiling any appetite for negotiations on the Indian end of things.
So this serves you know, the shelling serves multiple purposes, not to mention testing Modi, which is another confounding event,
event that the next finding that sort of comes out of all of these readings and this was I have to say, I was kind of surprised.
Everyone I think everyone sees this in their later musings, the Pakistan army.
But when I how early I saw this, I was surprised right after the 1971 war,
where even going back to the to the 14 year olds playing the game of India and Pakistan, everyone would concede that Pakistan lost.
But after that 71 war and of course, many Pakistanis will see it as a loss.
You know, they tried to throw Yahya Khan under the army. Different parts of Pakistan try to deal with that loss in different ways.
But the military basically dealt with it by saying Yaya Khan was a drunken lout and we got he's gone, so let's rebuild ourselves.
But what you see in their literature is really puzzling.
Right after the loss and before India's nuclear tests of 74, you see articles that say, we're the only country that can resist India's rise.
Yes, it's true. We lost East Pakistan, but quite frankly, we were taking on a much bigger neighbour.
How could we defend two parts of our country that was separated by the expanse of India?
This is actually a really remarkable argument that right after they've lost half their country,
their responses were the only one that can challenge India.
And then, of course, as you know, it was after the 71 war actually clarify something.
Well, I'll get there in a second, but not under the nuclear umbrella. So this is this is just really kind of extraordinary.
Know the ageing myself, but remember those weevils when we were kids?
Weevils wobble, but they don't fall down. It wobbled, but it got right back up and that's how it saw itself.
And this sort of reminds me, I'm not sort of this exactly was something that a former Army chief told me several years ago in the gravity of it.
I don't think hit me until I continued seeing versions of this argument in these texts.
But I said, you know, why did you do Cargill? Then going back, you know, did you not gain this out and you gain this out even cursorily?
You should have been able to predict the disaster that it was and therefore roll back the decision making.
And people made institutional arguments. It was very stovepiped.
It was just Musharraf and his and his commander of CNN.
It didn't involve ISI.
And then the traditional arguments notwithstanding, even the army chief, Musharraf, should have been able to figure out the cargo was a fiasco.
But this freed this other army chief that I was talking to. He says, you don't get it.
We will always, when a window presents itself, take a calculated risk because to do nothing is to accept India's hegemony.
So we have to take a calculated risk, even if we know we're going to lose.
Just by virtue of doing nothing, we are defeated and by doing something, we're not defeated.
So in some sense, Pakistan is like an international insurgent, right?
The insurgent doesn't have to defeat the counterinsurgent.
It doesn't have to wield complete hegemony of force. It only has the present prevent the counterinsurgent from doing that.
So another words why Pakistan keeps engaging in these things despite enormous
cost is that it doesn't see defeat in the way that most people think of defeat.
Right. They have a just a very different definition of defeat.
And so this is this the unique definition that facilitates Pakistan constantly engaging in this brinkmanship.
Now, this is worrisome on its own on its own terms,
but especially worrisome given that the primary tools that Pakistan has developed is what I call jihad under an ever expanding umbrella.
I'm going to talk about this extensively at Ruthie's tomorrow.
So but let me just sort of point out a couple of things about this.
This exercise, at least for me, revealed, I think,
a number of understandings that are not typical in the field of scholars that work on this, the nuclearization of South Asia.
So first there is, I think, this conventional wisdom that Pakistan got into the jihad business when the Americans did in the eighties.
Not true. They obviously began 47, 48. And that was.
Very much. A state led state law isn't the right word.
It had state support. That's where this stuff began.
Anyone who doesn't believe that should read Shuja Nawaz his piece on the First Kashmir War published in India Review in 28.
He was the brother of a former army chief, very pro army.
So the fact that this dude would write this is actually pretty surprising.
And the details with which he describes both provincial and eventually federal support for the first war.
It's really eye opening.
And the reason he could do this was he had access to archives because of his relationship to his his deceased brother in the fifties,
because of their training with Americans. We were training them to to be counter insurgents with us.
That's why they were members of Cedo and Central. That's why we had the mutual defence pact.
Well, and so while we're hanging out with them at the National Defence College or training them in Quetta,
we're training them in American institutions. They're actually learning how to wage an insurgency.
So you get these articles they have like these checklists. Here's what we need to wage an insurgency on a mountainous jungle terrain.
And they don't necessarily say Kashmir, but you have to be an adult and not know that jungly, mountainous terrain is.
