School of Hard Knocks

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

George Tanham’s scathing 1995 RAND Report on the Indian Air Force excoriated the service leadership for much of the Service’s ills – doctrinal incoherence, multiplicity of combat aircraft types in the inventory that has produced logistics, servicing, and training nightmares, the emphasis on platforms and, despite the evidence of the First Gulf War in 1992, rather than on high-technology suites (avionics, ground-based electronic support) and force multipliers. It is only after the report was published that Air Headquarters (AHQ) woke up to air war in the modern age, and began contemplating tanker aircraft and airborne warning and control systems.

Last week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a monograph by a former RAND staffer, Benjamin S. Lambeth, on IAF’s performance  in the 1999 Kargil border conflict. It is a straightforward rendition of what happened and how the missions were carried out, coming to what are by now stock conclusions in any study on the Indian military in wars, such as the absence of inter-service war and operational planning and, once into the conflict, of cooperation and coordination at least in the initial stages. The still bigger problem was of the complete lack of preparation for fighting an air war in the mountains because nobody in the IAF command structure anticipated  an operation “at such elevations until it was forced to do so by operational necessity.” Why not? Well, to tweak one of Tanham’s conclusions, because “traditionally Indians do little formal thinking”.

Lambeth refers to the “jugaad” mentality, which all Indian organizations live (and die) by. Had the IAF planners kept abreast of technology developments, such as GPS integrated into the avionics of all fighter aircraft as standard equipment, and if the Tactical Development (TacD) cell then in Jamnagar (since shifted to Gwalior) had been tasked by AHQ to develop fighter tactics for use in mountains before, rather than after receiving the hard knocks of three aircraft downed in first three days of entering the war by man-portable heat-seeking Stinger and Pakistan-produced copies of the Chinese Anza missiles, the Service wouldn’t have sullied its record.

But jugaad has limitations, as improvisation by its very nature is a sub-optimal solution. There would be no need for it if the IAF brass, and the Indian military generally, did their homework, foresaw contingencies instead of practising missions by rote, and meshed new technologies with novel tactics during peacetime preparedness regimes.

Lambeth exaggerates the role of the US-sourced Laser-Guided Bomb – the Paveway-II. Only nine of these LGBs were dropped during the entire conflict, eight of them by the Mirage 2000 and one from a Jaguar and  successfully took out the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light Infantry (NLI) battalion headquarters atop Tiger Hill. But destruction, especially of the Muntho Dhalo supply depot and base-camp that made sustaining the intrusion impossible, resulted from an innovative use of dumb bombs – the 250 pound bombs left over from when the Ajeet (the licence-production version of the Folland Gnat) air defence fighter carried them in the 1970s. He also does not mention the fact that the LGB kits purchased from the United States by IAF prior to the 1998 nuclear tests had a grievous flaw in one of the internal circuits, which prevented integration of the Paveway with the Mirage 2000 fire control system. Americans refused to help correct the flaw because India was then under US sanctions owing to its nuclear tests the year before. None of these aspects find mention in the Lambeth study.

The innovation worked out by the ASTE (Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment) staff and IAF pilots even as the battle raged, was to first correct the Paveway circuit, and then to devise tactics to drop the dumb bombs in precision-mode using the bracket-mounted bazaar-bought GPS units in the Mirage cockpit with its on-board computer. Lambeth does not relate the story behind this innovation either. IAF asked the French for advice on how to use the dumb bombs on low-value targets. True to their mercenary reputation, the French refused to part with any free advice, even though they had previously used dumb bombs successfully in precisely the manner ASTE-IAF had worked out, and suggested instead that they be given a contract for upgrading the avionics mid-operations!

The Lambeth study states that the initial series of dumb bomb attacks by MiG-23s and MiG-27s were wide off target because of inaccurate target coordinates supplied by the Army. What he does not reveal – perhaps because the senior IAF officers he talked with did not apprise him of this — is how the army’s 15 Corps spotters risked their lives to close-in on the entrenched NLI encampments and dugouts on the ridge-line and mountain slopes to get an accurate fix on these targets. This more precise data led to the dumb bombs hitting their marks dead-on in the latter phase of the conflict.

The main lessons of Operation Vijay in Kargil other than the value of self-reliance and preparing for unforeseen tactical missions, are that no foreign country will pass on professional secrets. And, as regards the French suppliers, their money-grubbing attitude, and their propensity to default on  contracts on technology transfer, the Indian government has to ensure that on the Rafale Multi-role Medium-Range Combat Aircraft deal, as I have iterated in this column, that payments are timed with every technology package actually transferred, including not just the source codes and flight control laws, but manufacturing technology for every last sub-assembly and component, and that there are no technology ‘black boxes’ that we, the Indian taxpayers will keep paying for the lifetime of the aircraft.

