Examining the Strategic Culture of Singapore

Vasu, Norman and Kumar Ramakrishna. “Countering Terrorism: Multiculturalism in Singapore.”

Connections 5, no. 4 (2006): 143–156. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26323271.
Walsh, Sean P. “The Roar of the Lion City: Ethnicity, Gender, and Culture in the Singapore
Armed Forces.” Armed Forces & Society 33, no. 2 (January 2007): 265–285. 10.1177/009532
7×06291854.
Yaacob, Abdul. “Singapore’s Forward Defence Strategy Goes Naval.” East Asia Forum. 2019,
https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/12/21/singapores-forward-defence-strategy-goes-naval/.
Yew, Lee Kuan. “Why Singapore Is What It Now Is.” Estudios Internacionales 40, no. 159 (2008):
171–176. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41391966.

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 22
INDIAN STRATEGIC CULTURE
A Review Essay
Muhammad Shoaib Pervez1

Introduction
Strategic culture is an essentially contested concept and has presented a conceptual
conundrum due to an intense debate between its advocates and detractors regarding its
potential usage in international politics. Without delving into this conceptual maze, as it is
beyond the scope of this review essay on Indian strategic culture, this chapter will focus on
just one working definition given by Ashley Tellis, who paraphrased Jeannie L. Johnson2:

Strategic culture refers to those inherited conceptions and shared beliefs that shape a
nation’s collective identity, the values that color how a country evaluates its interests,
and the norms that influence a state’s understanding of the means by which it can best
realize its destiny in a competitive international system.3

From this definition, this chapter takes the approach that understanding the role of
strategic culture in a state’s security discourse is a two-step process. The first step
involves the exploration and identification of certain influential sociocultural norms of
society or those norms which carry popular support and are instrumentally used by state
elites in their discursive practices to gain public legitimacy. The second step involves
studying the security discourse of a state formulated by the strategic behavior of its elites
at critical junctions of time. This is a very simplistic explanation of strategic culture,
considering the fact that there are four distinct generations or “waves” of strategic
culture scholarship, including national identity conceptions (NICs) during the Cold War;
critical explorations at the societal level and questioning the hegemony of state narra-
tives; a more contemporary debate on causality versus contextuality of strategic culture
between Alastair Iain Johnston and Colin Gray4; and fourth-generation scholarship
focused in part on providing more structured methodological frameworks for strategic
culture research. This chapter will not delve into all these debates as they fall beyond the
scope of this discussion; however, it is sufficient to mention here that strategic culture, as
a concept, enjoys a great scholarly lineage.
With regard to understanding Indian strategic culture, in addition to ongoing concep-
tual debates, there is another problem of identifying influential sociocultural norms in a

312 DOI: 10.4324/9781003010302-25

 Indian Strategic Culture

huge country like India which is also a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious polity.
Indian society is a very complex one divided into castes, dogmas, and sociocultural norms.
It is not easy to dig out influential norms which prescribe or proscribe behavior of a state
with a given identity.5 Indian strategic culture as espoused by its elites is woven around an
intermixing of complex mythologies, dogmas, norms, and an inherent pride in its civili-
zational history. It is very difficult to construct a monolithic conception of Indian strategic
culture and what it entails. In plain words, India does not have any one repository of
strategic culture which functions as the fountain spring of all of its strategies and security
practices. The diversity of Indian culture is the essence of its elites’ strategic thinking, and
hence this review essay will be appreciative of the myriad forms of Indian strategic culture
instead of aiming to identify any single form which does not exist at all.
There are certain unique aspects of the Indian political system which must be taken into
consideration as they all have a bearing upon the state’s strategic culture. First, India’s
massive billion-plus population is projected to overtake the current number one most
populous country, China, in mid-2023. Second, it is one of those very few postcolonial
states who have given ascendency to the political elites and have marginalized the military
elites from all important matters of security. Almost all of the other postcolonial states who
achieved independence in the second half of the twentieth century have seen a predominant
rise of their military in all affairs of the state and specifically in the security domain. With
little or no direct influence of a military-bureaucratic nexus in Indian strategic decision-
making, the military and the bureaucratic elites are all subservient to the political elites.
Third, the political elites in India are the real entrepreneurs of norms and they are the ones
who have developed key facets of Indian strategic culture.
Fourth, the understanding of Indian strategic culture requires an appreciation of
distinct political trends of Indian history. For example, from its independence in 1947
until 1964, the founding father of India, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was at the
helm of affairs. Nehru belonged to the Congress Party of India, which vehemently fol-
lowed and advocated the “Ahimsa” (nonviolence) norms of Mahatma Gandhi, the
spiritual father of India. This norm encapsulates nonviolence toward other powers and
brotherhood toward everyone. This approach was in the formative phase of the nascent
Indian state which at that time had championed itself as the beacon of hope for all
postcolonial states struggling to sustain themselves after throwing away the colonial
yoke. Hence India adopted a secular form of democracy in order to allay the anxieties of
its minorities who were all fearful of Hindu domination. From 1964 until 1998, this tryst
with a secularized form of democracy continued with a small interregnum (a brief period
of rule of Hindu fundamentalist parties like Bharatiya Jana Sangh from 1975 to 1977).
It was only in 1998 that the phenomenal rise of “Hindutva” (Hindu Raj or the rule of
Hindu religion-based political parties in India in the late 1990s) led to the practical
demise of secularism in India, and the dawn of the twenty-first century witnessed the
progression of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a fundamental Hindu party aiming for
the revival of Hindutva norms. The strategic culture of assertive Hindutva ideology led
to distinct security practices of overt nuclearization, war rhetoric for the outside world,
and coerced assimilative integrationist policies at home.
There is a need to understand these shifts in the political behavior of the Indian state
before explaining the nuances of its strategic culture. It is remarkable to see the progress of
Indian strategic culture from Ahimsa norms (nonviolence) to modern-day Hindutva ones
(assertive Hindu identity). Yet as Tellis notes, “the dominance of civilians and general

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exclusion of the military from decision-making has hindered India from becoming a power
that regularly uses the military as an instrument of policy.”6
This chapter will not only recap the key literature on Indian strategic culture but will
also explain the strengths and weaknesses of these scholarly works and offer recom-
mendations for future research on Indian strategic culture. As a body of work, there are
three distinct domains in the Indian strategic culture literature. One is the work written
by policy experts working in think tanks for their respective governments; the second is
the work done by pure academicians; and the third is done by scholars writing in the
nuclear domain, especially after India went nuclear again in 1998 after a lull of 25 years
(following the first “Peaceful Nuclear Explosion” [PNE] in 1974). Accordingly, this
review chapter is divided into four distinct sections. The first section will synthesize
various themes on Indian strategic culture as explained by think tank experts and tailor-
made for policy formulation; the second section will develop a synthesized version of
academic experts’ works; and the third section will explain the key works on Indian
nuclear strategy. The final section will conclude by elaborating on future trends or
areas of research on Indian strategic culture. But first, this chapter will establish the
philosophical embeddedness of Indian strategic culture.
The genealogy of Indian strategic culture’s philosophical foundations is tied to the
Sanskrit epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. But the problem here is “there is not a
single Ramayana or a single Mahabharata in India. Each version presents its own tradi-
tions and cultural values endemic to its own smaller circles.”7 This leads us to look toward
Kautilya who wrote Arthashastra around the third century BC when Alexander the Great
invaded India and defeated Raja Porus (327 BC). His advice to local Indian kings was
based on a complex terminology in the local vernacular of sociocultural norms, which
include among others the mandala system (a system of external policy relations through
identification of friends and foes in the geostrategic area of a state) and the matsya-nyaya
system (compromises and coercions in foreign decisionmaking) in order to govern the
mosaic-like Indian society riddled into castes and tribes. Kautilya was a realist and his
prescriptions to the kings and princes carry a Machiavellian taste. These prescriptions are
akin to a realist account of state behavior but at the same time also offer tips for rap-
prochements as and when the ulterior motive of the king is served best through compro-
mises. This “Kautilyan brand of realism seems to pervade the Indian policy of
nonalignment which has been the cornerstone of Indian foreign policy and security policy
since India’s independence.”8 Zaman further explains the influence of Kautilyan thought
through Indian adoption of nonalignment policy:

Nonalignment was a strategy to stay away from the bloc conflicts, not global politics
in its entirety. It was a strategy to use diplomatic or, when the situation permitted,
military means to gain influence despite material weakness. Simply put, nonalignment
was a low-risk strategy to gain influence on the cheap.9

Zaman is of the opinion that Kautilyan thought has a lingering impact on Indian elites’
strategic thinking, as he notes:

[T]he Kautilyan admonishment to be wary of depending on one group of “allies” also

can be used to explain the fact that India has not dropped its allies in the developing
world. Even while rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful economies of the

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North, India has been active in organizing groups of developing economies on trade
issues and at times has been willing to deadlock negotiations rather than concede.10

Indian Strategic Culture Explained by Policy Experts

The seminal research on Indian strategic culture was done by George K. Tanham in a
RAND research report, which explained that four principal factors worked in the back-
drop of Indian strategies and security practices: “Indian geography; the discovery of Indian
history by Indian elites over the past 150 years; Indian cultural and social structures and
belief system; and the British rule.”11 Tanham explained Indian defensive posture as being
due to the uniqueness of the Hindu belief system based on reincarnation of the human body
into seven different forms, positing that pacifist Indian strategic culture is inherently linked
to this belief system. Tanham’s methodology is interpretive and decouples Indian strategic
culture from the methodological rigors of rational approaches, which are the prime basis of
analysis of strategies in Western governments. He stated:

The complex [Indian] view of life makes the future appear uncertain and less subject
to human manipulation than it does to a Westerner. Rational analysis, so vital to
Western societies, has less influence in Indian society, as so many other factors play
important or dominant roles. The acceptance of life as a mystery and the inability to
manipulate events impedes preparation for the future in all areas of life, including the
strategic.12

