Retired Pakistani Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai told an audience of some 50 South Asia and nuclear experts at Stanford that India and Pakistan need a joint strategic vision to attain permanent peace and economic stability on the Subcontinent.

Kidwai, addressing a CISAC seminar on March 30, 2015, said the enmity between India and Pakistan - born from the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 that effectively divided Hindus and Muslims into two separate nations - will never be resolved until people are brought out of abject poverty.

"The obvious is not sinking into our regional calculations," he said. "The obvious is the elephant in the room: sustained socioeconomic progress."

More than 22 percent of Pakistan's 196 million people are living in poverty and 46 percent of its rural population falls below the global poverty line, according ot the Sustainable Development Policy Institute.

"Conflict resolution without socioeconomic progress will never work," said Kidwai, who is one of the most decorated generals in Pakistan. "There is no running away from this stark reality. For 68 years we have blustered and blundered our way through solutions, leaving 1.5 billion people condemned to hunger, filth and squalor."

He offered hope, in that there are two relatively new, democratically elected leaders now leading the nuclear-armed neighbors, which have gone to war three times since partition. Narendra Modi became India's 15th prime minister last year; Pakistan elected a new president, Nawaz Sharif, the year before that. They represent two political parties with strong elctroal mandates.

"We are waiting for the two leaderships to grasp, sit together, explore conflict resolution and go for it in a manner that all partners on all sides win," Kidwai said. "It needs vision, statesmanship and guts."

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Kidwai is advisor to Pakistan's National Command Authority and was the inaugural director general of the country's Strategic Plans Division, which he headed for 15 years. He conceived and executed Islamabad's nuclear policy and deterrence doctrines. He also is the architect of Pakistan's civilian nuclear energy and space programs.

Kidwai, who was hosted by CISAC's Siegfried Hecker, told the Stanford audience that he wanted to dispel what he called "two fallacious counter-narratives that have taken root in our neighborhood."

The first, he said, is that Pakistan supports and conducts terrorism inside India. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" he said, adding that the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008 were not backed by Islamabad. On that day, 10 Pakistani men associated with the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 164 people during four days of attacks throughout the city. India has repeatedly accused Islamabad of supporting the terrorists; Islamabad said non-state actors were responsible for the attacks.

"Terrorism is not a Pakistani invention," he said. "What would Pakistan attempt to achieve from this strategy?" 

The second myth, he said, is that the Pakistani military purposely keeps tensions at a high boil in an effort to boost its defense budget.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "The Pakistan Army is all for an equitable, just and ordinary peace with India. We recognize that war is not an option."

Kidwai believes the presence of nuclear weapons in South Asia is a stabilizing force and that any new peace initiatives lay with India. 

India conducted its first "peaceful" nuclear explosion, code-named "Smiling Buddha," in May of 1974; it would then conduct five nuclear tests in May 1998. Seventeen days after the first of those tests, Islamabad announced that it had detonated six nuclear devices, which happened to match the Indian total.

Today, India is believed to have between 90 and 110 nuclear warheads; Pakistan has between 100 to 120, according to the Arms Control Association.

Kidwai said the tried-and-tested concept of Mutually Assured Destruction has maintained a tenuous truce between the two nations. MAD follows the theory of deterrence, where the threat of using nuclear weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons.

He considered the concept of space for limited conventional war highly problematic and explained that Pakistan opted to develop a variety of short-range, low-yield nuclear weapons as a defensive deterrence response to what he called an aggressive Indian doctrine.

Kidwai assured the Stanford audience that Pakistan's nuclear weapons were safe, secure and under complete institutional and professional control. 

"For the last 15 years, Pakistan has taken its nuclear security obligations very seriously," he said. "We have invested heavily in terms of money, manpower, weapons and preparedness."

Kidwai was challenged about the deterrence utility of tactical, or battlefield, nuclear weapons compared to the increased security and safety risks of their potential deployment. Although Kidwai made a convincing case for improved security of Pakistan's nuclear assets during his tenure at the Strategic Plans Division, concerns were nevertheless expressed because of Pakistan's challenging internal security environment.

You can listen to the audio file of his talk here.