The Defence Ministry’s Price Negotiation Committees in past deals have invariably ended up favouring the foreign supplier because they have not conditioned payouts on suppliers meeting stringent and time-bound technology transfer criteria for every little bit connected with the aircraft. These sorts of boondoggles cannot be tolerated anymore. Insiders, however, claim that owing to the usual lax approach of Defence Ministry-Defence Production department bureaucrats and the private sector company fronting for the Dassault Avions Company, a host of irregularities may be embedded in the Rafale deal. These will doubtless be investigated by the next government.

[Published Sept 27, 2012 in the ‘Ásian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/school-hard-knocks-632 and the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/school-hard-knocks ]

Posted in Defence Industry, DRDO, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US. | 12 Comments

‘World Politics Review’ — Karnad’s views on Cong Party & Manmohan Singh Govt

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

World Politics Review

Revolt Against Singh Could Stall India’s Economic Momentum

By Catherine Cheney, 21 Sep 2012, ‘Trend-lines’

In India, a growing number of political leaders are threatening to withdraw their support for the governing coalition of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the face of new economic measures that, among other changes, allow for greater foreign investment by global retail giants in India’s heretofore protected domestic retail sector.*
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Mamata Banerjee, the populist chief minister of West Bengal, announced that her party, the Trinamool Congress, would formally leave the government. Meanwhile, Kunal Ghosh, a member of the Indian Parliament from the same party, suggested that Singh should resign.
“India is passing through a turbulent time, as are many other countries,” Bharat Karnad, a research professor in national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, told Trend Lines. “The real danger is that the country will relapse into its bad economic habits of a dominant state-controlled economy.” That, Karnad said, could cause India to lose its “economic momentum and energy, and accordingly blight its prospects of rising to great power status.”
Karnad explained that Singh’s decline started a few years ago, when the prime minister was unable to push his agenda of economic reforms because it clashed with the trademark “populist-socialist-statist” thinking of the president of the Indian National Congress, Sonia Gandhi, and the Gandhi family.
As an unelected prime minister nominated to the post by Gandhi, Singh does not have a constituency that he can rely on in political crises, Karnad added. According to Karnad, Gandhi found Singh to be an expedient choice for prime minister because he poses no threat to her or her son, Rahul Gandhi, who she is grooming for the post.
“Ruling by borrowed political heft means Singh is only as effective [as Gandhi] allows him to be,” explained Karnad.
He added that the various provincial and regional party agendas “do not necessarily coalesce well,” and there are concerns that the governing coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, may fall apart because of Banarjee’s withdrawal of support.
Karnad expected Gandhi to work hard to keep the governing coalition together until the next general elections set for 2014, mainly because Rahul is currently deemed unprepared for the role of prime minister. Opportunistic support from the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party could allow the UPA to survive until then, he said, but elections may become necessary should either party decide to withdraw their support.
In terms of any impact Singh’s eventual ouster might have on relations with the United States, Karnad said that there “may be minor changes in rhetoric and atmospherics.” But he does not expect a negative impact on bilateral relations, because “there is now a political consensus among all parties” on the importance of maintaining the “strategic partnership” with the U.S.
“If Singh has put himself on the line for anything, even more than the economic reforms, it is improved relations with the United States,” Karnad said, mentioning the 2007 nuclear cooperation deal between the U.S. and India for which Singh survived a no confidence vote as the flagship issue for the prime minister.
The bigger impact of a governing coalition without Singh, Karnad noted, would be the potential rollback of his economic reforms, already menaced by the fractious political environment.*
“If Singh is out and his economic reforms agenda is junked, the country’s foreign policy orientation is unlikely to change,” Karnad said. But, he continued, India’s economic progress and growth rate will be seriously set back, with “all the consequences that will follow in the wake.”

[Available at www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/12359/revolt-against-singh-could-stall-indias-economic-momentum ]

Posted in Indian Politics, Internal Security, Strategic Relations with the US & West, US. | 1 Comment

Preempting Danger

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

If a graph were drawn with Pakistan government’s bluff, bluster, and threats of nuclear weapons use on one axis and the growth of its nuclear arsenal on the other axis, what you’d trace is actually a line that has been steadily dipping as our neighbour’s nuclear weapons inventory has grown. The conclusion would be that a weak Pakistan feels more reassured and secure with a reliable nuclear arsenal by its side, believing it will deter the much larger, more powerful, India it has always apprehended as a mortal threat.