Hence on a methodological scale, Tanham’s approach of interpretivism explains Indian

strategy as the product of a complex Hindu way of life where there is an “absence of
strategic thinking, defensive posture and a lack of an expansionist military tradition.”13
The prescriptions of Tanham carry a contemporary taste, which is obvious considering that
his is a policy document written for the US State Department as a practitioner manual to
understand Indian strategic culture for better policymaking. His study gives a pessimistic
account of Indian “sub-optimal” performance.14 Burgess offers an explanation for this
pessimism in the Tanham report:

Among the cultural and social structures and belief systems that Tanham cites for a
lack of strategic vision is the dominance of Hinduism and belief in re-incarnation,
which indefinitely lengthens the shadow of the future and reduces the sense of
urgency among Indian leaders until crises [are] upon them. Also, the relative strength
of Indian imperial states over the centuries in the South Asia subcontinent and the
ability to assimilate invaders provide India’s leaders with confidence that they will
ultimately prevail.15

If India’s pacifist attitudes are taken as an extension of Hinduism then the question here
arises of how to explain the assertiveness and decisiveness in Indian strategy from 1998
onward once the Hindu fundamental party BJP came to power. The way the BJP used
Hindutva norms as a deliberate strategy to reincarnate the strategic culture of India
through its security practices brings out a lacuna in Tanham’s analysis. There is no per-
petual pacifism or assertiveness in Hinduism; it all depends on the articulation of professed
norms of behavior which are tactfully employed by the elites for the securitization of their

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strategies. The discursive practices or “speech acts” of elites play a dominant role in this
regard.16 The pacifism or assertiveness in Hinduism needs a focus on actual elites’ prac-
tices. In this vein, Pardesi’s optimistic account gave the carte blanche of “offensive realism”
as the future strategy of Indian behavior based on his rich analysis of five pan-Indian
powers: the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Mughals, British India, and the Republic of India.17
Another interesting study on Indian strategic thinking is by Javed Hassan, a Brigadier
and later Lieutenant General of the Pakistan Army, who in his book India: A Study in
Profile states:

The Indian obsession with the mythical past has given birth to a number of beliefs
which most Indians (Hindus) hold as an article of faith. “The more myths one
encounters, the more the basic theme seems to be reinforced … (that) is the process
of developing order out of chaos.” The importance of these ‘mythical’ beliefs are;
one, that in the distant past Mahabharata (Great Bharat) extended over an area
from (including) parts of Iran and Afghanistan to Indonesia, that this India was
always a united country ruled by Great Aryan Kings (named Bharatas) till the
invaders from the north west came and destroyed this unity; two, that India must
reclaim and reunite all the lost territories and emerge once again as a great
Mahabharata, which is its destiny. This myth along with the aspiration was
reflected in 1947 when India was named as “India that is Bharatavarsh” at the time
of independence.18

As an interesting case study of Indian history and strategy, Hassan further notes that
Indians as a race have never been migrated from their own territory, have often capitulated
to foreign aggressors, and the “creed of Hinduism has been the dominant impulse of Indian
civilization.”19
There is almost a consensus in all think tank policy reports prepared by the intelligentsia
in the West, especially in the United States, that Indian strategic culture is quite unique on
many fronts. India has a vast expanse of territory, but at the same time, its underperformed
security potential is due to the ascendency of civilian elites, an underfunded colonial-
minded bureaucracy, and marginalization of military elites in important matters of state
security.20 In Burgess’s assessment, “[d]omestic politics and outmoded bureaucracy also
contribute to a phlegmatic and short-sighted strategic culture and to a foreign policy that
does not serve a rising India well.”21 The next section will cover some of the scholarly
academic works on Indian strategic culture.

Indian Strategic Culture Written by Academicians

On an academic front, the research on Indian strategic culture focuses on a theoretically
informed empirical understanding of Indian state behavior. Different theoretical fra-
meworks from realism to liberalism and social constructivism have been applied to
understand Indian strategic culture and this has resulted in a plethora of research from
indigenous Indian scholars and Westerners alike. India has developed a Monroe
Doctrine type of “sphere of influence” around the Indian Ocean whereby the presence of
outside powers in the Indian sphere of influence is strictly abhorred.22 In Brewster’s
words, “[t]his is essentially an expression of South Asia as a single strategic unit, with
India having a special role as the custodian of regional security.”23

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The journey of Indian strategic culture from secularism toward Hindutva was also
interjected with realpolitik, as Ian Hall explains: “Indian strategic culture is informed by
ideas taken from Hindu texts, nineteenth and twentieth-century religious [thought], and
modernist thinkers. These ideas shape three traditions of strategic thought: Nehruvian
tradition, realpolitik, and Hindu nationalism.”24 Kanti Bajpai has rephrased these three
schools of strategic thought as “Nehruvian, neoliberalism, and hyperrealism” and goes
on to draw common assumptions as well as different propositions of all three schools.25
All three agree on the centrality of state sovereignty, state interests as defining features of
world politics, and power both in soft and hard forms as the end of all means adopted by
state survival.26 The differences between these three schools are in the strategy toward
foreign policy, where first the Nehruvian school asks for the mitigation of anarchy
through cooperation at all levels, from people to people and from state to state. In other
words, this school offers both bottom-up as well as top-down strategies for cooperation
by emphasizing the goodness in human behavior. The neoliberalism school explains
the efficacy of compliance toward international institutions for cooperation by asserting
that “economic well-being is vital for national security … [emphasizing] free market
policies.”27 Hyperrealism focuses on the accumulation of power in order to be a heg-
emon and believes that only a strong military force can change things in the economic
realm.28 Bajpai elaborates on these three visions of Indian strategic culture toward its
policies vis-à-vis China and Pakistan, but the general sweep of his arguments is not based
on any deductive logic or isolation of strategic culture causality determining concrete
policy actions, a core feature of the third wave of strategic culture scholarship.29 Work
in this vein would benefit from developing the causality or embeddedness of strategic
culture behind Indian state behavior, and from further exploration of strategic culture’s
relationship to elite politics in India and the role played by the ideology of respective
political parties.
This crucial question of how strategic culture develops at the elite level and where this
can be found is addressed by your author in his work on the BJP and Indian strategic
culture.30 This work develops an intermediary step of elites’ socialization by the norms
of a political party who later work as state elites and develop security practices of the
Indian state. It argues that the norms of strategic thinking are embedded in the political
ideology of political parties.31 For example, it is the BJP’s norms of Hindutva that
developed the strategic culture of “hyperrealism” with emphasis on the use of optimal
power as the surest way of state survival. This was amply demonstrated during the
second term of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2019 onward) through Indian
state security practices both internally (e.g., scrapping of Article 370 on Kashmir) as well
as externally (e.g., the use of surgical strikes in Pakistan to stop cross-border terrorism).
The problem here is that elites’ socialization as an intermediary step needed to be
investigated by an in-depth case study of Indian political parties who came to power with
a focus on their hierarchical structure and the process of socialization adopted by them.
Your author’s case study of Hindutva ideology exclusively focused on the Indian deci-
sion to become a nuclear power in 1998 and did not proceed with an in-depth analysis
of political parties and strategic decisionmaking in India.32
According to Rodney Jones, “India has an omniscient patrician strategic culture,”
which originally in Sanskrit means “Bharat jagat guru,” or “India: The World’s
Teacher.”33 Jones further explains five “philosophical and mythological foundations” of
this type of strategic culture, which are sacredness of Indian identity, timelessness of

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perpetual goals, inherent great status of India, quest for truthful knowledge, and hier-
archical structure of the world order.34 Each of these embedded myths gave rise to
unique elements of strategy devised by the Indian elites. For example, the instrumental
implications of this mythical knowledge led to an “enigmatic” vision of India, the per-
petual nature of self-interests, the “contradictory” nature of the world, power politics,
security being “sedentary,” and strategy being “assimilative.”35 There is one caveat in
Jones’ analysis and that is the generalizations made in line with the five mythical strands
of Indian strategic culture. Further focused research needs to elaborate on each of these
myths by explaining the distinct phases of Indian foreign policy, with particular atten-
tion as to what type of behavior is shown by the Indian state in line with this mythical
knowledge. But Jones’ idea of an omniscient-patrician strategic culture is quite thought-
provoking and needs to be augmented with a fine-grained analysis of Indian strategy
adopted during “crunch times” of decisionmaking by Indian elites.

Strategic Culture and Indian Nuclear Strategy

There is a third body of work on Indian strategic culture in the realm of its nuclear pro-
gram. Here scholars have defined the strategy of nuclear decisionmaking by analyzing
the foreign policy of India and all have developed their causal arguments on different sets
of variables.36 The application of Indian strategic culture over nuclear weapons has also
been discussed in a number of articles. Rajesh Basrur explained:

Indian nuclear strategy (and strategic culture) has retained elements of deterrence –
from Nehru’s minimal open door to Vajpai’s pronouncements on credible minimal
deterrence – and thereby stayed within the neorealist framework that emphasizes
states’ need to ensure security through the possession of military capability in an
anarchic self-help system. In this sense, strategic culture as intermediate structure
supplements rather than undermines the neorealist concept of system structure.37

On an academic note, the transformation in Indian strategic culture of idealism coupled

with ambiguity over nuclearization is carried from Nehruvian thoughts (moorings of long-
serving Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947–1964) to Hindutva ones (ideology
given by the BJP from the 1990s onward). This is very interesting as, from carrying
the secularist credentials of its founding fathers, India has embraced an overt Hindutva
ideology. Runa Das notes:

In pursuing this line of strategic thinking, known as Nehruvianism, postcolonial

India’s political leaders were influenced by Gandhian nonviolence, which drawing
from ancient Indian civilizational moorings, was considered by the Indian leadership
as an alternative to the conflict-ridden strategic conceptions of the West.38

India tested its nuclear devices in 1998 after a lull of almost 25 years since the country’s
PNE in 1974 under Indira Gandhi, the Congress Party Prime Minister and the daughter of
Nehru. The political horizon was completely changed in 1998 with the ascendency of the
BJP, and the strategic culture also showed a transformation with more cultural values
imbued into the security practices of the Indian state. Runa Das explained this strategic
transformation from secularism to Hindutva as “[o]ne nation, one people, one culture

