Changing Guard at GHQR

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will soon anoint from among the three star contenders the successor to General Raheel Sharif and the new Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) and, willy-nilly, the person around whom the Pakistani state will revolve for the next three-odd years (should he follow Raheel’s example and without much ceremony demit office on completing his tenure).

As per Dawn story of Aug 15, 2016 (at http://www.dawn.com/news/1277442) the seniority list reads as under:
1) Lt Gen Maqsood Ahmed, Military Adviser UN Department of Peacekeeping Military Operations,
New York
2) Lt Gen Zubair Hayat, Chief of General Staff, retiring in Jan 2017
3) Lt Gen Syed Wajid Hussain, Chairman Heavy Industries Taxila, retiring in Jan 2017
4) Lt Gen Najibullah Khan, DG Joint Staff Headquarters, retiring in Jan 2017
5) Lt Gen Ishfaq Nadeem Ahmed GOC, II Corps, Multan, retiring in Aug 2017
6) Lt Gen Javed Iqbal Ramday Commander XXXI Corps Bahawalpur Aug 2017
7) Lt Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa Inspector General Training & Evaluation Aug 2017

Maqsood and Syed are out of the running, the former because he is on extension and unlikely to give up on a cushy UN job with great retirement benefits, and a US residency to boot, and the latter because well he is not in a bonafide army post.

Among the remaining five, Zubair Hayat (who looks a bit like Anupam Kher in specs) from the artillery arm is believed to be the favourite, having also pulled time in other significant posts — GOC, II Corps, and DG, Strategic Plans Division (SPD) — the nuclear all-in-all organization in that country. If the odds are beaten and Hayat misses becoming COAS, then Najibullah from Hayat’s batch too will be overlooked.

Among Nadeem, Ramday, and Bajwa, bringing up the next senior echelon and the Aug 2017 batch of prospective retirees, Nadeem is the “soldier’s soldier” — besides commanding Pakistan’s Strike Corps, and the officer Raheel picked to be his Chief of Defence Staff (a post he later traded with Hayat not too long ago). He was previously DG, Military Operations, at GHQR, and, prior to that, as a Brigadier, was chief of staff of the Mangla Corps. An infantryman, his parent unit, interestingly, is the Azad Kashmir Regiment. Undoubtedly, Nadeem would appear to be Raheel’s choice for COAS. Except Nawaz has to the deciding and has had mixed luck with picking army chiefs.

The Pak Prime Minister has picked five of the seven army chiefs after Zia ul-Haq — Asif Nawaz Janjua (in 1991), Waheed Kakar (in 1993), Gen Pervez Musharraf (in 1998) and Gen Raheel Sharif (in 2013). To the PM’s credit his selections, Janjua and Kakar were gentlemen and constitutionalists, who believed in remaining secondary to the elected political authority. Musharraf was the bad egg who proved right the late General Tikka Khan’s observation about Pakistani heads of government unerringly picking their nemesis. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto chose the person featured last on the succession/seniority list of top dozen drawn up by Tikka, Zia ul-Haq. The clever Zia had done his homework well in the run-up to his selection and, as Tikka told me when I visited him at his home in Rawalpindi in December 1982 — my first trip to Pakistan, he laid the flattery on thick when Bhutto visited HQ 1st Armrd Division. There, in front of the assembled officers and men, Zia took out a copy of the Koran wrapped in green silk and, with his hand on the holy book, swore his eternal loyalty to the foolish Zulfi, a sucker for flattery. A flabbergasted Tikka, quite aware of Zia’s “chaploosi and tricks” as he called it, repeatedly pleaded with Bhutto to pick almost anybody else from his list of twelve. But Bhutto chose wrong. “Jab qayamat aati hai, kaun roke sakta hai” said a rueful Tikka to me. He was then under ‘House arrest’ imposed by his successor, and loudly abused Zia in choicest Punjabi when seeing me off within the earshot of the MI staffers and Mil Police doing pehra at the gate. I was in Islamabad to attend, along with Inder Gujral and K. Subrahmanyam, a Pak Army arranged affair billed as the “First Conference on Peace and Security in South Asia”. How time has passed and how little things have changed!

Nawaz made a similar mistake with Musharraf except, as it was bruited about in Islamabad circles, the PM was much impressed by the former SSG officer’s quality of no-nonsense directness, without keying on his over weaning ambition, which wasn’t a secret in army corridors. Bhutto paid for his bad choice with his life. Lucky Nawaz, it only cost him a stint as an exile in Riyadh.

Nawaz has to calculate that if Raheel’s top choice, Nadeem, is anything like his mentor, he can be relied on to go professionally about his business without ever entertaining thoughts about deploying the 111 (coup) Brigade. Except, it is precisely his professionalism and attainments in closing down a good part of the ISI-supported terrorist state apparatus, fighting the religious extremists in FATA and North Waziristan, and clamping down on the ever troublesome London-based Altaf Hussain’s MQM that not too long ago ran Karachi that Raheel may turn into political gold. He could be the the PM nominee of a political party and defeat the ruling Muslim League (N) in the next general elections. Whence, the advice to Nawaz from some quarters to confer a Field Marshal’s baton on Raheel and shove him to the sideline. As an FM he doesn’t ever retire, but equally he cannot go political either!

Hayat, in the event, would seem to be the safer selection. But Nadeem, the hardened military professional, appears (dispassionately speaking) the better choice for Pakistan at this time in its evolution as a state where the army is getting accustomed to playing second fiddle to the political masters. But is Nawaz feeling confident enough to appoint Nadeem?

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Terrorism | 2 Comments

The Cost of Localising BRICS

Posted on October 22, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Published as the ‘Open Essay’ in ‘Open’ magazine dated 21 October 2016, at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/the-cost-of-localising-brics
———
Let’s not induce the world to re-hyphenate India and Pakistan

HERE’S A CONTRAFACTUAL: Say, the terrorist attack on the Army camp in Uri hadn’t happened, and the much-trumpeted Indian ‘surgical strike’ in retaliation hadn’t materialised, the Eighth Summit in Goa of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group, far from pivoting centrally on the issue of ‘terrorism’ in South Asia, would have debated measures to increase intra-BRICS trade to inure these states against market-induced swings on Wall Street and in London. And discussed ways and means of this group emerging as a forceful political and economic bloc to balance the power of the United States and Western Europe, and to stabilise the international system careening off in different directions. The desire to rise as a geopolitical power house was the impulse behind the formation of BRICS in the first place. These countries had hoped that, as a collective, the group would fill the space previously occupied by the Soviet Union-led Eastern bloc and the ineffectual Non-Aligned Movement in the post-1945 world, and generate synergy.

Sure, Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have still tried in the bilateral talks in the run-up to the summit to impress on the Chinese President Xi Jinping to relent on the matter of Masood Azhar and declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, and to dilute Beijing’s opposition to India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which Indian officials and media alike insist on calling ‘prestigious’, when actually it is only a trade cartel that retards the comprehensive development of Indian nuclear military and civilian capabilities.