China was at its obnoxious worst in the mid-1950s when it had just embarked, with Soviet Russian help, on its nuclear weapons programme. Maozedong declared that China could absorb the loss of 300 million people in a nuclear attack. That statement, because of its outrageousness, alerted American war-planners to the fact that they had a huge strategic problem on their hands: Mao’s China would not be easily deterred. Up until then, the United States routinely issued nuclear threats. However, with China fast-tracking the development of both the megaton thermonuclear weapons and the inter-continental ballistic missile able to reach targets in America, and achieving these capabilities by 1967, the U.S. Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara conceded that China had attained deterrence vis a vis America.

In the Fifties serious plans were hatched by the Pentagon to take out the Chinese gaseous diffusion plant producing enriched uranium for bombs and other nuclear facilities in Lop Nor, graphically referred to by mission-planners as “throttling the baby in the cradle”. This plan remained unimplemented because of the uncertainty of the USSR reaction to such a strike. After the rift between Moscow and Beijing and a couple of years before the first Chinese atomic test in October 1964, Russians mooted a joint plan to destroy Chinese nuclear weapons-making capability. This time, the U.S. acted coy for reasons not entirely clear. With the loss of those two  opportunities and the subsequent fast-tracked development by China of a megaton thermonuclear weapon and an intercontinental ballistic missile able to hit the farthest targets in Russia and the U.S. west coast, its ascent to great power became unstoppable.

India could have pre-empted the nuclear danger from Pakistan by attacking the nuclear installations in Kahuta and the Indian government contemplated such strikes, the first time in 1982 in cooperation with the only specialists in the business, Israel, and the second time in early 1984, when a solo effort was considered. In both instances, the Indian government, as is its wont when making critical decisions, got cold feet. The attack window on Pakistani nuclear facilities closed in 1988 with the Pakistani acquisition of a deliverable device. Writing in that period, I had urged bombing Kahuta, which shocked many people. But I had also warned then that once the Pakistani bomb came on line, India would “forever have to hold its peace” with Pakistan.

Much of Indian thinking and writings pertaining to national security is suffused, not with realism, but passion and sentiment. It so colours the view and clouds judgement that hard decisions are impossible to make. But having not made the crucial decision, countries have to live with the consequences — the U.S., Russia, and the world with a nuclear China, and India with a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

But nuclear adversaries on its flanks with a nexus between them, poses a tremendous strategic challenge to India. Pakistan has been more forthright and direct in exploiting its new found sense of nuclear security to wage “asymmetric warfare”, using terrorism. It recruits malcontents in Pakistan society and among the Indian Muslim community, trains them, launches them on terrorist missions within India, rides the disaffection of the people in Kashmir, and generally creates a heck of a nuisance.

India, on the other hand, with much bigger ambitions and potential, has been just so glad to beat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty-deadline and barely cross the line with simple fission and boosted-fission weapons, it has chosen to virtually shut its nuclear shop. But, there’s not much strategic profit to milk if you don’t go the whole hog, which the Indian government hasn’t had the guts to do because it would require open-ended nuclear explosive testing to obtain a variety of proven and performance-certified nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and panoply of delivery systems, including ICBMs to take on China.

Pakistan is best dealt with by an array of targeted intelligence operations, which can be modulated depending on whether the uptick in trade and economic relations has moderated Islamabad’s behaviour. The benefits to Pakistan from plugging into the Indian economic engine, according to Shahid Javed Burki, a former Vice President of the World Bank, and one of the strongest advocates of free trade under the South Asian Free Trade Agreement, is an increase of as much as 2.4% in  its Gross Domestic Product. No small attraction for a country tipping the scales in the ‘failed states’ Index. Indeed, the well-known Pakistani analyst, Ayesha Siddiqa, claims that pressure from the Pakistani business community made the Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani green signal the peace process underway with India.

The trouble is the Indian government is either primed for peaceful relations or for adversarial relations, not for the more real-life mixed relations in which trade, cultural exchanges, and open visa regimes co-exist with remotely-controlled acts of terrorism and subversion, and military provocations on the side. It is the sort of multi-pronged policy China has perfected and prosecutes smoothly against India. Such a multi-purpose policy is what India needs to adopt except against China the effort will have to be sharper, ruthless, and more proactive. Thus, as priority China has to be paid back for its actions to nuclear missile-arm Pakistan, by transferring nuclear-warheaded cruise and ballistic missiles on the sly to Vietnam, and the ‘Tibet card will have to be revived and put on a war footing, all this even as bilateral trade inches towards the $100 billion mark and our diplomats prattle pleasantly in Mandarin.