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underpin the BJP’s construct of India as a Hindu rashtra.… Pitrabhoomi (fatherland), jati
(bloodline) and Sanskriti (culture) are identified by the BJP as constituting the cultural
boundaries of India as a nation.”39 This new Hindutva outlook of Indian strategic culture
was aptly explained by the BJP’s minister of External Affairs Jaswant Singh in his book
Defending India:

[T]o define Indian strategic culture one has to examine the very nature of India’s
nationhood: The very characteristic of its society; and the evolution of its strategic
thought over the ages … it is [mainly] a by-product of the political culture of a nation
and its people … this is where history and racial memories influence a nation’s
strategic thought.… Above all else, India is Hindu and Hindus thinks differently from
non-Hindus … that has given birth to a culture from which we hope to extract the
essence of its strategic thought.40

On one hand, George Perkovich’s analysis of Indian nuclear strategy is an excellent

historical account of the discourse of nuclear strategy in which he explained the role
played by the “strategic enclave” of Indian nuclear scientists as well as “the normative
national identity interest in achieving major power status.”41 The focus of Perkovich’s
analysis is on “the normative identity-nuclear nexus as the prime motive behind the
Indian decision to go nuclear” in 1998.42 Itty Abraham, on the other hand, focused on
the postcolonial mindset of Indian elites who are bent on achieving something great
(acquired modernity) for India in the community of nations.43 The achievement of the
bomb is a conduit for this endeavor. The strategy of nuclear decisionmaking is linked
here to the pro-bomb lobby within the Indian scientific community coupled with this
mindset of Indian elites which helped India to formulate a distinct strategy for achieving
its target of building this “indigenous” bomb.44
The approach of Abraham is hinged upon exploring the mindset of Indian elites
through their discursive practices. In both Perkovich and Abraham’s studies, the his-
torical analysis is sociocultural, while Jacques Hymans’ study is more of a psychological
account of Indian elites’ decisionmaking.45 Hymans has linked the Indian elites’
“national identity conceptions to nuclear proliferation,”46 explaining the nuclear
strategy of India through the “oppositional nationalist identity conceptions” (NICs) of
BJP elites like the Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Oppositional nationalism
is described by Hymans “as based on a stark black-white dichotomization of us against
them.” Hymans further developed his NIC model on two dimensions of solidarity and
status: Solidarity referring to the content of national identity and status to the global
standing of this identity in comparison to others.47 Hymans developed this socio-
psychological theory of NICs of Indian elites to explain nuclear strategic decision-
making; however, it fails to give room to the political parties, which socialize these
elites by inculcating values of specific NICs.
Chris Ogden in a similar vein explains the “security identities” of Indian elites,
which he distinguishes from strategic culture and links to ideological norms while ex-
plaining the nuclear posturing of the Indian state,48 but Ogden neglects to explain the
cycle of norms through its emergence, cascade, and internationalization.49 Your author
has argued that the role of political parties as harbingers of strategic culture is very
important, to the extent of framing Indian strategic culture as “an understanding of
social practices of elites embedded in sociocultural ideology of their political party

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forming some falsifiable determinant of strategic behavior.”50 Ogden’s type of research

is a snapshot survey of Indian strategic culture as it exclusively focuses on nuclear
decisionmaking with selective use of sociocultural norms of Indian society, but the
analysis of strategic culture can be much better served if a holistic approach to foreign
policy analysis is employed in all these case studies.
The impetus behind the Indian nuclear program is tied to certain contradictory
“rationales” as explained by Ogden, which exists for “self-sufficiency” in security along
with “repeated calls for universal disarmaments.”51 These contradictions in Indian
security practices in the realm of nuclear proliferation can be better explained by Indian
strategic culture. During the first three decades of Indian independence, Indian strategic
culture under Nehruvian influence called for global norms of nuclear nonproliferation
and at the same time aimed for nuclear reliance to make India “Mahan” (Grand)
again.52 In the last decade of the twentieth century (1998 onward) and still at the time
of this writing, an obsessiveness toward Hindutva norms brought forward the strategy of
over-nuclearization in Indian nuclear discourse. The shift in India’s nuclear behavior
from an ambiguous posture (1974–1998) to an overt one from 1998 forward was ex-
plained by Sumit Ganguly as due to three factors, one of them that “the fitful movement
toward a nuclear weapons capacity closely followed the shifting calculations of Indian
leaders, who responded to a mix of ideology (initially a force of restraint), statecraft,
and domestic pressures reflecting security concerns.”53 This ideology and strategy nexus
is explained through the strategic culture of India as connivance between political party
ideology and elites’ security practices at the helm of affairs.54 Even the posturing
problem in Indian nuclear strategy can be better explained through the lens of strategic
culture: The distinct and changing posturing of Indian nuclear weapons is in line with
the ideological commitments of its elites’ strategic thinking. This is an area where
future research in Indian strategic culture can be undertaken as most of the nuclear
proliferation policies used for nuclear posturing are devised on a rational calculus with a
positivist methodology.55 A detailed case study of Indian nuclear posturing with an
interpretive postpositivist methodology can reveal much as compared to the positivist
framework.

Conclusion
Future studies on Indian strategic culture would benefit from an in-depth historical analysis
of Indian strategic thinking by linking the practices of its elites with that of sociocultural
norms of Indian society. A synthesis of comparative research on Indian political parties
with that of cultural anthropology aimed at exploring sociocultural norms can be one area
of future research. The role of Indian political parties in propagating norms of behavior as
well as the socialization of elites has been consistently glossed over in almost all major
works on Indian strategic culture. This is in spite of the fact that most of the time modern
India is ruled by two major parties – the Congress Party and the BJP – with each professing
contrasting norms of behavior for India’s elites. This requires juxtaposing the modus
operandi of these two parties, looking at their distinct ideologies, focusing on their
methodologies used for elite socialization, and finally explaining the strategic thinking and
practices of their elites.
On a normative note, in order to explore influential norms behind strategic thinking,
there is a dire need to deconstruct the richness of the Indian polity by focusing on the

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diversity of people living in this state and what norms of behavior each of these
communities allude to. At present, there is ample research on the predominant norms of
the Hindu community, and seldom any research is done on the multicultural norms of
Indian society. A media approach focusing on the propagation of norms is another area
of research where the methodology of popular culture can help us understand the
phenomenon of norms cascades.56 The cycle of norms starts with their generation,
moves to cascade or propagation, and finally to internalization (becoming second
habit). In this chain, the middle tier of norms cascade or propagation is very important,
as at this stage the norms receive popular acceptance and legitimacy. There is significant
value in studying how such influential norms are being propagated in a vast country
like India. In India there are a plethora of media channels and the Indian films industry
(Bollywood) propagates such norms of behavior.57 This is important because the crit-
ical shifts evident in Indian strategic culture from Ahimsa (nonviolence) to Hindutva
(assertive Hindu identity) require an exploration of mechanism of norms propagation
used to garner public support behind such shifts. The traditional yardstick of rational
choice focusing on material capabilities and cost-benefit calculation of a state is
inadequate as it cannot explain critical shifts in Indian strategic behavior. This requires
a postpositivist interpretivist framework where a critical analysis of the security dis-
course of India can help bring to light the myriad forms of Indian strategic culture. A
via-media approach helps bridge the gap between a rationalist and an interpretivist
framework by incorporating the role played by identity and norms in constructing state
interests.
To conclude, Indian strategic culture is at a crossroads of yet another major critical
shift – a clear break from the past. The strategic culture of India constructed through
Ahimsa norms (nonviolence toward other states) has been rejected by popular vote with
the advent of the BJP on the national political horizon. The call made by present-day
elites of the BJP aims for assertive security practices and overt nuclear posturing based
on Hindutva norms, which is a break from the Indian founding fathers’ ideology of
Ahimsa and subsequent elites’ practices of being flagbearers of the Non-Aligned
Movement as well as spokesmen of nuclear ambiguity. This critical junction has pre-
sented a crossroads for Indian strategic culture, as either it will fully embrace the
Hindutva ideology or it will move away from religious schisms to help India shine again.
Further research utilizing the strategic culture paradigm can offer crucial insights as
Indian elites face the herculean tasks of overcoming parochial political interests in order
to embrace the challenges of this century.

Notes
1 Acknowledgments: I am thankful to Allah for giving me the strength to complete this task. I am
also grateful for the prayers of my parents Shahida Pervez and that of my late father Wajeeh
Uddin Pervez. I am also thankful to my beloved wife Sadia for her unwavering support through
thick and thin and finally to my sons Muneeb and Moiz for giving me time to pursue my intel-
lectual pursuits.
2 Jeannie L. Johnson, “Strategic Culture: Refining the Theoretical Construct,” in Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC) (Defence Threat Reduction Agency, 2006).
3 Ashley J. Tellis, “Overview,” in Understanding Strategic Cultures in the Asia Pacific, ed. Ashley J.
Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills (Seattle: The National Bureau of Asian Research,
2016), p. 5.

