A cold blooded approach is necessary to evaluate the risks that can flow out of the current levels of confrontation of Pakistan with India. This evaluation should be based on actual history of Pakistan's behaviour towards India in the past 55 years and the motivations and intents as can be reasonably gleaned there from and not on a theoretical understanding of what might have happened elsewhere in the world. The variables as applicable in the Pakistani case are qualitatively different from those which operated in the cold war between the US and USSR.

Experts of the nuclear theology of cold war concluded that nuclear weapons had only a deterrent value and were useless as weapons of war since nuclear war would have led to a mutually assured destruction of both parties. The intent on each side was to bring about the demolition of the other side but this intent operated within the parameters of rationality. Rational evaluation informed that, given the numbers, ensuring one sided nuclear devastation was an impossibility. Rationality compelled the evolution of doctrine of deterrence in the West.

In our Western neighbourhood rationality is at a discount. Western models therefore cannot serve as a basis for reconstructing scenarios of Pakistani options and likely actions. Western models generate a climate of wishful thinking. One has to avoid carefully this element while cognising what Pakistan might or might not do.

rest of the article is at http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper413.html

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