No ‘Cold Start’ doctrine, India tells US

[Officer of Engineers]

Sir, five years ago that would be true. However while America has grown more dependent on China, the share of the Chinese economy that relies on the US market has shrunk, in 2009 the US was the final destination for barely 1/5th of China's exports.

And a drop of 1/5 market would tantamount to a new revolution. The CCP is banking its survival on economic stability.

[zraver]

And a drop of 1/5 market would tantamount to a new revolution. The CCP is banking its survival on economic stability.

Then why the hostile economic actions vs the US?

[Officer of Engineers]

Then why the hostile economic actions vs the US?

I don't see it as hostile as to managing growth. The Chinese faced a superheated economy once and it was not pretty. Other priorities are now taking place as far as quality of life is concerned. Pollution controls and health concerns are now heading up the list as the older generation needs more care. The Chinese are relearning that a healthy population is far cheaper than a polluted population. With reduced output and other monies being diverted into pollution controls, health industry, etc, the Chinese obviously will look for the best bang for their products ... and that may not be the US.

However, the very fact that they are still buying American dollars should tell you that they know they're in the same coffin as the US.

[Double Edge]

But over 90% of the production. There are other sources, but it takes time before those can reduce/replace the chinese share by any significant amount.

And here's how you buy the time.

If we strip away all the extra layers of spin on the latest stunt China pulled, what remains is a trade dispute. They are a WTO member since 2001. They agree to certain rules. So there must be fora where these issues can be addressed and ultimately settled. They are not keeping to their side of the deal.

Face it, for a rising superpower this is irresponsible behaviour.

[xinhui]

Ran into this from today's NYT


November 5, 2010
Obama Is Not Likely to Push India Hard on Pakistan
By LYDIA POLGREEN and MARK LANDLER

NEW DELHI — Senior American military commanders have sought to press India to formally disavow an obscure military doctrine that they contend is fueling tensions between India and Pakistan and hindering the American war effort in Afghanistan.

But as President Obama heads to India on Friday for a closely watched three-day visit, administration officials said they did not expect him to broach the subject of the doctrine, known informally as Cold Start. At the most, these officials predicted, Mr. Obama will quietly encourage India’s leaders to do what they can to cool tensions between these nuclear-armed neighbors.

That would be a victory for India, which denies the very existence of Cold Start, a plan to deploy new ground forces that could strike inside Pakistan quickly in the event of a conflict. India has argued strenuously that the United States, if it wants a wide-ranging partnership of leading democracies, has to stop viewing it through the lens of Pakistan and the war in Afghanistan.

It is also a victory for those in the administration who agree that the United States and India should focus on broader concerns, including commercial ties, military sales, climate change and regional security. However vital the Afghan war effort, officials said, it has lost out in the internal debate to priorities like American jobs and the rising role of China.

“There are people in the administration who want us to engage India positively,” said an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “They don’t care about Afghanistan. Then there are people, like Petraeus, who have wars to fight.”

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, is among those who have warned internally about the dangers of Cold Start, according to American and Indian officials. He is joined in these fears by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The doctrine calls for India to create fast-moving battle groups that could deliver a contained but sharp retaliatory ground strike inside Pakistan within three days of suffering a terrorist attack by militants based in Pakistan, yet not do enough damage to set off a nuclear confrontation.

Pakistani officials have repeatedly stressed to the United States that worries about Cold Start are at the root of their refusal to redeploy forces away from the border with India so that they can fight Islamic militants in the frontier region near Afghanistan. That point was made most recently during a visit to Washington late last month by Pakistan’s army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani..

The administration raised the issue of Cold Start last November when the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited Washington, Indian and American officials said. Indian officials told the United States that the doctrine was not a government or military policy, and that India had no plans to attack Pakistan. Therefore, they added, it should have no place on Mr. Obama’s agenda in India.

For at least the president’s first stop, in the commercial capital, Mumbai, it almost certainly will not. With a huge delegation of 240 business executives, including the chief executives of General Electric and PepsiCo, trailing Mr. Obama, the emphasis will be on how the United States and India can expand economic ties in a way that benefits both countries.