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 Muhammad Shoaib Pervez

4 Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese
History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Jeffrey S. Lantis and Darryl
Howlett, “Strategic Culture,” in Strategy in the Contemporary World, eds. John Baylis,
James J. Wirtz, and Colin S. Gray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Tellis,
“Overview.”
5 Peter J. Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed.
John Gerard Ruggie, New Directions in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996).
6 Tellis, “Overview,” p. 2.
7 Ana Sinha, “Critical Analysis of Tanham Interpretation of Indian Strategic Culture” (MA thesis,
University of Delhi, 2019).
8 Rashed Uz Zaman, “Kautilya: The Indian Strategic Thinker and Indian Strategic Culture,”
Comparative Strategy 25 (2006), p. 242.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 243.
11 George K. Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, CA: RAND,
1992), p. V.
12 Ibid., p. 17.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Stephen Burgess, “India’s Strategic Culture, Foreign and Security Policy, and Relations with the
United States,” in American Political Science Association Convention (2009), p. 10.
16 Ole Waever, “Securitization and Desecuritization,” in On Security, ed. Ronnie D. Lipschutz
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
17 Manjeet Singh Pardesi, Deducing India’s Grand Strategy of Regional Hegemony from Historical
and Conceptual Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies Nanyang
Technological University, 2005).
18 Javed Hassan, India: A Study in Profile (Rawalpindi: Army Education Press GHQ, 1990), p. 11.
19 Ibid., p. 49.
20 Burgess, “India’s Strategic Culture, Foreign and Security Policy, and Relations with the United
States.”
21 Ibid., p. 16.
22 David Brewster, “Indian Strategic Thinking about East Asia,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 34,
no. 6 (2011), pp. 825–852.
23 David Brewster, “Indian Strategic Thinking about the Indian Ocean: Striving towards Strategic
Leadership,” India Review 14, no. 2 (2015), pp. 221–237.
24 Ian Hall, “The Persistence of Nehruvianism in India’s Startegic Culture,” in Understanding
Startegic Culture in the Asia-Pacific, eds. Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills
(Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2016), p. 141.
25 Kanti Bajpai, “Pakistan and China in Indian Strategic Thought,” International Journal 62, no. 4
(2007), pp. 805–822.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., p. 808.
28 Ibid.
29 Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History. Lantis and
Howlett, “Strategic Culture.”
30 Muhammad Shoaib Pervez, “Strategic Culture Reconceptualized: The Case of India and the BJP,”
International Politics 56, no. 1 (2019), pp. 87–102.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Rodney W. Jones, “India Strategic Culture and the Origins of Omniscient Paternalism,” in
Strategic Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction, eds. Jeannie L. Johnson, Kerry M.
Kartchner, and Jeffrey A. Larsen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., p. 118.

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36 Itty Abraham, Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State
(London: Zed Books, 1998). George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global
Proliferation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999). Jacques E.C. Hymans,
The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
37 Rajesh M. Basrur, “Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture,” Journal of Peace Research
38, no. 2 (2001), p. 196.
38 Runa Das, “The Prism of Strategic Culture and South Asian Nuclearization,” Contemporary
Politics 15, no. 4 (2009), p. 399.
39 Ibid., p. 403.
40 Jaswant Singh, Defending India (New Delhi: Macmillan Press, 1999), pp. 2, 5.
41 Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation, p. 452.
42 Muhammad Shoaib Pervez, Security Community in South Asia: India-Pakistan (New York:
Routledge, 2013), p. 108.
43 Abraham, Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State.
44 Ibid.
45 Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Chris Ogden, “Norms, Indian Foreign Policy and the 1998–2004 National Democratic Alliance,”
The Round Table-The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 99, no. 408 (2010),
pp. 303–315. Chris Ogden, Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian
Security: Portents of Power (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).
49 Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, Cornell
Studies in Political Economy (London: Cornell University Press, 1996).
50 Pervez, “Strategic Culture Reconceptualized: The Case of India and the BJP,” p. 92.
51 Ogden, Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Security: Portents of
Power, p. 153.
52 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian Book Limited, 1947). “Jawaharlal
Nehru’s Speeches” (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,
Government of India, 1968). Mushirul Hasan, ed. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (Delhi:
Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2006).
53 Sumit Ganguly, “India’s Pathway to Pokhran Ii,” International Security 23, no. 4 (1999), p. 170.
54 Pervez, “Strategic Culture Reconceptualized: The Case of India and the BJP.”
55 Neil Narang, Erik Gartzke, and Matthew Kroeing, Nonproliferation Policy and Nuclear Posture
(London: Routledge, 2017). Ibid. Vipin Narang, Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional
Powers and International Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
56 Finnemore, National Interests in International Society.
57 Pervez, Security Community in South Asia: India-Pakistan.

Selected Bibliography
Abraham, Itty. Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State.
London: Zed Books, 1998.
Bajpai, Kanti. “Pakistan and China in Indian Strategic Thought.” International Journal 62, no. 4
(2007): 805–822.
Basrur, Rajesh M. “Nuclear Weapons and Indian Strategic Culture.” Journal of Peace Research 38,
no. 2 (2001): 181–198.
Brewster, David. “Indian Strategic Thinking about East Asia.” The Journal of Strategic Studies 34,
no. 6 (2011): 825–852.
Brewster, David. “Indian Strategic Thinking About the Indian Ocean: Striving towards Strategic
Leadership.” India Review 14, no. 2 (2015): 221–237.
Burgess, Stephen. “India’s Strategic Culture, Foreign and Security Policy, and Relations with the
United States.” In American Political Science Association Convention, 1–16, 2009.

323
 Muhammad Shoaib Pervez

Das, Runa. “The Prism of Strategic Culture and South Asian Nuclearization.” Contemporary Politics
15, no. 4 (2009): 395–411.
Finnemore, Martha. National Interests in International Society. Cornell Studies in Political Economy.
Edited by Peter J. Katzenstein. London: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Finnemore, Martha. “Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology’s Institutionalism.”
International Organisation 50, no. 2 (1996): 325–347.
Ganguly, Sumit. “India’s Pathway to Pokhran Ii.” International Security 23, no. 4 (1999): 148–177.
Hall, Ian. “The Persistence of Nehruvianism in India’s Strategic Culture.” In Understanding Strategic
Culture in the Asia-Pacific, edited by Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills,
141–167. Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2016.
Hasan, Mushirul, ed. Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru. Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund,
2006.
Hassan, Javed. India: A Study in Profile. Rawalpindi: Army Education Press GHQ, 1990.
Hymans, Jacques E.C. The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign
Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Johnson, Jeannie L. “Strategic Culture: Refining the Theoretical Construct.” In Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC) Defence Threat Reduction Agency, 2006.
Johnston, Alastair Iain. Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History.
Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Jones, Rodney W. “India Strategic Culture and the Origins of Omniscient Paternalism.” In Strategic
Culture and Weapons of Mass Destruction, edited by Jeannie L. Johnson, Kerry M. Kartchner,
and Jeffrey A. Larsen, 117–136. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Katzenstein, Peter J. The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics.
New Directions in World Politics. Edited by John Gerard Ruggie. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996.
Narang, Neil, Erik Gartzke, and Matthew Kroeing. Nonproliferation Policy and Nuclear Posture.
London: Routledge, 2017.
Narang, Vipin. Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Narang, Vipin. “Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation: How States Pursue the Bomb.” International
Security 41, no. 3 (2017): 110–150.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. London: Meridian Book Limited, 1947.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. “Jawaharlal Nehru’s Speeches.” Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1968.
Ogden, Chris. Hindu Nationalism and the Evolution of Contemporary Indian Security: Portents
of Power. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Ogden, Chris. “India: The (Accepted) Gatecrasher.” In Handbook of Nuclear Proliferation, edited by
Harsh V. Pant, 149–160. London: Routledge, 2014.
Ogden, Chris. “Norms, Indian Foreign Policy and the 1998–2004 National Democratic Alliance.”
The Round Table-The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 99, no. 408 (2010):
303–315.
Pardesi, Manjeet Singh. Deducing India’s Grand Strategy of Regional Hegemony from Historical
and Conceptual Perspectives. Singapore: Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies Nanyang
Technological University, 2005.
Perkovich, George. India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999.
Pervez, Muhammad Shoaib. Security Community in South Asia: India-Pakistan. New York:
Routledge, 2013.
Pervez, Muhammad Shoaib. “Strategic Culture Reconceptualized: The Case of India and the BJP.”
International Politics 56, no. 1 (2019): 87–102.
Singh, Jaswant. Defending India. New Delhi: Macmillan Press, 1999.
Sinha, Ana. “Critical Analysis of Tanham Interpretation of Indian Strategic Culture.” MA thesis,
University of Delhi, 2019.
Tanham, George K. Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay. Santa Monica, CA: RAND,
1992.

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Tellis, Ashley J. “Overview.” In Understanding Strategic Cultures in the Asia Pacific, edited by Ashley
J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills, 3–26. Seattle: The National Bureau of Asian
Research, 2016.
Waever, Ole. “Securitization and Desecuritization.” In On Security, edited byRonnie D. Lipschutz,
46–86. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Zaman, Rashed uz. “Kautilya: The Indian Strategic Thinker and Indian Strategic Culture.”
Comparative Strategy 25 (2006): 231–247.

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 23
PAKISTAN’S MILITARY-CENTRIC
STRATEGIC CULTURE
A Review Essay
Arshad Ali

Introduction
There are various debates over the concept of strategic culture and its role in explaining the
strategic conduct of states. Many agree that the strategic culture of a nation is based on “its
shared beliefs and assumptions [meaning that] the observer needs to immerse himself or
herself in that nation’s history, attitudes, and conduct.”1 For the purpose of this chapter
examining Pakistani strategic culture, this study focuses on two definitions that explain
military-centric strategic culture: First, that “strategic culture stands for the ‘beliefs and
assumptions that frame … choices about international military behavior, particularly those
concerning decisions to go to war, preferences for offensive, expansionist or defensive
modes of warfare and levels of wartime casualties that would be acceptable.’”2 Second,
that “strategic culture [is] ‘the set of attitudes and beliefs held within a military estab-
lishment concerning the political objective of war and the most effective strategy and
operational method of achieving it.’”3 These definitions are important in order to grasp the
central politico-military and military-organizational aspects of Pakistan’s strategic culture.
To understand Pakistani strategic culture, it is necessary to reflect on the security en-
vironment in which Pakistan came into being after the partition of the Indian subcontinent
in August 1947. Since that point, Pakistan’s strategic thinking has evolved in the context of
hostility with India, security concerns on the Western Afghan borders, and the interests
of global superpowers in Pakistan’s geostrategic position during and after the Cold War.4
For example, Pakistan fought three major wars and one limited war with India, including
the Kashmir war right after independence in 1947. Moreover, Afghanistan had territorial
claims over Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun areas along the “Durand Line” in Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces and opposed Pakistan’s admission to the United
Nations. Compounding this, both the former Soviet Union and the United States had
significant interests in Pakistan due to its geostrategic location during the bipolar contest of
the Cold War. Thus, Pakistan was born in a very difficult security circumstance where
survival became the main priority of the country.5
This uneasy existence has shaped Pakistan’s strategic compulsions by giving ascendency
to the Pakistani military elites who developed the contours of the state’s strategic culture.

