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Shankar Roychowdhury
"The recent beheadings are a deliberate, well-planned action designed to provoke a major response from the Indian side"
Jingoism” is the new intellectual fashion statement emerging in the aftermath of the recent atrocity at Mendhar, Jammu and Kashmir, disparaging displays of public emotion at moments of national crisis. Fortunately, most Indian soldiers are not sufficiently fluent or familiar with the English language to comprehend the implications of the epithet as applied to their efforts.
The gruesome beheading of two Indian soldiers was calculated affront of supreme contempt on the part of the Pakistan Army, and though the Indian government maintains that it was the act of Pakistani regular troops, the very nature of the act warrants a second look to determine responsibility and fashion an appropriate response.
The incident has raised temperatures amongst Indian soldiers along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir and 13 Rajputana Rifles and their comrades are certainly straining at the leash to retaliate in kind. But “aman ki aasha” remains “the bigger picture” of the political leadership of this country who seems to be almost desperately searching for any utterance from across the border which could be construed as even faintly reconciliatory. However, there has been no such luck so far in the quest for the holy grail of peace with Pakistan.
So, stepping back from the heat, dust and hair-trigger tensions of the LoC, India needs to take serious stock of the way forward vis-a-vis Pakistan after this horrific incident.
On its part, the Pakistani military leadership is under no such constraints. This was clearly demonstrated during a recent interview with a sensation-mongering Indian news channel by Pakistan’s former President and now discredited Army Chief, Pervez Musharraf, who might well be a political persona non grata in his homeland, but nevertheless functioned as a determined and extremely aggressive spokesman for his Army. Mr Musharraf is attempting to rebuild his own political future, and his energetic rebuttal of the Indian media commentator might pay him political dividends when he returns to Pakistan, as he stridently proclaimed on screen.
That being said, tit-for-tat retaliations by either side to incidents of this nature are part of the folklore which has grown in both armies, deployed eyeball to eyeball on this tinderbox frontier. Clashes and exchange of fire here are nothing new to both armies, and casualties on both sides are accepted as inevitable. But the recent beheadings put the Mendhar incident beyond the pale, adding a whole new dimension of appalling savagery to the long-running confrontation. It is clear that the incident did not result from some sudden ungovernable individual impulse or the runaway action of a rogue unit, but is a deliberate, well-planned action designed to provoke a major response from the Indian side, for ulterior reasons which can only be speculated upon at the moment. Pure logic may indicate that India should not retaliate in a like manner, but ground environments in the country reflect a popular sense of outrage and demand that the country respond appropriately, with the overriding proviso of a time and place of own choosing.
Mendhar is an obscure mountain village on the LoC in the Poonch region of Jammu and Kashmir, little known except to its residents, or to those located there by the vagaries of soldiering in the Indian Army. This almost ridiculously nondescript little habitation is located squarely athwart the main winter route of ****** infiltration into the Kashmir Valley via the Pir Panjal range which has invested Mendhar with an importance in the peace scenario, which is totally disproportionate to any value it may command in the commercial real-estate market.
But the vigil on the LoC by the Indian Army is not about gross commercial values of landed property, though the Jammu and Kashmir government has reiterated the demands of landowners for fair compensation for lands on which military posts of the Indian Army have been established for guarding the LoC. An unexceptionable demand in India, but it is not known whether such a demand could at all be raised across the ceasefire line in ****************** Kashmir as well as by local inhabitants of areas near the LoC whose lands have been appropriated on similar grounds. Going by existing knowledge, it is highly unlikely that it is so.
The purely military outlines of the Mendhar incident will provide a live tactical situation for future professional case studies, examination and analyses at the appropriate institutions of the Indian Army, like the Army War College in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. In all professional armies, patrolling is an arcane and astonishingly detailed activity, regarded as the acid test of war. The Indian Army lays great stress on this aspect of operations and prides itself on its proficiency. For the general public, details of the action are still emerging in the media, and are undoubtedly being discussed at length, often with a great deal of passion. But for the professional military, the in-house military analyses of Mendhar will be behind closed doors. It will be merciless, praise will be sparing and questions searching. It will be argued whether the incident was a deliberate Pakistani ambush of an Indian patrol, or a meeting engagement where two opposing patrols bumped into each other literally in the fog of war. After-action reports will be intensely scrutinised to assess conduct and reactions of leaders on the ground.