Pushing a singularly Indian agenda at the summit level, however, risked getting egg on the face, which is what happened in Goa. In the Declaration issued at the end of the summit, there was no mention of ‘cross-border terrorism’, nor were the Pakistan-supported terrorist gangs—Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Toiba named (even as the Islamic State was identified). Modi’s attempts to have the BRICS grouping endorse the Indian position thus failed.

China was the big hurdle, which shouldn’t have surprised anybody. Every indication was available that Xi would not budge from China’s supposedly ‘principled’ stands on these issues. The foreign policy ‘brain bank’ of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of External Affairs decided nevertheless to push ahead, and ran smack into the Chinese wall.

Physical intimacy with the former KGB agent in Berlin and no-nonsense Russian President, Vladimir Putin, was never on the cards, and just as well, because he had arrived at the summit site determined to recover his country’s position as the top arms supplier to India, failing which to sink Modi’s foreign policy, of which there were hints galore. Russian troops had just ended their first-ever joint exercise with Pakistan army units, and Moscow had sedulously stoked speculation in New Delhi and Islamabad about the flow to the Pakistani military of frontline Russian hardware at friendly prices and about a new and powerful Asian triad in the offing of Russia, China and Pakistan. More pointedly, the Kremlin had disavowed the statement in support of India’s retaliatory action for the Uri strike made by Russia’s ambassador in Delhi, Alexander Kadakin.

It was enough to unnerve the Modi Government and get it to agree speedily to deals for big-ticket items that had been hanging fire, but even so, like all India’s military procurement schemes, had not been thought through. Thus, Rs 39,000 crore was committed to buying just five batteries of the S-400 Triumf system that promises an all-in-one air defence solution, able on paper to neutralise airborne threats ranging from drones, combat aircraft, to missiles. Except, optimised for the anti-aircraft mission, it is no more able to neutralise incoming salvos of enemy missiles than the Indian Prithvi interceptor ballistic missile defence system can (or any other extant BMD system, including the Israeli Arrow-2 and the American Patriot PAC-3).

Once he had an agreement for the purchase of high-value armaments in hand, Putin made the requisite reassuring noises, but stopped short of joining the Modi-driven campaign to skewer Pakistan as the ‘mother ship’ of international terrorism. In fact, like Xi, he agreed to nothing more than anodyne statements in the Goa Declaration, such as, ‘We strongly condemn the recent several attacks against some BRICS countries, including that in India’ and calls to expedite the adoption of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism at the United Nations. The Chinese and Russians are no dummies in playing hardball.

While the host country always enjoys some leeway in channeling the summit discussions, overdoing it has its costs. What, for instance, would Presidents of Brazil and South Africa, Michel Temer and Jacob Zuma, respectively, reduced quite literally to sideshows in Goa, have made of India’s almost manic focus on Pakistan-centred terrorism? Even though they might have had a whiff of the direction the proceedings would take under Modi’s ministrations, they must have been surprised to find themselves asked to take sides and join in making India’s anti-Pakistan song the BRICS summit’s signature tune.

Curiously, India’s Foreign Secretary K Jaishankar tried to bring the BRICS states in line by intoning rather sternly on the opening day that “no country can be agnostic on terrorism”. Agnosticism implies a high church and tenets that can be questioned. In this case, the dogma was the coupling of Pakistan and terrorism that would brook no questioning. This was but a short step from pillorying the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and, by extension, Islam as a seedbed of terror. It didn’t work.

Perhaps Jaishankar misspoke. If, on the other hand, he was voicing New Delhi’s seriousness in getting fellow BRICS countries to swallow whole India’s terrorism concerns wrapped in its patent perception of Pakistan as threat, then he was attempting to do something even more tricky and difficult. Seeking to conflate the separate BRICS views of the international security situation with India’s national interest was a politically impossible task.

That the Indian Government actually expected BRICS to hitch itself to its anti-Pakistan terrorism wagon suggests it is not properly oriented with the international diplomatic landscape. No country will subsume another country’s threats, even less expend scarce politico-diplomatic capital on issues extraneous to its own immediate interests and realpolitik goals. China has Uyghur nationalism to contend with—a problem that’s going to grow in the future. Especially if, as is already evident, stalwart jihadis—veterans of singularly violent wars against the unbeliever in locations as diverse as Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan—trickle back home, there to use their expert knowledge and experience of guerrilla fighting, Kalashnikovs, and improvised explosive devices to formally wage a brutal war for an independent East Turkestan in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang. But this prospect, while alarming, cannot prompt Beijing to give up on Pakistan, a most useful strategic ally in riling its two prime adversaries, India and the US, and affording it a gateway to the Indian Ocean.

Moscow, on its part, has dealt with Islamic dissidents in its Muslim enclaves in the Caucasus—Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia—with rough and ready methods, and has generally succeeded in forcefully pacifying these peoples, at least for the nonce. Brazil has no terrorist problem and Muslims in South Africa are part of the Indian diaspora dating to the mid- to-late 19th century, who inspire less friendly feelings than resentment in the majority Black population. Modi’s move to make Kashmir-centred terrorism the preoccupation of the BRICS summit was, therefore, a stillborn initiative that did not have a spitball’s chance in hell. The consolation was that Brazil (whose nearest brush with terrorism were the Tupamaro urban guerrillas active in neighbouring Uruguay up until the 1970s) and the heads of state of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal who were in Goa to liaise with their BRICS counterparts, were prevailed on to condemn Pakistan’s support for terrorists.

There is so great a chasm in the strategic interests and the approach to security of the five BRICS countries, the possibility of arriving at a consensus on any issue, except in the most vapid terms, is remote. That leaves only the economic sphere where there’s some movement. So, small achievements, such as the setting up of a credit rating agency to help the BRICS’ offshoot, the New Development Bank, to function better, were duly celebrated in Goa. But this group has yet to acquire economic salience because BRICS doesn’t act as a single economic-cum-negotiating unit since the economic interests of constituent states too diverge greatly.

The potential is huge though. According to the BRICS page on the Ministry of External Affairs site: ‘In 2015, BRICS countries accounted for a total nominal GDP of [$]16.92 trillion, equivalent to 23.1% of world GDP. Their territories are home to 3.073 billion inhabitants (53.4% of the population). Its exports amounted, in 2014, US$3.48 trillion. Imports in that same year amounted to US$3.03 trillion. Since 2001, the BRICS have more than doubled their share of world exports. In that year, the group represented 8.1% of world’s total exports; in 2015, they accounted for 19.1% of that total.’

But, intra-BRICS trade constitutes only a small part of the global trade, and is skewed. While it grew 163 per cent between 2006 and 2015, from $93 billion to $244 billion, the bulk of it was in the two dyads—China-India and China-Russia. Modi has projected the trade figure to touch $500 billion by 2020 at a time when serious disagreements have surfaced at the 15th G-20 economic summit held in Hangzhou, China, just last month over market distortions induced by hidden and indirect state support that Beijing is said to have used to sustain high levels of Chinese exports. On this issue, India sided with the United States and Europe against China. Xi made his by-now- stock promise to ease access to the Chinese market by Indian exporters, a promise his regime has made to the US and European governments as well. India’s trade imbalance with China is currently valued at $50 billion (of the total bilateral trade of some $70 billion). The fact is that an inequitable trade regime within BRICS fundamentally undermines the possibility of realising the group’s potential economic clout.