And so infiltration in the fifties and sixties is a huge concept.
There's so much so much page space is dedicated to this idea of infiltration.
Not a surprise that one of the authors who wrote this piece on infiltration was a leading officer in the 1965 war,
which was, of course, an exercise in infiltration itself.
They talk a lot about peoples armies in this period, recognising this conventional on balance.
So is early as the fifties and sixties you see the Pakistanis innovating at this low end of the
conflict spectrum in complete acknowledgement that it can't deal with India's conventional superiority.
Now we can have a debate about the conventional superiority.
Is it was it really conventionally superior, particularly on the the international border?
Doesn't matter, because that's how they viewed it as such.
By the time you get to the seventies, this is and you would see episodically even through the 4748 war in the 65 war,
they would call the intruders jihadis. They would have religious leaders past fatwas to call them jihadis.
But by the time you get to the seventies, you're more or less seeing this term jihad use.
And contrary to what Pakistanis say in their efforts to sort of make Americans feel guilty and pull out the chequebook,
and we didn't suffer men to our jihad. Far from it.
That's just really bad history. When King Zahir Shah was ousted by Daoud in 73 and began imposing Soviet backed Islamization,
the Islamists began fleeing into Iran and Pakistan respectively. It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto actually, who set up the ISI cell in 1974.
So they were actually running their own Soviet jihad policy on their own dime.
And there was a brief period after Zia took over when there was some optimism that Daoud Resort would would acquiesce to accepting the Durand Line.
And Zia let go, and then Daoud got assassinated. And then Zia resumed once again that the full on ISI ran jihad policy in Afghanistan.
They wanted Carter to back it. Carter said, No. Some of you may or may not know that we first sanctioned Pakistan in April of 79.
I want to hang on to that day because that's very important. So clearly we weren't planning on sucking them into a jihad if we're sanctioning them in
April 79 because of sanctions and we sent in them for nuclear proliferation on the sanctions,
made it illegal for us to give them security assistance so we're not able to actually give them overt security assistance.
And so 1982, after Reagan comes into power and gets a waiver, okay, so Pakistan begins this policy long.
But this by policy, I mean the use of non-state actors masquerading as Islamists.
But they're not only using people acting as Islamists in the 1980s.
Well, it's thoroughly involved in Afghanistan. It's also thoroughly involved in supporting the sick insurgency in India and Pakistan.
Nearly got a war in this period over it.
And they're also continue to interfere in Kashmir, although that's not the full fledged insurgency that it will be by 1989.
And they're still messing around in the northeast of India. So it's a very impressive suite of non-state actors that Pakistan is running in the 1980s.
I mean, it really is impressive that they're that they're able to do this. So that's the sort of timeline for non-state actors.
Let's talk about the the nuclear umbrella timeline.
If you read how Kapoor's work on the stability instability slash instability, instability paradox, I generally quite like that word.
But he gets one thing very wrong. He thinks Pakistan's nuclear period begins in 1990.
It doesn't begins much, much earlier than 1990.
And that's why he can't in his work explain for a lot of the behaviours I just talked about the northeast of Punjab insurgency,
what's happening in Kashmir. He can't explain that until 1990 because he didn't understand that our sanctions of Pakistan did not begin in 1990.
What the prisoner amendment was from 1985 is also this has been largely misunderstood in much of the writings.
The press or amendment passed in June of 85 was meant to resolve this growing concern in America,
in the American interagency process about Pakistan's continued acquisition of nuclear weapons.
CIA knew this from the beginning. We knew about A.Q. Khan long before 2002.
You all know about AQ. So you had part of the CIA that was very concerned about this going back to the seventies.
Carter first wanted to sanction Pakistan in 77.
And then you had these proliferation proponent opponents in Congress that also wanted to cut Pakistan off.
But the Reagan administration and the the the Russia folks at CIA obviously want to keep the money going.
So you have this interagency problem.
And Congress, of course, didn't want to continue the waiver, and that was required to continue arming Pakistan with his waiver.
So the press for amendment was actually a compromise that involved the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It involved the Reagan administration in Congress to say we basically move the red
line because the sanctions in April 79 were about enrichment and reprocessing.
What priceless then was the president just has to say Pakistan doesn't have a bomb.
So we move this red line from processing, reprocessing and enrichment to doesn't have a bomb.
And then this becomes basically threading the difference between an outright lie and exploiting
the small differences that existed amongst different and within the interagency process.