[Published September 21, 2012 in the ‘New Indian Express’ as “Danger of Sino-Pakistan nexus” at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1237244.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Terrorism, United States, US., Western militaries | 5 Comments

Nuclear Correctness

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

National Security Adviser (NSA) Shiv Shankar Menon was at an Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) meet on August 27 to launch a revived Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan for nuclear disarmament. In his speech, he teased the audience with his claim that pre-1998, India faced “explicit or implicit” nuclear coercion on three occasions “to try and change India’s behaviour”.

Making informed guesses, two obvious instances are, of course, the 1971 episode of the Enterprise carrier Task Group with aircraft armed with nuclear ordnance steaming into the Bay of Bengal holding out an explicit threat. Another equally explicit threat was, perhaps, made in 1995 thwarting Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s decision to test. The third instance is the tricky one but it happened, I believe, in 1974 imediately after the first test. Indira Gandhi had approved an open-ended series of underground tests but abruptly cancelled testing after just the first Pokharan explosion on May 11. The question why, had troubled a number of senior nuclear scientists at the time, who were aware that Dr. Homi Bhabha, the nuclear visionary, was killed by an American timed-explosive on board his Geneva-bound flight – which has since been borne out by an admission by the alleged agent who admitted placing the explosive on the plane. Bothe because stopping the Indian Bomb was a Washington priority and it was surprised by the Indian test, an implicit threat was likely conveyed to the Indian government to halt testing or face action. There was no further testing in Indira’s lifetime.

Hard pressure and dire threats have always been part of the Standard Operating Procedure of the nuclear Haves to keep the nuclear club manageably small, and a way of imposing disarmament on the nuclear Have-nots. Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 Action Plan for a nuclear disarmed world was a quaint attempt to replicate Jawaharlal Nehru’s championing nuclear disarmament in the Fifties. Except, Nehru  cleverly sought “general and complete disarmament”, which required all countries to disavow nuclear weapons, of course, disband their conventional militaries, and retain only small constabularies for internal law and order purposes. The thinking behind Nehru’s stratagem was that general and complete disarmament being an unrealistic and unachievable goal, it allowed India to take the moral high-road while providing cover for an India furtively pursuing the weapon option and reaching the weapon threshold by 1964 with the commissioning of the plutonium reprocessing plant in Trombay.

The main difference between the Nehruvian initiative and the Action Plan was that the latter lacked the former’s realpolitik foundations. People around Rajiv Gandhi actually believed that this Plan was a practicable proposition and that nuclear weapon states would rush to zero-out their thermonuclear arsenals as per a definite timetable. The same people, with Rajiv Gandhi’s confidante Mani Shankar Aiyar in the van, are now seeking to revive that Plan at a time when President Barack Obama’s Prague Initiative, eventuating in two nuclear summits in Washington in 2009 and in Seoul two years later, packs far greater international weight and credibility. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been a regular at these summits, and endorsed this U.S.-led effort. With the Indian government on the Obama bandwagon and the nuclear summits trumping the Action Plan, not only does the latter not have a chance, it does not even pack much moral heft that Nehru’s advocacy did 60 years ago. It is rather like a tired, old mare being whipped to go round the track one more time.

As to why Congress party stalwarts, like Aiyar, see political value in reviving the Rajiv Plan, is hard to say, except in terms of trying to remain relevant in a Nehru-Gandhi party because, in the real world, more countries are inching towards the safety and security afforded by nuclear weapons. Actually, with uncertainty and spreading international anarchy, nuclear weapons are a security comforter for nations. In the event, Shiv Shankar Menon’s straight talk on the subject at the ICWA event — “Until we arrive at that happy state [of] a world truly free of nuclear weapons”, India will not disarm — was the firmest official declaration to-date. It also  torpedoed the refloated Action Plan.

Alas, the NSA stuck to the Establishment view revolving around the minimum deterrence concept, which seriously needs to be junked. Derived from this concept is the view that Menon dutifully mouthed, that nuclear weapons are not meant for “war fighting”. Naturally, a small nuclear force cannot perform diverse strategic roles other than try and deter the adversary with threat of “massive retaliation”. But this is a manifestly incorrect take on the military aspects of the Bomb incessantly propagated by the late K. Subrahmanyam. Unfortunately, it has put down deep roots in the higher bureaucratic and military circles.

In the nuclear realm, as in the conventional military sphere, the greater the variety of armaments and more of them that a country has in its nuclear weapons inventory, the larger will be the array of options available to meet different military contingencies, and why is that not preferable to limiting one’s choices?

Because for every incident, the Indian response is “massive retaliation”, it didn’t take Pakistan, for instance, long to work out that it can get away with “small” provocations and, hypothetically, even initiation of low-yield nuclear weapons use on aggressing Indian formations on its own territory because massive retaliation is simply too disproportionate a reply to be credible. This is the reason why “minimum deterrence” and secondary precepts (No First Use, etc.) are worth discarding in substance, if not as rhetoric.

