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Chaturanga

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Tag Archives: LoC

Taming the Dragon

01 Sun Oct 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Taming the Dragon

Tags

China, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC, Dragon on Our Doorstep, George Tanham, Ghazala Wahab, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kargil, Line of Actual Control, Line of Control, LoAC, LoC, military, Nathu La, OBOR, One Belt, One Road, Operation Meghdoot, Operation Vijay, Pakistan, People's Liberation Army, PLA, Pravin Sawhney, Russia, Siachen, Sumdorung Chu, United States

Sawhney, Pravin and Ghazala Wahab. Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017. 488 pp.

Let alone China, India cannot even win a war against Pakistan. This is the provocative opening sentence of Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power by Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab. While most Indians grudgingly admit to the vast disparity between their country and its giant northeastern neighbour, they are emotionally unprepared to accept that India might struggle to win a war with its Islamic twin to the west. Sawhney, a journalist with 13 years of service in the Indian Army, and Wahab, a career journalist covering security and terrorism, describe in their book the disturbing lack of strategic thought in India’s defence policy. While the material is nothing new for seasoned analysts, it brings to to the general public in a readable manner what the authors see as shortcomings in the country’s security and their proposed solutions.

The crux of the central point of Dragon on our Doorstep is made at the outset – Sawhney and Wahab begin with the argument that bean-counting the number of tanks, artillery pieces, fighter jets, and other hardware may make for colourful charts and captivating news coverage but says little about military strength. The authors differentiate between military power, which Pakistan has developed, and military force, in which India enjoys numerical superiority. The latter is merely the stockpiling of war materiel while the former is concerns the optimal utilisation of that force through well considered defence policy and political directive.

If the famous Prussian military theorist was right that war is the continuation of politics by other means, Sawhney and Wahab have put their finger on the fundamental weakness in Indian security that propagates to all other aspects and levels. The authors’ observation that India’s political will and institutional structure is ambivalent at best reinforces an observation made by an American analyst, George Tanham, in that has been received with some rancour in the Indian establishment. In a now famous 1992 essay for Rand titled, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay, Tanham bemoans that India has always lacked in strategic thinking. This has only been to the advantage of Delhi’s enemies. As Sawhney and Wahab contend, “India’s political and military leaders, in cahoots with its diplomats, have sold falsehoods to their own people” about the country’s security.

Establishment weakness is partly due to incompetence: in its crusade to establish civilian primacy over the military, the government has effectively eliminated the armed forces from decision-making process and replaced them with generalist civil servants who are simply unaware of the implications of policies. Dragon on our Doorstep gives several examples of diplomatic errors that were caused by having little knowledge of precedence, history, and facts on the ground.

The lack of a coordinated security policy sometimes results in different government departments working at cross purposes with each other. The lines of authority are also inordinately ambiguous; for example, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police falls under the Ministry of Home Affairs during peacetime but is seconded to the Ministry of Defence in wartime. Not only do such regulations denude cohesiveness and self-awareness among units at the border but they create multiple chains of command that report to different bureaucracies that do not always have the same goals.

Sawhney and Wahab contrast the Indian condition with a conference they attended in China. From the beginning to the end, all representatives of the Chinese media had only one message to impress upon their guests, from the political leaders and bureaucrats to military officials and the media. Such is Beijing’s coordinated strategy, aligning everything from the battlefield to the airwaves.

Not only are Chinese forces well-coordinated, they have, through arms exports and constant training, achieved a high degree of interoperability with the Pakistani Army. This means that India’s enemies retain the physical option to fight on two fronts against a common enemy, holding only the political decision in abeyance. Delhi, on the other hand, suffers from poor coordination between its units, its services, and with foreign powers. Blurred chains of command and the lack of a joint chief of staff has hurt military planning severely, and Raisina’s reticence to establish regular and comprehensive exercises with foreign militaries has left India completely unprepared even if foreign assistance were immediately forthcoming in the event of war.

Sawhney and Wahab take readers on a tour of India’s security blunders and make a convincing case that someone, somewhere, who should know what is going on in fact does not. As the authors explain, weakness at the top has percolated to all levels – from strategic to operational and tactical. The elimination of military inputs from foreign policy and even, to an extent, defence policy, has created a dangerous blind spot in the manner India views the world.

One of the concerns is that India does not seem to learn from its mistakes; perhaps the structure of the defence establishment is such that it does not retain an institutional history. For example, Operation Vijay (1999) was preceded by an Operation Meghdoot. Just as Indian soldiers returning to the mountain tops of Kargil in the summer of 1999 discovered that Pakistani soldiers had infiltrated into India during the winter and occupied the heights, Indian soldiers at Siachen had already had a similar experience in 1983. Sawhney and Wahab describe how Indian delegations were surprised to bump into their Pakistani counterparts in Europe shopping for the same winter accoutrements. The inability to learn from experience is a death knell for any organisation.