The two countries are expected to sign a $5.8 billion deal to supply Boeing C-17 transport planes to the Indian military, one of several lucrative multiyear deals to supply India with military hardware. The United States is eager to deepen military ties with India partly to make it a counterweight to China, which is flexing its muscles militarily and economically.

“President Obama intends this trip to be — and intends our policy to be — a full embrace of India’s rise,” Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, said to reporters on Air Force One en route to India.

For Mr. Obama, politically wounded by the midterm elections and chronic high unemployment at home, such deals are also important to bolster his argument that the relationship between the United States and India can create American jobs rather than simply siphoning them away.

“There is a lot of money to be made there,” said Daniel S. Markey, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The big question is whether we have the ability to forge a defense and trade relationship with India that is symbiotic.”

For all the talk of shared interests, India still lies at the nexus of America’s greatest foreign policy crisis. Its archrival, Pakistan, is a crucial but deeply troubled American ally in the war in Afghanistan. The United States has struggled to find a way to mediate between them.

Some administration officials have argued that addressing Cold Start, developed in the aftermath of a failed attempt to mobilize troops in response to an attack on the Indian Parliament by Pakistani militants, could help break the logjam that has impeded talks between the countries.

India, however, has mostly declined to discuss the topic. “We don’t know what Cold Start is,” said India’s defense secretary, Pradeep Kumar, in an interview on Thursday. “Our prime minister has said that Pakistan has nothing to fear. Pakistan can move its troops from the eastern border. India has no expansionist designs.”

Indian officials and some analysts say Cold Start has taken on a nearly mythical status in the minds of Pakistani leaders, whom they suspect of inflating it as an excuse to avoid engaging militants on their own turf.

“The Pakistanis will use everything they can to delay or drag doing a serious reorientation of their military,” said Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on South Asia at the Brookings Institution.

India’s response to terrorist attacks has been slow-footed. After Pakistani militants attacked Parliament in 2001, India’s ponderous strike forces, most of them based in the center of the country, took weeks to reach the border. By then Western diplomats had swooped in, and Pakistan made conciliatory statements, deflating Indian hopes of striking a punitive blow against its old foe.

The military began concocting a plan to respond to future attacks. The response would have to be swift to avoid the traffic jam of international diplomacy, but it would also have to be carefully calibrated — shallow enough to be punitive and embarrassing, but not an existential threat that would provoke a nuclear retaliation.

For now, there are no signs that Cold Start is more than a theory, and analysts say there is no significant shift of new troops or equipment to the border.

But American military officials and diplomats worry that even the existence of the strategy in any form could encourage Pakistan to make rapid improvements in its nuclear arsenal.

When Pakistani military officials are asked to justify the huge investment in upgrading that arsenal, some respond that because Pakistan has no conventional means to deter Cold Start, nuclear weapons are its only option.

Still, many analysts are skeptical that Cold Start could be the key for the Obama administration to promote negotiations between India and Pakistan, which have been stalled since Pakistani militants attacked Mumbai in 2008.

“They are grasping at straws because they have a predicament in the Afghan theater that they cannot fix without Pakistan’s help,” said Ashley J. Tellis, an former diplomat and South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They are looking at India to do something to placate the Pakistanis.”

Lydia Polgreen reported from New Delhi, and Mark Landler from Washington. David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/wo...gewanted=print

[Double Edge]

Is it me or does that NyTimes article come across as surreal

Two things, either what was discussed in this thread is wrong or that article is, and i'm betting its the latter.

[nvishal]

I went through some of the text of the so called cold start doctrine and stopped after a few paras. The grammar and semantics used to describe the tactics are ridiculous. It sounded like a scene from an action movie.

It doesn't matter if india wins 10 or even 25 wars with pakistan cause that is not what is required to stop pakistan from doing what it's doing. Plus manmohan and team have agreed that it will indeed be a two front when it happens.

Does india really have the capacity to do MAD on both pakistan and china?

[Tronic]

I went through some of the text of the so called cold start doctrine and stopped after a few paras. The grammar and semantics used to describe the tactics are ridiculous. It sounded like a scene from an action movie.

It doesn't matter if india wins 10 or even 25 wars with pakistan cause that is not what is required to stop pakistan from doing what it's doing. Plus manmohan and team have agreed that it will indeed be a two front when it happens.

Does india really have the capacity to do MAD on both pakistan and china?

lol.... Don't know where to start and how to reply to this.