There’s a desperate need, moreover, for a large and diverse arsenal with nuclear weapons in every yield bracket, and tactical doctrines for their use. Deterrence may be the desired end-state, but nuclear war fighting and the Strategic Forces Command practicing and preparing for this eventuality – are the means of enforcing it. Parroting the “not for war fighting” mantra may be the politically correct thing to do, and reassuring to the political leadership, but to actually stick to it would be for India to lose the strategic nuclear game before it begins.

[Published September 13, 2012 in the ‘Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/nuclear-correctnmess-495 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/nuclear-correctness ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Strategic Forces Command | 18 Comments

Vikramaditya delay & IN Sqdn 303

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Just got back from the College of Naval Warfare at INS Mandovi, Goa, after a talk at the CORE (Combined Operational Review and Evaluation) program. There learned that Carrier Vikramaditya (ex-Gorshkov) won’t be inducted before April-May 2013. A Russian crew is putting it through its paces in sea trials which’ll be followed by an elaborate certification process.  But the MiG-29K complement (IN Squadron 303)  is in; with Indian Navy pilots already logged over 1,700 hours of flying time off the moored Kuznetzov in Russian waters. A static deck is about ready as well at Dabolim with the ski jump and arrestor wire for carrier-simulated landings and takeoffs, so the pilots needn’t go to Russia to practice use of the 29Ks.

Spotted half a squadron of IAF’s  navalized Jags at Dabolim. Working up coordination?

Posted in India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions, Relations with Russia, Technology transfer | Leave a comment

China respects hard power

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Shyam Saran, the former foreign secretary and Chinese language speaker, the other day delivered in New Delhi a most insightful and enlightening public lecture on China. Equally, there has not been a more damning indictment of India’s China outlook, approach, and policy. It was not intended to be that way. Saran’s aim apparently was to explain the nuance and the complexities involved in dealing diplomatically with the Chinese whose written language, he observed, requires mastery over some 5,000 alphabetic ideograms before a half-way serious analysis in Mandarin can be attempted.

The difficult language empowers Chinese officials at the expense of befuddled foreigners who have to deal with tailored levels of ambiguity that is hard to pin down. What the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) takes to be a firm commitment is later discovered to be just a play of words. Thus, Saran recalls the meeting of the MEA director-general R K Nehru with Zhouenlai in 1962, a few months before the war, in which Zhou indicated that China never said it did not recognise India’s sovereignty over Jammu & Kashmir, which was taken by MEA to mean China accepted India’s position, only to have Zhou later say, with similar composure, that China never said it accepted Indian sovereignty over that state. Saran blamed India’s “not being conversant with Chinese thought processes” for this misunderstanding. He retailed another such episode. In 2003, China conceded Sikkim as part of India and, two years later during Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit, handed over maps of India with Sikkim, only for Chinese scholars to recently point out that because no official statement of the erstwhile kingdom’s status has ever been made, there’s the possibility of China putting Sikkim back on the negotiating table. “The Chinese will insistently demand and sometimes obtain formulations from friends and adversaries alike on issues of importance to their interests,” explained Saran, “but will rarely concede clarity and finality in formulations reflecting the other side’s interests.” If the MEA knows this, then why isn’t it inflexible as well?

However, such Chinese diplomatic success stories surely appear to be less the result of obfuscatory language or some inscrutable machinations on the part of the Chinese than the lack of matching effective diplomatic riposte of getting a lot in return for giving away little. The larger concern is this: the MEA may have been tricked this way one time, ok; shame on it when it was done in the second time, but if this sort of giveaways become a diplomatic habit, then there’s something definitely wrong.

For instance, at the time of the 1996 visit by President Jiang Zemin, the Congress government headed by P V Narasimha Rao signed the accord on peace and tranquillity on the border. It necessitated a virtual demilitarisation of a 40-km-(presumably, as the crow flies)wide belt on either side of the LAC. Except, the Chinese side is, for the most part, the flat Tibetan plateau while, on the Indian side, it is mountain ranges. In a contingency, mandating the rushing of troops to forward posts, guess which side is hugely disadvantaged? So, the question is, were the MEA negotiators unaware of the terrain in question, or didn’t they appreciate the difficulty of our army units having to climb up to the heights, even as Chinese soldiers are trucked to their jump-off line? It may be that the Indian government of the day thought it politic to have such a lopsided agreement for the sake of atmospherics than not having one at all. It shows certain recklessness on the part of the MEA in even allowing this proposal to be tabled highlighting, in the process, the disconnect between the military and the foreign office.