326 DOI: 10.4324/9781003010302-26

 Pakistan’s Military-Centric Strategic Culture

The dominance of the military started right after the partition when General Ayub Khan
became the first native Commander in Chief in 1951. Under General Ayub, the military
gradually increased its influence in state affairs and ultimately took over the government,
imposing the first martial law administration in 1958.6 Since then, military elites have
remained influential in all key strategic decisionmaking, including the issue of Kashmir,
nuclear weapons, relations with Afghanistan and India, and participation in the Cold War
and the Global War on Terror (GWOT).7
Despite being a parliamentary system, Pakistan has been governed by a troika of the
prime minister, the president, and the army chief.8 However, the prime minister has his-
torically been very weak and does not have much say in the strategic affairs of the country.
In fact, the army chiefs formed the core of Pakistan’s strategic culture during their 33 years
of direct rule where the primary task was to establish foreign and security policy for the
very survival of the country. In the remaining period, the military elites ruled indirectly
with the support of the president and by manipulating the parliamentary system. In the
1990s, the Pakistani president dismissed three elected governments – in 1990, 1993, and
1996 – with the support of the military elites to maintain their dominance in state affairs.9
The military elites justified their upper hand on the grounds of the security deficit with
India: perceiving that India was going to be a permanent enemy in the foreseeable future,
they believed the country required “a strong military and permanent military prepared-
ness” to maintain its security.10 Thus, Pakistan’s strategic culture has been almost ex-
clusively defined by the military elites in the country.
In addition, the Pakistani military inherited the legacy of the British Army after the
nation’s independence in 1947. The British Army’s strategic thinking, designed for colonial
rule in India and the empire’s interests in the South-Central Asian region, played a key role in
the formation of Pakistan’s strategic culture.11 Christine Fair explains that Pakistan inherited
British narratives about the subcontinent’s defense, and particularly the idea of Afghanistan
as a neutral buffer against Russian threats.12 Furthermore, the development of Pakistan’s
nuclear program and the use of proxy war were added to Pakistan’s strategic culture in the
1970s. Over time, military elites escaped civilian oversight of Pakistan’s strategic assets and
further elevated the role of asymmetric warfare in the country’s strategic culture. Thus,
carrying through to the 2020s, the Pakistani military has maintained heavily predominant
control over the country’s foreign and security policies and its strategic assets.
Against this backdrop, there are certain unique politico-military and military organi-
zational aspects of Pakistan’s strategic culture that are taken into consideration in this
chapter. First, the partition of India was incomplete, so the Pakistani military had to
complete the unfinished agenda of Kashmir. From 1947 to 1971, the Kashmir conflict was
the main board of contest between India and Pakistan. Second, Pakistan adopted a
military-centric national security approach by prioritizing military competition with India
over nation-building. Third, the Pakistani military considers itself the guardian of terri-
torial borders and Pakistan’s ideological frontier, which provides the military prestige and
position in the state and society. Fourth, the military has established financial and political
autonomy to act independently in state affairs. Finally, the military considers the civilian
leadership weak and too incompetent to protect the country’s strategic interests. Thus, in
the eyes of the military elites, Pakistan needs a “guided democracy” where the military
elites take charge of all strategic decisionmaking with respect to the Kashmir conflict,
Pakistan’s nuclear program, participation in war, and relations with the United States,
India, and Afghanistan.

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This chapter will review the literature on the domineering role of the military elites in
Pakistan’s strategic culture and explore twin aspects of Pakistan’s military-centric strategic
culture: First, the organizational norms of the Pakistani army and how it functions as a
unified chain of command; and second, the military’s spillover effect as the specific orga-
nizational culture it has developed leads to its domination of all affairs of the state. In total,
the chapter assesses what type of norms are disseminated by Pakistan’s military elites in the
name of state security as they hold the helm of state affairs.

The Culture of Pakistan’s Military

Organizational Structure and Norms
Since its independence in 1947, Pakistan has adopted a military-centric security approach
to protect its territorial integrity and national sovereignty. The Pakistani military elites
developed their institutional mechanisms by resolving all the outstanding issues con-
fronting the new country through military means and resources, and the military presented
itself as the only institution capable of protecting Pakistan’s national interests from ex-
ternal and internal threats. Interestingly, there was general acceptance of the military’s
ascending political role in the country. As a result, these elites governed the country directly
through military rule for some time and indirectly for the remaining period with the
support of the president and by manipulating democratic processes in the country.13
Therefore, Pakistan’s “culture of national security”14 is directly influenced by military
institutional norms, as the military is the only organized forum that is a consistent key
player in strategic decisions of national importance.
At the structural level, the Pakistani military comprises three branches with a total of
650,000 active personnel, among which the army is the most politically assertive and
largest service with 550,000 personnel. It is followed by the Pakistani air force and navy
with 45,000 and 25,000 personnel, respectively.15 The bulk of the forces, around 75%,
come from the largest Punjab province, followed by 20% from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Sindh and Balochistan provinces are underrepresented in the military with 5% of the
national forces coming from each, while the remaining forces come from other Pakistani
administrative units.16 The role of the military was defined for the first time in Article 245
of the 1973 constitution, outlining that the military is required to "defend Pakistan against
external aggression or threat of war, and, subject to law, [must] act in aid of civil power
when called upon to do so.”17
From the vantage point of institutional norms, the military corps commanders play a
prominent role in major strategic decisions in the country, especially in working closely
with the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) – the most powerful position in the armed forces – to
discuss key security and political matters, including foreign and security policies, imposing
martial law administration, and domestic power and politics. According to Blom,
“although the COAS is all-powerful, he needs the support of the CCC (Corps Commanders
Conferences) for any major change in foreign policy.”18 Thus, the corps commanders have a
significant role in the political affairs of the country. Furthermore, the military has the 10th
Command structure known as Army Strategic Forces Command, which is responsible for
holding key strategic assets, including nuclear weapons.19 Interestingly, the Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee is the highest position in the military, nominally pre-
siding over all three armed services, but in practice the Joint Chief is powerless, and such a

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position is offered to a senior military officer simply to become a four-star general.20 Thus,
the military elites have established a command-and-control structure that is effectively used
in the political sphere of the country as well as the strategic domain.

Historical Factors Elevating the Military

The centrality of the Pakistani military in state affairs was historically driven by the fact
that the civil and military bureaucracies were the only institutions that existed before the
partition in 1947. Under the terms of the partition agreement, Pakistan got 33% of the
military resources and only 17.5% of the financial resources from British India upon
independence.21 Pakistan had to establish nearly all other institutions from scratch to make
a functional state.
It is important to note that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, wanted to
have a democratic setup in Pakistan with a supportive and politically neutral military. In
his speech at the Staff College Quetta to army officers, Jinnah admonished military elites
“not to forget that the armed forces were the servants of the people and you do not make
national policy; it is we, the civilians, who decide these issues and it is your duty to carry
out these tasks with which you are entrusted.”22 Subsequently, the Pakistani leadership
attempted to establish civilian-led institutions and agencies to govern the country. In June
1948, the government established the Defense Committee of the Cabinet, which was
headed by the defense minister to manage and oversee the armed forces. However, this
body failed to regulate the military and its functions.23 Subsequently, the Pakistani military
started its role as a watchdog in defense matters in 1952. General Ayub became a gov-
ernment cabinet member in 1951 and then took over as defense minister in 1954.24 In this
context, General Ayub presented himself as a prominent statesman to address political
crises and establish a viable foreign and security policy during the Cold War. He played an
instrumental role in formulating the alliance with the United States during this period,
which facilitated subsequent US financial and military aid to Pakistan.
Interestingly, there are seldom any formal documents on national security doctrines or
security strategies of Pakistan to date, as all decisions are highly personalized following the
unique traits of the army chief in power. Under General Ayub’s leadership, the military
elites defined the strategic priorities and foreign policy directives of the country in the
1950s. Stephen Cohen noted in his article:

From the day Pakistan was created the army has helped to establish internal order
and protect Pakistan’s permeable and often ill-defined borders; it used its power and
special position within Pakistan to ensure that it received adequate weapons,
resources, and manpower. Finally, it always regarded itself as the special expression
of the idea of Pakistan, and a few officers have argued for an activist role in reforming
or correcting the society when it fell below the standard of excellence set by the
military.25

There were many factors driving the military’s ascendent role which were set right after
the partition in 1947. The Pakistan Muslim League was a popular independence movement
among Indian Muslims, but it was unable to convert itself into a grassroots political party.
Moreover, the political leadership became weak after the death of prominent leaders,
including Jinnah in 1948 and Liaquat Ali, the country’s first prime minister, in 1951.

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After that point, the country witnessed continuous political turmoil, experiencing four
governor generals and seven prime ministers in the first decade after independence. There
was no change in the military command when General Ayub became the Commander
in Chief in 1951.26 Consequently, the military took advantage of the general political
instability to establish its dominance in the political spheres of the country. In addition,
the military got firsthand experience with government administration when martial law
was imposed in Lahore after riots started against the Ahmadiyya sect and the civilian
administration failed to maintain law and order. The martial law administration success-
fully restored stability and transferred the control of the city to civilian administration in
a relatively short time. Hasan Askari noted the following implication of the martial
administration on the state and society:

First, the weaknesses and deficiencies of the political institutions and leaders were
exposed – that they could not satisfactorily perform their primary duty of political
and administrative management. Second, it gave the military firsthand experience of
civilian affairs and the machinations of the political leaders – that some political
leaders were involved with smugglers, hoarders and other criminal elements. Third, it
created a strong impression in the public mind that the military could cope with a
difficult situation even when the political leaders failed, thereby giving a boost to the
Army’s reputation as a task-oriented and efficient entity with a helpful disposition
towards the people.27

Therefore, this administration of martial law left a deep imprint on the military’s
institutional culture. Since then, the military has viewed itself as highly competent and the
most uncorrupt institution in the country, while perceiving the political leadership as weak
and incompetent in dealing with state affairs. More importantly, it has become a military
norm to act under domestic compulsion to establish state control in the country.