There is no “feel-good” effect after Mendhar and its effects on the country, the political leadership and, most importantly, the Army will be around for sometime to come. It will be safe to assume that there is just no possibility of any Indian response to the Mendhar executions which will be acceptable to an inflamed public opinion in India. How this plays out in the next general elections, now frighteningly close in 2014, remains to be seen. The electoral potential of the Mendhar incident will definitely be played out before full Houses of Parliament by both the government as well as the Opposition. Whatever the outcome, the names of the two victims will gradually sink into oblivion. The process has already commenced.
The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament
http://www.asianage.com/columnists/chasing-holy-grail-peace-pakistan-669
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ajai Shukla: Mapping the changes in Pakistan
During my travels in Pakistan last week, I could hardly miss the stark difference between Indian and Pakistani reactions to the killing and mutilation of two Indian soldiers on the Line of Control (LoC) in J&K. Oblivious to Indian jingoism, the Pakistani press covered, minute-by-minute, the Anna Hazare-style reality show that was Canada-based cleric Tahir ul-Qadri’s challenge to that country's political establishment. This is a metaphor for a changing Indo-Pak dynamic. For decades, India looked inward while Islamabad tom-tommed the looming India threat. Today as Pakistan, while lurching toward a form of democracy, focuses mainly on its burgeoning internal challenges, India increasingly obsesses about the terrorist threat from across the border. This, even as the tide of Pakistan-fomented violence recedes and Indian police and intelligence officials shift focus to disaffection within the country.
But the fortuitous outcome of Pakistan’s single-minded focus on Tahir ul-Qadri’s so-called Long March was that New Delhi's tough response to brutality on the LoC went almost unnoticed in Pakistan, allowing Islamabad (which has little appetite for roiling the waters) to settle for a pro-forma response. This avoided an acid exchange of tit-for-tat statements that would have united Pakistan’s divided anti-India constituency.
But that was luck, not design. New Delhi, which views Pakistan in the context of an outdated and intellectually lazy narrative of implacable hostility, needs a clearer understanding of a rapidly changing Pakistani playfield. The most important transformation relates to Pakistan’s most powerful organisation, the army; and the evolving relationship between Pakistan’s five key institutions, viz. the army, the polity, the judiciary, civil society and the media.
While the India threat remains a convenient drum for the Pakistan Army to beat, especially when New Delhi issues hawkish statements, General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi is increasingly focused on the tribal areas of the north-western frontier, now called Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. As Pakistani generals admit, their ill-conceived juggling act — which involved fighting the radically anti-establishment Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan (the “bad Taliban”
, while backing the Afghanistan-focused Haqqani Network (the “good Taliban” — has become unsustainable because of close linkages amongst jihadis. Tanzeems in the tribal area now coordinate closely with groups like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Lashkar-e-Toiba that are embedded within the Punjab heartland.
With the tribal areas already aflame, the generals worry that Taliban success in Afghanistan would inevitably blow back into Pakistan, first into the tribal areas and from there into the heartland.
Hasan Askari Rizvi, a perceptive observer of the Pakistan Army, explains, “The army fears that Afghan Taliban success would embolden the Pakistani Taliban. Through their links with extremist groups in Punjab, this would raise terrorism, radicalisation and extremism across Pakistan. Taliban success would also galvanise the Deobandi and Wahabi madrassas that do not today support the Taliban actively, like they did in the 1990s. The army believes that this would make the internal security situation in Pakistan unmanageable.”
This apprehension provides a crucial window for an Indo-Pakistan dialogue on Afghanistan. While both sides regard Afghanistan as a zero-sum game that has no winners, this gloomy outlook on a post-2014 Afghanistan could be brightened through a political initiative, preferably through back channels, to address both sides’ concerns. An agreement between New Delhi and Islamabad could backstop a mutually beneficial stabilisation of Afghanistan.
