| Why has South Asia's history been mired in a perpetual and often violent rivalry between the neighboring states of India and Pakistan? What explains Pakistan's persistent willingness to initiate conflict against its militarily superior adversary, India? Given that Pakistan appears to be unable to achieve its conflict goals absent some form of U.S. support, does the U.S.-Pakistan alliance have the features of a moral hazard dynamic? In order to explore this question, I leverage scholarship on moral hazard theory, interstate alliances, and extended deterrence theory to undertake a structured case comparison of four major conflict events---the 1965, 1971, and 1999 Indo-Pakistani wars and the 1990 Kashmir Crisis---with an eye toward determining the relative, causal influence of the U.S. alliance on Islamabad's decision to initiate or escalate conflict.;The analysis indicates that a moral hazard dynamic has at times existed in U.S.-Pakistani relations when Pakistan perceived that it could rely on U.S. alliance commitments to ensure Pakistan's national survival and support its diplomatic quest for greater territorial inclusion of the Kashmir province. The analysis further suggests that Pakistan's risk-acceptance was calibrated in accord with the strength of its belief in the prospect of U.S. intervention. However, after Pakistan crossed the nuclear rubicon, beliefs about the prospect of U.S. intervention were less important in Pakistan's short-term military calculations, but they continued to embolden Pakistan's diplomatic strategy to internationalize the Kashmir dispute through armed aggression. |
