Atul Mishra's comments on Pakistan and Syria

Atul Mishra, who teaches at Central University of Gujarat, (blogs here) responded by email to a couple of my essays in Economic Times which I had posted here.  [Full disclosure: We are academic collaborators and currently have a jointly-authored book manuscript under review].  With his permission, I am posting both his comments/questions and my responses.

Atul:

About Pakistan. Don't our guys do the same thing across the LoC? They must be fools to not do it. And if they do, does it really matter whether our deterrence works or not? After all, we get our revenge. We can be seen to be doing more, having a strategy, but largely for domestic eyes; no? What is the point of going into PoK if not to recover it and cause Pakistan deep damage (read, break up)? 

A Pragmatic Policy on Syria

I wrote this essay immediately after it became clear (I then thought) that President Obama had decided to hit Assad to punish him for his use of chemical weapons.  Now . . . who knows?  Maybe Obama will go ahead with his military plans but he increasingly looks like someone making things up as he goes along, a prisoner of circumstance and his mouth rather than someone who has any control over events.  Obama has been an enormously lucky politician and may be that will be enough still.

In an essay in the Economic Times, I argued that India should adopt a pragmatic policy on Syria because India does have an interest in ensuring that the taboo against chemical weapons use is not eroded.  Since then, the External Affairs Minister Khurshid as well as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have decided that it is the UN that should take the lead.  Apparently it is not just economic policy that smells of the 1970s around here.  I will have more on this later, but below is my take on the crisis.

India needs have pragmatic policy on Syria, not its traditional default option

It seems reasonably certain now that the US and its allies will launch a military assault on Syria to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons. The strikes are likely to be limited with the objective of deterring further Syrian use of chemical weapons rather than to change the regime.