The three months spent in Washington-based think-tank, Henry L Stimson Center were full of learning new ideas. I became a nuclear non-proliferationist. In 1997 I was barely 29 years old, full of energy and a fertile mind. New ideas attract you instantly at that age. You don’t think about the context; you don’t think about your situation. You just grab whatever is coming your way. Non-proliferation ideas were fashionable in Washington, I thought they would be fashionable in Pakistan as well, or at least the profession of such ideas would attract awe from my colleagues working with me in the Islamabad-based newspaper.
The President of the Henry L Stimson Center, Michael Krepon was also very convincing in his argument. He used to incessantly talk about peace. Impressively he will talk at length about the mechanisms that are required to put in place functioning deterrence relations between Pakistan and India—mechanisms that were in place during the Cold War, and which made stable strategic relations between the US and the USSR possible. Peace and non-proliferation appeared very attractive in the Pak-India context. I used to call Mr. Krepon a nonproliferation fundamentalist. He used to laugh and point out that there were more hardened nonproliferation fundamentalists in Washington than him. We once discussed Minto and his short stories and their possible impact on people-to-people contact between Pakistan and India. Many of Minto’s stories are in the context of the newly independent states of India and Pakistan.
During those days I met a US diplomat from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) of the US State Department. I believe I remember her name correctly—It was Caroline Russell (at least my notes from those years tell me so). She was working on the South Asian Desk of ACDA in those days. She was very well versed in the Cold War armament issues but appeared to be a novice about armament issues in South Asia. She appeared very persuasive in her nonproliferation arguments. Crux of her arguments was that the only option available to Pakistan and India was a negotiated peace and moves away from nuclear proliferation. Years later I received a call from the American Embassy that Caroline Russel was visiting Islamabad and would like to meet me. This was I believe two years after Pakistan had carried out nuclear explosions. She again was very convincing: peace was the only option before Pakistan. I won’t say these were decisive influences on my strategic thinking. But at least these two encounters changed the direction of my further studies in strategic affairs. I became a peace nick.
Two recent wars—Gaza and Ukraine— have changed the world or have introduced fundamental changes in the thinking of those who were under the influence of US public diplomacy or who had interacted with Washington’s nonproliferation lobby
In those years I remember an encounter with another American strategic thinker, George Tan Ham in Islamabad—the famous one who wrote a book about, “India’s strategic culture”. He told me he was writing a book on Pakistan’s strategic Culture. It was again the American Embassy in Islamabad that introduced me to George Tan Ham. George was especially well versed in the strategic and military history of the sub-continent and both sides of the Atlantic. George again was emphatic in his arguments that the world is moving away from conflict and war. He was no non-proliferationist, but an analyst and historian of strategic and military affairs. He wanted to discuss Pakistan’s history with a young man in his early 30s—It was my 8th or 9th year as a journalist in Islamabad, I did my masters from a government-owned and run university and I was from a middle-class family. It was not that George was lacking in knowledge of Pakistan’s history or its social reality. But he was interested in knowing how young middle-class professionals perceived his country’s history. In other words, he was interested in my understanding of Pakistani history—something which provided him the base material for writing about Pakistan's strategic culture.
My initial encounters with US thinkers and officials and what they said about peace, non-proliferation, and obsoleteness of wars and conflicts determine my future course of studies in strategic and military affairs. Suddenly I felt that I was no longer a nuclear enthusiast and that the military as a tool of statecraft appeared to me as obsolete or redundant, especially for a country like Pakistan, where social sector budget cuts were regularly introduced in the national budget to make way for the massive levels of defense spending. My pro-peace and anti-proliferation inclination were not restricted to these three above-mentioned encounters. Reading writers and the military like Lawrence Freedman, Jeremy Black, Robert Kaplan, and many others contributed to me becoming a peace nick. I hated war and thought it was unnecessary in inter-state relations. My experience of actively reporting the conflict in Northwestern parts of the country from 2004 till 2018 reinforced my inclinations. I still hate war, but I don’t think that it is obsolete, and I don’t think it has become unnecessary in inter-state relations.
Two recent wars—Gaza and Ukraine— have changed the world or have introduced fundamental changes in the thinking of those who were under the influence of US public diplomacy or who had interacted with Washington’s nonproliferation lobby. War is back with a bang. Both the Gaza and Ukraine wars have one thing in common—in both the wars the states with powerful militaries, the Israeli and Russian Federation, inflicted or attempted to inflict heavy damages on the weaker societies and states. Ukraine had powerful and wealthy backers in the form of Washington and other Western European capitals, whereas Gaza as a society was and is completely helpless. With the help of American weapons, the Ukrainian military was able to resist the Russian military for quite a long time. In the case of Gaza, even God didn’t come to help when, with the help of American weapons, the Israeli military was dropping bombs on hapless Gazans.
We often hear fairy tales about the peaceful nature of the Scandinavian countries like Norway and historically and militarily neutral states like Sweden. Both European states are adjacent to the Russian border. Look what impact the Ukraine War had on Norway and Sweden. Sweden officially joined the military alliance, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on 7 March 2024. Before applying for NATO membership, Sweden had maintained a policy of neutrality in military affairs since the Napoleonic Wars, after which Sweden adopted a policy of "non-alignment in peace and neutrality in war".
On the other hand, BBC recently published a report about how Norway is fast reactivating its thousands of military shelters and bunkers close to its border with Russia.
