Left to right: Antoine Levesques, Daniel Markey, Feroz Khan, Frank O’Donnell, and Sylvia Mishra
Feroz Khan Discusses His New Book, Subcontinent Adrift: Strategic Futures of South Asia
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington: In his recently published book, Subcontinent Adrift: Strategic Futures of South Asia, Feroz Khan tackles the strategic challenges facing India and Pakistan, along with the prospects for a closer relationship between the two nuclear-armed countries.
The author, a former brigadier in the Pakistan Army who is now a research professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School, discussed these issues with a panel of experts on the region in an October 25 webinar co-hosted by the Stimson Center and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).
“This book uniquely combines in one volume the security challenges faced by both Pakistan and India in isolation, the grand strategies and military policies they have each adopted in response, and the trajectories of their current strategic drift for regional and global security,” said Frank O’Donnell, deputy director of the Stimson Center’s South Asia program.
India’s test launch of the Agni-P new generation high precision ballistic missile on October 21, he pointed out, “captures a lot of the dynamics that this book speaks to.”
Daniel Markey, senior advisor on South Asia at USIP and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Policy Institute, noted that not even Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal or its strategic ties – whether with the United States or now increasingly with China – have fully alleviated its “sense of existential threat.”
Continuing the discussion on nuclear weapons, Khan said that one motivating factor propelling him to write the book was the “fundamental argument that if Pakistan’s narrative on nuclear weapons didn’t come out, it would always be synonymous with the A.Q. Khan nuclear weapons smuggling network.” Abdul Qadeer Khan was the controversial “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear program. He was arrested in 2004, released in 2009, and died in 2021.
Despite having nuclear weapons, “Pakistan remains dependent on external balancing, both economically and militarily,” Khan said. But, he added, “Nuclear weapons give you that independent variable in your security calculus that should allow you to have more sovereign policy and more independent policy and allow you the space to have economic development…and an independent foreign or security policy. That is what nuclear weapons or nuclear deterrents do for you.”
Khan believes the Lahore Declaration of 1999, the landmark nuclear control agreement signed by both countries, is the “key document from which India and Pakistan can still find a pathway rather than the course they are already on. There is no other discourse that India and Pakistan can find.”
Amid a mix of geopolitics and shifting military doctrines, India continues to “struggle between pragmatism and idealism,” Khan concluded. Pakistan, on the other hand, is still trying to find its “space within both national identity and the method of governance as to how to deal with the country.”
Khan remains “cautiously optimistic that India and Pakistan are rational actors that will eventually find a modus vivendi or detente of sorts and eventually resolve the conflict and there will be a good future of sorts.”
After reading Subcontinent Adrift, Antoine Levesques, research fellow for South Asia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, called Khan’s book a “valuable Pakistani perspective by a scholarly minded once insider-in-government who has the rare quality of combining critical but constructive perspectives with practical policy minded professional experience. It’s a useful book not just for academics and students but for policy analysts and diplomats.”
For Levesques, important areas that Khan emphasized were the “value of seizing opportunities,” the “worthy exercise of scenario planning” and “the importance and challenges of fact-based assessments.”
Sylvia Mishra, senior nuclear policy associate at the Institute for Security and Technology and nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center, praised Khan for straightforwardly presenting the “stubborn fixation of history…and how India and Pakistan view each other and their threat perceptions of each other.”
Amid several unresolved issues and crises, Khan rightly raises the question of the future of 1.6 billion people who have not been able to benefit from economic integration, Mishra said, pointing out that South Asia remains one of the least integrated geographic regions. “Because of these unresolved issues, the constant falling back into stubborn fixations, and unresolved crises, both of the countries are not able to really benefit from the dividends of integration,” she contended.
Subcontinent Adrift is an “incredibly rich compendium of the strategic future of South Asia and provides a clear, lucid explanation of the causes and consequences of the drift in bilateral relations between India and Pakistan,” Mishra stated. And, importantly, “Brigadier Khan has really shaped the thinking of emerging scholars.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