But the Goa summit will be remembered mainly as India’s futile efforts at localising BRICS. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sets a great deal of store by international summits and conferences. But unless he stops trying to convert every multilateral and bilateral meet into a diplomatic slugfest targeting Pakistan, not only will India’s larger interests not be served, but it will induce the international community to re-hyphenate India and Pakistan. When Indian foreign policy is so imbued with parochial concerns, it is hard to imagine it accomplishing much beyond affording extra-territorial big powers the opportunity to intervene and shape the outcomes they desire.

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Dissolving to farce

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

It never takes long for an India-Pakistan fracas to dissolve into a farce. The unintended fun has arisen from the Bharatiya Janata Party government not giving up on the “surgical strike” issue to wring every last drop of political capital out of it. Except, the claim of this retaliatory action of being generically different from previous such cross-LoC actions by Special Forces (SF) has now been officially hollowed out by Foreign Secretary K. Jaishankar, who merely repeated the statement by his predecessor Shivshankar Menon that the only difference was that the Narendta Modi government to make it public but added mysteriously that going public was in order to unveil a new “strategy”.

What strategy? The one of carrying out “limited-calibre, target-specific, counter-terrorist operations”. OK. But publicly owning up to an anti-terrorist operation is no bad thing if a really major aim was achieved. But when the goal itself was pretty minor — of destroying some LeT/JeM staging camps and killing anybody getting in the way, as the FS’ explanation itself suggests, it is hard to transform it into a military spectacular without the whole episode turning into one generating mirth. All a retired, much respected paratrooper general who visited me the day before yesterday could do when asked about the unfolding comedy was to make embarrassed noises. He couldn’t make head or tail of it anymore than anyone has been able to.

Something so obvious should have been kept in mind when the Modi regime chose to announce it to the world. So, a bit of chest-thumping doesn’t hurt. But it is precisely this He Man-activity the PM had asked his BJP colleagues to refrain from. As if to further roil the issue, defence minister Manohar Parrikar attributed the decisiveness shown by Modi and himself in ordering SF retribution for the Sept 28 terrorist attack on Uri to a mindset firmed up during their time in the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh). Not to be contained, Modi, on the basis, of this SF action compared India to Israel. A more inapt comparison is hard to conceive. The actions would have been comparable had the Indian reaction been more in the Ram Madhav-articulated mould of “jaw for a tooth”. Actually, the Israeli retaliatory principle is rearranging the skull for a slap — which metric doesn’t fit any Indian military action to-date (other than 1971 war to liberate Bangladesh).

At a practical level, Israeli retaliation believes in methodically eliminating the leadership — if hydra-headed, a head at a time. It is something the Israeli Intelligence is geared for, because it seeks realtime information about the evolving Hezbollah or militant Palestinian leadership race. No sooner a controlling head surfaces, it is chopped off in response to usually small Palestinian provocation. Whole Arab villages are bombed for a katyusha rocket attack. This is simply not the sort of counter-insurgency, anti-terrorist wars, or even hard-hitting conventional military conflicts, the Indian Army is either prepared for or ordered to fight.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Bangladesh, civil-military relations, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, indian policy -- Israel, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Internal Security, Israel, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Special Forces, Terrorism | 12 Comments

Mindless military procurement – S 400

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The BJP government of Narendra Modi seems well set on the course of mindless military procurement. With so many strategic military areas to cover and a host of choices to strengthen national security available, trust Modi, Parrikar and Co. to splurge scarce resources on the wrongest buys imaginable. After committing US$30 billion for 36 — too few to make a difference but too costly to disregard the downstream costs — of the by and large useless Rafale “MMRCA” from France, naturally another equally flawed acquisition for the Russian S-400 supposedly anti-everything in the air from drones, aircraft to missiles, was approved in a move mainly to placate Moscow. Whether to make or firm up friendly relations, Modi apparently thinks armament purchases are the prime instrument. India will be paying through its nose for the Rafales and the S-400 long after the Modi dispensation is history. True the US$ 10.5 billion plus will mainly cover the cost of some five batteries of the advanced Russian air defence system, but also involve buying four of a new class of frigate, and to produce some 200 Kamov utility helicopters under license in the country. So, there’s a variety of armaments which buffers the S-400 purchase (rather than a single combat aircraft — Rafale) for like vast sums of money.

But why S-400, comparable to the US THAAD (Theatre High Altitude Area Defence)? May be because it is versatile able, owing to the Russian design philosophy of having a single tube fire different interceptors, such as the 400 km range 40N6, the 250 km range 48N6, the 120 km range 9M96E2, or the 48 km range 9M96E, to pull different missions. So this is an all-in-one air defence solution. Except, like all AD systems, it is optimized to take out ECM-laden, high-flying, combat aircraft, not incoming missiles. And it is very expensive. Given the conniptions when ever GOI contemplates nuclear missiles, India is buying this system as BMD (ballistic missile defence), with the Indian S-400 likely equipped with the 40N6 interceptor.

So, why is this bad? For one thing — what happens to the Indian BMD programme that VK Saraswat (now member of the Niti Ayog) during his time as DRDO head had protected and nursed so carefully? This BMD system operates on the principle of the twin Prithvi missile interceptors, one trying to take out an incoming missile in direct hit mode in exo-atmosphere, failing which the second interceptor destroys it in the endo-atmospheric milieu. As Saraswat himself admitted to me — and it is so revealed in my book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’, the Prithvi BMD may be effective, if at all, in killing single missiles, but simply will not be able to handle missile salvos — which is exactly how Pakistan and China will fire their missiles. So, what good is it, considering no BMD system anywhere in the world has done better than the Indian system in real-live firing, and none has fared at all well? If BMD is such a concern, the Rs 39,000 crores would have been better invested in increasing the production rate of strategic missiles, and in the indigenous development of a genuinely effective system to take on massed attacks? And, some of the monies could have been expended in strategically firming up an area in which India has zero capability, namely, manned long range high altitude bomber?

Because of the demand from the Strategic Forces Command, and perhaps my fevered advocacy from my time in NSAB (and since in my books and writings), the Indian Air Force finally and reluctantly agreed to buy/lease the Tu-22M3 ‘Backfire’ bomber from Russia. But, and extraordinarily, it asked for just FOUR of this bomber. This is consistent with IAF’s conviction that the country’s strategically capable air arm remain marginal if not nonexistent. A plainly bemused Moscow advised Delhi that an indent for 20 Tu-22M3s (i.e., a squadron plus reserve) would make better sense as it will ensure that, at any given time, at least ten of the aircraft will be ready to takeoff (and a single Tu-22 would be operational if only four of the bombers are inducted into IAF service)! That the Russians had to proffer this practical advice speaks volumes of IAF’s strategic sensibility.

The more one examines the Indian military’s procurement priorities, the more dismayed one gets. When our armed services falter at so basic a level, what hope for national security?

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons, Western militaries | 29 Comments

Modi policy in tatters

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is finding his foreign (cum military) policy in tatters on several fronts.