Top generals who have retired from the Pakistan army say it would be willing to support such a dialogue. Asked why GHQ did not signal its changed attitude, these officers retort that the Pakistan army’s changing attitude towards India will never be reflected through public pronouncements, so New Delhi should not hold its breath waiting for those. Instead, India should scrutinise Islamabad’s recent public positions, which are broadly cleared by Rawalpindi.
The Pakistan army’s current low-key posture does not mean that it has ceased to be the country’s most powerful institution. But while it continues to exercise political influence, its methods are getting subtler because of the rise of balancing forces. These include an activist judiciary and a media that has given voice to a previously disempowered civil society. These alternative power centres make it difficult for the army to envision single-handedly managing Pakistan.
Also deterring the Pakistani military from assuming more visible power is its understanding that the Pakistani economy is in trouble. GHQ possesses significant economic expertise, not only from managing its own considerable commercial empire but also because the generals study international thinking on Pakistan and interact regularly with foreign experts. Currently, the economic mess can be blamed on the politicians; but not if the army assumed power.
And so the generals watched as Tahir ul-Qadri held the government to ransom, occupying an Islamabad square with 50,000 followers (he had promised four million). The fiery chief of the Tehrik Minhaj-ul-Quran had hoped to paralyse the capital, forcing the army to move in. But this hope was belied and the polity joined hands, forcing him to climb down and sign an agreement that had been offered to him a week earlier. This was a triumph for democracy, even though the politicians who sealed the deal were hardly men of spotless reputation. In earlier times, many of them would have asked the Pakistan Army to intervene.
Interestingly, even as Pakistan’s military dims its public profile, New Delhi has taken to citing the Indian Army as the basis for its policy positions. In choosing not to sign a Siachen Agreement (wisely, but that is another debate!), New Delhi holds up the army’s objections as a fig leaf. In hardening its condemnation of Pakistan after initially soft-pedalling the recent LoC incident, the government took its cue from the army. A disempowered Indian military probably basks in this show of concern, but it would do well to remember that in the aspects that really matter — e.g., long-term strategic planning; equipment modernisation; and soldiers’ welfare — the military remains out in the cold.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/ajai-shukla-mappingchanges-in-pakistan/499548/
"The recent beheadings are a deliberate, well-planned action designed to provoke a major response from the Indian side"
Jingoism” is the new intellectual fashion statement emerging in the aftermath of the recent atrocity at Mendhar, Jammu and Kashmir, disparaging displays of public emotion at moments of national crisis. Fortunately, most Indian soldiers are not sufficiently fluent or familiar with the English language to comprehend the implications of the epithet as applied to their efforts.
The gruesome beheading of two Indian soldiers was calculated affront of supreme contempt on the part of the Pakistan Army, and though the Indian government maintains that it was the act of Pakistani regular troops, the very nature of the act warrants a second look to determine responsibility and fashion an appropriate response.
The incident has raised temperatures amongst Indian soldiers along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir and 13 Rajputana Rifles and their comrades are certainly straining at the leash to retaliate in kind. But “aman ki aasha” remains “the bigger picture” of the political leadership of this country who seems to be almost desperately searching for any utterance from across the border which could be construed as even faintly reconciliatory. However, there has been no such luck so far in the quest for the holy grail of peace with Pakistan.
So, stepping back from the heat, dust and hair-trigger tensions of the LoC, India needs to take serious stock of the way forward vis-a-vis Pakistan after this horrific incident.
On its part, the Pakistani military leadership is under no such constraints. This was clearly demonstrated during a recent interview with a sensation-mongering Indian news channel by Pakistan’s former President and now discredited Army Chief, Pervez Musharraf, who might well be a political persona non grata in his homeland, but nevertheless functioned as a determined and extremely aggressive spokesman for his Army. Mr Musharraf is attempting to rebuild his own political future, and his energetic rebuttal of the Indian media commentator might pay him political dividends when he returns to Pakistan, as he stridently proclaimed on screen.
