Pak pacts may fuel ‘overconfidence’, China ties can’t be hostage to border issues: Ex-CDS Chauhan

NEW DELHI: Former chief of defence staff Gen Anil Chauhan (Retd) on Saturday cautioned that Pakistan's new defence pacts could provide Islamabad "some kind of an overconfidence" and push it into "some kind of a miscalculation again", even as he noted India's.

Key points

• India put the 1960 treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam attack last year.
• The Mecca Pact's kinetic potential: A new equationThe Mecca pact: Into the age of hybrid warfare On China, the former CDS.
• The answer was credible deterrence, demonstrated through the surgical strikes, Balakot and Operation Sindoor.
• The new pacts, Gen Chauhan cautioned, could cut the other way.
• India and China were "two major Asian powers, large economies and civilisational states" that cooperate in some areas while competing in others.

Pakistan would remain "a major security concern", with terrorism and proxy war central to its strategy, Gen Chauhan (Retd) remarked at the annual GB Pant memorial lecture in the national capital. China, he continued, posed "an absolutely different and more long-term and comprehensive challenge".

Pakistan's nuclear weapons had provided "a degree of static stability at the apex level" while inducing instability lower down, reflecting the classic stability-instability paradox, he remarked.

"The idea of Pakistan has been to reduce space for conventional operations and expand the space for sub-conventional operations, that is, terrorism and cross-border activity."

While degrading individual terrorist networks was not enough, non-state actors provided Islamabad deniability.

"Even when a particular terrorist network is degraded, the enabling ecosystem, that is, the ideology, the recruitment system, the finance, training, propaganda and state support, can be recreated, " he remarked.

In practice, the answer was credible deterrence, demonstrated through the surgical strikes, Balakot and Operation Sindoor.

"Deterrence must operate throughout the spectrum. India must be able to raise the cost of proxy war, " he remarked, adding that Operation Sindoor and keeping the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance could force a behavioural change in Pakistan.

India put the 1960 treaty in abeyance after the Pahalgam attack last year. Last week, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled that it remains fully in force and that abeyance has no standing in its text. India, which did not participate in the proceedings, rejected the award as null and void.

For context, the new pacts, Gen Chauhan cautioned, could cut the other way. Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkiye last month, under which an armed attack on any one of the three is treated as an attack on all. It followed the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement signed in September last year.

Notably, the Mecca Pact's kinetic potential: A new equationThe Mecca pact: Into the age of hybrid warfare On China, the former CDS. This person demitted office lately, struck a more nuanced note, with his remarks coming a week before the BRICS summit in New Delhi, which Chinese President Xi Jinping is anticipated to attend.

India and China were "two major Asian powers, large economies and civilisational states" that cooperate in some areas while competing in others. "The future of Asia, I believe, will depend substantially on how India and China manage" it, Gen Chauhan remarked.

His assessment of Chinese backing for Pakistan has additionally been more cautious than that of some serving officers. Deputy Chief of Army Staff Lt Gen Rahul R Singh remarked in July last year that Pakistan received "live inputs" from China during the fighting and that Turkiye aided its drone attacks.

While real-time intelligence-sharing was challenging to establish, gen Chauhan (Retd), in contrast, remarked last month that 70 to 80 percent of Pakistan's inventory was Chinese-origin, making the presence of Chinese equipment manufacturers a routine contractual obligation.

Notably, the frontier, nevertheless, remains unsettled, with differing perceptions along the boundary, infrastructure build-up and force multipliers creating "the possibility of friction and escalation".

This requires "vigilance, credible capabilities, clear agreements and consistent adherence to them", he remarked.

He welcomed the two extra military hotlines in the Eastern and Middle sectors and two more senior-commander gathering points agreed during NSA Ajit Doval's discussions with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing last month.

Is the Mecca Defence Pact a Threat to India? Ambassador Puri Answers.

In short, pak pacts may fuel 'overconfidence', China ties can't be hostage to border is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.