There is nothing particularly new by way of data or analysis in Dragon on our Doorstep for scholars or even seasoned observers of Indian foreign and security policy. However, the solutions offered are bound to raise hackles and ignite spirited debates. Ultimately, however, this is perhaps what Sawhney and Wahab seek – greater discussion of issues of vital importance among citizens and decision-makers alike.

For example, it is suggested that the path to India becoming a leading power is Pakistan because Delhi would not be able to focus on global issues or dedicate resources to them without a stable neighbourhood. This would indeed be ideal but the observation underestimates Pakistan’s hatred of India. The authors remind readers of how close both nations were to peace during the Agra summit in 2001 with Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf but India was wary of trusting any offer from across the border so soon after the Kargil conflict.

On a related issue, Dragon on the Doorstep warns that Kashmir is potentially destabilising for India and goes on to criticise the highly controversial enactment of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the state. Again, the ideal of diplomacy over bullets is proposed without taking into account relentless cross-border instigation. Sawhney and Wahab also work on the assumption that Kashmir is the root of India’s problems with Pakistan, something that has always been rejected by India and recently been dismissed by even Western scholars such as Christine Fair and Daniel Markey.

Provocatively, the authors write, “India needs to understand that the road to managing an assertive China runs through Pakistan.” This is not the first time this suggestion has been made. Bharat Karnad, a scholar at the Centre for Policy Research, has long advocated some emollience with Pakistan so that India may better focus on the real threat to its security from China. As Sawhney and Wahab see it, India has three options towards China. One, it can form a closer partnership with the United States to contain Chinese ambitions; however, India will always have a deficit of trust with a country that is as supportive of Pakistan as the United States has been.

Two, India can go it alone – build the requisite military and economic strength to become a true rival to the dragon; this is easier said than done and the umpteen structural weaknesses in the Indian state will make this a decades-long process, assuming there is no wavering of political will in the meantime. Three, India can bluff its way along without aggravating China too much; the authors leave the substance of this ambiguous but it possibly means maintaining the status quo and playing the unsatisfying balancing act between Beijing and Washington. The language leaves one suspecting that this would be the authors’ choice.

While the title may imply a hawkish position on China, some of the authors’ suggestions are surprising, some may even say naive. For example, Sawhney and Wahab recommend that India join Chinese infrastructural initiatives like One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and even the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) because it would give Delhi leverage to open negotiations on Tibet and facilitate a stable peace with Pakistan.

The same credulity is witnessed when Dragon on the Doorstep accept every positive claim about the Chinese and Pakistani armies while questioning the Indian army at every turn. The simple fact of the matter is that India managed to “win” its wars with Pakistan and hold its ground with China in later conflagrations such as at Nathu La in 1967, Sumdorung Chu in 1987, and Doka La in 2017. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has no doubt advanced leaps and bounds since the modernisation begun by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1970s – which Dragon on our Doorstep discusses at length – but despite its clear strategic vision, the PLA still suffers from lack of decent hardware, regular political indoctrination, insufficient training, a crisis of loyalty, and corruption much like the Pakistani Army.

It is important to understand the assumptions behind these evaluations, for they are not limited to the authors alone. In this world view, the United States is seen as untrustworthy, and India’s nuclear deal with it a failure. Russia is the model relationship, and China is a regrettable enemy. With these parameters, Dragon on our Doorstep makes a far more compelling argument than without. Sawhney and Wahab do not explore these assumptions beyond a superficial glance, unfortunately.

Otherwise, it might be countered that the United States remains the only country that has the economic and military wherewithal to catalyse India’s hesitant rise to an international power to reckon with. Furthermore, its relations with India and Pakistan over the decades have been coloured by Delhi’s (Jawaharlal Nehru’s) assumptions about the United States. Regarding Russia, there are more thorns in that relationship than are publicly discussed. The ballooning cost of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier was just one incident among several disagreements on transfers of technology, quality of equipment, and cost. Finally, on China, it is unfathomable that a rising superpower would ever tolerate a powerful country on its border. Regardless of how much both countries can achieve together, Beijing can never countenance Delhi’s power.

Dragon on our Doorstep has a questionable foreign policy analysis but that should not detract readers from its strength – the discussion of the nitty-gritty of military planning and preparation, from foot soldier to president. The expertise of both the authors is on display as they marshal facts and anecdotes to make their argument that security-wise, India is ill-prepared at all levels. Sawhney and Wahab present a comprehensive accounting of India’s weaknesses, from border logistics to Islamist and Maoist insurgencies that draw soldiers away from military operations to counter-terrorism, from an anaemic domestic defence manufacturing industry to over-confidence in India’s armed forces.