So many analysts believe, and they will say straight up that Reagan lied,
that when he said with the first certification, Pakistan didn't have the bomb.
We knew they had the bomb, but they were exploiting technical differences in the area, to be precise.
By the time 1990 comes along, we no longer need to arm them.
And we're no longer we're no longer willing to have our president apparently plagiarised or whether or not he lied before Congress.
We now know, based upon Pakistani forces and other declassified stuff, that, in fact,
Pakistan had the bomb, a crude bomb that could be delivered from a C-130 as early as 1980.
Right. So what you see when I see Pakistan's behaviour with respect to its use of non-state
actors and Pakistanis talk about this in their literature is like a nuclear overhang.
As early as the seventies, writers were saying, it doesn't matter what we have the matter of,
the Indians think we may have, it doesn't matter what we'll do in matters of the Indians think we may or may not do.
And so this sort. So it's interesting, if Kapoor had only read this stuff before he wrote his book, his arguments would be strengthened.
But he didn't read this stuff, and I would have been great to have collaborated on it,
collaborated with him on this, because his argument would have been so much more robust.
So I actually see Pakistan exploiting its its nuclear umbrella as early as circa 1980.
And I in in the book, I present some of the quantitative analysis that sort of looks at that argument,
looking at the various nuclear and various nuclear rising versus non-nuclear periods and the rate of conflict dividing conflict,
money and peace months per all months in that period.
So look, so do how do we end this this sort of we don't want to think.
I mean, gee, ickiness, is it always going to be like this?
Can it get better or can it possibly be worse? I'm not the most creative person, so this is not an exhaustive list.
But these are the things that seem most obvious to me. Sort of anxiety is game changers.
In other words, things that the Pakistan army can't directly influence.
Well, the first is some major confrontation with the United States from a proxy that's not entirely on their leash.
Right. It's not exactly exotic, just given their relationship.
It's possible. But boy, I don't know how much more majorly confrontational things should have gotten when Osama bin Laden was caught in Abbottabad.
I mean, I haven't seen it get any worse. Oh, yeah. Killing our troops in Afghanistan with their Taliban proxies in Lashkar e Taiba.
Hmm. We just seem our response is, I'm going to bend over and write another check for you.
I don't know what would at what would the pocket what would have to happen before we say enough is enough is enough?
I just don't know. Natural disasters. Actually, Pakistan is more resilient and is not.
The Anatol even argument of bribery and bribery that makes Pakistan so resilient is actually at a very grassroots level.
Pakistanis are able to very quickly immobile, mobilise resources to it.
Sometimes the organisations are not terribly civil, right?
Jamaat e Islami not terribly civil, but the the relief,
the analogy that I use is like we have a really nasty battlefield wound and you don't have a medic around.
You put the clotting agent in your thigh to kind of your biting bleed.
You're not going to survive that if you don't get to a hospital. But you're not going to bleed to death right there.
And so what these local CSO civil society organisations do, they're basically the clotting agent, while the big aid helps.
So if you just take a look at the timelines it takes for big aid to get there,
if it weren't for these CSOs getting in there, this would have been much worse.
If you compare the actual damage of the Pakistani floods of 2010 to the Haiti earthquake.
Pakistan was by far worse hit and it had about 1/100 of the aid because the International Committee of Aid Fatigue
with Pakistan remember the earthquake in 2005 plus there's all this whole terrorism saying Lashkar e Taiba,
people just didn't want to open up their pockets from Pakistan, whereas Haiti was just aghast with aid.
Several years out, you don't see the scars of this flood.
There was no secondary death, wave of death, there was no famine targeting, had a bumper crop.
You look at Haiti, Haiti still looks like it's been hit by an earthquake yesterday.
So, again, natural disasters with an embargo with the Pakistani army, this is where the U.S. is kind of culpable.
We let the Pakistan army look great. Right. International helicopters were doing the sorties, but we let the Pakistani military be the face of that.
So the military always comes out smelling really nice after these disasters.
So that's not going to be something that's going to undermine their position in society.
International partners forging a consensus because it's not going to happen.
When has there been an international consensus to punish Pakistan? Never.
All right. So let's think about some of these and dodges game changers, this democratic transition.
I have been a cynic about this because the Army has such they're the biggest losers in true democratisation.
And, you know, look at this. These idiots on the street demand dimmer.
Qadri and Imran Khan. I mean, what an ISI funded farce that he has followers that take that they have followers who take them seriously.
It just makes me wonder. They have no clue about the fact that they believe this.