[troung]

Cold Start doctrine to stay on shelf
Cold Start doctrine to stay on shelf
Saturday, December 11, 2010

By Abdul Zahoor Khan Marwat
WikiLeaks has produced a treasure trove of hidden and not-so-hidden data about many countries, including Pakistan. There are also some reports about the Indian Armyís Cold Start Strategy.

According to a cable sent on Tuesday February 16, 2010 by US Ambassador Tim Roemer to State Department, Washington, subject Cold Start: A mixture of myth and reality “The Indian Army’s Cold Start Doctrine is a mixture of myth and reality. It has never been and may never be put to use on a battlefield because of substantial and serious resource constraints, but it is a developed operational attack plan announced in 2004 and intended to be taken off the shelf and implemented within a 72-hour period during a crisis. Cold Start is not a plan for a comprehensive invasion and occupation of Pakistan. Instead, it calls for a rapid, time- and distance-limited penetration into Pakistani territory with the goal of quickly punishing Pakistan, possibly in response to a Pakistan-linked terrorist attack in India, without threatening the survival of the Pakistani state or provoking a nuclear response. It was announced by the BJP-led government in 2004, but the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has not publicly embraced Cold Start and GOI uncertainty over Pakistani nuclear restraint may inhibit future implementation by any government. If the GOI were to implement Cold Start given present Indian military capabilities, it is the collective judgment of the Mission that India would encounter mixed results.”

The US envoy pointed out that India had failed to implement Cold Start in the wake of the audacious November 2008 Pakistan-linked terror attack in Mumbai. He said this called into question the willingness of the GOI to implement Cold Start in any form and thus roll the nuclear dice. “At the same time, the existence of the plan reassures the Indian public and may provide some limited deterrent effect on Pakistan. Taken together, these factors underline that the value of the doctrine to the GOI may lie more in the plan’s existence than in any real world application.”

So, even the Americans, for that matter all sensible Indians, do not believe in claims made by the Indian Army with regard to the Cold Start Doctrine. While the Cold Start is unlikely to ever take off, the Pakistan Army has nevertheless taken counter measures. These include taking up field positions and deployment where Indian strategy could be foiled and other steps to denying Indian military planners space for a short notice, short duration war with curtailed objectives despite the nuclear factor.

But for the world’s second-largest standing army, with about 1,100,000 soldiers in active service and about 960,000 reserve troops, the WikiLeaks cable on Cold Start is quite embarrassing as it shows that the much-touted strategy or for that matter “the great Indian Army” is not going anywhere.

==================================
2 Dec, 2010, 02.53PM IST,PTI
'Had no intention of carrying out surgical strikes in Pak'

'Had no intention of carrying out surgical strikes in Pak' - The Economic Times
CHENNAI: India had no intention of carrying out "surgical strikes" in Pakistan if another terror attack emanated from that country as it did not believe in a tit-for-tat policy, a top defence official said today.

"We are a nation which does not believe in doing tit for tat. Our complete policy with respect to development as well as security is purely from the defensive point of view. We do not subscribe to aggression," Adviser to Defence Ministry , V K Saraswat , said.

He was responding to reporters' queries on leaked US cables on whistle-blower website Wikileaks in which officials had, among other things, talked about India's 'Coldstart', a plan to attack Pakistan without provoking a nuclear response.

"We do not subscribe to aggression. Even during the 26/11 (terror attacks on Mumbai), despite such a kind of a provocation our country has taken a very matured view," he said.

He said any fear that India will go for any surgical strike was the "imagination of people."

On fears of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists in Pakistan, Saraswat said the issue of safety of nuclear assets has always been an international issue.

He said all nations should make efforts to ensure that there was a "robust system" of storing, distribution, transportation of nuclear material and ensuring that it does not fall in the wrong hands.

"To that extent, there is a message, not just for Pakistan, but all nations that besides developing nuclear technology, the security of the nuclear material and assets, both in respect of radiation and pure usage, have to be taken care of," he said.

The Indian nuclear establishment boasted of such a robust and secure method, he said.

"So we are very confident that in our system, in our way of doing things, nothing can go into the wrong hands," he said on the sidelines of a supplementary convocation of the Satybama University here.