The long war demands a changed approach

A week is a long time in a crisis. Last week I wrote about how war should not be our first response and that the India-Pakistan military balance was such that there could be no useful outcome from the use of force. I had argued that if we set out to give Pakistan a bloody nose, we could be bloodied too.
There were three assumptions behind my reasoning. The first was that the government of Pakistan, including its armed forces, were sincere when they said they were appalled by the Mumbai massacre and that they would do everything to help us to get to the bottom of the issue. The second, flowing from the first, was that Mr Zardari and his government were one with India in delivering a bloody nose to the terrorists and non-state actors operating in Pakistan. The third was that India was not keen on any option that could involve some loss to itself.
A week later, it seems that all three of my assumptions were wrong. Pakistan has decided to brazen it out. After having gone through the motions of proscribing the Jamaat-ud-dawa (because of the UN Security Council decision and not to oblige India, as their Minister of Defence insists), the enthusiasm to aid India has vanished. It has been replaced by a systematic and organized campaign of barracking, whose goal seems to be to protect those involved in the attacks by raising the spectre of war.
India’s Prime Minister correctly noted on Tuesday that “the issue is not war, it is terror and territory in Pakistan being used to promote, aid and abet terror here.” Significantly, the PM noted that “non-state actors were practicing terrorism, aided and abetted by state establishments.” To me it appears he is saying that the Lashkar were aided by the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

Dynamics

This seems to have a startling confirmation from across the border in Pakistan. One of the most telling responses has been from the real boss of Pakistan — General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani. In the past month, neither he nor the Pakistani military establishment has uttered a single word regretting the Mumbai massacre. The ISI, which has been mentioned as a co-conspirator, reports to General Kayani. The general could have taken the opportunity to tell the world that since the ISI was mentioned, he had personally looked at the records and could assure everyone that his organization was in no way involved in the horrific event.
But he has said nothing to that effect. Instead, he has blustered about how Pakistan was prepared for war and that the Pakistani armed forces would mount “an equal response within minutes” if India carried out any kind of strike. This seems to be the behaviour of a cornered guilty party, rather than that of one who has nothing on his or his institution’s conscience.




So, the government in New Delhi is faced with little option but to contemplate a chastisement strategy that could cost India some. But the mood in the country is such that the government would pay a higher price for doing nothing. In other words, it has the public backing for the use of any measure that would send a message to Pakistan that enough is enough.
In my article, I had expressed my hypothesis that the attack had been initiated by elements in the Pakistan army. I still think this is correct. At its lowest point in history, and faced with a debilitating war against people of their own ilk, the ISI came up with the terrible strategy of attacking India and provoking an Indian response. Two months ago, Asif Zardari and his civilian government were riding high; today they have tamely lined up behind Kayani and are hiding behind the national flag.
There is an important subsidiary reason why the international community needs to take the Mumbai massacre very seriously. Terrorist organisations have an internal dynamic. These are dependent on successful operations which enable them to expand their area of influence and boost recruitment. It is important to disrupt this process either by unearthing underground cells by arrest, choking funds, or by military action that targets their overground infrastructure like camps.
If India does not react adequately to the Mumbai strikes, the Lashkar will be tempted to step its attacks up to a higher and presumably more horrifying level. The logic here is that after being formally banned in Pakistan in January 2002, the ISI relocated Lashkar camps to Azad Kashmir. Simultaneously, it began to use its Bangladeshi proxies and other assets to create the “Indian Mujahideen” who would be Indian recruits, using local material to make bombs, but under the command and control of the ISI.

Mumbai

But the serial bombing campaign across Indian cities in the past few years has not yielded much return. There have been no communal riots or signs that India has been seriously hurt economically. Besides their ability to plant the bombs, the IM achieved little in terms of jihadi goals.
This could have been the trigger for the Mumbai attack. And as the logic goes, Mumbai has united rather than disunited the nation, and so there is a need to press home the idea of an even more intense strike. India needs to break these dynamics, and it can do so with the help of the government of Pakistan and the international community.

