The New War Tools Are Counterinsurgency & Infiltration

Painting--"Madonna" by DAWN MELLOR


The New War Tools Are Counterinsurgency & Infiltration

Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s recent operationalisation of three regional NSG
(National Security Group) “Black Cat” Commando hubs at Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata in addition to its HQ at Manesar, has come not a minute too soon.

Mr. Chidambaram has indeed kept the Government’s promise by making this long overdue beginning for the Indian citizen’s protection within seven months of the terrorist atrocities committed in Mumbai on 26/11 last year.

It is most encouraging that India is waking up to the fact that the nature of Internal insurgency from the Maoists in Central and Eastern India and others in the North East, and foreign terrorism, need more than the attentions of an ill-equipped and under-manned state police. The police, after all, are trained to use minimum force in the administration of law and order on city streets and the rural “sadar” hinterland.

The Government of India is also coming around to the notion that the conventional armed forces including the CRPF and the BSF tend to use too much force in what are, after all, domestic situations. Perceived as “occupational forces”, they also find it difficult to win over “hearts and minds” or utilize the advantage of surprise.

Such conventional armed forces, however well trained and disciplined, are designed to engage a similarly configured foreign enemy. And full-fledged conventional war is being increasingly checkmated between nuclear states as in India, Pakistan and China in our immediate neighbourhood.

Conventional forces are not best suited to engage in guerrilla warfare with a wily and multi-faceted enemy adept at using men, women and children as recruits, decoys and shields. Nor are they the best response to human suicide bombers and low intensity warfare involving disruption, subversion, infiltration, recruitment, media-borne disinformation, propaganda, entrapment, blackmail, counterfeit currency, malevolent stock market operations, drug-running, honey-trapping, random killings and targeted assassinations--in short, the effects of Pakistan’s very effective policy of “war by a thousand cuts”, come at after losing three conventional encounters against India.

Even though our armed forces have been increasingly deployed in natural calamity situations and other law and order enforcement situations like riots, it is still not the best solution to tackle internal insurgency and foreign led and inspired terrorism.

It is commando units such as the NSG which saved the day at 26/11 and also achieved spectacular results against the LTTE as part of the IPKF. The newly formed Cobra unit deployed recently for the first time at Lalgarh against the Maoists was most effective. All we need are more numbers of such units, trained, equipped and deployed, sometimes on a pre-emptive basis.

India has learned much from Israel about counterinsurgency and infiltration ever since full diplomatic relations were established in 1992.This has ensured much better border surveillance and counterinsurgency measures in Kashmir, perhaps leading, inadvertently, to the Pakistanis spreading their terrorist wings to other parts of India, using the on-site knowledge and connections of the Islamic underworld of Indian origin based in Karachi, Kathmandu, Dhaka, Bangkok and Dubai.

India does rely on state-of-the-art Israeli hardware as well, famously involving the $1 billion Phalcon early warning reconnaissance aircraft and the Barak surface-to-air naval missiles, among other matters. The Defence cooperation with Israel currently stands second only to the historically embedded relationship with Russia.

And looking at the issue conversely, through the eyes of the enemy, we must agree that insurgency, infiltration and psychological warfare is the cornerstone of the spectacular success of Pakistan’s ISI, comparable with the exploits of the legendary Israeli agency Mossad.

But where Pakistan wins over Israel is in terms of its extremely successful international public relations gambit. Unlike the bully-boy image of Israel, Pakistan maintains a highly articulate and sympathetic image as a victim of terror, even as it is, in fact, the world’s epicentre of terrorism.

Pakistan boldly holds the Western world to ransom. It garners generous financial aid and military supplies from the US and has successfully projected itself as recourse of last resort in its geographical theatre.

It not only demonises India’s “human rights abuses” in Kashmir but runs circles around international sanctions and bans by nurturing a large number of home-grown terrorist outfits forever changing nomenclature. In addition it maintains seemingly freelance non-state actors that allow it the fig-leaf of plausible deniability.

To add insult to Indian injury, it blatantly harbours much wanted criminals from India, keeping them in considerable style. And in a masterful demonstration of how to manage chaos, Pakistan keeps its domestic situation in destabilised ferment and flux by stoking sectarian, that is, Sunni versus Shia violence, and religious tensions between Islamic progressives and fundamentalists, rent-collecting on such issues from the oil–rich Islamic world as well.

For the further bamboozling of the West, Pakistan uses its blow-hot-blow-cold relationship with the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and its hosting of the Al Qaeda as adroit bargaining chips.

It flaunts its strategic relationship with China with the latter’s tacit support. This enables Pakistan to be muscular about its armed nuclear options and hint menacingly about the possibility of its nuclear weapons falling to the Taliban as well. They also murmur darkly about the implications of clandestine nuclear proliferation activities conducted by “disgruntled elements”.

Pakistan is so good at what it does that it clearly bears imitation. India may at last be learning a little from the Pakistani version of media diplomacy, demonstrated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh firing his “stop the terrorism” salvo at President Zardari at Yekaterinburg in June 2009 in the full audio-visual glare of the international media.

We cannot, given Pakistani nuclear sabre-rattling, safely order a conventional set of air strikes against terrorist training centres in POK and elsewhere within Pakistan. But nothing prevents us from doing as they do. We too can develop the capacity to take the battle to the enemy by infiltrating Pakistan’s terrorist assets, or making them believe that we have, in order to degrade their capabilities on their own soil.

Effective long-term counterinsurgency and infiltration operations do call for patience. But first, we need to get the infrastructure in place. And we need to put some tooth and claw back into intelligence agencies such as RAW and the IB, even as moves to coordinate and integrate their efforts with those of our fighting arms go forward. And we need to use our new anti-terror laws.


(1,051 words)

2nd July 2009

Gautam Mukherjee


Truncated version published in The Pioneer OP-Ed Page on 14th July 2009 as "New means of proxy war" and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived online under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com