That being said, tit-for-tat retaliations by either side to incidents of this nature are part of the folklore which has grown in both armies, deployed eyeball to eyeball on this tinderbox frontier. Clashes and exchange of fire here are nothing new to both armies, and casualties on both sides are accepted as inevitable. But the recent beheadings put the Mendhar incident beyond the pale, adding a whole new dimension of appalling savagery to the long-running confrontation. It is clear that the incident did not result from some sudden ungovernable individual impulse or the runaway action of a rogue unit, but is a deliberate, well-planned action designed to provoke a major response from the Indian side, for ulterior reasons which can only be speculated upon at the moment. Pure logic may indicate that India should not retaliate in a like manner, but ground environments in the country reflect a popular sense of outrage and demand that the country respond appropriately, with the overriding proviso of a time and place of own choosing.
Mendhar is an obscure mountain village on the LoC in the Poonch region of Jammu and Kashmir, little known except to its residents, or to those located there by the vagaries of soldiering in the Indian Army. This almost ridiculously nondescript little habitation is located squarely athwart the main winter route of ****** infiltration into the Kashmir Valley via the Pir Panjal range which has invested Mendhar with an importance in the peace scenario, which is totally disproportionate to any value it may command in the commercial real-estate market.
But the vigil on the LoC by the Indian Army is not about gross commercial values of landed property, though the Jammu and Kashmir government has reiterated the demands of landowners for fair compensation for lands on which military posts of the Indian Army have been established for guarding the LoC. An unexceptionable demand in India, but it is not known whether such a demand could at all be raised across the ceasefire line in ****************** Kashmir as well as by local inhabitants of areas near the LoC whose lands have been appropriated on similar grounds. Going by existing knowledge, it is highly unlikely that it is so.
The purely military outlines of the Mendhar incident will provide a live tactical situation for future professional case studies, examination and analyses at the appropriate institutions of the Indian Army, like the Army War College in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. In all professional armies, patrolling is an arcane and astonishingly detailed activity, regarded as the acid test of war. The Indian Army lays great stress on this aspect of operations and prides itself on its proficiency. For the general public, details of the action are still emerging in the media, and are undoubtedly being discussed at length, often with a great deal of passion. But for the professional military, the in-house military analyses of Mendhar will be behind closed doors. It will be merciless, praise will be sparing and questions searching. It will be argued whether the incident was a deliberate Pakistani ambush of an Indian patrol, or a meeting engagement where two opposing patrols bumped into each other literally in the fog of war. After-action reports will be intensely scrutinised to assess conduct and reactions of leaders on the ground.
There is no “feel-good” effect after Mendhar and its effects on the country, the political leadership and, most importantly, the Army will be around for sometime to come. It will be safe to assume that there is just no possibility of any Indian response to the Mendhar executions which will be acceptable to an inflamed public opinion in India. How this plays out in the next general elections, now frighteningly close in 2014, remains to be seen. The electoral potential of the Mendhar incident will definitely be played out before full Houses of Parliament by both the government as well as the Opposition. Whatever the outcome, the names of the two victims will gradually sink into oblivion. The process has already commenced.
The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff and a former member of Parliament
http://www.asianage.com/columnists/chasing-holy-grail-peace-pakistan-669
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ajai Shukla: Mapping the changes in Pakistan
During my travels in Pakistan last week, I could hardly miss the stark difference between Indian and Pakistani reactions to the killing and mutilation of two Indian soldiers on the Line of Control (LoC) in J&K. Oblivious to Indian jingoism, the Pakistani press covered, minute-by-minute, the Anna Hazare-style reality show that was Canada-based cleric Tahir ul-Qadri’s challenge to that country's political establishment. This is a metaphor for a changing Indo-Pak dynamic. For decades, India looked inward while Islamabad tom-tommed the looming India threat. Today as Pakistan, while lurching toward a form of democracy, focuses mainly on its burgeoning internal challenges, India increasingly obsesses about the terrorist threat from across the border. This, even as the tide of Pakistan-fomented violence recedes and Indian police and intelligence officials shift focus to disaffection within the country.
But the fortuitous outcome of Pakistan’s single-minded focus on Tahir ul-Qadri’s so-called Long March was that New Delhi's tough response to brutality on the LoC went almost unnoticed in Pakistan, allowing Islamabad (which has little appetite for roiling the waters) to settle for a pro-forma response. This avoided an acid exchange of tit-for-tat statements that would have united Pakistan’s divided anti-India constituency.
