There are multiple reasons why India cannot attack Pakistan. India envious of Pakistan nukes–jittery about Pakistan Plutonium capability. The world already knows the meaning of Mutually Assured destruction. Nukes: Don’t mess with us–Islamabad’s defiant rebuke to threats.India knows that it can never win a conventional warfare because of the Nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). However it still harbors notions of winning a sort of a mini war. India may think it has a Cold Start Strategy, but it may end as a hot nuclear war. Indian Defense planners cannot guarantee that a limited strike will not escalte into a full fledged war. A full fledged war witha nuclear armed labor may destroy both countries. Responding to the “Surgical Strikes”: Neutralizing Delhi’s Cold Start strategy:

Here are five enumerated by Tunku Varadarajan and some by Congressman Dan Burton.

• PAF responds to Indian war games
• KPMG report: Half of India’s weapons are obsolete
• IAF embraces gravity- grounds half the planes
• 100 Indian Mig 27s grounded: IAF strength below 300 now
• Response to “Cold Start Strategy”
• India vs. Pakistan
• Nuclear deterrence & Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) blunts Bharat’s Cold Start Strategy

Over the last week, many Americans (and not a few Indians) have asked me why India does not “do a Gaza” on Pakistan, referring, of course, to an emulation of Israel’s punitive use of force against Hamas-run Palestine, a territory from which rockets rain down on Israeli soil with reliable frequency (if not reliable destructiveness … but that is not for want of Hamas intent).

My answer, given with the heavy heart that comes always with a painful grip on reality, is simple: India does not because it cannot. Pakistani defense based on missile nuclear deterrent. Hatf, Shaheen, Ghauri, Babar and Abdali are far more advanced then previously thought

Here are five reasons why:

1. India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories. India does not have the immunity, the confidence and the military free hand that result from an overwhelming military superiority over an opponent. Israel’s foe is a non-sovereign entity that enjoys the most precarious form of self-governance. Pakistan, for all its dysfunction, is a proper country with a proper army, superior by far to the tin-pot Arab forces that Israel has had to combat over time. Pakistan has nukes, to boot. Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it an apocalyptic risk for India. This is, in fact, Pakistan’s trump card. (This explains, also, why Israel is determined to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.)

2. Even if India could attack Pakistan without fear of nuclear retaliation, the rationale for “doing a Gaza” is, arguably, not fully present: Israel had been attacked consistently by the very force–Hamas–that was in political control of the territory from which the attacks occurred. By contrast, terrorist attacks on India, while originating in Pakistan, are not authored by the Pakistani government. India can– and does–contend that Pakistan’s government should shut down the terrorist training camps on Pakistani soil. (In this insistence, India has unequivocal support from Washington.) Yet only a consistent and demonstrable pattern of dereliction by Pakistani authorities– which would need to be dereliction verging on complicity with the terrorists–would furnish India with sufficient grounds to hold the Pakistani state culpable.

3. As our columnist, Karlyn Bowman, writes, Israel enjoys impressive support from the American people, in contrast to the Palestinians. No other state–apart, perhaps, from Britain–evokes as much favor in American public opinion as does Israel. This is not merely the result of the much-vaunted “Israel lobby” (to use a label deployed by its detractors), but also because of the very real depth of cultural interpenetration between American and Israeli society. This fraternal feeling buys Israel an enviable immunity in the conduct of its strategic defense. India, by contrast–while considerably more admired and favored in American public opinion than Pakistan–enjoys scarcely a fraction of Israel’s “pull” in Washington when it comes to questions of the use of force beyond its borders.

4. Pakistan is strategically significant to the United States; the Palestinians are not. This gives Washington scant incentive to rein in the Israelis, but a major incentive to rein in any Indian impulse to strike at Pakistan. However justified the Indian anger against Pakistan over the recent invasion of Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists, the last thing that the U.S. wants right now is an attack–no matter how surgical–by India against Pakistan-based terror camps. This would almost certainly result in a wholesale shift of Pakistani troops away from their western, Afghan front toward the eastern boundary with India–and would leave the American Afghan campaign in some considerable disarray, at least in the short term. So Washington has asked for, and received, the gift of Indian patience. And although India recognizes that it is not wholly without options to mobilize quickly for punitive, surgical strikes in a “strategic space,” it would–right now–settle for a trial of the accused terrorist leaders in U.S. courts. (Seven U.S. citizens were killed in Mumbai: Under U.S. law, those responsible–and this should include Pakistani intelligence masterminds–have to be brought to justice.)

5. My last, and meta-, point: Israel has the privilege of an international pariah to ignore international public opinion in its use of force against the Palestinians. A state with which few others have diplomatic relations can turn the tables on those that would anathematize it by saying, Hang diplomacy. India, by contrast, has no such luxury. It is a prisoner of its own global aspirations–and pretensions. http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/04/israel-hamas-india-oped-cx_tv_0105varadarajan.html

• The Kiyani Doctrine
• Tactical nuclear weapons to obliterate ‘Cold Start Strategy’
• Why China’s ignored India’s ‘military doctrine’
• Indian tankers
• Russia’s PAKFA 5th Generation Stealth fighter
• China’s 5th generation J-14 Stealth Fighter
• Indian General Kapoor vs. China and Pakistan

Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at the Stern Business School at NYU and research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is opinions editor at Forbes.com, where he writes a weekly column.

Congressman Dan Burton, who is well-known for his anti-India approach at the Congress, believed otherwise. “I wish all of the experts and the people in the governments involved, as well as the US would make as their number one goal resolving the issues that have been prevailing for a long, long time. And that is resolving the issue of Kashmir,” he argued.

“I think the only way to do that is to get the Pakistani government and the India government and the people in Kashmir together and resolve some way for them to solve that problem in Kashmir that’s been existing since 1948. Until you get that done, you’re not going to solve this problem.

“India can’t attack Pakistan because if they do, Pakistan’s got the ability to retaliate with a nuclear weapon and vice versa, and so the killing’s going to go on and the festering that’s created from this impasse is just going to grow,” he said.