His attempt to coerce Pakistan into acknowledging that there’s a new game afoot and that every terroprist incident will trigger a prompt response in kind hasn’t worked. GHQR (General Headquarters, Rawalpindi) has not risen to the bait nor have the cross-LoC terrorist shootups stopped. The much trumpeted “surgical strikes” did not prevent/dissuade/deter the Pakistan army minders of the LeT/JeM cadres from launching attacks on Baramulla and following that up with the strike on Pampore, where the jihadis are holed up in a educational institute from which premises, the paramils have, so far, failed to clear, even as they have taken many casualties.

Manmohan Singh’s NSA, Shivshankar Menon, has explained, to no one’s surprise, that cross-LoC covert ops by Special Forces are routine and differ from the “surgical strike” policy only in that the BJP dispensation wanted to get some political benefits from going public with it, whence the need for grandstanding.

That there’s no known retaliation by Indian forces for the Baramulla and Parampore attacks suggests one of two things, that having thought through the situation the Modi PMO has thought it best to revert to the covert war norms, thereby permitting both the Indian and Pakistan armies plausible deniability for actions undertaken by either across the LoC; or, they are stuck to a metric mentioned in a previous blog — of publicly-acknowledged retaliation on the basis of unacceptable level of military fatalities. This last makes no sense. The former option of returning to covert ops is more sustainable and, properly planned and executed, has far greater potential for disruption in PoK.

Modi’s parallel policy prongs of getting China’s backing for a policy of retaliation, and of keeping Russia on India’s side even as Delhi scampers to the US side in the unfolding power politics are, likewise, failing. The Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Baoling was categorical: “No country”, he said, “should pursue its own political gains in the name of counterterrorism.” (See http://tribune.com.pk/story/1197012/india-striving-promote-military-ties-china/.) This pays put to Modi’s idea of getting the BRICS countries (at the Goa summit) to support the idea of an international convention against terrorism. MEA would be best advised to ditch this initiative than have it rejected in the plenary.

Trying to shore up its leverage in Delhi, Moscow has done the obvious thing of talking arms supplies to Pakistan on concessionary terms no doubt, and given expression to its policy trend by conducting a military exercise — the first of its kind ever, with the Pakistan army. Sure, on Delhi’s protests Moscow arranged to move the exercise from the Baltistan area of PoK to the Pak interior. But its explanation that the exercise was meant to inculcate an anti-terrorist stance in the Pakistan army is laughable. Except, the whole episode portends the firming up of a Russia-China strategic cushion for Pakistan to fall back on — something I have warned about in my books, and all my writings. The Vladimir Putin regime is unlikely to accept being fobbed off with contracts for additional VVER 1000 nuclear power units at Kudankulum, in return for not reacting adversely to Delhi’s favouring exorbitantly priced US and Western military hardware buys at the expense of India’s longstanding military supply relationship. So, Kremlin is making known the strategic costs India will have to bear, costs the US cannot make up. It will pretty much ensure that Modi’s departing from the country’s tested policy of some five decades as international power balancer will end up diminishing India globally.

Half way into his five year term, the grand scheme of Modi and his team (Messrs Doval, Jaishankar, et al) seems headed for a fall, as they have made plain their intent to carry on in this vein even if it runs India, foreign-military policy-wise, into the ground.

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Battle of “befitting replies”

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The unending Indian claims and celebrations about the “surgical strike” Sept 28 across the Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir and the Pakistani refutations that any such intrusion happened across what they call the “working boundary” are transiting from the tiresome to the comic. That the Modi government chose to make the punitive response to the Uri attack by PoK-staged terrorists such a big deal suggests two things: One that the Indian Army and military generally have such a low bar for achievement and are so starved of any operational success that even the smallest, meanest, actions are blown out of proportion as full-scale victories in major war. Sure enough, between the Indian cross-LoC op described as a “befitting” response, and Pakistanis, including General Raheel Sharif promising a “befitting” reply to any further Indian intrusions, the exchange has settled into a verbal fusillade from both sides of “befitting” responses.

It only proves the point I have long made in my writings that India-Pakistan military encounters are unserious kerfuffles. Neither side can really generate either the popular enthusiasm or the effort for a real war! Indians and Pakistanis, cut from the same cloth, are too much into each other, too much part of each other, to credibly sustain enmity of the hard kind, notwithstanding the mullahcracy on that side and the Hindutva-wadis on this side. Whence India-Pak “wars” are dismissed by most major countries as periodic eruptions of little consequence, like seasonal boils on skin. Except, with Pakistanis time and again bringing up the threat of use of tactical nukes, these encounters are now jokes with an edge.

But, how credible is the prospect of Pakistani initiation of nuclear weapons use when the outcome for that country is sure and certain extinction? So, N-use is practiced nonsense Islamabad purveys only because it finds that the Indian government, which is never able to hold its nerve in a crisis (attacks on Parliament, Mumbai, etc), is easily rattled at the slightest mention of Nukes. So why shouldn’t the Pakistanis brandish this “Allah ki dain”?

But let’s get back to getting real, and the usual Ind-Pak contretemps.

True, the prime minister advised his colleagues and fellow BJP-partymen to stop their chest-thumping. But he did so more than a week after the event, by when a hysterical media, TV in particular, had gone bonkers, with hyperbolic patriotism. Who can stop the Times Now 9PM anchor from screeching and screaming his head off and trying desperately to induce a heart-attack or a blood clot in himself? (Had the novel experience of sitting mute in one edition of this program after an initial innocuous interjection as all the invitees were imitating the anchor in out-shouting each other.) The mystery about why Pakistanis, some of them reputable, subject themselves to insulting behaviour of Indian TV comperes was, however, clarified to me. The Pakistanis are paid US$1,000 for each appearance. That is a cool 80,000 Pakistani rupees for agreeing to become targets for ten minutes of harangue. Two appearances a month will heftily increase the monthly income. Pakistanis being nobody’s fools, more and more of them want to be seen on Indian TV, as a means of bolstering their hard currency earnings, and burnishing their own nationalist credentials by trying to act more outrageous than the anchor. So much for Indians and Pakistanis engaging in public debate.

What apparently has hurt Islamabad to the quick was the CNN-associated Indian channel playing an obviously Indian Intel-given tape of conversation picked up between a Special Branch “SP” in PoK and “IG, (Pak) Punjab” about Pakistani fatalities from Indian SF action, adduced as evidence of the Indian action. The Pak Foreign Office spokesperson was livid, and reprimanded “the world renowned” CNN for indulging in an “unethical and fraudulent act” of disseminating disinformation, and threatened “necessary legal action”. (See http://tribune.com.pk/story/1194920/india-spreading-litany-falsehoods-coas/.) This can only happen on the subcontinent where the trivial is routinely exalted into the tremendous (to use a pet Trumpianism).

This raises the question: Why are GOI and Indian military so keen to prove the veracity of the Special Forces action when there’s very little riding on it? Had the “surgical strike” been a meaningful one deep (30-50 kms) inside PoK, and had there really been fireworks in terms of meaningful damage to the Pak army terrorist support infrastructure, there would have been reason to crow that terrorist outrages in the future would involve progressively higher cost for the Pakistan military. Such action did not take place, which makes it hard for the Modi regime to play up the Sept 28 op as other than a declaration of intention that hereafter cross-LoC retributive actions will be the norm.