A more conscientious editor would have certainly helped Dragon on our Doorstep sharpen the argument and reining in the authors when they got carried away by their narrative. What should be obvious by now is that Sawhney and Wahab are primarily interested in revealing the inefficiencies and incompetence in the Indian security structure despite the ominous, admonitory title implying China. In this, the book certainly succeeds, and is a valuable addition to the security buff’s reading list .

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Calling Pakistan’s Escalation Bluff

29 Thu Sep 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Pakistan, Security, South Asia

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

India, LoC, nuclear, Pakistan, terrorism

On Thursday morning, the Indian Army announced that it had conducted several strikes on terrorist camps across the Line of Control. According to the statement by the Director General for Military Operations, Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, operations took place in four sectors along the LoC – Bhimber, Hotspring, Kel, and Lipa – at 00 30 on September 28 and destroyed seven terrorist bases that were used to stage infiltrations into India. All facilities were between 500 and 3,000 metres from the LoC. Casualties are reported to include two Pakistani soldiers and 38 terrorists. Commandos were dropped at the LoC from where they crossed over into Pakistani-occupied Kashmir under the watchful eye of Indian drones. The action was undertaken after receiving “credible and specific information” about terrorists at the locations planning attacks on major Indian cities.

Pakistan’s initial reaction has been to deny these strikes, citing “usual” Indian cross-border shelling instead as the cause of death of two of its soldiers. This buys their leadership time to decide on how to respond, especially in light of the United States’ prompt statement expressing support for Indian counter-terrorism efforts. Though worded vaguely, its timing and general import leaves little doubt that Washington knew about and approved of India’s military actions Wednesday night.

The Indian strike is truly genius – while representing almost nothing tactically, it has truly set the cat among the pigeons diplomatically and strategically. At an empirical level, India’s action is a cross-border strike only by the grace of semantics – its special forces penetrated into Pakistani-held territory only just beyond a good sniper’s range and killed 38 terrorists, a number that could probably be replaced in hours. Normally, a cross-border strike evokes memories of Neptune Spear, Ajax, Moked, or Thunderbolt. Nonetheless, this is nothing to be scoffed at – I had written in a previous article that India cannot hope to dissuade Pakistan from terrorism with cross-border strikes and should instead attrit Pakistan and its terrorist allies. Wednesday’s strike fits the mould perfectly.

The ingenuity of India’s move comes in its diplomatic package. First, it sought to persuade the United States of the justness of its cause – Washington can be a moralising bully as much as India’s early prime ministers were. Second, it announced the strike publicly and reiterated that the operations were limited and had been halted – this dampened any escalatory opportunism by Pakistan. Furthermore, it was a booster shot for national morale, sagging after decades of receiving blows from across the border. Third, Delhi briefed the envoys of 22 nations, including the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council,  through its foreign secretary S Jaishankar on Wednesday’s mission. This would consolidate international opinion behind Indian actions, especially since Pakistan has a glowing reputation for supporting terrorism. The briefing was presumably to also reassure the global community that the military action was indeed limited, the conviction of which would lead to their diplomatic pressure on Islamabad to abjure from further provoking Delhi.

Strategically, India has called Pakistan’s bluff that it would respond with nuclear weapons if the former dared to conduct raids into the latter’s territory. Wednesday’s raid is so small and insignificant that a nuclear response would seem insane by any standards. As several analysts in favour of striking back at Pakistan, including myself, have argued earlier, India must utilise the conflict space below Pakistan’s nuclear threshold if it is to have any hope of curbing Pakistani shenanigans. This is exactly what Delhi has now done, challenging Islamabad to actually defend in public terrorists with nuclear weapons. And it seems, Islamabad has blinked.

There is no reason this bluff could not have been called earlier, but previous administrations imagined – and Pakistan allowed them to do so – that even the slightest response to the asymmetric war being waged from across the LoC would incur Pakistani nuclear retaliation. The Narendra Modi government has understood that the threshold had to be higher than that for it to have any meaning. Yet in all caution, Modi authorised only very shallow strikes at first – if Pakistan fails to live up to its rhetoric, future strikes may be even deeper and more significant as India improves its capability to conduct such strikes. Wednesday’s raid has disregarded Pakistan’s nuclear red lines and in all likelihood, pushed them back a bit.