External and Internal Pressures Driving Military Predominance

The formation of the Pakistani military’s culture was confronted by the constant challenge
of India, which was larger in terms of territory, population, economy, and military power.
Moreover, the conflict over Kashmir and other bilateral issues intensively shaped
Pakistan’s early foreign and security policy, consequently prioritizing an arms race with
India over domestic nation-building. During the Cold War, the Pakistani government
allocated extensive budgetary resources to the armed forces, with the defense expenditure
recorded as 53.5% of the total government expenditure during the 1947–1983 period.28
Furthermore, the United States assisted Pakistan in building its military capabilities after
the formation of its alliance in the 1950s, offering $8.7 billion to Pakistan in economic and
military aid between 1951 and 1959. This military alliance and high government ex-
penditure helped restructure Pakistan’s military capabilities and balance against India’s
military power. Thus, the perceived threat from India was used to advance the military
institution at the expense of civilian institutions from 1947. This allocation of resources
lent professional autonomy to the military, and its interests were prioritized in the state’s
strategic culture while the civilian leadership became subordinate.
While the Pakistani military was modernized according to its own requirements at
the expense of civilian institutions and true nation-building, Pakistani military elites

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nonetheless became heavily involved in domestic affairs by establishing welfare and com-
mercial enterprises using their political and administrative autonomy during military
regimes. Since 1954, there has been vertical and horizontal growth in their business ven-
tures. According to media reports, the military runs more than 700 military companies,
96 enterprises, and holds about 10% of the private-sector assets in the country.29
Furthermore, the military has established public sector organizations that are engaged in
various businesses such as transportation, construction, and telecommunication. The
purpose behind the business ventures was to promote import-substitution industries and
boost the military and private sectors to create employment opportunities in the country.
Thus, over time the military has presented itself as a nation-building institution.30 This has
given rise to the Pakistani “military-industrial complex,” which gives financial autonomy
to the military to act independently.
Furthermore, the Pakistani military has established a monopoly over the definition of
“national interests” and has subsequently presented its own institutional interests as national
security interests, in particular by utilizing hyper-patriotism and religious ideology. Following
the military coup in 1999 led by General Musharraf, a former army chief said that “anyone
who did not support the coup was not a patriotic Pakistani.”31 Therefore, the military in
Pakistan has been treated as an untouchable subject and any objective criticism of the military
has been considered an anti-Pakistan activity and unacceptable maligning of the armed forces.
Despite Pakistan’s parliamentary system, the military enjoys greater control over the
political parties, media, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and paramilitary forces as well as
the ministry of defense, finance, and foreign affairs. Many retired officers have been allocated
to key positions in civil administrations, which provide them with control over other state
institutions as well as the ability to run the government.32 According to Stephen Cohen:

In a country such as Pakistan, where for many years the armed forces have been at the
helm of civil affairs, the influence of adulatory publicity on them cannot be over-
looked. It appears to have affected them deeply enough to change their professional
attitude and standards and to breed in them the unfortunate belief that armed forces
could do no wrong.33

The military has justified its dominance on the grounds of the external security threat
from India and internally weak and incompetent political leadership to deal with such
threats. Thus, Pakistan’s military-centric national security approach has played a major
role in shaping the country’s strategic culture because military elites have a veto within
Pakistan’s national security state that allows them to largely define the strategic culture of
the country.

Gaps in the Strategic Culture Literature

This section has reviewed the extensive literature on Pakistan’s strategic culture that ex-
plains the military’s nearly exclusive role at the helm of strategic affairs. However, the role
of Pakistani civilian leadership in strategic affairs has been largely ignored in the literature.
After the 1971 India-Pakistan war, the civilian leadership of Z.A. Bhutto got a chance to
influence the state’s military-centric strategic culture; however, Bhutto continued with the
military-centric strategic approach. Although he played an instrumental role in the coun-
try’s nuclear program, it was later taken over by the military elites. Similarly, Prime

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 Arshad Ali

Minister Nawaz Sharif got the opportunity in his second term (1997–1999) to influence
Pakistan’s strategic approach, but he continued with the same military-centric strategy and
conducted Pakistan’s first nuclear test after India’s 1998 nuclear tests due to the influence
of the military. There is very limited academic debate on the role of civilian leadership in
shaping Pakistan’s strategic culture and little discussion on why even key civilian leaders
have been unable to transform it.
The addition of the Pakistani nuclear program has further expanded the military’s
power and has escaped civilian control or oversight. The military elites have leveraged the
secrecy of the nuclear program, which is managed through a closed system. Information
relating to its operations and financial resources are kept confidential due to national
security concerns, which has magnified the military’s control over the program. The mil-
itary elites’ enduring belief that the civilian leadership is weak fuels the perception that
civilian leaders could not handle the international pressure over Pakistan’s nuclear pro-
gram.34 Benazir Bhutto said that she asked for a briefing on Pakistan’s nuclear program
after becoming prime minister, but she was denied. It was US Ambassador Robert Oakley
who informed her about Pakistan’s nuclear program.35
Some shift in the national dialogue took place after 2007, since which time Pakistan’s
strategic culture has been discussed and criticized by civilian leaders in the parliament,
media, and civil society in public. These leaders have objectively questioned Pakistan’s past
strategic policies and their impact on the state and society and have demanded that the
parliament has the right to decide the country’s strategic interests and its foreign and
security policies. However, the role of civil society in Pakistan’s strategic culture is still
significantly underexplored in the literature.

The Indian Factor in Pakistan’s Strategic Culture

As discussed above, Pakistan has perceived or encountered a real threat from India since
its inception in 1947. In the wake of the partition, the Indian leadership was of the view
that the Pakistani state was weak and the country could not survive for long. According
to India’s first minister of Home Affairs Vallabhbhai Patel, “Pakistan was not viable
and would soon collapse.”36 Consequently, the Pakistani leadership perceived that India
wanted to undo the partition of India, and thereby revamp the old “Akhand Bharat” –
reunified India.37 Moreover, Kashmir became a main source of conflict and rivalry between
India and Pakistan as an area that both countries saw as part of their respective territories
following the partition.38 This led to the 1947–1948 war between the two countries over
the issue in which India occupied two thirds of Kashmir and Pakistani forces were defeated
during their first war with India.39
After this formative conflict, Pakistan’s military elites drew some conclusions that
shaped formative elements in the state’s strategic culture: First, that the partition of India
was incomplete; second, that India was going to be an existential threat to Pakistan; and
finally, that India sought to be a regional hegemon in South Asia.40 From that point, the
military viewed India to be a permanent external threat in the foreseeable future, and as a
result the profile of the Pakistani military increased on the grounds of the security deficit
with India. According to General Ayub Khan:

Our aim must be to make India realize that it is not worth her while to maintain a
hostile attitude towards us. India’s military strength would always be greater than ours.

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Our aim should be to build up a military deterrent force with adequate offensive and
defensive power; enough, at least, to neutralize the Indian army. India can concentrate
her forces against us without warning. We must, therefore, have a standing army to
take the field at moment’s notice. In our circumstances a territorial army has hardly any
place; it would take too much time to mobilize and train such an army.41

The 1971 war between India and Pakistan changed the security dynamics of South
Asia and shifted the strategic balance in favor of India. However, Pakistan did not accept
Indian regional hegemony and considered asymmetric ways to balance the growing
dominance of India in the region. The Pakistani leadership realized that nuclear deter-
rence was necessary for the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of the country.
It was Z.A. Bhutto who proposed the nuclear program during the cabinet meetings
in General Ayub’s regime. In 1965, Bhutto famously said that “if India builds the bomb,
we will eat grass and leaves for a thousand years, even go hungry, but we will get one of
our own.”42 Bhutto noted in his book:

Pakistan’s security and territorial integrity are more important than economic
development.… All wars of our age have become total wars; all European strategy is
based on the concept of total war; and it will have to be assumed that a war waged
against Pakistan is capable of becoming a total war. It would be dangerous to plan for
less and our plans should, therefore, include the nuclear deterrent … our problem
in its essence, is how to obtain such a weapon in time before the crisis begins.43

Huge strategic efforts and budgetary allocation were necessary to develop the nuclear
program. In 1974, India carried out a nuclear test that provoked Pakistan to start devel-
oping its own nuclear program.44 Consequently, Z.A. Bhutto got an opportunity to
materialize his proposed nuclear program on the grounds of the strategic deficit and pre-
venting future events like the 1971 debacle with India.45 Since then, the development of the
nuclear arsenal has become a major component of Pakistani strategic thinking. According
to Pervez Hoodbouy and Zia Mian:

Overwhelmed by the power of the bomb, they saw it as magical; a panacea for solving
Pakistan’s multiple problems. They told themselves and their people that the bomb
would bring national security, allow Pakistan to liberate Kashmir from India, bind
the nation together, make its people proud of their country and its leaders, free the
country from reliance on aid and loans, and lay the base for the long-frustrated goal
of economic development.46

In addition, Taxila Heavy Industries and the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex in Kamra
were established to rebuild, upgrade, and modernize the state’s military capabilities in the
1970s. These facilities were used for the production of sophisticated weapons such as
tanks, F-6s, the Mushshak and K-8 Karakoram trainer aircraft, armored personnel car-
riers, radar, and avionics equipment. Most recently, it has developed the JF-17 aircraft in a
joint venture with China.47 These measures have demonstrated Pakistan’s resistance
against Indian hegemony in South Asia, and the development of the nuclear program and
other sophisticated weapons have further extended the military’s control over strategic
assets in the country – exempted from civilian influence or oversight.

