Pakistan’s army has dominated the state for most of its 66 years. It has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India to revise the maps in Kashmir and to resist India’s slow but inevitable rise. To prosecute these dangerous policies, the army employs nonstate actors and nuclear weapons. The Pakistan army started three wars over Kashmir with India in 1947, 1965, and 1999 and failed to win any of them. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, some of whom have now turned their guns against it. The Pakistan army has supported non-Islamist insurgencies ... More

Pakistan’s army has dominated the state for most of its 66 years. It has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India to revise the maps in Kashmir and to resist India’s slow but inevitable rise. To prosecute these dangerous policies, the army employs nonstate actors and nuclear weapons. The Pakistan army started three wars over Kashmir with India in 1947, 1965, and 1999 and failed to win any of them. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, some of whom have now turned their guns against it. The Pakistan army has supported non-Islamist insurgencies and an Islamist terror campaign throughout India that have brought the two countries to the brink of war on several occasions. Despite Pakistan’s efforts to coerce India, it has achieved only modest success. Even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India’s equal and demands the world do the same. Why does the army persist in pursuing revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds? This volume argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. From the army’s distorted view, it prevails over India as long as it continues to resist India’s hegemony and the status quo. To acquiesce is defeat. Because the army is likely to persist in these policies, the world must prepare for future Indo-Pakistan conflicts and crises and an ever more dangerous future Pakistan.