On 1 October 2001, 29 people were killed at the hands of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in a terrorist attack outside the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. India's immediate reaction was to insist that unless the US was able to rein in Pakistan, it would be forced to take matters into its own hands, which might be a setback to the US-waged Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. While President Musharraf immediately complied by condemning the act as one of terrorism, the Talibanised militants attacked the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001. Enraged, the Government of India launched Operation Parakram, an operation that ordered the general mobilisation of the army for war on 18 December 2001. When Operation Parakram was called off on 16 October 2002 without meeting its professed objectives, it left many questions unanswered. - Why was Operation Parakram launched? - What were the military and political objectives? - Was the political leadership at all serious about the war? - What role did international pressure play in weakening the government's resolve? - At what stage did the government decide to opt out? - What did the military feel about this decision? - Does Operation Parakram have a future? Written by the perfect combination of a senior army officer and a journalist specialising in defence strategy, this important book answers these questions. It traces the changing pattern of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and discusses both the military and political aspects of the Operation. The bottomline, say the authors, is that a war has yet to be fought, and Operation Parakram is not over.

This edited volume explores competing perspectives on the impact of nuclear weapons proliferation on the South Asian security environment.The spread of nuclear weapons is one of the worlds foremost security concerns. The effect of nuclear weapons on the behaviour of newly nuclear states, and the potential for future international crises, are of pa

This is a monumental & epic work on India’s Military History. It seeks to answer the seminal question – ‘Is there an Indian Way of War-fighting and an Indian Strategic Culture?’ The author has traced the history of war-fighting in India from the Vedic & Mahabharatan period to the Mauryan & Mughal Eras and thereafter the British Period. It is a comprehensive audit of India’s combat performance in the ancient, medieval, modern and post-modern periods of Indian history. The focus of this work however, is on India’s Post-independence Military History. The author has analysed each of India’s wars with China & Pakistan as also its CI and CT campaigns in meticulous detail, to draw lessons for the future. The path-breaking contribution is the author’s thesis that there have been three local Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) in India, which shaped the course & flow of her history. Each of these RMAs helped to unify India under a great Empire and transformed it from a civilisational entity to a strong empire state. The first was the Mauryan RMA of using War Elephants in mass to generate shock & awe. This politically unified the whole of India and Afghanistan for the first time. The next RMA came with the Mughals who introduced Field Artillery, Muskets and Horsed Cavalry Archers with stirrups and cross bows. The Mughal horsed cavalry and artillery helped spawn the mighty Mughal Empire. The Third RMA came with the British who raised local Infantry Battalions on the European Pattern and drilled them to shoot in disciplined rhythms, to defeat all cavalry charges. This Infantry-based RMA helped establish the British Empire in India. The present Republic is a successor entity of the British Empire. The author has traced the evolution of India’s Strategic Culture to the Arthashastra of Kautilya. The surprise finding is that in the 1971 War – India unconsciously returned to this Kautilyan paradigm of using information dominance, covert war and Shock- Action military campaigns to defeat its adversaries. In the post-independence phase he traces the evolution of India’s war-fighting from the tactical phase of 1947-1962 when India’s capacity was confined to use of 2-3 Divisions alone. The 1965 War saw the graduation to the level of Operational Art, wherein 12 Divisions and a bulk of the Indian Air Force (IAF) saw active combat. The apogee came in 1971 – when India fought a brilliant, Quasi-Total, Tri-Service Campaign that broke Pakistan into two, put 93,000 prisoners of war in the bag and for the first time after the Second World War, created a new nation state with the Force of Arms. He traces the impact of nuclearisation on South Asia and prognosticates about the Future. The time has come, he asserts, for India to create a Fourth RMA in South Asia; and decisively shape outcomes. For this, economic power must be rapidly converted into usable military power. India must field dominant war fighting capabilities in South Asia.

Conflict resolution and promotion of regional cooperation in South Asia has assumed a new urgency in the aftermath of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, and underlined by the outbreak of fighting in Kargil in 1999, full mobilization on the border during most of 2002, and continued low-intensity warfare and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The stability of nuclear deterrence between the two countries is therefore a matter of great urgency and has found a place on the scholarly agenda of security studies in South Asia. Several books have been written on India’s nuclear programme, but these have been mostly analytical histories. The India-Pakistan Nuclear Relationship is a new departure in that it is the first time that a group of scholars from the South Asian subcontinent have collectively tried to apply deterrence theory and international relations theory to South Asia.

Rethinks how bureaucracy shapes foreign policy - miscalculation is less likely when political leaders can extract quality information from the bureaucracy.

This book focuses on the 2001-2002 crisis that brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. Authors focus on: the political history that led to the crisis; the conventional military environment, the nuclear environment and coercive diplomacy and de-escalation during the crisis; and how South Asia can avoid similar crises in the future.

Critical questions remain unanswered on the events of the cold-blooded and devastating terror attacks in Mumbai on 26 November 2008. Investigative and introspective, this book offers a lucid and graphic account of the ill-fated day and traces the changing dynamics of terror in South Asia. Using new insights, it explores South Asia’s regional dynamics of antagonism, the ever-present challenge to the frontiers of India, Pakistan and the terrorism question, the strife in Afghanistan and the self-serving selective US ‘war on terror’. This will be an engaging read for those interested in defence, security and strategic studies, politics, international relations, peace and conflict studies, and South Asian studies as well as the general reader.

In the post–Cold War era, states increasingly find themselves in conflicts with nonstate actors. Finding it difficult to fight these opponents directly, many governments instead target states that harbor or aid nonstate actors, using threats and punishment to coerce host states into stopping those groups. Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili investigate this strategy, which they term triadic coercion. They explain why states pursue triadic coercion, evaluate the conditions under which it succeeds, and demonstrate their arguments across seventy years of Israeli history. This rich analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict, supplemented with insights from India and Turkey, yields surprising findings. Traditional discussions of interstate conflict assume that the greater a state’s power compared to its opponent, the more successful its coercion. Turning that logic on its head, Pearlman and Atzili show that this strategy can be more effective against a strong host state than a weak one because host regimes need internal cohesion and institutional capacity to move against nonstate actors. If triadic coercion is thus likely to fail against weak regimes, why do states nevertheless employ it against them? Pearlman and Atzili’s investigation of Israeli decision-making points to the role of strategic culture. A state’s system of beliefs, values, and institutionalized practices can encourage coercion as a necessary response, even when that policy is prone to backfire. A significant contribution to scholarship on deterrence, asymmetric conflict, and strategic culture, Triadic Coercion illuminates an evolving feature of the international security landscape and interrogates assumptions that distort strategic thinking.