Except, Pakistan answered with the strike on Baramulla, with the attackers getting away scott-free — melting away into the drakness, and there was no “befitting response” this time. So, may be what the Uri episode has actually done is lay the benchmark measured by the scale of military deaths as trigger for Indian retaliation. That’s a start because asymmetric warfare cannot be cost-free to Pakistan. The cost threshold to the Pak Army, however, needs to be raised manifold for it to prove a deterrent to GHQR (General Headquarters, Rawalpindi).

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, SAARC, society, South Asia, Special Forces, Terrorism | 41 Comments

Let the Army have a go at the LeT/JeM in PoK!

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

I wrote the last post yesterday that the reaction to the Baramulla strike on the RR camp ought to be a sustained operation against the terrorists deep inside PoK. This morning, Economic Times on its front page had an intriguing story “Army wants Six Months to Smash PoK Terror Ops” (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/army-wants-six-months-to-smash-terror-infrastructure-in-pakistan-occupied-kashmir/articleshow/54664612.cms) about Army HQrs seeking sanction from the Modi government for a sustained cross-LoC drive against ISI-managed and Pakistan army protected LeT/JeM infrastructure. Without sounding too bloodthirsty, GOI should authorize such a strategy. It will free the army to realize its plan without its having to seek political approval at every turn or before every action. If the army is essentially demanding that professionals be left free to obtain the outcome GOI wants, then it is time that such a carte blanche, in fact, be given.

For one thing because the army seems to be fired up, especially because of the criticism about the complacency and lax attitude permeating the military that, time and again, permits jihadis to stroll in and shoot up army camps and kill jawans at will, the army is reacting in this visceral fashion. This is a good thing to see happen. It shows there’s some self-respect left in the Indian land forces after all.

Defence minister Manohar Parrikar too should be enthused and grant the army the license to proceed because he has after all taken the credit for instilling “self confidence” in the armed forces for too long acting like Hanuman drained off his confidence before his Lanka operation! In other words, Parrikar has taken on the persona of Hanuman’s friend in the Ramayana epic — Jambuwan, the Bear who reminds the great Monkey God of his inherent strength and advises him to shake off his diffidence, and get on with the job of defeating the enemy. [This is a curious thing to happen, because in my book ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ I use this episode as the curtain raiser in the first chapter, to liken the Indian nation to Hanuman, who is in a funk and unable to gauge his own enormous strength.]

Now that the army is all fired up, it will be tragic if not criminal to see such stoked-up spirit go waste. Parrikar should advise Modi to OK the army’s plans for eliminating the terrorist scourge — whatever it takes, however long it takes.

There’s yet another reason the army should be given the go-ahead. It is the first time in a very, very long time that the army is thinking along such proactive offensive lines. Such initiatives should be heartily encouraged. Talking of variants of Cold Start doesn’t help — because it is an inherently impracticable, over-expensive, set of plans that only cavalry generals get worked up about, but will fail to deliver the outcome of conventionally subduing Pakistan. But the army’s plans of carrying out a scheme of strikes ought to gain traction with PM Modi, even if his NSA Ajit Doval establishes links with his opposite number in Pakistan, and agrees to calm things down.

It will be especially interesting to see is how the Indian army, in pursuit of its strategy, will deal with the Pakistan army that will rise to protect the terrorist outfits and will fight the Indian Special Forces in PoK.

To limit India-Pak relations to just the one formal Doval track, without also allowing the army to be active on a parallel track, by getting on with whatever it has in mind to do, is to fall back on the old belief that only resumption of talks will matter in the context of the supposed success of the “surgical strikes” fueling the conviction that a sufficiently chastised Islamabad will now follow Delhi’s script. It won’t, but assuming the Indian army successfully beats up on the terrorists and the Pak army support system, it will certainly give GHQR pause for thought.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian para-military forces, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Special Forces | 34 Comments

What now after Baramulla?

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The Pakistan army’s being more agile and faster on the draw and initiative means that India will always be wrongfooted. Apparently, the targeted state is far from comatose as defence minister Manohar Parrikar prematurely declared it as anesthetized — a strange metaphor to use. While the Modi government and much of the country was celebrating what media and official circles continue to mislabel as “surgical strikes” when the Sept 28 night attacks were, as I have indicated, in the genre of the normal Special Forces actions the Northern Command occasionally undertakes on the Line of Control where “hit teams” amble out across the line to shoot up-blow up things on the Pakistani side, amble back to safety behind own lines. There’s mutual deniability. Whence Pakis denied any SF operation had taken place. Hearing the media commentariat go bonkers and our politicians ballistic — besides Parrikar, Home Minister Rajnath Singh self-satisfyingly saying India had given — this being UP political lingo — a “muh tod jawab”, what will all these parties do now that the attack by suspected LeT/JeM jihadis on the Rashtriya Rifles camp in Baramulla did not fetch any kills of the intruders? They need to shut up and think of what next to do.

It seems likely that ISI activated a sleeper cell already inside the Srinagar valley, because the alternative explanation that the Pakis risked another infiltration so soon after the last one suggests that the army and BSF, despite being on heightened alert, still did not police the LoC with sufficient diligence.

It is doubtful GOI had prepared to deal with an attack so close in time after the one that created so much ruckus. But that’s doing the unexpected and Indian forces, predictably, mostly reactive by habit are trying now to quell the disturbance, rather than, jointly with the BSF and armed J&K Police and with local intelligence handy, sanitize the border zone with door-to-door searches and, grid-wise, combing operations in areas close to LoC with a history of being hospitable to cross-LoC jihadis. In the absence of such measures, we have the present situation of GOI, apparently, once again caught unawares. And a Hindi TV program rightly wondered whether India would be engaged in “serial surgical strikes” on PoK targets in response to serial terrorist attacks on Indian military targets?

It emphasizes the need for a permanent system of automatic and instantaneous retaliation I have previously mooted, and which should — two decades after Hizbul Mujahideen under Salahuddin (who decamped for PoK) after New Delhi clumsily rigged state elections and he was declared a loser — have been in good functioning order, had someone thought of so basic a set-up.

Should such an organization for coordinated intelligence assessment, operational planning, and prompt action be established as is desperately required to be done, it will have to wrestle with precisely such situation as unfolded in Baramulla.

There has to be punitive action — there cannot now be a break in the action-reaction sequence initiated by the Indian counter-strike. There’s no doubt about this. Not responding will convince Pak army and ISI that India has no stomach for a sustained fight. This cannot be allowed to happen. Instantaneous anything seems beyond the ken of the government and the armed forces. What’s the second best option? A genuine “surgical strike” on targets deeper in PoK rather than on the LoC where targets will now be hard to find as the Pak army, per news reports, have moved the terrorist training camps, etc to hinterland areas, such as Nowshera and Jhelum.

