Calling the Indian Army Chief's Bluff
| | Columnist Lt Gen (Retd) JAVED NASIR, former DG ISI exhorts our leaders to ensure that India recognizes ground realities |
The Indian Chief of Army Staff made a statement on 11 February 1999 that 'If militancy in Kashmir grows too big, India would be tempted to enlarge the conventional weapons' implying thereby the level of conventional conflict. That this statement was datelined from New Delhi, simultaneously with the announcement made by the Indian Prime Minister that he was undertaking the historical inaugural Bus ride to Pakistan and most important of all that he would be talking even on the most contentious issue of Kashmir. This could not be coincidental, certainly not in India where an Army Chief has to wait for days even for an official appointment with the Defence Minister. How dare he make a statement which contrasted so much with his Prime Minister declaration. I think there is no doubt that it was a ploy of either the Indian Foreign Ministry or RAW- both unfortunately have a very rigid stance totally divorced from reality and devoid of any flexibility.
Is the Indian threat perception realistic and justified? Is the Indian Army in a position to enlarge the conflict should the militancy grow bigger than the present level? This article will take these two questions in details.
Let us first take the justification of the monstrous white elephant in the shape of the defence forces that India is maintaining. The military system and the quantum of ready military strength are a direct reflection of the response to the threat perceived by a country. This threat can neither be imaginary nor whimsical. It has to be real. Having crystallized the threat it has to be seen whether it can actuate. India has to the rest of world since 1962 played the bogey of Chinese threat. It was a self-inflicted wound, a military blunder as one of its actors Brig Dalvi so aptly brought out in his book 'The Himalayan Blunder'. In order to wash off the absolute humiliation to which Indian Army was subjected, it has since that day been exaggerating the Chinese threat beyond all limits of probability. Even if the Sino Indian border was denuded of the last Indian soldier, the Chinese would not be able to come beyond the point they reached in 1962. The terrain does not place the capability beyond a limited tactical offensive. India had only the border security forces and no regular troops on its frontiers with China. For the immediate response to the Chinese infiltration, the first troops India inducted were from plains of Punjab who did not have even winter uniforms. From cantonments where temperatures were still on the plus side of 100o-F, they were airlifted to NEFA at altitudes in excess of 12000 FASL and day time temperature below 40o-F. India has since 1962 been playing on western minds the phobia of China. Indian ground and air infrastructure and its military system are organised for an offensive against Pakistan only. Its mechanised forces of which India is so boastful cannot even reach within 100 Kms of the Indian side of the Sino Indian border. Indian air force's most modern state of the art, MiGs-25, SU-27s, MiG-29s, SU-30s and Mirage 2000 would not be able to reach even tactical targets in China. As regards the naval threat, China does not have the capability to pose even a wildly distant threat. With 19 Ocean going (mostly Kilo class) submarines to which a nuclear one is being added shortly, the aircraft carrier Vikarant, (negotiations to buy another one from Russia with SU 27s with short take off capability are going on) with over 150 combat aircrafts and armed helicopters of the naval aviation, none of which can reach the Chinese waters but these can very effectively choke Pakistan's sea lanes of communication through a sea blockade. Therefore, when India talks of the Chinese threat, it is a fantasy. It is an imaginary whimsical threat which cannot actuate and the response that India has cannot even reach the Sino Indian border.
India's declared (12.5 Bil $) and hidden (3.5 Bil $) defence budget is five times Pakistan's defence budget (3.2 Bil $). In fact it is almost twice of Pakistan's national budget - after the nuclearisation of both India and Pakistan - there is no justification to have the monster of defence forces being maintained by India at present levels. These need to be cut drastically which is possible only if the military planners on both sides from amongst the retired officers sit together and work out genuine and realistic force goals. Pakistan is maintaining the minimal defensive response - a unilateral force reduction by Pakistan will totally compromise Pakistan conventional response. It will, however reciprocate any force reduction that India may affect, while maintaining the delicate minimal defensive balance.
