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In The Difficult Politics of Peace, Christopher Clary traces the India-Pakistan rivalry from both countries' independence in 1947 to the present. Drawing on personal interviews and recently declassified documents, Clary offers new insights into the political struggles of Indian and Pakistani national leaders as they sought to navigate domestic politics and international politics simultaneously, and in so doing reveals how the causes of war and peace are inextricably linked to political circumstances within rival states.

Russia–Pakistan relations have improved since the end of the Cold War. While that trend is likely to continue, Russia is unlikely to transform Pakistan's difficult strategic circumstances. Russia is insufficiently wealthy to provide enough aid and investment to revitalize Pakistan's economy. Russia is also too concerned with maintaining access to the Indian defense market to increase defense sales to Pakistan more than modestly. This article reviews what I call the constraints of geoeconomics, where the relatively small size of the Russian and Pakistani economies combines with the considerable distance between them to limit Russian–Pakistani ties despite periodic official interest in deepening them. It situates these current obstacles in the context of the historic Soviet–Pakistani relationship, which was similarly constrained by distance, great power politics, and Indian concerns.

On May II, 1998, the newly constituted government of India, headed by the Hindunationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), detonated a nuclear device at Pokhran. The same site had been used twenty-four years earlier when Indira Gandhi had done the same thing This time, the world was aghast for a multitude of reasons. This device was detonated to further India's program of nuclear weaponization, whereas Indira's program was for peaceful purposes. Secondly, the decision was made by a Hindu-nationalist party, rather than the secular Congress party. Finally, this nuclear detonation essentially forced the government of Pakistan to respond two weeks later with its own detonation and weaponization. Overnight, "South Asia has thus achieved the dreaded distinction of becoming the world's most perilous region of potential nuclear conflict in the twenty-first century.·(454) A region that still has not resolved long-festering Indo-Pak tensions over Kashmir, that are only exacerbated by religious differences.

Christopher Clary is a research associate at the Center for Contemporary Conflict, United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. These views are the author's own and do not necessarily represent those of the US Naval Postgraduate School, the US Department of Defense or the Government of the United States. An earlier version of this article appeared as 'Dr. Khan's Nuclear Walmart', in Disarmament Diplomacy, no. 76 (March-April 2004), pp. 31–36. Portions also were presented as 'A.Q. Khan and the Dangers of Secondary Proliferation', presentation to the conference on WMD Proliferation in the Middle East: Directions and Policy Options in the New Century, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 29 June 2004. Special thanks to Peter Lavoy, Feroz Hassan Khan and James Russell for their helpful comments.

AbstractHow much weight do voters place on foreign policy when deciding between electoral candidates? In traditional surveys in Pakistan, the vast majority of respondents identify India as an enemy and threat to Pakistan. What these studies do not assess is whether these beliefs affect voter preferences. Using a conjoint survey experiment conducted among 1,990 respondents in Pakistan, we find that respondents punish hypothetical politicians who advocate a friendly policy toward India, but only modestly. Candidate attitudes toward India were the least meaningful characteristic for voter choice among five characteristics tested, suggesting that attitudinal measurements of salience poorly predict candidate preference. Subgroup results are also instructive: younger and more educated respondents and those from Pakistan's largest province of Punjab were less likely to punish dovish politicians. We discuss implications of these findings and outline avenues for future research.

Is India shifting to a nuclear counterforce strategy? Continued aggression by Pakistan against India, enabled by Islamabad's nuclear strategy and India's inability to counter it, has prompted the leadership in Delhi to explore more flexible preemptive counterforce options in an attempt to reestablish deterrence. Increasingly, Indian officials are advancing the logic of counterforce targeting, and they have begun to lay out exceptions to India's long-standing no-first-use policy to potentially allow for the preemptive use of nuclear weapons. Simultaneously, India has been acquiring the components that its military would need to launch counterforce strikes. These include a growing number of accurate and responsive nuclear delivery systems, an array of surveillance platforms, and sophisticated missile defenses. Executing a counterforce strike against Pakistan, however, would be exceptionally difficult. Moreover, Pakistan's response to the mere fear that India might be pursuing a counterforce option could generate a dangerous regional arms race and crisis instability. A cycle of escalation would have significant implications not only for South Asia, but also for the broader nuclear landscape if other regional powers were similarly seduced by the temptations of nuclear counterforce.