War as a tool of militarily powerful states to inflict atrocious damages on militarily weaker states is very much a reality of international politics
“Close to Norway's border with Russia north of the Arctic Circle, the hangars of the Bardufoss Air Station and the naval base at Olavsvern feel like they belong in a spy film, with their rough rock walls, gleaming concrete and military equipment. Carved out of a mountainside, protected by around 900ft (275m) of tough gabbro rock, the Olasvern base is particularly evocative with its 3,000 ft-long (909m) exit tunnel complete with massive blast door”.
“After the war (Second World War), the Royal Norwegian Air Force then used its mountain hangars to protect its fighter planes from a possible Soviet attack. These hangers included everything the planes and their pilots needed, such as fuel storage, weapon storage, space for maintaining the aircraft systems, and crew areas. Then around 40 years ago it was closed and mothballed.” “The role of the reactivated base which has had structural and equipment upgrades is to help the "resilience and survivability" of Norway's F-35s in the face of a Russian attack. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown the world how vulnerable expensive military aircraft like these $80m–$110m (£64m to £80m) F-35s can be when on the ground, particularly to attacks by "kamikaze" drones that can cost as little as $300 (£230)”.
Some might argue that I am too naïve to wait for Ukraine and Gaza to change my perspective about the inevitability of war. Immediately after my encounters with my American friends, there was a devastating and ferocious American-led war in our neighbours—the Afghan War and Iraq War. Yes, that’s true. But we Pakistanis as a nation were completely oblivious to what was going on in Afghanistan and Iraq—we still suffer from some kind of amnesia about What Americans did in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pakistani state—which under a military dictator was in military alliance with Washington during this period—played no small role in injecting amnesia into the Pakistani psyche.
We don’t confront the reality about what, during this period, was happening in Afghanistan and our deeper amnesia about our role in it. We have only meaningfully contemplated the Afghan war from the perspective of how it affected Pakistan. We have not confronted the reality of our complacency in what Americans did in Afghanistan—inflicted a war and left it in a deeper lurch by handing it over to the Taliban indulging medieval practices. So, I am not above Pakistani society—I just didn’t register the Afghan and Iraq wars. I woke up from deep intellectual slumber when Israelis destroyed human life in Gaza and Russians tried to bulldoze the pride of the Ukrainian people.
War as a tool of militarily powerful states to inflict atrocious damages on militarily weaker states is very much a reality of international politics—weaker states pose minor threats to the powerful states. Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza are military non-entities or weaker than the United States Israel, or even Western European nations. Then how to interpret Washington’s peace and nonproliferation-focused public diplomacy—of which I was one of the consumers. Can we say that public diplomacy was carried out during the liberal eras of former US President Bill Clinton and were honest efforts? But then former US President Joe Biden was no less a liberal in his political inclinations, how come he remained silent in the face of Israeli atrocities?
The world’s powerful military states are in no mood to care for the international norms against war. We need to be careful
Peace-focused public diplomacy was targeting Pakistani society which was then in the grip of war euphoria after a recent Afghan victory over Soviet occupation and the 1989 uprising in Kashmir. Every Pakistani political leader provided material support to Kashmiris and used to boast about Pakistan’s role in the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Maybe US public diplomacy had a specific purpose within the context of the belligerent atmosphere of Pakistani society. However liberal or conservative means nothing when it comes to the extremely belligerent nature of the US international role. US commentators define all the US presidents since 911 as liberal (except President Trump) in their political inclinations. But, in one or the other way, they have all been belligerent when it comes to destroying what they perceive to be a threat.
What are the implications for Pakistan of the newly emerging reality of international politics where powerful military states are posing an existential threat to militarily weaker states? Pakistan is militarily not a weaker state. But we need to consider three emerging realities about India—Pakistan’s military rival. First, India is making every effort to widen the gap with Pakistan in terms of its superiority in conventional weapons. Second, India is in league with those militarily superior states, including the US, Russia, and Israel, which are responsible for imposing devastating wars on weaker states. Thirdly, Indian society is under the political influence of a religious revivalist ideology—Hindutva— which, many years ago, was dubbed as the natural house of the militarily assertive policy of not secular but Hindu India. The emerging international realities are posing a threat to Pakistan—we don’t know how the events will unfold, but we do know that things are not good for Pakistan. The taboo against using war as a tool against relatively weaker states had died its own death. The world’s powerful military states are in no mood to care for the international norms against war. We need to be careful.
I still hate war, which is the destroyer of humanity, which human groups have used against other human groups, in history, to inflict incalculable losses, which provides bases to destructive revolutions, which in turn deprive humans’ society of social fabrics and morals values. Modern wars are not heroic and are extremely destructive. Even imagining war between Pakistan and India makes my skin cold. But we cannot wish away the institution of war. It is a reality, and it will recur as long as modern states continue to harbor the dreams of international or regional supremacy.
Let me admit a technical era in this piece—what is happening in Gaza is not a war, and yet I have placed Gaza alongside Ukraine. War is fought between two belligerents. In Gaza the only belligerent is Israel, and it is carrying out a massacre or genocide. And if God exists, he will not let it go unnoticed. Neither the God of the Quran nor of the New Testament or Old Testament will approve of what is going on in GAZA. The God of the Quran, the Old Testament, and the New Testament is the God of Justice. May Justice prevail.