Pakistan army has higher quality: UK experts

No winners in this war! saima

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ARTICLE:

As the crisis over Kashmir deepens, British military experts say that while 
India's armed forces would enjoy a numerical superiority if a war broke 
out, Pakistan's army is of higher quality. 

Comments by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on Wednesday 
that "the time has come for a decisive fight" further fuelled fears of an 
all-out war. 

In any long-lasting conflict, India would have the advantage of a stronger 
economy and a population of over one billion compared to Pakistan's 142 
million. It would thus be able to mobilize more soldiers. But if a conflict 
was of short duration, these assets would not necessarily enter into the 
equation, according to William Hopkinson, of the London-based Royal 
Institute of International Affairs (RIIA). 

"The quality of some of the Pakistani troops is probably better on average 
than that of the Indians," he said. 

"If the worst happens and a war starts, the pressures from all sides to 
stop it soon would be obviously enormous, so India's theoretical long-term 
advantage might not come into play." 

According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic 
Studies, India has 1,303,000 people in its armed forces, plus 535,000 
reservists. Pakistan has about 612,000 troops and 513,000 reservists. India 
is believed to have about 60 nuclear warheads and Pakistan has 25, 
Britain's Times reported. 

According to British government sources quoted by the paper on Wednesday, 
the Pakistanis are considered better troops, and could beat off an initial 
Indian offensive. But the Indians could then use their superiority in 
conventional forces to overwhelm the Pakistanis. 

In one doomsday scenario which, according to The Times, has been considered 
by British ministers, Islamabad could then use its weapon of last resort: a 
nuclear device. 

India would survive the strike and hit back with its own atomic weapons, 
according to the scenario. 

The use of nuclear weapons in a war for the first time since the Americans 
dropped such bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 
1945, is a threat that experts are not dismissing. 

"Yes, it is possible," said Hopkinson. "There could certainly be a risk if 
one side is going down in conventional struggle to use a nuclear 
weapon. "Whether their doctrine would be to use it tactically or to make a 
strike at the enemy's capital, I don't know. 

"I would have thought that the likelihood would be a tactical use but 
again, it depends where the forces are... you don't want to use something 
(like that) on your own territory unless you can't avoid it." 

Hopkinson added: "If Pakistan is faced with defeat but the defeat were 
happening on its own territory or its part of Kashmir, it might well strike 
for something a bit further back ... it could be forces massed behind the 
first echelon."


Posted from http://www.dawn.com/2002/05/23/top6.htm