Tuesday June 02, 2009
To the Inuit we shall come in a moment. COINOPS first.
COINOPS is the military acronym for Counterinsurgency Operations.
It is heartening to note that the Pakistan Army has finally woken up to the call. Gone is the dilly dallying that one saw all these years. Gone also are the excuses that this was counterinsurgency combat and they were not cut out for such an unconventional warfare, and that the enemy were only our own countrymen and blah blah blah.
After having finally realized that the experiment of preparing a witches brew by mixing religious zealotry with geostrategic ambitions had gone horribly off beam, that the rats that they had turned into monsters had finally come calling on their own masters, Pakistan Army is now in top battle gear. Terminate, terminate, terminate are the buzzword on every signal dispatch from the higher HQ to the field command. The soldiers are now in Malakand, with their boots on the ground and guns blazing. In stunning actions conducted while on foot patrol, eyeball to eyeball with the unwashed godmen, they are dispatching post haste their strategic assets, their own creations, to less strategic oblivion. Godspeed is what one wishes them of course, and not merely because the scribe had been exhorting the army to adopt these very tactics for a long time now.
As the war has just begun, lets hasten to the lessons of some other COINOPS that have been recently fought and won. The reason is very simple. If the Pakistan Army does not win this counterinsurgency, it loses; while if the insurgents do not lose, they win.
Sri Lanka and Turkey instantly spring to mind. Apart from the fact that the lessons from Sri Lankas very recent counterinsurgency victory, other than that of grit and determination for the long haul, are still being collated, the Turk model is very close to Pakistans. The terrain in which the Turkish counterinsurgency was fought is much the same as Pakistans North. The Pakistan Army, therefore, can learn a thing or two from the Turks. (Note: The validity or otherwise of the cause of insurgents in these countries is beyond the scope of this piece.)
Turkey fought against PKK, whom the Turkish government called a Marxist-Leninist Kurdish terrorist group, a 20 year counter-terrorist war and won at the end.
The first PKK attack was reported in 1983. In the beginning the terrorist organization was weak and attacks were only occasional. Initially they were thought to be an insignificant terrorist group, a minor irritant. Turgut Ozal was the Turkish Prime Minister at the time (who later became president). He himself was a Kurd and explicitly ordered army not to be too harsh on PKK as he thought he could handle the situation through tact and diplomacy. Also, and just like the Pakistan Army, the Turkish army too was not initially ready or trained for an unconventional war. Therefore, only light police force was used against the insurgents.
The result was that by 1987 the PKK had evolved into a force to be reckoned with. This was the time, just like the Pakistani governments capitulation to the militants in Swat, Prime Minister Ozal made the biggest blunder of the counterinsurgency war. He agreed to a cease fire with PKK and started peace talks. He also declared his readiness to talk about anything including a possible federation. Not just the PKK but all of Turkeys neighbours took that as a sign of weakness. Some of them harbored a few unforgotten grudges against Turkey. One by one, a la Pakistans neighbours, these neighbours started to support PKK directly and indirectly. Again just like the Pakistani Taliban using the ceasefires to recoup and expand, by some estimates, the PKK trained approximately 30,000 insurgents during the ceasefire period. They had now become a formidable foe.
The PKK became so strong in fact that in 1989 it was they who ended the ceasefire through some very well planned ambushes on Turkish soldiers in the countryside. Distant border garrisons, like Pakistans in North and South Waziristan, especially took heavy casualties.
It was then that the Turkish Army came into their own. They started training for counter-insurgency warfare. After much study and practice, a new Turkish counter-insurgency doctrine was finalized the essence of which was area control. Meaning thereby that the main aim of the army was not engaging the terrorists but of area control, that a counter-insurgency soldier must live where his enemy lives; at the top of the mountains, in the depth of forests, in caves, in every single village, that the terrorists must not have a single secure breathing space and that, ultimately, contact with the enemy will come as a natural consequence of such actions.
Thus trained, the Turkish army spread out in rural localities and went into the forests and up the mountains to clean up and secure every single nook, grove and cave in the area. When the local people saw Turkish soldiers everywhere, their support to terrorists immediately ceased. It was thus that the Turkish army was finally able to defeat the PKK.
Here are some of the lessons from the Turks COINOPS:
1. Never try to negotiate with a terrorist group. They will never honor the agreements but only use it as propaganda and to replenish and regroup.
2. Control the area. Deploy enough troops to occupy every single village, mountain and forest. The enemy must not have any place to rest. If they cannot rest, they will lose morale. And when they lose morale, they surrender. In the terminal phase of Turkeys war, PKK terrorists surrendered en masse.
3. Offer amnesty to anyone who surrenders willingly. You do not want to be seen as mindless killers. And ex-terrorists can become great COINOPS assets, as they know the enemys tactics.
4. Always target the leaders; they are the poison wells, the snake heads. Without leaders the followers surrender easily.
5. Local support is very important. Local people generally support the side that does them less harm and also is physically closer to them. Build mini garrisons in the secured areas as you go along.
6. A terrorist group needs outside support. They need to have weapons and ammunition as supplies, safe resting and training facilities. This outside support is their life line. It must be severed. If borders are too long to control effectively, use political pressure to stop it.
7. Most important of all. The enemy must understand that you are ready to go to the end to win the war. That means a resolve for the long slog and a stomach for attrition. If the enemy thinks that you develop feet of clay rather quickly, he will continue fighting.
And now to the Inuit.
Annie Dillard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, perhaps did not know that she would be adding a lesson especially for Pakistan Army when she wrote the following;
An Inuit hunter asked the local missionary priest: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why, asked the Inuit earnestly, did you tell me?
Next time the Pakistan Army wants to turn simple tribesmen into strategic assets in the name of God, they would do well to remember the Inuit and his question.