But that was luck, not design. New Delhi, which views Pakistan in the context of an outdated and intellectually lazy narrative of implacable hostility, needs a clearer understanding of a rapidly changing Pakistani playfield. The most important transformation relates to Pakistan’s most powerful organisation, the army; and the evolving relationship between Pakistan’s five key institutions, viz. the army, the polity, the judiciary, civil society and the media.
While the India threat remains a convenient drum for the Pakistan Army to beat, especially when New Delhi issues hawkish statements, General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi is increasingly focused on the tribal areas of the north-western frontier, now called Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. As Pakistani generals admit, their ill-conceived juggling act — which involved fighting the radically anti-establishment Tehrik-e- Taliban Pakistan (the “bad Taliban”
, while backing the Afghanistan-focused Haqqani Network (the “good Taliban” — has become unsustainable because of close linkages amongst jihadis. Tanzeems in the tribal area now coordinate closely with groups like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Lashkar-e-Toiba that are embedded within the Punjab heartland.With the tribal areas already aflame, the generals worry that Taliban success in Afghanistan would inevitably blow back into Pakistan, first into the tribal areas and from there into the heartland.
Hasan Askari Rizvi, a perceptive observer of the Pakistan Army, explains, “The army fears that Afghan Taliban success would embolden the Pakistani Taliban. Through their links with extremist groups in Punjab, this would raise terrorism, radicalisation and extremism across Pakistan. Taliban success would also galvanise the Deobandi and Wahabi madrassas that do not today support the Taliban actively, like they did in the 1990s. The army believes that this would make the internal security situation in Pakistan unmanageable.”
This apprehension provides a crucial window for an Indo-Pakistan dialogue on Afghanistan. While both sides regard Afghanistan as a zero-sum game that has no winners, this gloomy outlook on a post-2014 Afghanistan could be brightened through a political initiative, preferably through back channels, to address both sides’ concerns. An agreement between New Delhi and Islamabad could backstop a mutually beneficial stabilisation of Afghanistan.
Top generals who have retired from the Pakistan army say it would be willing to support such a dialogue. Asked why GHQ did not signal its changed attitude, these officers retort that the Pakistan army’s changing attitude towards India will never be reflected through public pronouncements, so New Delhi should not hold its breath waiting for those. Instead, India should scrutinise Islamabad’s recent public positions, which are broadly cleared by Rawalpindi.
The Pakistan army’s current low-key posture does not mean that it has ceased to be the country’s most powerful institution. But while it continues to exercise political influence, its methods are getting subtler because of the rise of balancing forces. These include an activist judiciary and a media that has given voice to a previously disempowered civil society. These alternative power centres make it difficult for the army to envision single-handedly managing Pakistan.
Also deterring the Pakistani military from assuming more visible power is its understanding that the Pakistani economy is in trouble. GHQ possesses significant economic expertise, not only from managing its own considerable commercial empire but also because the generals study international thinking on Pakistan and interact regularly with foreign experts. Currently, the economic mess can be blamed on the politicians; but not if the army assumed power.
And so the generals watched as Tahir ul-Qadri held the government to ransom, occupying an Islamabad square with 50,000 followers (he had promised four million). The fiery chief of the Tehrik Minhaj-ul-Quran had hoped to paralyse the capital, forcing the army to move in. But this hope was belied and the polity joined hands, forcing him to climb down and sign an agreement that had been offered to him a week earlier. This was a triumph for democracy, even though the politicians who sealed the deal were hardly men of spotless reputation. In earlier times, many of them would have asked the Pakistan Army to intervene.
Interestingly, even as Pakistan’s military dims its public profile, New Delhi has taken to citing the Indian Army as the basis for its policy positions. In choosing not to sign a Siachen Agreement (wisely, but that is another debate!), New Delhi holds up the army’s objections as a fig leaf. In hardening its condemnation of Pakistan after initially soft-pedalling the recent LoC incident, the government took its cue from the army. A disempowered Indian military probably basks in this show of concern, but it would do well to remember that in the aspects that really matter — e.g., long-term strategic planning; equipment modernisation; and soldiers’ welfare — the military remains out in the cold.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/ajai-shukla-mappingchanges-in-pakistan/499548/