In Kashmir freedom fighters have a genuine cause, full support of the people and a contiguous border with a sympathetic country and finally the freedom fighters are willing to make the sacrifices and can sustain the casualties. The counter insurgency operations are a bottomless bucket, a super sucker of more and more troops. This is what has happened to the Indian army whose induction in Kashmir has already exceeded the staggering figure of 600,000 a number which far exceeds even the total strength of Pakistan Army. Apart from second line forces and logistic units, regular infantry troops number is approximately 400,000. This is the infantry strength of nearly 45 Infantry Divisions - a number that far exceeds the total infantry strength of the 4 RAPID(s), 18 Infantry, 9 Mountain Divisions and about 15 Independent Brigades that India actually has. From where did the rest of infantry come? The Indian desperation is manifested from the fact that having milked all infantry units from the field formations - they have cocooned the tanks and taken away the manpower from the tank regiments and grounded even their air defence units as well, which make up for the additional infantry. Grounding specialist units and using them as infantry in counter insurgency operations is last straw and the most demoralizing stage. The freedom struggle has entered the 11th year. Some five years back every Indian infantry soldier was getting a tenure every 5 years. The way Indian inductions in Kashmir have escalated, this dreaded tenure has been reduced to just one year. Every Indian soldier and officer has to return to Kashmir after one year of completion of one year tenure. This is actually the crux of the matter - counter insurgency operations are the most difficult. These operations sap energies and resources with such rapidity that even the strongest economies and the best of soldiers start wilting under it very quickly. The insurgents do not have any fixed time for attack. They can strike anywhere any time. Those fighting insurgencies remain under tension for 24 hours of the day and 365 days of the year. This in itself injects short temperedness, frustration and sense of guilt. There has been a constant and major decline in the discipline standards. Frequency of incidents reflecting total breakdown of discipline are also on the increase. The large scale desertions and absent without leave cases, homicides, Jawans killing their own officers reflect the degeneration that has set in the Indian Army. The frequency of cases of insubordinations is reaching alarming figures - same is the case with homosexuals. Officers no longer say 'Do as I Do' but want to remain in the safety of the unit lines and say 'Do as I Say' to men designated to look for the insurgents. There are false reports and imaginary encounters which are narrated or transmitted to higher headquarters with fabricated details. Brigade Commanders transmit totally fabricated encounters to Div Commanders and they do likewise to the Corps Commanders, when on ground not a single casualty takes place. They wipe out mujahideen in hundreds. The overwhelming tendency is to avoid an encounter and return to the safety of unit camps. If the casualty figures reported in the situation reports transmitted by all the units and those appearing in the Press are added up, the whole of Kashmir population would have been killed three times over, in the last 11 years. Like Leukaemia counter insurgency operations need fresh blood which India no longer has in reserves. To maintain and support these operations logistically the bill gets multiplying.
Bulk of the India defence budget has been going to Kashmir. So when Gen V.P. Malik threatens that 'should militancy grow too much - India would be tempted to enlarge the conflict'. Who is he trying to bluff? The military planners in India cannot be so naive as not to know that the Indian army is deeply plunged and suffering from the worst imbalance of its history. They innocently think that the bluff of their Chief will work. By such large scale milking of infantry from Indian formations a very major strategic imbalance has been injected in the Indian Army's holding and strike formations. I say with all the authority and professionalism that 'THE INDIAN ARMY IS INCAPABLE OF UNDERTAKING ANY CONVENTIONAL OPERATIONS AT PRESENT WHAT TO TALK OF ENLARGING CONVENTIONAL CONFLICT'
This most vulnerable and critical imbalance has occurred in the Indian army because in India, ridiculing and disparaging even the best professional viewpoints of the soldiers in an ignominious manner has become a routine. The summarily sacking of the Indian Naval Chief last month is a point in reference.
