On 12 May, 2002 India got what it couldn't get through an actual war. That calls for a thorough review of various nuclear doctrines that have been in circulation since the 6th day of August, 1945 (when an American B-29 bomber dropped an atom bomb, code-named 'Little Boy', over Hiroshima).

On 6 May, 1999 Indian patrols first sighted 'infiltrators' across the heights of Kargil. Indian territory had been captured. On July 4, we agreed to a U-turn on our Kargil agenda. The bomb couldn't save us in Kargil.

On 11 September, 2001 we took a U-turn on our Taliban policy. The bomb couldn't salvage our Taliban strategy. On 12 May, 2002 we took another U-turn. This time it was Kashmir. The bomb couldn't save our Kashmir enterprise either.

Our 'Offensive-Defence' has now been torn into shreds. We thought no one could stop us from seeking "strategic depth" into Afghanistan because we have the bomb. We thought we could be on the offensive because we have the bomb to defend us. We thought that we could take the offensive into the Indian side of Kargil because we have the bomb to defend us. We also thought that we could continue "bleeding the Indian Army" in Kashmir and no one would dare block our "low cost" offensive because we have the bomb to defend us. Just look how all our policies were stumped; the bomb being largely irrelevant.

Our nuclear umbrella has also proven to be no more than a suspended mirage. Between December of last year and May of this year, all the nuclear threats that we coated the world with were mere attempts to gain world attention. Get the world to somehow intervene in our Kashmir dispute with India. To get the world help us draw a new LoC east of the present LOC. We were never really serious about using the bomb because using it would have meant an end to Pakistan (India's commitment to 'no-first use' implies an assured second-strike capability. Even in case of a multi-sector Indian ground advance we cannot respond using strategic weapons because that would mean writing our own death warrant in the process).

Right after September 11, American policy-makers discovered that Pakistan could be made to do almost anything by threatening to destroy her bomb. Their strategy was vindicated when we took no more than two minutes to end our decade long relationship with the Taliban. In that sense, the bomb has actually become a liability not an asset.

To be certain, our U-turns on the Taliban and the Kashmiri jihadis are both in Pakistan's own long-term interest. Our real tragedy is that we need a kick in the back to do things that are in our own interest in the first place.

Our other tragedy has been that our strategic thinkers think with their boots and not their heads. Has anyone ever done a 'cost-benefit analysis' on Kashmir (something that housewives with bangles do everyday)? We are adamant that the bomb has now internationalised the Kashmir issue but not many bother to either calculate all the related costs or what good this internationalisation would bring us.

First, the costs. According to the Statistics Branch, Army Service Forces of the US War Department, the total cost to the United States for the Manhattan Project (in which America built the first atom bomb) was a colossal $20 billion. Documents released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have now revealed that the Government of Iraq had sunk in some $8 billion into its nuclear programme and that Iraq was still a couple of years from achieving its final objective. Data put together by the Brookings Institution, IAEA and ISIS suggests that Pakistan must have spent an average of $300 million to $400 million a year over the past two decades to get to where we are today. In purely monetary terms, we have internationalised Kashmir at the cost of nearly $35 billion which is the rough equivalent of our entire external debt.

On top of that, there is the huge mountain in human costs. The fifty million Pakistanis for whom life has been made a penalty because of trying to survive below the poverty level. The one hundred million Pakistanis who have been kept illiterate and three-quarters of all Pakistanis who don't even have access to safe drinking water.

Where do we go after internationalising Kashmir? We insist on third-party intermediation (after agreeing with India at Tashkent, Simla and then Lahore that Kashmir is a bilateral issue). Is America going to redraw a new LoC hundreds of miles east of the present LoC? Not a chance. As far as Pakistan is concerned, it has all been a game of wayward passions over self-interest.

What happened to our "low-cost" alternative of "bleeding the Indian army" in Kashmir? It turned out to be a Rs20 billion mega blunder. For fiscal 2001-02, budgeted allocation for defence stood at Rs131 billion. The revised estimate is Rs151 billion. The Rs20 billion differential essentially represents forward mobilisation of troops.

It will be a mistake to conclude that our bomb deterred India from undertaking strikes into Pakistani territory. India also has the bomb and that didn't deter us from capturing Indian territory (during the Kargil episode).

Let us take an audit of what is around us. A total of four neighbours. Afghanistan in the west with a border measuring 2,430 km, China 523 km, India 2,912 km and Iran 909 km. In Almaty, on 5 June, 2002 Pakistan signed the 'CICA Declaration on Eliminating Terrorism'. Clause 16 states: "The Member States unconditionally and unequivocally condemn terrorism in all its forms....." Clause 18: "The Member States shall not support on the, territory of another Member State any separatist movements....." Clause 19: "We reject the use of religion as a pretext by terrorists and separatist....."

Who are we now going to fight? East and west are more or less settled. It isn't going to be China or Iran? Why then an elevated defence allocation of Rs146 billion for fiscal 2002-3 (a whopping 40% of this year's tax revenue and an 11.5% increase from last year's allocation)?