Why did Modi not act earlier? Perhaps because he wanted to, on the world stage, give diplomacy a chance; perhaps the Indian military was not ready in the first two years of the Modi administration; or perhaps he wanted to dispel the stereotypes about him for domestic political reasons. This is all speculation and irrelevant to the national security debate. What matters is that the Indian government has finally acted boldly – and wisely – on the Pakistani-sponsored terrorism question and it is a much appreciated breath of fresh air.


This post appeared on FirstPost on September 30, 2016.

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Escalation, Retaliation, And Deterrence

10 Fri Oct 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Pakistan, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Escalation, Retaliation, And Deterrence

Tags

Border Security Force, BSF, India, Line of Control, LoC, Pakistan

Last week, the Pakistani Army started shelling Indian positions along the Line of Control – the de facto border between India and Pakistan. This is a customary tactic for aiding terrorists to cross over from Pakistan – occupied Kashmir into India. What was not usual, however, was India’s response to its neighbour’s violation of the border and ceasefire agreement – Delhi ordered its Border Security Force to take all appropriate measures to subdue the enemy offensive.

Indian troops responded to the Pakistani firing on their posts with a barrage of artillery fire that has destroyed several of the Pakistani Army’s permanent positions along the LoC. Several civilians have also been killed in border towns on both sides as both armies tried to take their intimidation directly to the civilians.

Predictably, there have also been several counsels of restraint and proportionate response with concern expressed about escalation implicitly alluding to Pakistan’s low nuclear threshold.

While such analysis has been the mainstay of international and domestic commentary during every skirmish between the two South Asian neighbours, it has little to offer by way of solutions: we all understand that war is bad, that precious national resources are wasted on armaments, and that conflict escalation between nuclear rivals has horrific worst-case scenarios but what does one do, short of abject surrender and supplication, to pacify a crisis riven nuclear state that engages in asymmetric warfare?

The Modi government has refused to become a victim of escalation terror and so far responded well to the situation. By not expanding the scope of the firefight yet increasing its intensity until it delivered tangible results – the destruction of permanent posts – India has forced Pakistan to either back down or be responsible for further escalation.

This is undoubtedly an unstable situation, relying on Islamabad for peace to prevail. However, the nuclearisation of the Islamic Republic – with tacit approval from the United States and direct assistance from China – has removed the ball from India’s court in a large way.

The fear of conflict escalation to nuclear proportions is not insignificant but has been exaggerated beyond reason. It is nothing short of nuclear terrorism by Pakistan to hold the slightest Indian military action, even static defensive manoeuvres, as grounds for nuclear release. There can be little existential threat perception In Islamabad without a corresponding Indian deployment of additional troops on the LoC, cancellation of personnel leave, air force readiness, and the several other telltale signs of preparations for war. A robust response to cross-border firing or infiltration alone hardly qualifies as escalation.

In reality, Islamabad’s nuclear threshold must necessarily be higher to allow operational and diplomatic flexibility. It is unlikely military planners in Delhi take Pakistan’s stated posture any more seriously than military planners in Islamabad do India’s doctrine of massive retaliation.

The role of India’s border security forces has been ill-defined until now. With orders from Delhi ambiguous, security posts restricted their actions to tit-for-tat numerically proportional responses to Pakistani aggression. While this has served the personal desire for revenge, it has not prevented a regular recurrence of bloodshed. If India intends to genuinely deter enemy fire, it must aim to deliver punitive yet localised counterstrikes. The disturbance or destruction of the enemy’s border logistics and infrastructure will at least give pause to their activities if not their thinking. India may not allow the rebuilding of the destroyed permanent bunkers or depots, thereby exacting a cost upon the enemy for each of its misadventures.

The ability for a small and unthreatening border post to inflict punishing blows needs to be finely honed with rigorous training and superior quality equipment. It is no secret that the Indian Army suffers from low reserves of ammunition and outdated equipment due to the government’s bureaucratic sluggishness and irrational policies. Poor border infrastructure makes logistics even more challenging than it has to be. These factors reduce the credibility of India’s deterrence and must be addressed to give foreign forces a uniform experience all along India’s borders.

However, such measures can offer relief in the short to medium term at best: a game-changing play is to be ultimately found in better relations with Iran, closer cooperation with Afghanistan, and extending empathy towards the plight of the Ballochi people. Just what form the ties, cooperation, and empathy will take will be in Islamabad’s hands.

There is a lot of misplaced pride in some sections of the moral and civilisational lessons Indian culture can offer the world – restraint is the jewel that adorns Indian statecraft. Yet let us also consider that moderation is seen to be a virtue only in those who have an alternative. For too long has Delhi shown that it does not…the latest incident along the LoC is a welcome change.


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on October 12, 2014.

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