Saran dilated on the near-war incident in 1986 on the Somdurong Chu River, revealing the MEA’s casual attitude to Chinese cartographic creep in the Himalayas. Chinese troops crossed the Thagla Ridge and established a post on the Somdurong Chu in the disputed territory but instead of leaving some evidence of their presence and withdrawing as is normally done by both sides, they built a helipad. The Indian Army reacted fast and furiously, with the chief, General K Sundarji, ordering an airlift of troops, occupation of the parallel Lurongla-Hathungla-Sulunga Ridge overlooking the new Chinese forward station, and setting up of two forward posts on the river just 10 metres from the Chinese presence — all done without consulting with the government. Saran admits that “there was…a reluctance (in government) to take any military counter measures.” As a result of this “over reaction” (in Saran’s words), things eased for India, the Chinese became, according to the ex-foreign secretary, “more polite”, and an invitation from Chairman Deng Xiaoping to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to visit China, ensued.

In the interaction with the audience after his lecture, when I asked Saran if the Somdurong Chu event did not highlight the need for Indian foreign and military policy to be more “proactive”, and whether the country was not better off because Sundarji did not seek the usual advice from the MEA to do nothing, which would have prevented army action and perpetuated the Chinese perception of India as a punching bag, Saran, to my utter surprise and, with some vehemence, iterated the government line that India needn’t be “aggressive” to get its way.

Saran and the MEA’s stand is that all India needs to do to neutralise China, which believes in deception and opportunistic use of force, is to have “cultural exchanges” and “get inside the Chinese mind”, understand its strategic “calculus” and monitor the regional and international “context” and build up a web of partnerships to ensure it doesn’t turn adverse enough for Beijing to exploit with aggression. Such timidity may indeed win India peace but on China’s terms.

The awe that Indian officials hold China in is difficult to fathom. It disables our diplomacy and sells India short. China is respectful of the military power of adversaries and, even more, the willingness to use it. If only the Indian government appreciated hard power.

[Published in the New Indian Express, September 7, 2012, at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article602025.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy | 7 Comments

Marginalizing the army

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

It is a mystery why we don’t imitate the Chinese: act nice, talk peace, trade and  challenge China when it steps on our toes

Gen. Bikram Singh, Chief of the Army Staff, is bringing in as his Principal Staff Officers (PSOs) colleagues from his time at the Eastern Command in Kolkata, and others who have served with and under him. This is normal and reasonable practice because a COAS is ultimately judged by what he accomplishes, and who best to advise him and implement his agenda than the people he has confidence in.

Gen. Bikram Singh’s tenure began under a cloud — the Army he leads is divided over whether or not he deserves his post and how much favouritism, stratagem and intrigue by his predecessors, Gen. J.J. Singh and Gen. Deepak Kapoor, and a complicit government, played a part in his elevation. The controversy surrounding his appointment because of their alleged “plan of succession” is history, but the bad blood it may have created should not lead to the discarding of the good schemes former Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh initiated, the most notable being the Army’s China thrust. Gen. Bikram Singh would be well advised to push that slant as well. It is a particularly awful habit the Armed Services have fallen into, of allowing every new Chief of Staff to inaugurate and nurse his own pet projects. Whatever Gen. Bikram Singh’s take on his predecessor’s focus, unfortunately, the desperately needed China tilt is already endangered.  With the government instructing the three service chiefs to come up with a “joint plan” to deal with the China threat, the concept of the Mountain Strike Corps (MSC) is possibly being readied for burial.

While a joint military plan to counter China militarily is an imperative, shelving the embryonic idea of a Mountain Strike Corps does not make any sense unless that old sentiment from Jawaharlal Nehru’s days is returning, this time dressed up by the China Study Group (CSG) as a pragmatic posture. Since the 1970s, the CSG has been the fount of advice resulting in pusillanimous actions and policies related to our northern neighbour. And it is now proposing that India and China rise peacefully together. Admirable outlook, except we better also have a strike capability to hit back in case they pick a fight.

It is a mystery why we don’t imitate the Chinese — act nice, talk peace, trade as much as the traffic can bear, build up the military for offensive action and challenge China when it steps on our toes. If the overarching concern with not provoking China — India’s main threat, economic competitor, geopolitical rival and military adversary — is to take precedence over acquiring strike forces, then we might as well mentally prepare ourselves for a pummelling.