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 Arshad Ali

In addition to the nuclear program, Pakistan has used jihadi groups in proxy wars to
protect its strategic interests and balance Indian military power. Pakistan supported the
Khalistan movement in Indian Punjab in the 1980s and the Kashmir uprising in 1989 by
providing covert military aid.48 This strategy of proxy support was effectively used by
the Pakistani military elites against strong Indian military power, based in part on the
assumption that India would not react beyond the “Line of Control” (LoC) in case of a
proxy war in Kashmir because of Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities and India’s restraint policy
after the Simla Accord in 1971. However, the Indian leadership has demonstrated a more
aggressive posture after the Pulwama terror attacks in February 2019 and carried out
airstrikes inside Pakistan beyond the LoC, violating the international border. This signals
that India has changed its traditional maximum restraint strategy, which has significant
impact on Pakistan’s asymmetric warfare and nuclear deterrence strategies against India’s
military power.49
There is limited discussion on the 2019 Indian airstrikes in the context of Pakistan’s
strategic culture. Most of the literature on the Indian factor in Pakistan’s strategic cul-
ture has focused on a historical perspective, covering Pakistan’s traditional rivalry with
India and arguing that the military has justified its dominance on the grounds of security
shortfalls toward India. However, the recent developments in India, especially with the
rise of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hindu nationalism, have changed
Pakistan’s strategic outlook. India’s decision to step away from its traditional restraint
policy toward Pakistan by carrying out airstrikes in the wake of the 2019 Pulwama
terror attack likely means that India has formed a new nuclear threshold in which it
has created a strategic space for conventional war. Therefore, there is a need for fresh
insights in the literature on the Indian factor in Pakistan’s strategic culture in the era
of Modi.

Ideological Factors in Pakistan’s Strategic Culture

Religious-National Identity
Unlike Turkey, Indonesia, and Algeria, Pakistan won independence from the British
colonial empire through a constitutional and political struggle in 1947. The Pakistani
military had no direct role in the independence movement against the British empire; in
fact, the Pakistani military was part of the “ex-colonial” army, not a “national liberation”
army or a “post-liberation army.”50 Rather, the Pakistani military inherited the British
legacy, which was designed for colonial rule in the subcontinent. Most of the military
officers were commissioned and trained by the British military before joining the Pakistani
armed forces after independence. Therefore, at the time of independence, these officers
lacked military and political legitimacy which could be used to interfere in the affairs of the
new nation-state.51 Thus, the military had to redefine its role and identity according to the
ideology of the new country.
Against this backdrop, the Pakistani military took its inspiration from the ideology of
the independence movement known as “two nation theory.” This ideology was based on
the idea that Muslims and Hindus are two separate nations based on their religion; a
premise on which the Muslim League demanded a separate homeland for the Indian
Muslims. This ideology has defined Pakistan’s political, social, military, and educational
discourses after independence. Hasan Askari Rizvi noted that “Islam is an integral part of

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Pakistan’s strategic culture because it contributes to shaping societal dispositions and

orientations of [its] policy makers.”52 Interestingly, the Pakistani military was the first to
redefine itself on the basis of this ideology and presented itself as the sole guardian and
defender of the country’s ideological foundation and its territorial frontiers. However, the
Pakistani military continued the practices of the British military and has taken pride in its
British legacy of martial virtues and Western standards of professionalism in warfare.
Therefore, the military adopted the religious ideology of the new Pakistani nation in
combination with Western military professionalism.
In addition, the Pakistani military takes motivation from early Muslim warriors and the
battles they fought against great empires such as Byzantium and Persia. John Keegan ar-
gues that “it was Islam itself, which lays so heavy an emphasis on the fight for the faith,
that made them so formidable in the field.”53 The Pakistani military has viewed itself as
a successor of the Muslim warrior tradition – fighting for the noble cause of Islam and
subsequently conquering the great empires of their time. Through this ideological lens, the
Pakistani military fostered the belief that “one Pakistani soldier is worth ten Indian sol-
diers.”54 Thus, the military has presented itself as a Muslim military force, which provides
the institution with public support and legitimacy to have control in both state and society.
According to former interior secretary Khalid Aziz:

The Pakistan military strongly believed that if religious identity is imposed on Pakistan,
they will be mentally ready to face any enemies who might attack Pakistan[,] especially
India. Consequently, the religious narrative was propagated as the national identity
by [the] military establishment.55

Asymmetric Warfare and Proxy Groups

As discussed earlier, the Pakistani military adopted asymmetric warfare strategies to
achieve strategic parity against India in South Asia, providing covert support to jihadi
groups as a “politico-military strategy” in the Afghanistan and Kashmir conflicts. After
1979, General Zia devised a strategy to wage jihad against the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. The United States joined the bandwagon after seeing that this strategy was
successful in countering Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The Central Intelligence Agency and
ISI conducted the world’s biggest covert operation to counter the Soviet Union during the
1980s; moreover, the ISI received a significant amount of financial aid from Western and
Gulf countries – around $2 billion from the United States and a roughly equal amount from
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries – for the Afghan resistance movement against the
Soviet Union.56 Ahmad Rashid writes:

General Zia did not allow the CIA or any other foreign intelligence agency to aid the
Mujahedin directly, enter Afghanistan, or plan the Mujahedin’s battles and strategy.
That became the prerogative of the ISI, which, with its newfound wealth and
American patronage, had become a state within a state, employing thousands of
officers in order to run what was now also Pakistan’s Afghan war.57

Thus, the ISI became another key player under the influence of military elites in shaping
Pakistan’s strategic policymaking during the Soviet-Afghan War. Since then, the ISI has
coordinated with the army elites to further expand military control in state affairs.

335
 Arshad Ali

In addition, General Zia institutionalized religion in the armed forces. Many religious
scholars were appointed to work along with the armed forces from the Jamaat-e-Islami and
Deobandi religious groups. Moreover, Pakistan’s northwestern region became the base
point of a transnational jihadi resistance movement to fight against the Soviet forces in
Afghanistan. As a result, an alliance was established between the military, militants, and
mullahs (religious class), which served Pakistan’s strategic interests during the Soviet-
Afghan War. This alliance has brought a new class of military officers, which is “ideo-
logical in profession of belief and practice of both” as put by one Pakistani strategist. In
this process, the Pakistani military viewed itself in a larger pan-Islamic context during
General Zia’s regime.58 Thus, the Soviet-Afghan War added a new flavor to the Pakistani
strategic narratives institutionalizing religion in the military and using jihad as a “politico-
military strategy.”59
Like the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the 9/11 terror attacks had a major impact
on Pakistan’s strategic culture. It was General Musharraf who formulated the strategy to
join the GWOT. Musharraf apparently attempted to part ways with militant groups in
Kashmir and Afghanistan, which led to a major rift between the military elites.
Consequently, some key officers resigned from the military after Pakistan joined the
GWOT. Subsequently, the Pakistani military conducted operations against select militant
groups by differentiating on the basis of threats and strategic utilization. For example,
Pakistan cracked down on groups that turned against the Pakistani state, including Tehrik-
i-Taliban Pakistan, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and Al-Qaeda.60 However, the
Pakistani military thought it would overstretch the armed forces and evoke a possible
blowback by taking on all the militant groups. Paul Staniland et al. explain that:

the true crackdowns [by the Pakistani military] have only occurred when groups
ideologically radicalized against the military and began making unacceptable
political demands, rather than in response to outside pressure or a change in core
military preferences. Pakistan’s army appears entirely comfortable with a fractured
monopoly of violence, as long as it functions on the military’s political terms.61

Therefore, the military elites have utilized the militant groups based on their strategic
use to secure Pakistan’s interests in South Asia. However, Islam, which was applied as a
unifying national force, took a very conservative turn during General Zia’s regime, leaving
deep imprints on Pakistan’s state and society. This religiosity has put soldiers under the
delusion that “no power on earth can subdue the valour of the Mujahidin.”62 The
Pakistani military elites viewed the glory of Islam as being made manifest in the Pakistani
military, which was born to lead and rule after the Soviet Union withdrew from
Afghanistan. More importantly, the practice of asymmetric war and the use of proxy
groups have further strengthened the role of the military in the state’s strategic culture. It
was the Pakistani military that planned and executed the Afghan War against the Soviet
forces and more recently the GWOT, both with the support of the United States.
This review of the literature highlights studies that explain how the Pakistani military
has redefined its role based on the “two nation theory” after the partition, and moreover
how the military has used jihadi groups instrumentally to achieve its strategic interests
in the region. The use of such proxy groups was an effective strategic tool during
the Cold War, but it has become a very dangerous phenomenon after the emergence of
radical Islam in the post-Cold War era. There is a need for further study on the ways proxy

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war in the form of jihadi groups transformed from an effective instrument of preference
within Pakistani strategic culture to a dangerous phenomenon in the post-Cold War era,
especially after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Conclusion
The core themes across the literature on Pakistan’s strategic culture focus on the central
role of the military elites in developing Pakistan’s strategic culture after the state’s inde-
pendence in 1947. The Kashmir issue and rivalry with India have been used by the military
to justify its near-exclusive control in state affairs on the pretext of Pakistan’s security
deficit. The Pakistani military redefined itself on the country’s ideological right after its
inception, and subsequently military elites presented themselves as guardians to protect
the state’s territorial integrity and ideological foundations, which has in turn provided
position and prestige to the military in the Pakistani state and society. The military receives
a large share of budgetary resources, which has granted it professional and financial
autonomy and reinforced military elites’ belief that the civilian leadership is too weak and
incompetent to deal with state affairs. Hence, the military elites have established a powerful
role and veto in defining Pakistan’s strategic culture, and significantly, the military’s role as
a savior and guardian has been accepted in the country given the geostrategic global en-
vironment and domestic compulsion to protect the country’s national interests.
This chapter considers a wide range of the literature on Pakistan’s strategic culture that
explores the predominant role of the military in state affairs; however, there is very limited
discussion in the literature over the role of civilian leadership in building or influencing the
military-centric strategic culture of the country. In a similar fashion, while there has been
extensive scholarship on Pakistan’s traditional rivalry with India in the context of Kashmir
and the major wars fought by the two countries, further study is needed on Pakistan’s
response to India’s increasingly aggressive strategic behavior under the leadership of Prime
Minister Modi. Pakistan’s adoption of asymmetric warfare strategies after 1971 to balance
Indian military power and achieve its regional strategic interests has been well studied;
however, the use of proxy groups has provoked severe blowback in the form of extremism,
radicalization, and terrorism. As Pakistan has become increasingly isolated globally and
put on the gray list of the Financial Action Task Force for these issues, the state faces an
increasing need to reform its strategic culture and look for alternative strategic options to
protect its national interests in the region and further afield. Further study is needed on the
shifts in policy and paradigms that Pakistan’s elites may adopt to navigate the complex
security environment of the 2020s and beyond. These include how Pakistan may use its
strategic location for regional connectivity by adopting an economic-driven foreign policy
that could help restructure its weakening economy and international image, with a par-
ticular eye toward the potential impact of China’s multibillion-dollar projects in the region
under the Belt and Road Initiative from which Pakistan could only benefit if it transforms
elements of its strategic thinking and norms.

