APRIL 2024 Crisis Prevention and Management in South Asia: - Mutual Confidence, Risk, and Responsibility

The key argument of the report is that, in the India- Pakistan nuclear dyad, there is mutual confidence that the other can be relied upon to show restraint in times of crisis and not push their adversary into a choice between a humiliating defeat and escalating the crisis to the nuclear level. [...] because nothing is more threatening to the nuclear fate of the world than the loss of confidence on each side in the other’s restraint, patience, and security.”13 It is the contention of this report that India and Pakistan share such a confidence in the restraint of the other. [...] the clashes in March 1969 between China and the Soviet Union) and the United States and Soviet Union disputed control over Berlin leading to crises in 1958 and 1961, the superpowers did not have the geographical contiguity that characterises the India-Pakistan dyad. [...] The other distinguishing feature of the conflict over J&K compared to Berlin and Cuba is that Indians and Pakistanis feel deeply emotionally invested in the Kashmir conflict and have shed blood for this cause in a way that was never the case for Americans and Russians in the Cold War (see Section 2.1 of this report). [...] 3.1 A Responsibility-Based Regime for Crisis Management and Prevention The unpredictability of luck coupled with the uncertainties surrounding how far Indian and Pakistani crisis managers will continue to be able to rely on the other’s restraint given the erosion of the sources of confidence outlined in Part Two of the report puts a premium on the two states developing a more robust regime, not on.