Pathology

But if this help is not forthcoming, it must go it alone. The price of failure will be an even higher intensity of attacks and could well culminate in the use of nuclear weapons as well. Don’t forget, these are supposed to be in the custody of the Pakistan Army.
A month after the Mumbai strike, we have the strange situation where Pakistan has seized the mantle of victimhood. The issue, according to its leaders, is not that of a terrorist strike struck at a premier metropolis of a neighbour, killing nearly 200 people, injuring hundreds and terrorizing thousands, whose origins are in Pakistan, but that that neighbour is now allegedly threatening military action against Pakistan.
There is a strange pathology at work here and New Delhi needs to carefully feel its way towards a response. But being careful does not necessarily mean that it should be indecisive. It should not to be pushed to military action, but it should not rule it out either.
The issue should be seen from the perspective of the outcome. At present there is nothing more important than ending the dynamic of terrorist violence in the country. One part of this requires an internal response in terms of institutions, doctrines and action. The other part is external.
India has been found wanting in both because it has so far seen terrorist attacks as episodic distractions. The unfortunate reality is that we are in the midst of a long war which requires changed strategies and tactics. The sooner we begin to act on this realisation, the better.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 26, 2008

Revenge is a dish best served cold

Some Indians believe that November 26 is India’s Nine-Eleven. And, following from that, argue that India should respond just as the United States did — by making war on the country responsible for sheltering the terrorists. This sounds logical, and even reasonable, for something so horrendous as the Mumbai massacre deserves condign punishment, and hasn’t Barack Obama said that a sovereign nation like India has the right to protect itself?
The flaw in the argument is what realpolitik is all about. The US as a preponderant military power, with a blessed geography, can go half way around the world and make war on two countries, not just one, without facing any direct retribution. The wars have cost the US a great deal of money, but the loss of the lives of some 5,000 soldiers is hardly proportional to the death and destruction that has visited Iraq and Afghanistan.
India is not in that position. An air strike at a camp in Azad Kashmir is likely to be met by a retaliatory strike in Jammu & Kashmir. You bomb Muridke, and the Pakistanis are likely to hit an equivalent target in India. A ground attack on one part of the border could be met with by a counter thrust on another. In other words, there is no way in which we can give Pakistan a bloody nose without getting somewhat bloodied ourselves.
So, any war would become a slug-fest and the UN would soon step in. The international sympathy and support for India would melt away and the Mumbai massacre would mutate into an “Indo-Pakistani” problem. At this point, someone could append a clause to a UN resolution saying that not only must there be a ceasefire, but steps taken to settle the J&K dispute.

Capacity

Put simply, the US has the capacity to exercise military power and block any retaliation, military or diplomatic, whereas India does not. There is little value in using the military option, unless you can be sure that it is the bad guys who get the chastisement, not the chastiser. As of now only the most foolhardy military commander will offer such an assurance vis-à-vis Pakistan.
This is uncomfortable logic, but there it is. Its primary lessons come from the 2001-2002 near-war with Pakistan. India mobilized some 700,000 troops to teach Pakistan a lesson in the wake of the attack on the Parliament House. Islamabad mobilized its own army and used the opportunity to crack down on sectarian groups, even while permitting the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba to relocate in Azad Kashmir.
Later in 2002, on May 14, there was yet another attack, this time provocatively targeting the families of military personnel at the Kaluchak cantonment near Jammu. As many as 31 people, mostly families of jawans, were killed in the massacre carried out by three terrorists who had come from Pakistan.

The Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (aka Victoria Terminus) where most of the people were killed by two terrorists including Ajmal Kasab.

Despite an army ready to go to war, India did nothing. The reason was clear — there was no guarantee of a clear military outcome in our favour.
The reason why we cannot behave militarily as the Americans can is not only because we confront a nuclear-armed country, but also because India does not have the military capacity to carry out a military attack on Pakistan which will be free of the risk of retaliation.