While readying the armour and mechanized fleets, as is supposedly happening to dissuade possible Paki reactions is fine, the fact is Pak GHQR will not do anything as foolish as to get into a general war with India and start a conventional military affray south of Gurdaspur (and across the international border), meaning it will not respond to an Indian punitive strike by crossing the delineated India-Pak boundary. Even less will Raheel Sharif consider even remotely the nuclear option — something more people — with no idea of what they are talking about — are doing here than on the other side, Khwaja Asif and that lot of foolish Paki pols excepted.

But whatever else they do, the Indian media and politicians need to pipe down, not indulge in escalatory rhetoric, which is almost as bad as the real thing in mucking up matters. Kuttayuddha is necessarily silently prosecuted without all the Sturm and Drang. Part of covert warfare is the absolute necessity for greater surveillance of the Kashmiri population, whether it likes it or not, to identify those families/households potentially giving comfort to the LeT/JeM fighters as prelude to weeding them out.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian para-military forces, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Israel, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, society, South Asia, Special Forces, United States, US. | 12 Comments

Let the lesser state know

Posted on October 2, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

(The basic argument made in the previous post (Hindustan Times) is fleshed out with brief analyses of the diplomatic initiatives in the past ten days in this piece published in the ‘Open’ magazine, 30 September 2016 at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/comment/let-the-lesser-state-know. Incidentally the Uri Brigade commander, Brig K. Somashankar, has been removed from his post.)
———-
The midnight attack on terror camps in PoK alone won’t bring Pakistan to heel. We have a lot more to do

A WEEK AFTER the terrorist attack on the Uri Brigade encampments by four jihadi-terrorists that killed 18 troops and wounded some fifty others of the Bihar and Dogra Regiments, and the spiralling of public expectations about imminent and singular retaliation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Bharatiya Janata Party conclave in Kozhikode on 24 September called, anti-climactically, for “a thousand year war” with Pakistan on poverty, disease and illiteracy (albeit, in a thundering tone), sounding verily like a pumped-up political Mother Teresa—all sinew, grace and forgiveness. Not exactly the dislocating measure the BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav had promised when he signalled a “Pakistani jaw” for an Indian “tooth”.

Modi recognised that when the policy cupboard is bare of options, it is best to do nothing, and in this, emulate Atal Bihari Vajpayee (after the 13 December 2001 attack on Parliament) and Manmohan Singh (post-26 November 2008 strike on Mumbai). So he has reacted as a leader of a ‘responsible’ nation with excessive restraint—the hallmark of Indian policy, launched a diplomatic campaign to ‘isolate’ Pakistan, and otherwise red-flagged India’s impotence. The fact that the Prime Minister has been brought this to pass owes centrally to the Indian military’s characteristic laxity and complacency that allowed the terrorist penetration and precipitated the crisis in the first place, bringing the perennial problems of unpreparedness and incapacity to mount a hard- hitting counter once again into the public eye.

Also, evident was the not-so-subtle pressure from the United States, the country’s preferred ‘strategic partner’ in the new century, to be reasonable in dealing with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, which it does not tolerate itself. Recall the September 2001 visit by the US Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage to Islamabad in the wake of the 9/11 outrage when he warned General Pervez Musharraf to support the war America was going to unleash on the Taliban in Afghanistan, failing which, to face a Pakistan bombed back to the ‘stone age’. Musharraf duly complied.

But to be fair to previous prime ministers, they decided on doing nothing only after finding out from the Indian military that it could do nothing. Even as the terrorist intruders were being mopped up on Parliament grounds, an emergency meeting was called by Vajpayee to explore retaliation. In his inimitable way, he asked the then Army chief and Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Sundararajan Padmanabhan: “Aap kuchh kar sakte hain? (Can you do something?)” There was studied silence accompanied by a slow shaking of his head from side-to-side by Padmanabhan. I have often wondered how this response was ‘minuted’ by the Cabinet Secretary. Seven years later, with Kasab and Company storming five-star hotels on the Mumbai shoreline, the Indian military was, as on the earlier occasion, all at sea. Manmohan Singh questioned the Air Chief Marshal Fali H Major about launching sorties against the Pakistan army-run Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad training camps and logistics hubs in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir (PoK), only to be told that the Indian Air-Force did not—just then— have the target coordinates for surgical strikes.

Eight years on, come the attacks on the Pathankot air base this January, and several months later, the attack on the Uri camp, we see the same actors reprising their familiar roles. The Government seemed surprised and acted flustered, the armed services revealed their by-now-patent incapacity to prevent jihadis from sauntering into the Uri camp and shooting Indian soldiers or to retaliate meaningfully. And Modi talked soberly of mobilising international public opinion to pressure Islamabad. India, however, has yet to come to grips with Pakistan’s ongoing asymmetric warfare. With small-scale conflicts seen as diverting it from preparing for ‘proper’ wars, preferably only with Pakistan and then with imported armaments, and resource scarcity hindering the procurement of exorbitantly-priced foreign hardware to fight this war with, the Indian military finds itself unable to prosecute any type of war well, whether it is asymmetric-covert, conventional, or ‘hybrid’ with nuclear overtones.

Moreover, because the Government does not believe in integrating the military or its efforts, there is no centralised authority such as chief of defence staff, nor a single comprehensive operational plan, leaving the three armed services free to tackle terrorism in their separate, lackadaisical, ways. Thus, Army units, time and again, do basic things wrong, like not establishing an impermeable perimeter security to protect their own camps for a start, and the Air Force is always operationally unready, at the point of decision, to launch instantaneous retaliatory raids (even as retired IAF grandees write op-eds extolling aerial strikes as the best means of punitive action against Pakistan).

Post-Uri, one thing is clear: it is Pakistan that is focused, has proved itself adept at conducting a low cost covert war that, to use a tired phrase, ‘bleeds India by a thousand cuts’, and that India has no counter. And it pre-empts Indian retaliation by putting frontline Army divisions on alert, closes off the air space in northern Pakistan and PoK for exclusive military use, sequesters long sections of the Lahore-Islamabad super highway for emergency combat aircraft operations and, aware that New Delhi is easily rattled by nuclear threats, openly flaunts the possibility of using its short-range nuclear missiles in case India sends its armour trundling across the border. In fact, the situation is so unbalanced and favouring the lesser state, Pakistan enjoys both the psychological and seemingly also the material edge. Whence, the spectacle of politicians and ex-soldiers on Pakistan TV programmes jeering at the Indian military’s risk-averse attitude and taunting Indian soldiers for “fearing death”.

The Indian Government, as always, is as confused as the Indian military about how to handle Pakistan’s relentless needling and equally uncertain about how to react. There is apparently no understanding of the nature of the conflict Pakistan has imposed on India. The evidence of this is in the usual harrumphing from official quarters about retribution being visited on Pakistan at a time and place of New Delhi’s choosing. Or, in the ideas mooted by retired military brass, such as former Army Chief General Bikram Singh, who has damned “our traditional laissez faire policy of inaction and passivity”, called for a “befitting response”, and recommended that an appropriate retaliatory scheme be chosen from among a number of “comprehensive plans for all possible contingencies” he claims the military has drafted. But, he calls for the punitive military action to take place only after the “precautionary defensive measures” adopted by the Pakistan military to thwart Indian retaliation are removed. In other words, he advises waiting out the Pakistanis!