So the idea of a democratic transition, I'm not optimistic about that.
And even if there was a democratic transition, we would have to for us to see real change.
We'd have to have civilian leaders want something different. I don't see evidence of that,
although I will say this is a necessary but insufficient condition to get a different outcome in
Pakistan at least were at least were rolling the dice with numbers other than one president.
All six sides of the dice. Right, with the army. We got to sleep. We're rolling the dice.
But it's always the same thing that's coming up. Civil and civil.
And what I call on civil society gets a lot of press.
I'm not impressed with this because some of the most effective civil society in Pakistan are really, really uncivil.
Jama'atu Dala, Jamaat e Islami name any of the major Islamist organisations.
They're not civil, and yet they're also the ones that are most effective in mobilising social media.
Much more effective than than what I would call liberal.
And I don't mean liberal as an American or British values. I mean respect for fundamental human rights, letting girls go to education.
I'm not saying run around in bikinis on mall in Lahore.
I want to be very clear what I'm talking about.
I talk about liberal society, basically respecting the commitments that Pakistan has made under various U.N. conventions.
I think they've they've signed on to those conventions of the treatment of women and children.
This seems reasonable, signed up to it, honour it, dudes. And even the younger generation, the so-called Imran Paras, they call themselves burgers.
If you if you look at surveys on the on this particular segment of Pakistani society, they're very much a deep state constituent.
These are these are not folks that they think the Army is the problem.
They're not people who even think the Pakistan Taliban is a problem.
They think the United States must and cause a problem because we're actually funding the TTP.
So do I see hope there in this generation of folk? Not a chance.
Economic shocks again, because we are so afraid of Pakistan failing, we never allow Pakistan to bear the full consequences of its behaviour.
So this is like methadone, right? We know that Pakistan is a crack addict, but we're too afraid of what happens when Pakistan get sober.
So we're just happy to keep the methadone drip.
We can have a pretty elaborate argument that if we actually took Pakistan off of all international aid,
especially the multilateral IMF, World Bank DVD, that the Pakistan army would be more vulnerable to criticism from Pakistanis.
Right. Because Pakistanis would then have to start asking, why do you get to have all the resources when we get nothing?
But right now, the Pakistan army can be pretty reliant on that.
It can take whatever resources at once and that the international community
won't let Pakistan fail through various international bailouts like the IMF.
So we have a very pernicious system whereby we are all enabling and we're insulating
Pakistan from the kind of outrage that ordinarily these kinds of policies would engender.
Well, there is. One thing that I found that I thought is really curious now, I'm not Panglossian.
I'm not I want to think I'm going to leave here on a happy note. But there is something really interesting.
There is. So there's this idea that the Pakistan army is aslam izing.
And we see we see that there's been a lot of infiltration and not just in them, in the Army, but in the Navy, in the Air Force.
Look at any major attack on Pakistan's ISI or military infrastructure.
Then you see this is there's serious infiltration.
How much of this doesn't is questionable. But there's also this really interesting sort of accidental countervailing thing happening.
So what you have here and I'll never get more data, so don't ask me about 25 now because I'm never going to get it again.
This is a one time deal. What you have here is district level officer production data.
So this is not officer level data, but it's how many officers each district produce in any given year.
Next 32. And the darker the colours like brown and red show you that because the heat map shows you more intensively officer producing districts.
And you can see the vast majority of Pakistan is not producing any district.
This is mostly coming from the Punjab, parts of what they call Azad Kashmir and parts of what's now KPK.
This is 80 to 90 to 2000 to 25.
And what you can see is that now almost every district is producing an officer, at least one officer.
And you can actually see some of them are producing quite a bit of officers, particularly in Sind where nothing.
And look at look at all the heat that's coming up here. Same thing here. Why is the Pakistan army doing this?
Well, so in the United States, we have this happening from the grassroots up, minorities, women, gay folk.
They use their service in the military to leverage for more access to rights.
Right. I did my time. I got shot at. I'm a gay.
You take please get married. Right. I was just as worthy of a bullet as a straight dude or a woman who is who has served in combat.
Why is it that I only get 70% of what a dude makes when I go into the civilian occupation?
So they're using their time in service to leverage with African-Americans or in the civil rights era with the POC army is doing is just the opposite,
rather than folks using their service to agitate for rights.
They are hoping that by extending their reach into these previous districts and by the way,
send in below just under problematic districts for the Pakistani army,
because they tend to view the army as a blue or if it is a Pashtun, Punjabi, kind of many of them looting and ruining the country.
