Bastion of Free Speech
Mohan Guruswamy
War rather than being the extension of policy by other means actually means the failure of policy. Proof of good policy is the achievement of national objectives without resort to arms, though the USA has in the recent years equated good policy with waging war without loss of the lives of its own to achieve national objectives. When a layman talks about war he generally has in mind a general war, the last of which was the Iraq-Iran War. Please note I have used the masculine gender in the previous sentence because it is usually men who talk so easily of war, unless of-course you belong to the Mahila Morcha of the RSS. A general war is an all-out war where every national resource and every means available is deployed for the express purpose of destroying the adversary. Both the World Wars were general wars in the truest sense. Few nations seem stupid enough to embark on wars of such destructive dimensions, but in Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini we had, for a brief period, worthy successors to Hitler, Stalin and Tojo.
The end of the Second World War also saw the nuclearisation of some military forces and the emergence of super-powers. The ability to mutually assure each other an unacceptable level of destruction made general war extremely improbable not only between the adversarial super-powers but between their clients. The USA and then USSR engaged themselves in proxy wars for most of the Cold War period. The civil war in Angola, whose embers still smolder, was a classic illustration of such a proxy war. The Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 were also deemed proxy wars, though it often seemed that it were the tails that were wagging the dogs. When the USA waged war on Vietnam the USSR kept up very high levels of military aid to that country till finally the Americans slinked away in defeat. The USA reciprocated in Afghanistan. But never once in this entire period did the USA and USSR directly engage in hostilities. Such proxy wars have had to be limited lest things went out of hand and the super-powers themselves got suckered into a destructive conflict.
It was not as if only the clients of the super-powers waged such limited wars on each other. In 1982 the United Kingdom and Argentina got embroiled in a war over the Falkland Islands. Both were and continue to be under the wing of the USA. The UK is nowadays mostly an instrument of US foreign policy, even though it harbors pretensions of being a major and independent power. France is more of this though its interests more often than not coincide with those of the USA.
A limited war is generally restricted to a few theatres, and civilian centers and strictly economic targets are not attacked. Such wars have their own set of unwritten Mahabharata rules and the warring parties adhere to them to restrict collateral damage to a minimum. India and Pakistan are great exponents of such wars never having fought an all-out general war despite slugging it out three times. In 1948 such was the "gentlemanly spirit" that India was actually supplying Pakistan with arms and ammunition as stipulated by the divide and quit agreement devised by the British at a time when the two armies were fighting in Jammu and Kashmir. In 1965 we fought without letting the war get out of hand and involving Pakistan's eastern wing. In India civilian involvement mostly meant providing departing troops with refreshments on railway platforms and to supplementing the Army Supply Corps notoriously inadequate rations in the frontline areas. A few bombs were accidentally dropped on Amritsar but beyond that few non-military targets were hit. Either side hit few civilian targets even in 1971 when we waged a decisive war on the West Pakistan Army then in occupation of East Pakistan.
We in India too have waged our proxy wars. In 1960 we became involved, along with the USA, in supporting the Khampa rebellion in Tibet. Whether we did this because the Chinese were training and arming Naga insurgents or whether it was the other way around is still a bit hazy. But waging war on other nations by arming guerilla forces and terrorist groups came into the Indian sub-continent in a big way in the early 1980's when we trained and armed Tamil fighters to wage war in Srilanka. Sheer bloody-mindedness rather than any grand vision inspired this. In the end the wages of our sins came back to visit us. The Pakistanis emulated us by doing what we did to the Srilankans by first fomenting Sikh terrorism and then by stoking the Kashmiri insurgency. Even then in the mid 1980's we had begun to implicitly recognize Pakistan to be a nuclear power with a crude nuclear bomb or two and the option of waging a war, even the kind of limited wars we had gotten used to fighting, began slipping away. Ever since both countries became overtly nuclear in 1998, a limited war even as we know it is no longer an option. Even if India and Pakistan are willing to chance it, the rest of the world will not allow us to endanger them.
