Rounding up a posse
In the aftermath to 11/26 we’ve seen hand-flapping desi editorials saying we should do nothing because the Pakistani civilian government has no power. We’ve seen Dubya lean on India to do nothing about its actual dirty war to preserve America’s preventive war in Afghanistan. Dubya leaned on India after the Parliament attack in ‘01, and India got the train blasts and 11/26 in return. We’ve seen the Pakistani military issue a blackmail threat that Indian action would make it pull out of its half-hearted war in the NWFP.
A strike on India’s commercial capital cannot be ignored the way the gov’t usually ignores mass bombings. Voters will not now be satisfied by rounding up random Muslims, slapping them around and declaring the case solved.
It’s the Wild West out here with a dysfunctional civilian government in Pakistan that has constantly has its decisions overruled by the mandarins in the military. It’s a classic shell game, negotiating with someone who has no actual power while refusing access to those who actually make the decisions. It’s not a matter of law enforcement being absent — the Pakistani military funded and apparently trained the jihadis who attacked Bombay, and to this day allow the LeT to openly fundraise and operate its main campus near Lahore.
On the American frontier, the way you handled bad actors in the absence of functional institutions was to either hire bounty hunters or round up a posse and go after the bad guys yourself. All the incentives for the Pakistani military point to an expansion of its dirty war in the future. The greater the level of peace between the countries, the less Pakistan needs its military, which sucks up far more of the budget than is needed by a developing nation and dominates, by some estimates, 70% of the economy through various front groups. The military is an ops function, not a growth function, like a hospital, and the better it does its job, the less you need it. So, much like the military-industrial complex in industrialized nations like the U.S., it is running a constant shell game to justify its own growth. It needs an enemy, and more-Muslim-than-thou proxy warriors present an unappetizing target compared to the larger, traditional enemy.
The more India grows economically, the more you’d think Pakistanis would fear it, but for the factor of trade. India-China trade is growing even as China’s economy balloons, and that tends to reduce military tensions. Rapid trade normalization and economic interdependence is one of the best ways to drain people-to-people support for warmaking against the neighbors.
So yes, India works the UN, gets terror financing blocked, has funds frozen. These are small measures which are easy for jihadis to work around with hawala schemes. And yes, India ought to do surgical missile strikes, via UAV or otherwise, on jihadi training camps in PoK. Though Muridke is the epicenter of the LeT’s fundraising front, it’s too close to Lahore and would risk further escalation.
But at the end of the day, the most effective measures will happen on two fronts: taking out the leaders and starving the movements of ideological oxygen. India needs to track down and assassinate the attack leaders who live and operate openly in Pakistani cities. It has the advantage of physical and cultural similarity; agents would likely be able to blend in. The LeT and JuD heads need to be taken out. Dawood Ibrahim needs to go. Those who replace them need to live in fear of their lives so they’re spending most of their time on personal security, reactively, rather than planning future attacks.
Simultaneously, Kashmir and Afghanistan need to be pacified, trade with Pakistan needs to be boosted, and Indian Muslims need to be economically rehabilitated. The political situation in Kashmir has been a festering sore since Partition. India needs to get serious about settling the dispute, converting de facto borders into official ones if need be. Economic interconnects need to be built so that the Pakistani elite object to attacks on the grounds of intimate self-interest, and so the visible need for a suffocating military dominance is eliminated. Indian Muslims ought to be swept up in development plans that focus on all of India’s poor, so the country gets serious about solving its purulent class divide rather than spending all its time helping the elite siphon more money from the tax rolls.
The Pakistani military men who fund jihadis cannot be negotiated with except at the point of a gun, and it harms India to bribe them with military hardware the way the U.S. has done for years. This will be a generational change, where younger officers coming up see the rivalry primarily through an economic lens rather than as an existential threat, which is what the house jihadis have become.
on Friday, December 19th, 2008, 8:25 pm in Military, Politics, Terror! › 
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I’m with the Indian government’s very measured, cautious approach. I’m not convinced about taking out leaders of these groups. I think that’s just going to lead to other people taking over. It hasn’t really worked for the Israelis— or maybe it is working for them, but the strategy also seems to require unacceptable levels of collective punishment imposed on innocents, that I’d rather not see.
