Content area
Full Text
Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia by Kanti P. Bajpai, P.R. Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, Stephen P. Cohen, and Sumit Ganguly Manohar Publishers, 1995 200 pages; $28.00
India and Pakistan haven't gone to war since 1971. But they have come close on more than half a dozen occasions. Their closest call came in January 1987, when the Indian armed forces held their biggest exercise in history, "Brasstacks." The size, the location (35 to 50 miles from the Pakistani border), and a lack of communication convinced Pakistan that Brasstacks was not an exercise at all, but an operation aimed at provoking an attack, which would then be met by massive retaliation.
Although Pakistan responded by moving its own forces up to the border, Pakistani leaders may have decided not to play the game because of the sheer size of the Indian force. In any case, this bit of good sense--from leaders usually ready to ride into adventure--probably saved the day. It was the closest India and Pakistan had come to a full-fledged war in years, although their armies had been intermittently firing at each other on the world's highest battlefield, the Siachen glacier in northwest Kashmir, and had fought proxy wars in the Indian Punjab and Pakistan's Sind.
Taking a cue from recent analyses of the Cuban missile crisis, which have brought together former adversaries to record their remembrances, Brasstacks and Beyond was written by five experts--one Pakistani, two Indians, and two Americans. They have produced the most complete study of Brasstacks to date, discussing what led up to the crisis, how it unfolded, how it was defused, and most important, its lessons. Until now, the Brasstacks crisis has been covered comprehensively only three times--in a contemporaneous story in India Today magazine; in a book by a U.S.-based Indian scholar, Ravi Rikhye, who knows the Indian forces very well; and in a fictional account that borrows heavily...