Coalition

As President Pervez Musharraf put it in an interview to the Christian Science Monitor in September 2002 after the threat of war had passed “… my military judgment was that they [Indians] would not attack us… It was based on the deterrence of our conventional forces. The force levels that we maintain, in the army, navy, air force is of a level which deters aggression. Militarily…there is a certain ratio required for an offensive force to succeed. The ratios that we maintain are far above that — far above what a defensive force requires to defend itself....”
Even taking into account the Musharrafian bluster, there is more than a grain of truth in this assertion. The only way in which India could have overcome the tyranny of numbers is to have had much greater mobility and fire-power. But that is not the case. India’s armed forces follow archaic organizational principles and doctrines that do not allow them to combine their army, air force and navy to fight a single, integrated battle where all three services combine to deliver a single punch.
As it is, the army does not have adequate mobile artillery or real-time information systems to conduct long-range precision strikes. Our Air Force disdains supporting the army, and is, in any case, not geared for deep-penetration ground attacks of the kind the US and Israel specialize in.
It is an uncomfortable fact that Pakistan has fine-tuned a strategy of hitting us using proxies, even while holding out the threat of nuclear retaliation were we to use our military to hit back. The challenge for India is to craft another kind of strategy — one that understands that political authority in Pakistan is fragmented, and that while there are many elements that wish to live in peace with India, there are some that are determined to prevent this from happening. So, there is a need for a nuanced policy that encourages the former and isolates the latter. One way to do this is to take advantage of the international climate and build a global coalition to isolate the jehadi forces in Pakistan, even while encouraging those forces in Pakistan who are for peaceful co-existence.
The prospects for building such a coalition are very good. No country in the world, probably not even China, is comfortable with what is happening in Pakistan. This is the reason why they did not stand in the way of the UN Security Council putting the Jamaat-ud-dawa and Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed on a list of people and institutions associated with the Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
India and the world needs to investigate and analyse the Mumbai attacks thoroughly and act in a manner that will effectively prevent another attack, as well as ensure the dismantling of the jehadi infrastructure in Pakistan. This inevitably leads to the need to do something about the corporate culture of the Pakistan Army.

Beneficiary

The question to ask is: Who is the principal beneficiary of the Mumbai attack? It is not Asif Zardari or Geelani, or, notwithstanding the conspiracy theorists, the US, Israel or Hindu chauvinists. It is that part of the Pakistan Army which remains open to the jehadi temptation.
For the past year and more, these forces have been down in the dumps. They have been compelled to fight a deeply unpopular war against the Pakistani Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Going by the 2001 book, a massive terrorist attack on Mumbai ought to have provoked India into launching a limited military strike in Pakistan.
In such circumstances, the Pakistan Army could have ended their anti-Taliban campaign and marched off to counter the Indian challenge. They would once again have become heroes in the eyes of the public, and the US would have found it difficult to question the decision. A subsidiary consequence of this would have been an end to Asif Zaradari’s peace rhetoric relating to India.
Because generals usually learn to fight the last war better, the Pakistani plot has failed. India has not reacted militarily. The Pakistan Army must continue its war in the west, and at the same time face increasing international opprobrium and pressure with regard to their proxy warriors. The game has just begun, but with patience and fortitude, we can yet prevail. Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.
This article was first published in Mail Today December 18, 2008

And who will deal with the Kashmiri Taliban?

What’s to be done about Jammu & Kashmir? No one — especially not the government — seems to know what to do. As for political parties, so complicit are they in creating the disaster that it will be expecting too much to expect them to have a solution. Civil society seems to be in despair, some suggesting that India cede Kashmir to Pakistan or whoever. Unfortunately, things are not that simple. Constituents of a nation-state are not added and subtracted on the basis of the emotion of the moment. To do so would risk a huge price in terms of blood and destruction, as happened in the case of Bangladesh.
Looked at one way, things in the Valley of Kashmir are back to square one. Some observers compare the situation to the winter of 1989-90 when, through a 24-hour period on January 20-21, 1990, the Indian Union lost control of Srinagar to a huge separatist upsurge. But the similarities are only superficial. In some ways the situation in the Valley today is far more serious and the challenge to Indian authority much more fundamental. The rebellion of 1989-90 was led by the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front, a largely secular grouping seeking independence.
The upsurge today is under the leadership of Syed Ali Shah Geelani who was known to have fancied himself as the Amir-e-Jihad (leader of the jihad) in the early 1990s, and who has never made any bones about seeking the merger of the state with Pakistan. In 1990, the crowds were laced with armed gunmen who made it morally easier for the security forces to fire on them. Today, the crowd is unarmed and the militants know that any action on their part will only give the authorities an excuse to undertake a bloody crackdown.
Geelani has managed to effectively combine his Islamist agenda with the Kashmiri Muslim insecurity vis-à-vis Hindu-majority India. In this task he has been helped by Sangh Parivar activists who have succeeded in mixing minority Hindu resentment of Kashmiri domination of the state, with their pan-Indian Hindutva agenda. Now, both movements are feeding off each other.