Considering that the Pakistan military is more organisationally nimble and in a higher state of readiness and can be fielded faster than its Indian counterpart, this is useless counsel and, in any case, misses the point. Unless retaliation for terrorist acts is immediate and automatic, it loses its value. The standard operating procedure (SOP) should be that such actions are launched on first information of a terrorist strike followed by an official statement declaring that this action is limited and strictly in response to the preceding terrorist provocation, and that any military riposte to it would be escalatory for which Pakistan would bear the burden. This would offer justification, be a warning, and inhibit Pakistan from taking steps that could lead to spiralling of conflict. Such a clearly articulated Indian policy will be acceptable to the international community as well. However, if India waits for the mythical ‘right time’ to react, it may be a long wait, and the advantage of hitting back instantly would evaporate because, in the intervening time, the causality link between the terrorist incident and the retaliatory action will be lost.

It is precisely the absence of ready capability for a reflexive response, predicated on—and this is important—strike platforms at the ready and geared for instantaneous action and clued by continually updated operational plans and information regarding prioritised target sets and target coordinates, that is at the heart of India’s troubles and, visibly, Pakistan’s success. Such a system of instant and certain retribution kicking in automatically and every time there’s a terrorist provocation would at once establish the norm. Is such a system hard to obtain? Not at all, but curiously nobody in the Indian Government and military has thought of setting it up. So, each terrorist event is a revelation, treated de novo, requires the same bureaucratic head-banging to conceive and plan options, all of which take time. Soon it becomes yesterday’s concern, with the whole process petering out due to the flagging concern of all the parties involved, until the next terrorist event when this rigmarole is repeated.

Most of these terrorist moves would be ‘throttled in the cradle’ as it were if the intelligence agencies and the armed services did their jobs. The 26/11 attack happened in Mumbai because of loose maritime security; Pathankot occurred owing to base security being reduced to a joke, and now Uri because there was no policing of the approaches to the camp. In each case, it is the lack of perimeter security that facilitated the terrorist mayhem.

Let’s consider the Uri episode in slight detail. Uri is a salient, bordered on its three sides by the Line of Control (LoC)—some 6 km at the shortest distance, which is preferred by jihadis for infiltration purposes, and around 14 km in the other two directions. The 27 km of front in this sector is manned by a single Indian Army battalion with two Border Security Force (BSF) battalions in support. The Army and BSF camps are supposedly in adjoining locations. But the institutional tension between the Army and the paramilitary and their desire to minimise interaction led to a virtual ‘no man’s land’ being created between the Army and BSF camps. It is this vacant, unpoliced seam stretching to the LoC that the four terrorists exploited on 18 September to reach the Mess serving the Dogra and Bihari troops. It is the same seam two other jihadis used a few days after the Uri attack, but were apprehended because this time there was proper patrolling. There is, however, no explanation why, despite the awareness of the vulnerabilities of the Uri camp sites, the Army and BSF unit commanders failed to take the elementary precaution of providing overlapping coverage, why no armed watch was mounted in this space, and why the outer tier had no monitoring with raised sand-bagged positions, prefab posts, and roving patrols 24/7, given that Jammu and Kashmir, and especially the areas along the LoC, constitute an active (covert) war zone.

A former Kashmir-based Corps commander blames the Army’s flawed practice of concentrating the technical means for detecting irregular movements such as thermal imagers, on the LoC rather than deploying some of them rearwards to protect military facilities and installations. There’s also the fact that a good proportion of these imagers are, at any given moment in time, offline because they are broken down or undergoing servicing and repairs. Further, as a recent official report has observed, advanced technology surveillance sensors, like thermal imagers and ‘laser walls’ installed on the LoC to spot violations on the border in real time, do not always work as advertised, owing to the difficult terrain. In other words, for fail-proof physical security against terrorists, there’s no alternative to alert manpower, perimeter policing, and attentive patrolling on land and water. But such security regimen will work only when unit commanders are held accountable for lapses rather than, as happened in Pathankot, where the commander of the air base was merely transferred, not cashiered. But imaginative moves to fight terrorists, such as the placement in the mid-1990s of a unit of the powerful Marine Commando on the Wular Lake by the Navy Chief Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat that deterred jihadis from crossing this water body to reach the Srinagar Valley, are missing.

A good solution to sharpen the military instincts and lift spirits may be to empower and incentivise (with proper career-furthering rewards) the commanders of forward deployed units to react to terrorist bedlam by planning and executing reciprocal actions across the LoC with deliberate speed and lethality. This works. On 28 July 2011, in response to Pakistani troops sneaking into a prefab LoC post in the 15 Corps sector and beheading two Indian jawans, a revenge operation was planned, timed for the Eid holidays. Aware that large numbers of Pakistani army officers and men go on leave on this festive occasion, a 20-strong team of five officers, several JCOs, and a bunch of jawans, crossed the LoC and ambushed a truck carrying these Pakistani military-men to their homes. Five enemy heads were taken as trophy. It created a hubbub on the Pakistani side with the Pakistan DGMO (Director General Military Operations) calling his Indian opposite number to complain but meeting with a denial because the Indian DGMO was not in the loop. The message, however, struck home. Pakistanis have not repeated such an atrocity since.

Even though effective, this is still success only at the tactical level. For more enduring impact a two-pronged strategy needs to be pursued. One prong is to put the country’s Special Forces (SF)—which are penny-packeted as Northern Army reserve and wasted in small time missions across the LoC to blow up a bridge here, a culvert there—to more strategic uses deep inside PoK (to hinder progress on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, for instance). Indeed, it was a typical shallow (2 km) cross-LoC Indian SF operation to take out a couple of terrorist camps that was staged by the Army on the night of 28 September, perhaps as a face-saving gesture. It killed some 38 jihadis but did not address the core concern of a capability void.

For telling effect, SF actions need to be integrated with RAW’s activities inside Pakistan, as part of a sustained covert war or kuttayuddha . In fact, I have long maintained that as shared legatees of Chanakya’s philosophy and the Arthashastra, it is ironic that Pakistan is a better practitioner of kuttayuddha than India. The other prong is full-court diplomatic pressure in regional and international forums. This two-pronged strategy is premised on the belief that (1) responding to terrorism by ordering field armies into action (as happened with Operation Parakram in 2001) is inapt and a wasteful use of the military, and is to be avoided at all cost, and (2) no matter what, Pakistan will persist with its policy of waging asymmetric warfare against India, the best antidote to which may be to pay Islamabad back in the same coin.

Fortunately, there’s no dearth of faultlines to exploit— Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan in PoK being the most obvious, the discontented Muhajir community, Sindhi nationalism, and support for Kabul’s territorial claims by de-recognising the Durand Line as the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, being the other possibilities. The CPEC is an obvious economic target also strategically to discomfit China. Reviving the disbanded CITX (Counter Intelligence Team-X) inside the external intelligence agency, RAW, to more effectively use the resources cultivated within Pakistan, fits in with such strategy. The above covert strategy should hereafter remain the constant in India-Pakistan relations, its talons partially drawn in during periods when Islamabad moderates its policies.

