How the U.S. Can Avert an India-Pakistan War

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- So far, Donald Trump has had remarkably good luck: His administration has avoided a major international crisis not of its own creation. That luck has run out, however, with a deadly dispute between India and Pakistan. In previous showdowns on the subcontinent, the U.S. played a critical role in preventing tensions between nuclear-armed rivals from getting out of control. We are about to find out whether an erratic, hollowed-out Trump administration is capable of a similar performance.

India-Pakistan tensions over the disputed area of Kashmir have persisted since the birth of the two nations in 1948. The current crisis broke when Pakistani militants carried out the suicide bombing of an Indian security convoy, killing more than 40 Indian troops. After more than a week of threats and counter-threats, Indian planes have bombed suspected militant camps on the Pakistani side of the so-called Line of Control — the first time Indian forces had carried out strikes on the Pakistani side in decades.

Although the amount of damage caused is unclear, the bombings raised concerns that Pakistan will feel compelled to respond militarily. The potential escalatory implications are severe — both countries have nuclear weapons, and Pakistani doctrine reportedly emphasizes using them early in a war with India due to its conventional military disadvantages.

Given the grave dangers of an India-Pakistan war — as well as recent Pakistani threats that it might respond to an Indian assault by derailing the peace talks in Afghanistan — the U.S. has a clear interest in calming things down. In prior confrontations, in fact, American diplomacy has been vital to walking India and Pakistan back from the brink.

During the Kargil War — a limited but fierce military conflict high in the mountains over Kashmir in 1999 — President Bill Clinton used personal diplomacy to convince Pakistani leaders to pull their fighters back from confrontation with Indian troops. As Bruce Riedel, a senior National Security Council official present at the talks, recalled, “We could all too easily imagine the two parties beginning to mobilize for war, seeking third party support (Pakistan from China and the Arabs, India from Russia and Israel) and a deadly descent into full scale conflict … with a danger of nuclear cataclysm.”

Similarly, after Pakistani militants attacked India’s parliament in December 2001, leading both countries to move troops to the border, Secretary of State Colin Powell and other U.S. diplomats swung into action. They pushed Pakistan to visibly distance itself from jihadist groups in Kashmir, while also calling on India to show restraint. When the crisis flared again after an attack in Kashmir that killed 31 people in May 2002, Powell worked tirelessly to prevent Indian military retribution.

This sort of de-escalatory diplomacy — one that does not condone Pakistan’s perpetually bad behavior, but nonetheless reduces the potential of war — is again necessary. The question is whether Washington is up to the task.

In some ways, the job is harder because the U.S. has less leverage with Pakistan than it did in 2001-02, as a result of the Trump administration’s slashing of aid and a longer-running American shift toward alignment with India. (By the same token, Washington has more leverage with India than it did two decades ago.) The deeper problem, though, is that this administration has so far struggled to perform the sort of deft diplomacy the situation demands.

Disciplined messaging with carefully calibrated pressure has not been this president’s forte. The tendency on key issues such as North Korea has been shoot-from-the-hip presidential diplomacy that leaves allies confused and Trump’s own aides scrambling to keep up. On top of that, key mid- and upper-level positions are unfilled across the foreign policy bureaucracy, including the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, and many offices and agencies are operating at far less than full strength.

While all eyes are on Venezuela and Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un this week, the India-Pakistan crisis could actually be the acid test for Trump’s foreign policy. It may show whether an understaffed administration with a penchant for chaos is capable of executing smart and steady diplomacy when it is needed most.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Most recently, he is the co-author of "The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order."

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