Pakistan abetted terrorism in Punjab, helped by some maladroit handling by the then Congress regime, and was finally sorted out by an equally unconventional campaign led by KPS Gill. Gill's rough and rugged individuality and supreme indifference to the sensitivities of most concerned people, gave him a victory, that in strategic terms was far greater than what was achieved by Sam Maneckshaw in 1971. Most of the country would like to credit the 1971 victory to Indira Gandhi and Maneckshaw, though my friend "Jake" Jacob has his own views about this. (Read his recently published account of the 1971 East Pakistan campaign and you will know what I mean). But for KPS Gill, people like Julio Ribeiro and SS Ray would have been still making a mess of things in Punjab. There is a time and place for a Gill and the country gained by his strong-arm methods. There will always be two views about his methods. Some will think of him as having sorted out the situation in Punjab, whereas some others, like a lawyer friend will think of him as having "slaughtered" out a solution.
We have completely internalized the idea that the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir is entirely a proxy war being waged by Pakistan with irregular forces. Nothing can be further from the truth than this. There is no doubt that external element that sustains the insurgency, but nevertheless it is a homegrown one. Even today the majority of insurgents are indigenous with foreign forces, both stiffening and supplementing them. Remember it is no longer a movement for democracy or for asserting the right of "self-determination" or even a freedom struggle, but a plain Islamic jihad. A modern war to support a medieval notion. It is because it is just this; this insurgency must be completely crushed. The age of reason demands it. Compromise with such ideologies will give rise to similar primitive ideologies. Just take a good look at the Shiv Sena or Bajrang Dal and you are looking at the future, if the Islamic jihad is not halted in its tracks.
As things stand today, Pakistan is as much a victim of the jihadist upsurge being witnessed in many parts of the world, as India is. Quite an ironical situation considering that the majority of that country cheers the jihad on India. Gen. Musharaff has done everything possible to reduce the influence of the jihadists in his country. But clearly there are many things that are quite out of his control. In a limited sort of way his situation resembles that of Yasser Arafat. If he moves too fast and hard on the fundamentalists and extremists, he risks losing all legitimacy. Just as it is in Israel's interest that Arafat become stronger, it is also in our interest that Parvez Musharaff becomes stronger.
Whether by choice or by circumstances he has had to come out against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the fountainheads of international Islamic terrorism. To be a Pakistani is to be a victim of a mindset and a creature with certain predictable responses. We can at best hope for more moderate enemies like Nawaz Sharif or Parvez Musharaff or even Benazir Bhutto or get the true bloody-minded Neanderthal like Zia-ul-Haq (may Allah have mercy on his soul) or Hamid Gul. Our best hope is a modernizing Pakistan and anyone who takes on the mullahs must be viewed sympathetically.
Insurgencies are unconventional wars fought by trained but not uniformed combatants hiding in the countryside or among the general population. Their targets are the security forces and vital government installations. The insurgency in the Naga Hills is a typical case in instance. There seldom is any random violence and even the Indian Army is forced to acknowledge the chivalry displayed by Naga fighters. Sometimes an insurgency gets combined with terrorism as we see in Kashmir. This is when many groups compete with each other for ascendancy over the movement. The smaller groups often resort to outright terrorism because that gets them noticed which in turn draws recruits and money. Terrorist actions are characterized by disproportionate and mindless violence on civilians such as the spate of assaults we have seen recently.
You can talk to insurgents, because you know who to look for and where to find them. But the only known way to deal with terrorists is to be equally unorthodox in methods. We have failed in this. Over the years we have substantially degraded our intelligence services, and have often misused them for narrow partisan purposes. For instance even today the Intelligence Bureau deploys far greater resources on the political opposition rather than the opposition to all politics. Our war on insurgency in J&K has largely been a failure because of the Central and State government's inability to get their acts together. Bad government, colossal leakages, obsession with bureaucratic turf and ineffective leadership has characterized the effort all these years. Under the current Home Minister these have reached new depths.
In recent weeks we have seen the BJP government turn the ratchet towards a military strike on Pakistan. This should be seen as a cry for western intervention, which will be the only result of such adventurism. Neither India nor Pakistan is capable of fighting a limited conventional war that will gain any known national objectives.
Under the BJP dispensation we have come to agree that the USA is paramount in world affairs and thus see the mere de-recognition of a terrorist outfit or the freezing of its savings bank account as a major national achievement. This mere gaining of the USA's attention has been elevated to a national objective. What else can one expect from a Jaswant Singh. This war, if it happens, will not the extension of policy by other means, but the failure of policy. And to rectify that we must look inwards and not outwards.
Copyright(c) Mohan Guruswamy, 2001. All rights reserved.