‘Taking out’ the leaders of these groups will almost certainly result in the deaths of innocent people somewhere along the line, passers by, family members, including, possibly, children. That is what happens when Israel blows up a house in which some Hamas commander is staying in, killing five children in the process, that kind of thing. Any such action would morally make India culpable in the deaths of innocents and lose the moral high ground. A nice idea in theory, in practise, a very morally messy thing.
There are more targeted ways of doing it. If you get a fix on someone who masterminded the deaths of 200 Indians– and they are running around openly, giving press conferences in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar– you take them out in the most targeted fashion possible. It is immoral not to, because it will lead to more deaths.
And yes, though there will be replacements, they will be less experienced and you will have altered their behavior, forcing them to divert far more time to personal security. You work both ends of the equation, taking out the leaders while starving them of new recruits.
India doesn’t have the military capability to carry out “surgical” strikes in Pakistan. Pakistan’s air force is not technologically inferior to India’s to the extent that we would be able to quickly go in, bomb some sites and exit without being engaged in a major way. Any such attempt would result in an all-out war (which India would win, but not without a colossal cost) and result in world opinion shifting in favour of Pakistan.
India doesn’t have the intelligence capability to carry out assassinations inside Pakistan either. Even the CIA and Mossad don’t seem to have that capability. Moreover, Pakistan is probably already alert to such a possibility and is protecting its top terrorist assets.
I think the right approach is to isolate Pakistan diplomatically. Convince Sri Lanka to call off its cricket tour of Pakistan. Convince the USA to cut its aid to Pakistan (hard to do, but not impossible). Get Europe to cooperate and impose financial sanctions of some sort.
But I don’t think any of that will happen. A pattern is emerging in our political landscape: various Congress leaders pointing fingers, not at Pakistan and Islamist militantcy, but at “Hindus”. Antulay started it, Digvijay Singh jumped on. The Congress is too busy finding ways to blame things on the BJP to actually take any useful action on this.
Manish, let me say first of all, that in spirit I completely agree with you. How could India possibly do nothing (militarily) after all this? If we don’t respond now, they will do it again, and again, and .. it will be death by a thousand cuts. Still, there are important differences with both US vs Afghanistan and Israel vs Lebanon/etc. situations, so falling into that mindset can be destructive. Mutually assured destructive, that is. And as to doing things covertly, a lot of people in Pakistan already believe that the terrorist killingsthey’re experiencing is the work of RAW. In fact, they believe that India, with all its Consulates in Afghanistan, is launching Pakhtoon agents into Pakistan. The Marriott bombing was ascribed to such RAW agents, others of whom are supposedly behind the Baluch insurgency. If RAW revved up a covert campaign in Pakistan for real, ISI would just go 2 tits for the tat - and launch them from SL, NL, BD.
I agree with this. Isolate + Diplomatically Coerce with Washington’s help. But retain engagement with Pakistan civic society.
India and Pakistan have played cricket during times of great tension in the past - and cricket diplomacy works. Win or lose. A token postponement, say by a month - would have registered a protest. It was foolish for India to have called off the entire tour. And India simply doesn’t have the diplomatic clout, even with tiny Sri Lanka to get them to call it off - if they did, SL wouldn’t have offered to go in the first place! They want to poke their finger in India’s eye too. It’s too bad India gave them that chance. This underlines another, and very frustrating aspect of the ‘impotence’.
Cricket diplomacy is meaningless. The USSR and U.S. faced off in Olympic hockey during the Cold War. That did not stop each country from keeping their guard up against the other.
India would be fully justified if it were to launch a military strike in Pakistani-Kashmir. However, as Israel learned in its failed war against Hezbollah in 2006, you have to be prepared to fight on terms you may not be ready for. Israel destroyed a lot of buildings and some of Hezbollah’s longer range missiles. But, when it actually tried to invade southern Lebanon, Hezbollah held the Israeli army to no more than 2 km incursion. No matter how much the Israelis threw at them, by the time the cease-fire was enacted a month after hostilities began, Hezbollah was able to launch hundreds of rockets. And these rockets were not the Hamas-style pieces of junkyard crap - but high quality Chinese made, Iranian-supplied munitions. Israel’s did not beat them, their actions destabilized the American-friendly gov’t in Beirut, and now Hezbollah is in a stronger position. A military action against Pakistan runs the same risk for India.