An Army capability to attack Chinese targets within Tibet has been sorely missing from the start. As envisaged, the MSC comprises several brigades, each able, after being detached from the main force, of mounting independent offensive action across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) on the Tibetan plateau, a capability required to keep the massed Chinese group armies honest. These brigades are conceived as having integral logistics, heli-lift and attack helicopters under their command. Some nine Indian Army divisions are at present arrayed defensively in the eastern sector, and one and half divisions each in the northern and central sectors with an armoured brigade as a divisional component in both cases (to debouch from the Demchok Triangle and the northern Sikkim plains respectively). These two brigades worth of T-72 tanks divided between the central and northern sectors is a daunting mobile military force and it may be tested soon. The pre-positioned stock of shells for the tank guns in those areas cannot last more than a couple of days and recent military field intelligence suggests that the Chinese may be concentrating on an incursion into northeastern Sikkim in the next few months. If logistics support is strengthened, and to this mix is added the independently-operable brigades with T-90 tanks aided by the full aviation complement of the MSC for deployment anywhere along the 4,700 km border and able to affect a breach or two for meaningful ingress into Tibet, then the People’s Liberation Army of China will have reason to sweat a bit.

Is such an option to be left to the mercy of a military talk-shop? One thing is certain, had Gen. Bikram Singh stood firmly behind the MSC concept, it is unlikely the defence ministry, even less the finance ministry, would have written finis to it. A.K. Antony’s defence ministry is, like the rest of the Manmohan Singh caboodle, known for indecision and inaction. That finance ministry has suddenly asserted its fiduciary responsibility and questioned investment in the MSC based on its belief that China poses no threat and that even if it does the threat won’t last long into the future, is laughable.

Could it be that Gen.  Bikram Singh is influenced by one of his benefactors, Gen. J.J. Singh who, as governor of Arunachal Pradesh, put out that the Indian Army needs to concentrate its efforts on the western front, while the government goes about cultivating China’s friendship? Gen. J.J. Singh, rather than ensuring that the road and other infrastructure projects are speeded up on the border east of the Kameng sector where Army forward posts are still serviced by mule packs, is busy shooting off his mouth. It is the sort of unenlightened advice that needs to be trashed publicly, except, tragically, it seems to be in sync with this government’s thinking.

As it is, the Manmohan Singh regime has tried to marginalise the Army by making the Navy and the Air Force the main elements in tackling the Chinese threat. In war, the Navy should interdict China’s energy and trade traffic transiting the Indian Ocean. But in short, intense conflicts, when territory will be at stake, naval actions cannot replace a land attack option, which will be at a premium for a riposte for immediate effect. In this context, jettisoning the MSC is to not take the fight to the Chinese. Gen. Bikram Singh would be responsible for ditching a potential capability that any self-respecting Army would want to have.

[Published as “Delhi is in a China daze, again. Beware!” on August 30, 2012 in the ‘Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/delhi-china-daze-again-beware-869 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/delhi-china-daze-again-beware ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Pakistan, Pakistan military | 10 Comments

Unfinished business of Partition

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Think of an India without Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, animists, whoever, in our composite culture, in our everyday lives — it is inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Minority communities are part of the warp and woof of what India is. This India was not lost at Partition. In this country it has flourished, even prospered.

That India is, however, lost to Pakistan. At the parting, West Pakistan had as many Hindus as India had Muslims, roughly 13% of the population. Systematic, officially-condoned, pogroms led to Hindus and Sikhs being terrorized, evicted, and reduced to less than 2%, with this figure zeroing out with every new atrocity. Pakistan is diminished as it loses social equanimity and democratic ballast that minorities provide a country. That wonderful patchwork of communities living, at times fist by jowl, unravels, a handful of threads at a time. The next outflow may well be of Ahmediyyas as, even the  luminaries among them, such as the late physics Nobelist, Abdus Salam, are hounded, finding no peace even in death – their graves desecrated because the headstones carry Quranic verses.

Who is next in line? Probably the shias because, according to a Pew public opinion poll fully half of the majority sunnis surveyed in Pakistan thought shias were not Muslim. Little wonder sunni lumpen these days roam the streets of Pakistani towns shouting “shia kafir”. In recent days, shias returning to their homes in Gilgit, Hunza and the Northern Territories – part of the erstwhile “princely state” of Kashmir under Pakistani occupation – were pulled out of buses, lined up, and shot. Islamabad has since arranged for C-130 transport aircraft to ferry shias to their homes.

The kidnapping and forced marriage and conversion of Hindu girls, the open season on the god-forsaken Ahmediyyas, whose persecution is legalized in Pakistan, and now the increased killings of shias is the result of the spread of the Wahabbi values of desert Islam conflated with the even less tolerant Salafi strain nurtured in Saudi Arabia and propelled outwards by the Saud ruling family eager to divert this fanaticism to other climes. In South Asia, the Saudi and Gulf “charitable” funds have incubated the Hafeez Saeeds of a disordered world, the various Lashkars, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan — outfits the Pakistan Army thinks are ideal weapons of asymmetric warfare, and tools of asymmetric diplomacy to be deployed against India. Except, 49% of the Pakistani people in a recent poll, reported by Raza Rumi of the Jinnah Institute in the Express Tribune (Aug 20), identified America as the enemy, and only 26% India. Then again, these weapons have long since been turned on the Pakistani state, or haven’t the Generals noticed?