Independence

There is, however, some saving grace. Pakistan which took control of the movement in the early nineties through the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Hizbul Mujahideen, is itself down and out. The United States and the western countries which sought to fish in the troubled waters of the Valley in the early 1990s, are now aware that any support to separatism, especially of the Geelani variety, will be to jump from the frying pan into the fire. Yet the display of Pakistani flags and the slogans calling for merger indicate that the movement of today is in the hands of Islamists. Pro-independence activists like Yasin Malik and Javed Mir of the JKLF know that the Pakistani embrace can be uncomfortably tight. If the Indian security forces destroyed the JKLF militancy on its side of the Line of Control, so did the ISI on the Pakistan side of the border. The JKLF was systematically dismantled, its cadres Islamised, and its prominent leaders like Amanullah Khan kept under virtual house arrest.
However, Pakistan distracted is not quite the same thing as saying that the ISI has lost focus. It has not. The Pakistani-end of the militancy is run from Azad Kashmir where the ISI has sub-contracted the effort to the Wahabist Lashkar-e-Taiba which has proved to be the most durable and effective of the groups that have operated in the Valley.
Indian liberals say that India should let go of a reluctant Valley. Conventional wisdom suggests that most Kashmiris would prefer independence to merger with Pakistan.
How long do you think independent Kashmir will survive? My estimate is about half a day. That will be the time it will take for the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants within the Valley to take charge of Kashmir, execute all the moderates and establish the Kashmiri Emirate where the Nizam-e-Mustafa (the rule as per the laws of the Prophet as interpreted by Mullah Omar) will be enforced. This is the logic the movement run by Geelani and the hard-line elements of the Jamaat-e-Islami will follow in the Valley.

Security

Walking off from Kashmir means leaving the state to a fate far worse than it has suffered till now. The state of Jammu & Kashmir acceded legally to the Indian Union. Thereafter it was the Indian authorities who promised a plebiscite to ratify that accession. For a variety of reasons, and not all of them were India’s fault, the referendum was not held. This is the reason why many countries do not recognise the state to be a part of India, or for that matter Pakistan. All of them want the two countries to work out a mutually acceptable settlement which they will respect.
In this interim, India remains in charge of the security of the state and it must fulfil this duty regardless of the cost. In the past 60 years, it has taken the might of the Indian Army to keep Pakistan at an arm’s length in the state, a task they have not quite been able to manage. The initial success of Operation Gibraltar in 1965 and the Kargil incursion of 1999 are proof of this, as is the impunity with which Pakistan has supported the militancy in the state by sending in armed men, weapons and explosives.
There is little alternative at present but to confront the agitations, but with the lessons of the past in mind. The first step the government needs to take is to detain extremist leaders in both Jammu and Kashmir.
Second, the security forces need to get the clear message that force must be discriminate and carefully exercised. There have been no dearth of instances in the Valley — the firing on January 21,1990, the so-called Gowkadal massacre, the firing on Mir Waiz Farooq’s funeral procession, the Bijbehara massacre of 1993 — when indiscriminate action has set back efforts at normalising the situation.
Third, the government needs to clearly signal that it intends to press on with its larger plan of settling the Kashmir issue through a dialogue with Pakistan. The process has achieved a great deal in the last four years and it would be rank folly to put it on hold at this juncture.

Settlement

Things will be normal only when they are indeed normal. An appearance of normalcy or an approach to one is not enough. The government must understand that resolving the Kashmir problem involves not just getting things under control, but the acquiescence of all the stake-holders — the people of Kashmir, Jammu, India and Pakistan — on a settlement.
This may appear to be a distant goal today, but till the beginning of this year it was not so. It has been wantonly destroyed by a set of foolish politicians and administrators and a set of mendacious extremists in Jammu & Kashmir.
This article first appeared in Mail Today August 22nd, 2008

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Scarcely a day goes by when we do not hear of some or the other alarming report of police high-handedness, and indeed, criminality. But perhaps the worst crime that our custodians of law are guilty of is to concoct false cases against people. Even worse is when many of these cases concern Muslims and the charges are related to terrorism. It does not take a genius to figure out that such actions, which are undoubtedly accompanied by torture at the hands of investigators, and harassment of the families of the people in question , are the worst possible advertisement for why the secular, democratic system is superior to whatever paradise that the terrorists have on offer. Without doubt they help to widen the pool of recruits for terrorism.