It infuriates me no end that the leaders of LeT and JeM can travel safely around Pakistan, and not have to face any repercussions. And if India had the ability to do an Israeli (or Syrian) style hit on these guys, I’d be all for it. Instead, India can take a number of steps immediately. For starters, training SWAT teams in the major cities, so you don’t have to wait 9 damn hours for the cavalry to show up from New Delhi. Have a clear command structure that shows who the hell is in charge - local, state, or central authorities. Give the police an actual handgun, and not some single-bolt WWI era rifle.
I can’t remember who said it, but someone commented that this attack can initiate reforms the way India’s economic crisis in 1991 initiated economic reforms. That can be true, provided India’s voters hold their politicians accountable. If they continue to stay disengaged from politics, preferring to cocoon themselves in their gated communities, with satellite TV and private tutors, believing they can keep India’s problems safely at a distance - politicians will have little reason to change their ways.
My point exactly. India and Pakistan should play cricket, but India should also beef up its intelligence, security, law enforcement, coast guard, communications, transportation, coordination etc. It should do that anyway. Some of those reforms are linked to larger governance and accountability issues that must happen anyway, and in many ways were the real problem during 26/11. If these are not done, the next one could be worse, and really, they should be well in hand before acting externally.
But by merely canceling the cricket tour while not acting, or not being able to act, militarily, India has contributed to maintaining the current state of heightened tension between the civilian publics of the two countries while not impacting the terrorist threat whatsoever. The second-order effect is to strengthen the military Establishment in Pakistan and weaken the civilian government even further, thus increasing the capacity of the terrorists. In other words, a real no-win play. I really have to wonder who’s making policy in India these days and what they’re thinking.
NextSteps and KXB:
Calling off cricket is not meaningless here because of two reasons. First, India suffers from an image of impotency: no country expects India to be able to do anything. Cricket diplomacy would demonstrate to Pakistan that India is willing to seriously hurt Pakistan. Second, cricket is not just symbolic, it also means a lot of money. The PCB lost about 25 million dollars because of the cancellation of the India tour. Let’s pile on the misery by canceling the Sri Lanka tour. These factors simply didn’t apply to the US and USSR.
We do have the diplomatic muscle to push Sri Lanka to cancel its tour. There is huge sympathy for the LTTE in Tamil Nadu. India has been strongly condemning the LTTE so far, but cannot be expected to continue doing so if Sri Lanka supports anti-Indian terrorist states by rewarding them with cricket tours. A couple of invites for talks to LTTE leaders would do the trick. We wield enormous influence over Sri Lanka.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a US-Iraq type asymmetry of military or intelligence capability with Pakistan. So the only option for us is to get countries to squeeze Pakistan with economic sanctions until Pakistan takes some steps. The important thing is not to lose momentum. If we start pushing for these steps a month from now, the whole affair will be cold and they just won’t fructify. Now is the right time.
Which ‘civic’ society? The one that raises funds for LeT?? The so called ‘civic’ society is extremely small minority.
As far as war is concerned, when the ISI attacked the Indian Consulate in Afghanistan they did the first strike against India, as consulate is considered sovereign territories of the Nation that is in that consulate. A high level Indian diplomat was killed in that attack. Yet India stands by without any action. That is unacceptable.
I would like to see India embrace Israel more openly and suggest that it is asking for Israel’s help in carrying out surgical strikes in Pakistan. The embrace should include Israel using Indian air space and Indian airports. That would put the fear of XxxX in those terrorists.
A very nice column on the cricket issue - Pradeep Magazine at Hindustan Times:
A citizen of the cricketing world, no other.
.
India can’t do anything except strengthen its internal security/intelligence apparatus. I don’t see anything to indicate we have the intelligence or technical ability to pull off a precision strike in Pakistan. So we need to hunker down and resolve to learn from the experience and overhaul our domestic security capabilities.
When Pakistan implodes, as it must as every good secularist knows that a state defined by religious identity is doomed to failure, I hope its Western educated upper middle class apologists (e.g. Mohsin Ahmed) aren’t able to relocate abroad. They need to stew in the mess their social class created.
I meant to say Mohsin Hamid above instead of Mohsin Ahmed, that dude is irksome
PoK is a small territory relative to jet aircraft speeds, I believe overflight and return could be done quickly.
Advocating developing this.
They already know India does nothing, historically.
Irrelevant, many Pakistanis also think 9/11 was committed by Jews. You don’t calibrate policy according to the irrationals.
