What would be the unintended consequences of such a strike?
This is something the Government of India has always been very sensitive to. If you go back to 2001-2002 and see the calculations that dominated New Delhi's thinking then, it was not simply a question of whether India could go to war and teach Pakistan a lesson. The question was, what happens after that. You go in there, you thrash the daylights out of them, and then what do you do?
I mean, do you then stop, turn around and go home, or do you escalate, and if so how and to what end? These are all decisions that weigh on any responsible leadership, and I expect this government, which has been historically very cautious, will be thinking about that more than anything else.
Such restraint has been the hallmark of successive Indian governments in the face of constant terrorist strikes, would you say?
There is an Indian history of taking very measured responses. Even in 1971, which is what everyone talks of as the exercise of Indian pugnaciousness, India did all it could, until October that year, to avoid war. It was only when it became absolutely inevitable that the Pakistanis were not going to stop the carnage in the east, and that the tide of refugees would continue to keep flowing into India, that (then prime minister) Mrs (Indira) Gandhi decided to seek a solution through force.
Is this historical restraint, especially in the last decade that has seen Kargil, and an escalation of strikes across the country, in large part owing to Pakistan's nuclear capability and its deterrent effect?
That is the argument many will make, and you have to distinguish the argument from the fact. The fact is, Pakistan has nuclear weapons and this immediately induces caution on the part of any other State that is contemplating military operations.
The fact that it has nuclear weapons also allows Pakistan to conduct a variety of low-intensity wars against India with impunity. This is a tragic consequence of being nuclear armed, and this is nothing new -- it was equally true during the Cold War. But does it then represent the impotence of the Indian State? Not necessarily, in the sense that the possession of nuclear weapons has certain consequences that have to be considered by any country, no matter what character it has.
When you face a nuclear armed country you need, whoever you are, to think long and hard before employing force. Thus, to my mind India's deliberation is attributable more to the fearsome result of a nuclear exchange, than to the softness of the Indian State. People point to the 'soft' nature of India, but I wonder whether that is not a reasonable attitude to have given that you are facing a nuclear-armed adversary.
Image: Pakistan's nuclear-capable air-launched 'Ra'ad' cruise missile. Pakistan successfully tested the nuclear-capable, air-launched cruise missile with a range of 350 km a day after India tested a long-range missile early this year. Photograph: Mian Khursheed/Reuters
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