India may have made great strides as an economic power and the electoral aspects of its democracy are indeed a matter of satisfaction. But when it comes to the rule of law and the manner in which it is applied, we are definitely in the Third World category. Torture is the chosen method of solving all crimes, be they big or small, and planting of evidence and concoction of false cases routine. Just how skewed the system is against the minorities is borne out by the fact that perpetrators of the Mumbai blasts of 1993 have all been tried and punished, yet those, particularly Shiv Sena members, responsible for the horrific riots that triggered the blasts have yet to be charged, leave alone punished. And it is not just Muslims because we know that those guilty of the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 remain largely untouched.

In February 2006, the Delhi police announced the arrest of Irshad Ali and Mohammed Muarif Qamar, two alleged Al Badr terrorists, with great fanfare and spun out the usual story of how they had smuggled the RDX and the plans they had for using it. According to the Times of India the CBI found that the RDX was planted on them. The key to the CBI breakthrough was that an Intelligence Bureau official who lured Qamar to his arrest had used his own cell phone. When the authorities can frame people with such ease, we need to take all claims relating to terrorist arrests with a large dollop of salt.

A confirmation of how this works is now available in the Delhi High Court’s acquittal of six people accused of being a part of the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Red Fort in 2000. While the main accused has been sentenced to death, the High Court did not mince words in questioning the prosecution’s case, as well as the judgment of the lower court in finding them guilty.

According to the Indian Express the High Court Bench observed, “We became anxious to find out as to how these six accused were found guilty by the learned trial judge when despite our digging deep we could not find sufficient evidence against them.”

The pathology of the police’s attitude does not relate merely to terrorist cases, though they are the most serious. The manner in which the Delhi police continues to harass Uma Khurana, the victim of a sting, is an indicator of its mindset. Such incidents raise serious doubts about the convictions that have already taken place using the now repealed Terrorist and Disruptive Activities(Prevention) Act (TADA) and its successor Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA).

Such serious, and perhaps routine, instances of police chicanery is the reason why India cannot get a consensus on an anti-terror law. It is common knowledge that our State governments have used TADA and POTA to railroad political opponents, and any other inconvenient person or persons. In these statutes, a confession made by the accused in police custody was considered valid evidence. Fighting terrorism without a anti-terrorism law has handicapped Indian security authorities and has paradoxically encouraged extra-judicial killings of the suspects. But the security officials are themselves to blame for this. Having been empowered by TADA and POTA, they chose to misuse them flagrantly to the detriment of the country's security. The leaders of the police forces do not realise that the short cuts they take do not get them anywhere and that is the reason why they are stumped by the series of terrorist strikes in the last three years where nameless and ruthless people have set of blasts across the country and have yet to be brought to account.

There are no easy answers to resolving the problem. But a beginning can be made by a government that understands that there is a problem in the first place. The problem of errant police or security personnel is not new. The Roman poet Juvenal, who lived 2,000 years ago, is said to have first asked Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards?) All countries have gone through the process of getting their law officers to remain on the straight and narrow path. At the end of the day, the police needs to police itself, and the system must ensure that there are laws and procedures in place to ensure that.While there are many suggestions in police commissions about arbitrary transfers and and promotion of police officials, we think they are missing the point. There is no doubt that the system must do what is required to insulate police personnel from the vagaries of politics and politicians. But that is only one part of the problem.

There is also, more importantly, a need to institute deterrent penalties on police personnel for not doing their duty. Once such a system is in place, the police-politician nexus will come apart on its own.

My view is that the only way to police the police is a “zero tolerance” approach. While I believe that "zero tolerance" is not always the best way to fighting crime in general, I think it is the only way to deal with criminal activities of those who are are custodians of the law.

So, first, there should be be no tolerance of any wrongdoing by the police (and no means zero). Second, all cases of police high-handedness must be tried by special fast-track courts and third, and this is important, any violation of the law by police personnel must merit double the quantum of punishment that is reserved for other law breakers.