Many moons ago, strategists from both India and Pakistan had concluded that war of the type that the two countries fought in 1965 or 1971 was not an option any longer. Nuclear parity and its deterrence value had forced this reality into military thinking on both sides.

Unresolved issues between the two pushed them into finding alternate means of war. General Musharraf, the army chief in 1998, made his surreptitious move in Kargil, unknown to the political government. If ever there was the need to determine the space for a limited conflict, Musharraf's ill-thought adventurism helped define the domain.

Regardless of whatever other positive attributes of the late General one might list, this one fact of puncturing the deterrence regime, even if ever so slightly, will countervail all else that he exhibited in his leadership. It was poor judgment, plain and simple.

It goes to the credit of Vajpayee that recognising the risk involved in the new paradigm of conflict he kept Kargil restricted and limited. Another major event that inflamed resident hostility was the 2008 Mumbai attack — jury is out on its genesis and enactment, but it hurt prospects of anything positive between the two to its irrecoverable and insurmountable breaking point.

Since then, the smallest of incidents can raise the specter of a war to its ultimate finality. The reality of the nuclear overhang, however, establishes the limits to how the two nations may fight their civilisational battles. Why they choose the futile is driven by the civilisational hate that triggers such a primordial resort.

All the development and progression that mankind has seen in the last half century has failed to cut through the base instinct that drives emotion and sentiment in this part of the world. When mankind will only survive through cooperation in the face of........

© The Express Tribune