They apparently did when the jihadis, following upon the attack in May 2011 on the naval base, Mehran, in Karachi, last week struck the Minhas Air Force base in Kamra – home to the country’s main aeronautical complex, two fighter squadrons, the Saab 2000 AWACs complement, and a lot of de-mated nuclear weapons. A shaken General Parvez Kayani, Pakistan army chief, promised a “war against extremism and terrorism”. Let’s see if he delivers.

Surely, the fact that Pakistan has come to this pass is no surprise. A state built on religion invariably fractures along the lines of strict and stricter belief. Fundamentalists pushing their interpretation as the only true path confront society with peril, because the slightest deviation is apostasy punishable in their medievalist minds by death. But, which is the true Islam in a context where the argument should long ago have been settled on the basis of the natural inclination of the people of the subcontinent towards the easy going and joyful sufi variant, replete with song, dance, and music? Pakistan will likely be consumed by the antics of extremist Islamists. The trouble is India will have to pick up the pieces.

What India did not reckon with at Partition was the incapacity of the Pakistani state and people to firm up their nationhood and a national identity, even after 65 years of desperately trying. This either means that Islam as defining characteristic of a country in a polyglot, multiethnic, multi-cultural setting was a mistake because there are as many Islams centred around the Quran, as there are varieties of Hindu beliefs, and no one brand of Islam can claim supremacy and, hence, religion is not the glue many people had thought it would be in cementing a nation from a collection of disparate peoples. Worse, the infirmity of the state has compounded the problem with a visionless political leadership –  Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan gone early in the game — that never rose above the opportunistic.

India is stuck with having to tackle the infection of certain Indian Muslims by the Wahabbi-Salafi thought at the ideological end and, at the physical end, a large and growing Muslim fraction of its population with the unending seepage of Bangladeshi Muslims into lower Assam – that KPS Gill, the saviour of Punjab and former Director-General Police, Assam, had warned some two decades back would result in the colonization of a belt around Bangladesh.

This is a damned difficult task for India, a country barely able to keep its head above water, to manage. Official rhetoric requires it to live up to its secular pretensions and, as a matter of practical politics, the system is wedded to vote-banks. Can the Congress party, for instance, win in Assam without the votes of an ever-growing bloc of illegal Muslim immigrants beholden to it for legalizing their presence?  If the Congress party cannot politically afford other than to encourage such covert Muslim infiltration in the northeast, it cannot come down hard for the same reasons on the growing number of Wahabbi-Salafists in the country either, who are responsible for terrorism, communalization, and for fanning the recent panic among northeasterners living in the southern states, once considered oases of social harmony.

The unfinished business of Partition is not Kashmir, as Pakistan claims, but the fact that Pakistan cannot find social peace and Bangladesh cannot keep its people within its borders.

[Published as “Partition woes continue’ in the ‘New Indian Express’ on August 24, 2012, available at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article594721.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, India's Pakistan Policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Terrorism | 6 Comments

Cyber terrorism

Posted on August 18, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The method, discipline, and the singular purpose evident in the messaging and texting of dire warnings against Indians from the Northeast in southern India does not seem to be the work of local “miscreants” gone viral, but rather a well-defined cyber offensive to unsettle social and communal peace. This is another brand of terrorism and how adversary states will be laid low in the future — not by wars but by such cyber campaigns to attack the soft core of societal peace in composite societies such as ours. Those who initiated this campaign are in-country and should be hunted down and given exemplary punishment. Such as life imprsonment. It is not difficult to trace them and, assuming the National Intelligence Agency is already on the job, and the NTRO is not too busy doing nothing, the instigators should be collared fairly easily. Electronic footmarks aren’t easy to eraze. The trouble will be that once these people are caught there will always be those from “secular” parties demanding lenient treatment. Govt of India is nowhere in tune with the cyber potential for mayhem.

Posted in Cyber & Space, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Terrorism | 8 Comments

Bandar of Arabia

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Re: my passing reference to the Saudi Intel chief Bandar bin Sultan’s death by bomb explosion in “Hand in the Hornets Nest”; it was based on the July 31 story  — “Saudi silence on intelligence chief Bandar’s fate, denotes panic”  on Debka File at www.debka.com/article/22225/

Posted in Asian geopolitics, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Terrorism | Leave a comment