Even super powers or regional powers economies, could not withstand the fallout of prolonged counter insurgency operations. France had become the sick nation of Europe while fighting insurgency in Algeria. It was De Gualle who saved France by pulling it out of Algeria. US economy was about to collapse because of the counter insurgency operations it was fighting in Vietnam. It was Richard Nixon who saved the US by pulling it out. Gorbachev was two years too late to pull USSR out of Afghanistan. India has 3,500 tanks and approximately 700 state of the art modern aircraft, of which India is so boastful. India like Pakistan is still a babe in the nuclear field. Erstwhile USSR with its 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads, over 25,000 tanks and 5,000 aircraft could not escape the fallout of a counter insurgency operation and is continuing to disintegrate. India with relatively much weaker national cohesion; what with the south, the Sikhs, the Mizos and the Nagas and the Kashmiris is much more vulnerable to break up from within. Struggle in Kashmir is wholly indigenous. The Kashmiris waited for 50 years hoping from the successive Indian Governments that they will honour the commitments of plebiscite in conformity with the UN Resolutions to which their founding fathers were signatories along with Pakistan. Having failed to convince India through peaceful means they finally took the lead from Afghanistan where they received the battle inoccultation fighting the Russians alongside the Afghan Mujahideen. The Kashmiris have a genuine cause. They are prepared to make sacrifices. They have a difficult terrain which provides lot of sanctuaries and is ideal for insurgency operations; a fully supporting population, a large contiguous border of a friendly country which having become a nuclear weapon state has acquired the badly needed nuclear deterrence. India could enlarge the operations prior to May 28, it dare not do so now, not even the hot pursuits. India's greed for grabbing land is manifested from its history of military occupations of Hyderabad, Junagarh, Kashmir and finally the totally inhabited barren wasteland of Siachen - all these it will have to vacate one day. 90% of the over 5,000 casualties that India has suffered in Siachen, have been due to weather extremities. Indian soldiers are sitting on permanent snow covered peaks, altitudes of which in most cases are in excess of 20,000 feet AMSL. The Indians are staging supplies upto Leh by AN-12s and from there by road to the base camp at Zingrulama from where MI-26s carry these to Siala. the MI-26s can lift nearly 15-20 tons but its engines need replacement after every 50 hour at a staggering cost of Rs. 8 crores/engine. From Siala it is mostly lifted by the Cheetak high attitude helicopters which carry to the forward posts. Transportation of a shell weighing 25 pounds costs well over Rs. 15,000.00 by helicopter. Supplies by helicopter costs on the average Rs. 800-1000.00 per KG. The Indian soldiers are ill-equipped, ill-fed - they do not have the luxury of the heating arrangements like their Pakistani counterparts. On the contrary Pakistan constructed all weather roads right upto the battalion HQs and in some cases even at Company HQs wherever Pakistan had troops. The credit for this goes to Gen Aslam Beg and Lt Gen Imran who both agreed to my proposal to let FWO, of which I was the DG in 1989, construct all weather roads to all the forward posts. I knew the Hindu mentality that he will stick on to Siachen. I had a hunch that these roads one day will turn Siachen into Waterloo for the Indians. These roads were completed in 1990 and gave Pakistan Army a tremendous psychological ascendancy. The transportation cost was brought down from an average of Rs. 200.00 per KG beyond Goma/Dansom to less than Rs. 100.00/ KG. This enabled Pakistan Army High Command to provide the best high altitude sleeping bags, boots and jackets, Vitamin heavy diet, fibre glass igloos with heating arrangements and hot water plastic thermoses.
The present Indian military high command has been a dismal failure in not standing upto its professional assessment and advice and plunging India in such hopeless military situation. Under such circumstances if civil supremacy was to be upheld, the Indian Army Chief should have resigned rather than compromising on sound military judgement and dictates. India is so hopelessly imbalanced and has made it so tempting for Pakistan that should it decide to exploit - India within a few days would be brought to the brink of a virtual defeat to avert which the Indian leadership may be left with no option but to go for the nuclear option which obviously will spell doom for both countries. Though Kashmir would be wrested and so would be Khalistan and the Tamil Land and in the south - but all these and many more geographical zones and Pakistan would take decades to reach even the present levels of developments.
Vajpayee's visit therefore be seen as a landmark in the relations between India and Pakistan. He has shown the statesmanship and the political maturity by acknowledging the reality of Kashmir and has thus broken the ice. We should not be worried too much by his post-visit statements. We must not forget that unlike Nawaz Sharif he heads a coalition government and that his coalition partners can bring him down any time. As such he has to make certain statement, for domestic consumption. Mian Sahib has one, he has many Qazis, Mian Sahib should consider seriously only what he conveyed in his one to one talk. Following the traditions of the Prophet (PBUH) agreement of Hudebia, the victorious entry into Makkah -he must give peace talks a chance. If the Indians take the sensible course and resolve Kashmir through plebiscite - it will open floodgates of prosperity and opportunities for the people of India and Pakistan in the form of:-
- No War pact.
- No First use of nuclear weapons.
- Mutual inspection of nuclear installations.
- Mutual ban on development of more nuclear weapons/delivery systems.
- Drastic force reductions.
- Abolition of Visas.
- No terrorist activities.
- Open trade.
- Competitions in all fields of sports.
- However should India play for diplomatic victories, the games foreign offices are best at, Mujahideen should not let the freedom struggle by them fall below the present levels. India will not be able to endure it beyond a maximum of three years - the worst will start with the next millennium when the Indian army will face the crunch of rotations in Kashmir where 100% will become due for 4th and 5th tenures. This will be the beginning of the end. India will start disintegrating from within as it happened to the erstwhile USSR.
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