Not advocating ground invasion, rather precision airstrikes and assassinations focused on terrorist camps and leadership.
Nobody will fight your battles for you. Especially not when the mission is risky. You can rely on advice, training and weapons purchases, that’s about it.
In PoK specifically, risk of escalation in the mainland. India has bomber aircraft. Smart bomb conversion kits are inexpensive. Many camps’ locations are widely known.
How much influence did you have on Dubya’s foreign adventurism?
Bingo. It will be a decade before we recognize PVN’s mastery of Machiavellian strategy. The idea isn’t novel, it has a proven history of working circa 1991. Our covert capabilities have been rusted by chicken hawkish BJP’s negligence.
It makes eminent strategic sense, is without risk of escalation. Striking against Pakistani army’s economic interests would provide optimum bang for the buck.
India should start planning for an occupation. I hope we never have to go there, but if that’s what it takes, then so be it.
Of what exactly? War is bad, the response should be proportionate.
I agree, I said
Discussion of the military option here, on NDTV video. Ambassador Arundhati Ghose vs Air Chief Marshal Tipnis (retd). The Air Chief counsels caution, warns that getting good target intelligence is not easy because ‘terrorist camps’ are not fixed locations, says that Pakistan willescalate, that the military option has to be the ‘last option’. Ambassador refers to diplomatic theory, saying the military option is always an option, that is should be on the table. But Tipnis, who was in charge of the Air Force during Kargil (summer ‘99) makes much more sense to me. During Kargil, even though GoI had decided not to cross the LoC either by air or on the ground, the IAF lost a MIG-27, a MIG-21, and a MI-17 heavy helicopter (by a Stinger hit) dislodging militants on the Indian side of the LoC. The idea that you could quickly cross the LoC to ‘bomb the camps’ and come back before anybody’s the wiser is not realistic.
The distance from the LoC to the Muzzafarabad camp where the 11/26 attackers were trained is less than 30 miles. Indian MiG-27M fighter-bombers hit Mach 1.77, which is around 90 secs in and 90 secs out, not accounting for bombing time or radar coverage. But defensive scramble time is substantially more than 3 minutes.
Why not just use a missile if theey are within 100-200 km? With all the talk about missile dev and test. Use them.
Not sure which are more accurate, missiles or GPS-retrofitted bombs.
Manish, I don’t doubt the arithmetic . But, you seem to apply the scramble time only to the defensive side. There are radars, you know. Aircraft have to take off from home bases. My real objections are: (i) lack of really good target intelligence (ii) the reality of escalation. If you’re ready to start a war, sure, anything’s possible.
Continually pushing the military option as a realistic possibility is dangerous, because if the consequences are ultimately judged to have too high a cost and nothing is done, then India looks even worse than it otherwise would have. It is wiser to rule out the option publicly, and lower temperatures all round, while pursuing coercive diplomacy. You lose less face that way. A belligerent stance also strengthens the Pakistan military vis-a-vis the civilian government even more. There is already talk of a new ‘national all-party Government’ in Pakistan that would bring back to power many of the ISI-supported politicians who had served with Musharraf. This would dilute even further the power of the Zardari faction, which, whatever its other faults, is at least interested in a new kind of relationship with India. Lowering temperatures now, while reserving, at some future time, if absolutely necessary, the right to exercise the military option, makes more sense to me.
There are several Indian airbases in Punjab and one in Tajikistan.
At a minimum, take out the Mangla dam LeT base where the current attackers were trained. And develop the covert capability to take out Muridke without escalation.
Of course.
There’s already an ISI-funded dirty war in Indian cities going on with an attack every two months. 11/26 escalated, not developing a plan to remove the LeT leadership will escalate it further.
Look, better defense is only going to get you so far in a society where every building is not a fortress. At some point you have to be proactive about it. Next January, March, May we’re going to be having these same discussions after the newest attacks about ‘why nothing can be done.’
There’s a well-written article in today’s Hindustan Times that argues your point of view well:
The thing about the covert actions, however, is (i) the line separating them from ‘terrorism’ begins to get quite thin (ii) Since they’re deniable when successful, you don’t know whether they are or are not already happening right now. If they are already happening, how do you know which is tit and which is tat? As I said, large sections of Pakistanis already believe RAW is behind both their ‘organized insurgencies’ and their random terror attacks.