The fact is, diplomatic and other responses hove into view this time around once it became plain the BJP Government had no credible military response-options. But attempts to isolate Pakistan, or to declare it as a state sponsoring terrorism aren’t working because it is not in the US’s and China’s interests to do so. That has left New Delhi scraping the barrel. Ditching SAARC and replacing it with a SAARC-minus Pakistan organisation has some merit. But it will signal a move away from South Asian solidarity. The ramifications of this move will be felt in the long term as China will increasingly dominate Pakistan’s space, which, strategically speaking, will end up hurting Indian interests by consolidating the Chinese presence more fully on this country’s western flank as well. Modi should have thought of what this will end up meaning for India.

Withdrawal of the ‘Most Favoured Nation’ status likewise is a gesture that may cost India more. India enjoys a balance of payments edge in the minuscule bilateral trade of some $3 billion plus with Pakistan. But it will lose twice as much with the loss of the so-called ‘switch trade’ involving all manner of goods from tyres to cosmetics that happens with ships bound for Dubai anchoring off Karachi and offloading some of their cargo.

The other punitive measure being contemplated is not to abrogate the 1960 Indus Water Treaty (IWT), which Washington will not countenance, but to implement its provisions that permit India to more fully harvest the river system, westwards, something Pakistan has feared will reduce the water flow available to it.

The IWT allows India to use 1.34 million acre-feet (MAF) of the Indus waters for irrigation purposes, of which only some 0.792 MAF are presently utilised. India is also permitted to build hydropower projects and ‘run of the river’ storage facilities for 3.6 MAF on the Chenab River, whose main waters are otherwise for exclusive Pakistani use. Further, India has so far not majorly exploited the waters of the three eastern rivers IWT allotted to India (Ravi, Beas and Sutlej) for agriculture, and as much as 3 MAF of water flows into Pakistan and, absent infrastructure there, is completely wasted as a run-off to the sea. Should India, operating within the ambit of the IWT, speed the construction of the requisite infrastructure—big dams, smaller storage facilities, and hydropower stations on the Chenab, and on the eastern rivers, to meet India’s burgeoning energy and water needs—it will psychologically subdue Pakistan. The Indus is Pakistan’s lifeline, and any perceived loss of this water may render Islamabad more amenable than any threat from ‘Cold Start’, intervention in Balochistan, loss of SAARC, or rattling of nuclear sabres.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, China military, civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian para-military forces, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, SAARC, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US. | 14 Comments

Surgical strikes: A face-saving move or planned retaliation?

Posted on October 1, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Amid the self-congratulatory noises emanating from the BJP government and the satisfied snorting of the media commentators in the aftermath of the “surgical strikes” on jihadi targets 2-3 kms across the Line of Control (LoC), several contentious issues have come to the fore.

In the context of a ramped-up Hammurabi Code voiced by the BJP general secretary Ram Madhav who promised “jaw” for “tooth”, the strikes by heli-lifted special forces on seven staging areas in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) were fairly tame, retributive, actions of the kind routinely undertaken by frontline units of the Indian Army in response to some Pakistani provocation or the other. The present strike seems like a scaled up version, for instance, of the shallow penetration and ambush on July 28, 2011, in the 15 Corps sector of a transport carrying Pakistani troops proceeding home on Eid leave, culminating in five heads being taken as trophy. This was retaliation in kind to a Pakistani attack in the previous days on an Indian post and the beheadings of two Indian soldiers.

Such tactical level actions often involving regimental izzat and inconclusive artillery and small arms duels are par for the course. So there was nothing particularly novel or new about the attack this time around by Indian para-commando. What was innovative, however, was the follow-up move by the Director General, Military Operations, Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh to apprise his Pakistani counterpart of the successful Indian operation and to request Pakistan army’s cooperation in eliminating the jihadis. It, in effect, has prevented Pakistan from escalating. But the lapse in time between the Uri attack and the riposte suggests that the commando action was more an after-thought and a face-saver for the government than a thoroughly prepared action.

This is because of absence of an in-place system facilitating instant, automatic and, depending on the situation, proportionate or deterrent response to Pakistan army-driven terrorist events. The evolving international norm is for punitive, anti-terrorist actions, to be launched in the immediate wake of an egregious terrorist incident accompanied by official assurance (such as by Ranbir Singh) about such strikes being limited response to specific provocation, while indicating readiness to deal with any military reaction and possible escalation.

This requires that India, embroiled in an asymmetric conflict prosecuted by an adversarial Pakistan, have strike platforms at the ready at all times, primed by continuously updated intelligence and information about prioritised targets and target coordinates, and Pakistan’s military preparedness, etc, so no time is lost for the punishment to get underway. Lacking such a system, each terrorist incident is treated anew and initiates the same rigmarole of bureaucratised consultations up and down the government and the laborious process of conceiving and fleshing out options, this despite two decades of experience of fighting the jihadi-terrorists, who constitute an irregular arm of the Pakistan army.

The system of automaticity of proportional and punitive retaliation linked to anti-terrorist intent will do two things: Compel Pakistan to carefully think through the kind of terrorist event it may, at any given time, be planning. If it tips over, inadvertently or otherwise, into something big, General Headquarters, Rawalpindi (GHQR), would inadvertently face a situation spiraling out of its control — something it doesn’t want.

Second, with major provocations and escalation thus pre-empted, the situation will stabilise at low, mutually tolerable, levels of insurgency-counter-insurgency operations. This is not an ideal situation, but India and Pakistan could live with it until fatigue of the Kashmiris combines with good sense in GHQR to end the turmoil in the Srinagar valley and a compromise is implemented with Pakistan along the lines agreed upon by President Pervez Musharraf in the mid-2000s.

A more worrying aspect pertains to the Indian armed services’ characteristic unpreparedness for immediate retaliatory action. It forced AB Vajpayee after the December 2001 attack on Parliament to order the more wasteful “general mobilisation for war” once the Army chief General S Padmanabhan intimated him that the military was not in a position to take immediate action, and left Manmohan Singh in 2008 with the alternative of doing nothing after he was informed by the air force chief, Air Chief Marshal Fali Major that IAF did not, just then, have target coordinates of terrorist camps in PoK.

It is also the military’s complacency and, apparently, habitual laxity about perimeter security that have permitted terrorist intrusions and incidents to happen in the first place. The attack on Mumbai in 2008 occurred because the loose, in theory multi-tiered, maritime security allowed the seaborne attackers to slip through. Pathankot happened in January owing to base security being reduced to a joke. And now the Uri event obtained because the jihadis sauntered to the Army camp by taking the un-policed path between the Army and Border Security Force camps that stretches to the LoC.

While it is well to criticise the government and the political class for their terminal indecisiveness, it is time the Indian armed services are held accountable for inexcusable lapses in preparedness and security. To continue to treat the armed services as holy cow is to fundamentally undermine national defence.
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Published in the Hindustan Times, October 1, 2016, in the Net edition, at http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/surgical-strikes-a-face-saving-move-or-planned-retaliation/story-cdFJHE4KYpAcXFuOOm6ZCN.html, and in the print edition as “Let’s call a spade a spade”.

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