So if they can make these folks partners in this corporation of running and ruining the country, they will be less antagonistic towards the project.
So in other words, they're doing what armies do, which is using the army, as is a great sausage maker for the nation.
Now, you can ask the question because they're not really what they were just in jobs in Baluchistan that they're recruiting.
Okay. Well, I've got evidence that that's not the case. Let's just hold that thought and say that they are.
Let's just say it turns out I've got data, too. This is a national experiment thing.
So these questions, I just I'm going to walk you through them.
By the way, this is also on my website. This is a big survey I did with my colleague Jacob SHAPIRO and Neil Malhotra.
We asked them their opinions about jihad.
Is it, you know, blown up stuff or is it making yourself better on how much you think Pakistan is governed according to Sharia?
If there were more Sharia, would it be better or worse? Do you want more or less Sharia?
Do you think Pakistan is governed by a lack of representatives elected by the people?
Civilians should control the military per the Constitution went to the army be able to take over.
Think of the political preferences of Muslims in occupied Kashmir.
So these are these are just a handful of questions that are illustrative that
there is a free rider problem associated with going into these new districts.
So the first thing that I have as let's let's take a look at Punjabis versus Punjabis in the Punjab versus Punjabis everywhere else.
Because when we put this paper through review, people would say they're just recruiting Punjabis in Baluchistan.
Don't they think the same? Or I'm not sure why you thought that, but it turns out I've got evidence that says that's just not the case.
So let's take this issue that jihad is a military struggle.
Punjab, even the Punjab, 28% of them think that that's the case compared to 12% of Punjab, even elsewhere.
So in other words, a Punjabi living somewhere else in the country is less than half as likely as a Punjabi in the Punjab to have this view.
And by the way, the more stars it means, it's more significant. These numbers are quite large.
So not. Not. This number, these numbers are quite large.
So when you have 100, 100, you're increasing the likelihood of something being significant.
So the stars tell you how significant it is. So for the most part, jihad is a personal struggle for righteousness.
You know, that's sort of the the great jihad versus the lesser God, Punjabis in the continent.
Only 15% of them think that Punjabis elsewhere, 47% of them think that way.
And I can just I can go through all of these metrics.
And what you see, just by virtue of being a Panjabi anywhere else but the Punjab, you're not likely to hold the same view.
And I shouldn't be surprising, but the reviewer was astonished that that was the case.
But I can't control the reviewer. Now, what is interesting is that Punjab is a non Punjabis in the Punjab look much more alike.
There is only one metric where they're substantively different and that is the
belief that their government is governed completely by elected representatives.
41% of Punjabis think that compared to 26 non Punjabis.
But on the other metrics that we look at, even if the differences are significant because the numbers are large, the differences are small.
So already we're seeing that. And I do I have an explanatory mechanism for why this is the case.
No, I don't. And then let's take this other case.
Let's take a look at Punjabis versus Cindy's in Sind.
So again, going back to that recruiter, the reviewer saying, well, maybe they're just recruiting Punjabis resent the same thing falls in many cases.
So jihad is a military struggle. Punjabis in the thin 5% think that compared to Sindhis innocent 18%.
So just comparing these fellows to their how ethnics in the Punjab you see a huge difference.
And and the other chart I have is looking at Baluchistan very similarly.
So depending on which chart you look at, sometimes one population is better on the jihad metric.
But my point is this the army, this is the unintended consequences of them expanding their reach to these new districts.
Now, armies are very good at playing Whac-A-Mole. Right.
So if you don't play along with the army once, you think they've got a couple of options, right?
They don't promote you and you get kicked out. Maybe you've maybe you of your own.
Like, I don't really dig this and you don't and you don't retain as well.
If someone else who fits them all are maybe because the benefits are so great, you just keep your mouth shut and you go along.
So we can't say right now whether or not the army is by virtue of the Army going to squish these differences,
or if we're going to see some really different kind of officers popping up.
And the other thing that makes something out of this whole issue of their their proximity to these jihadi groups,
but we also this other problem that most Pakistani unit deaths now are going to be due to Pakistanis, not due to Indians.
So there's a lot of countervailing pressures and events are taking place in the officer corps.
But I think this is really kind of interesting, and I'm not going to end with this idea that, gee, everything is going better because of this.
But this is, for me, the only source smile, though it is that we might have pressure for positive change.
Thank you very.