Notes
1 Peter R. Lavoy, “Pakistan’s Strategic Culture,” SAIC, 31 October 2006, 5–6.
2 Peter Rosen’s definition, as quoted in Anand V., “Revisiting the Discourse on Strategic Culture:
An Assessment of the Conceptual Debates,” Strategic Analysis 44, no. 3 (2020): 199–200.

337
 Arshad Ali

3 Bradley S. Klien’s definition, as quoted in Anand V., “Revisiting the Discourse on Strategic
Culture,” 199–200.
4 Sumita Kumar, “Pakistan’s Strategic Thinking,” Strategic Analysis 35, no. 3 (2011): 479.
5 Arshad Ali, Pakistan’s National Security Approach and Post-Cold War Security: Uneasy Co-
existence (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 32–34.
6 Arshad Ali and Robert G. Patman, “The Evolution of the National Security State in Pakistan:
1947–1989,” Democracy and Security 15, no. 4 (2019): 309–311.
7 Priyanka Singh, “Army: The Be-All or End-All of Pakistan Politics?,” Strategic Analysis 39, no. 3
(2015): 319.
8 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford University
Press, 2009), 410–414.
9 Bennett O. Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (Yale University Press, 2002), 276–277.
10 Arshad Ali and Robert G. Patman, “The Evolution of the National Security State in Pakistan:
1947–1989,” Democracy and Security 15, no. 4 (2019): 320.
11 Arshad Ali and Fazal Subhan, “Deconstructing the Myth of Pashtun as a Nation of Extremists
and Warriors,” in Muhammad Shoaib Pervez ed., Radicalization in Pakistan: A Critical
Perspective (Routledge 2020), 130.
12 C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (Oxford University
Press, 2014), 112–115.
13 C. Christine Fair and Shuja Nawaz, “The Changing Pakistan Army Officer Corps,” The Journal
of Strategic Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 63.
14 Peter J. Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics
(Columbia University Press, 1996).
15 Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (Pluto Press, 2007), 71.
16 Ibid.
17 The Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973, Article 245.
18 Paul Staniland et al., “Pakistan’s Military Elite,” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 1 (2020):
74–76.
19 C. Christine Fair and Seth G. Jones, “Pakistan’s War Within,” Survival 51, no. 6 (2009): 163.
20 Paul Staniland et al., “Pakistan’s Military Elite,” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 1 (2020):
74–76.
21 Arshad Ali, Pakistan’s National Security Approach and Post-Cold War Security: Uneasy Co-
existence (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 35.
22 Roedad Khan, “Quaid’s Visit to Staff College Quetta,” The Nation, Pakistan, 22 November
2012.
23 Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (Harvard University Press,
2014), 35–36.
24 Kaushik Roy and Scott Gates, Conventional Warfare in South Asia, 1947 to the Present
(Routledge 2011), xvii.
25 Stephen Cohen, “Pakistan: Army, Society, and Security,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 10,
no. 2 (1983): 1.
26 Arshad Ali, Pakistan’s National Security Approach and Post-Cold War Security: Uneasy Co-
existence (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 37.
27 Hasan A. Rizvi, Military State and Society in Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 78–79.
28 Hasan A. Rizvi, “Pakistan’s Defence Policy,” Pakistan Horizon 36, no. 1 (1983): 38.
29 Ron Moreau, “The Military’s Long Reach,” Foreign Policy, 12 October 2009, http://foreignpolicy.
com/2009/10/12/the-militarys-long-reach/.
30 Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (Pluto Press, 2007), 50.
31 Ahmad Faruqui, “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan,” The RUSI Journal
159, no. 6 (2014): 75.
32 Yunas Samad, “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan,” Commonwealth &
Comparative Politics 54, no. 1 (2016): 145.
33 Smruti S. Pattanaik, “Civil‐Military Ccoordination and Defence Decision‐Making in Pakistan,”
Strategic Analysis 24, no. 5 (2000): 940.
34 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford University
Press, 2009), 437.

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 Pakistan’s Military-Centric Strategic Culture

35 Ibid., 415.
36 Nicholas Mansergh, “The Partition of India in Retrospect,” International Journal 21, no. 1
(1966): 16.
37 Jaffrelot, C., Pakistan at the Crossroads: Domestic Dynamics and External Pressures (Columbia
University Press, 2016).
38 Varun Vaish, “Negotiating the India-Pakistan Conflict in Relation to Kashmir,” International
Journal on World Peace 28, no. 3 (2011): 57–58.
39 Kaushik Roy and Scott Gates, Conventional Warfare in South Asia, 1947 to the Present
(Routledge, 2011), x.
40 C. Christine Fair, “Pakistan’s Strategic Culture Implications for How Pakistan Perceives and
Counters Threats,” The National Bureau of Asian Research –NBR special report no. 61,
December 2016, 4–6.
41 Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 47.
42 Yaqoob Khan, “Eating grass,” Express Tribune, Pakistan, 24 January 2015, http://tribune.com.
pk/story/826538/eating-grass/.
43 Zulfikar A. Bhutto, Myth of Independence (Oxford University Press, 1969), 152–153.
44 Alexander Evans, “Pakistan and the Shadow of 9/11,” The RUSI Journal 156, no. 4 (2011): 66.
45 Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, “Nuclear Fears, Hopes and Realities in Pakistan,” International
Affairs 90, no. 5 (2014): 1128.
46 Ibid., 1127–1141.
47 Muhammad N. Mirza et al., “Military Spending and Economic Growth in Pakistan,” Margalla
Papers, Islamabad XIX, no. 19 (2015): 169.
48 Alexander Evans, “Pakistan and the Shadow of 9/11,” The RUSI Journal 156, no. 4 (2011): 66.
49 Abhinav Pandya, “The Future of Indo-Pak Relations after the Pulwama Attack,” Perspectives
on Terrorism 13, no. 2 (2019): 65–68.
50 Raymond A. Moore, “The Army as a Vehicle for Social Change in Pakistan,” The Journal of
Developing Areas 2, no. 1 (1967): 59.
51 Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan (Harvard University Press,
2014), 31–32.
52 Runa Das, “The Prism of Strategic Culture and South Asian Nuclearization,” Contemporary
Politics 15, no. 4 (2009): 398–399.
53 John, Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Random House, 1993), 196.
54 Ahmad Faruqui, “Pakistan’s Strategic Myopia,” The RUSI Journal 145, no. 2 (2000): 52.
55 Arshad Ali, Pakistan’s National Security Approach and Post-Cold War Security: Uneasy Co-
existence (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 154.
56 Husain Haqqani, “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,” Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace (2005): 85.
57 Grant Holt and David H. Gray, “A Pakistani Fifth Column? The Pakistani Inter-Service
Intelligence Directorate’s Sponsorship of Terrorism,” Global Security Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 58.
58 Ibid., 55–56.
59 Arshad Ali, Pakistan’s National Security Approach and Post-Cold War Security: Uneasy Co-
existence (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021), 61.
60 Staniland, P. et al., “Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the
North West Frontier,” Security Studies (2018): 2.
61 Ibid.
62 C. Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (Oxford University
Press, 2014), 99.

Selected Bibliography
Arshad Ali, Pakistan’s National Security Approach and Post-Cold War Security: Uneasy Co-
existence. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021.
Arshad Ali and Robert G. Patman, “The Evolution of the National Security State in Pakistan:
1947–1989.” Democracy and Security 15, no. 4 (2019): 301–327.

339
 Arshad Ali

Zulfikar A. Bhutto, Myth of Independence. Oxford University Press, 1969.

Stephen Cohen, “Pakistan: Army, Society, and Security.” Asian Affairs: An American Review 10,
no. 2 (1983): 1–26.
Runa Das, “The Prism of Strategic Culture and South Asian nuclearization.” Contemporary Politics
15, no. 4 (2009): 395–411.
Alexander Evans, “Pakistan and the Shadow of 9/11.” The RUSI Journal 156, no. 4 (2011): 64–70.
Christine Fair, Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Christine Fair and Seth G. Jones, “Pakistan’s War Within.” Survival 51, no. 6 (2009): 161–188.
Christine Fair and Shuja Nawaz, “The Changing Pakistan Army Officer Corps.” The Journal of
Strategic Studies 34, no. 1 (2011): 63–94.
Husain Haqqani, “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.” Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, 2005.
Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian, “Nuclear Fears, Hopes and Realities in Pakistan.” International
Affairs 90, no. 5 (2014): 1125–1142.
C. Jaffrelot. Pakistan at the Crossroads: Domestic Dynamics and External Pressures. Columbia
University Press, 2016.
Bennett O. Jones, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. Yale University Press, 2002.
John Keegan, A History of Warfare. New York: Random House, 1993
Ayub Khan, Friends not Masters: A Political Autobiography. New York: Oxford University Press,
1967.
Sumita Kumar, “Pakistan’s Strategic Thinking,” Strategic Analysis 35, no. 3 (2011): 479–492.
Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within. Oxford University Press,
2009.
Smruti S. Pattanaik, “Civil‐Military Coordination and Defence Decision‐Making in Pakistan.”
Strategic Analysis 24, no. 5 (2000): 939–968.
Hasan A. Rizvi, “Pakistan’s Defence Policy.” Pakistan Horizon 36, no. 1 (1983): 32–56.
Hasan A. Rizvi, Military State and Society in Pakistan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Kaushik Roy and Scott Gates, Conventional Warfare in South Asia, 1947 to the Present. Routledge,
2011.
Yunas Samad, “The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan.” Commonwealth &
Comparative Politics 54, no. 1 (2016): 144–146.
Aqil Shah, The Army and Democracy: Military Politics in Pakistan. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc. Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. Pluto Press, 2007.
Staniland, P. et al., “Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the
North West Frontier.” Security Studies (2018): 535–574.
Paul Staniland et al., “Pakistan’s Military Elite.” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 1 (2020):
74–103.

340