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A year after 26/11, drift prevailsINSIGHT: Harsh V Pant
It was John Stuart Mill who said, ‘War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks thatnothing is worth fighting for is much worse.’One year after the dastardly terrorist attacks on Mumbai, the enduring image of India is of a state that is intent on signalling to its adversaries: Come what may,we will not fight. You can attack our Parliament, our cities, our symbols of prestigeand grandeur, you can enter our territory with impunity and kill our citizens, yetwe won’t resort to the use of force.It’s a dangerous trap India has set for itself. India’s adversaries havesystematically and incrementally probed its defences and have found themwanting. They have crossed the Line of Control and occupied strategic mountaintops, they have penetrated the security ring around Parliament, they have foundIndian cities and major institutions vulnerable. Make no mistake, they are learningtheir lessons. One just has to see the increasing Chinese intrusions into Indianterritory and the never ending assaults on Indians by insurgents of various hues.Everyone knows that large scale conventional wars are not possible in a nuclearenvironment. But that doesn’t imply that the use of force is out of the question. Itis the job of Indian military planners to give Indian policy makers some options,allowing greater flexibility to Indian diplomatic moves. And it is the job of Indianpolicy makers to assess these options on their merits rather than merely creatingfalse dichotomy between war and no war. As of now, Indian foreign policy is stuckbetween issuing threats that its adversaries know well it won’t be able to carryout and merely acquiescing to the agenda of its enemies.It is no one’s contention that India should have gone to war with Pakistan over theMumbai carnage or even that India should have gone ahead and bombed terroristcamps in Pakistan. The regional context in which India is operating today is beingshaped by the presence of American and western forces in Afghanistan. India canand should try to use diplomatic pressure to achieve its strategic end-state.But it’s a sorry state of affairs indeed when just a year after the Indian PrimeMinister boldly declared that India ‘will go after these individuals andorganisations and make sure that every perpetrator, organiser and supporter of terror, whatever his affiliation or religion may be, pays a heavy price,’ the Indiangovernment has nothing substantive to show to its populace. The masterminds of 26/11 are enjoying their lives across the border as if nothing ever happened. AndIndian response has been relegated to issuing statements that the terrorist beapprehended. When such statements are ignored, the government getsaggressive and lo and behold, issues another statement!It is important to recognise that the strategic end-state that India seeks is ratherdifferent from the one that the US or the West at large is seeking. For the US, thepriority is preventing an India-Pakistan conflagration so that the war inAfghanistan can go unhindered. A narrative has emerged in the West which Indiashould promptly take note of, because it is being appropriated by large sections of the Indian media and Indian elites. It goes something like this: the terror groups inPakistan have attacked India primarily to divert Pakistan government’s attentionand resources away from the western frontier. If only the Indian governmentcould resist domestic pressure to pressurize Pakistan and start engaging with thePakistani government, the situation on the ground could be prevented frombecoming worse.
 
And so India has been told that the US is putting pressure on Pakistan tocooperate with India in shutting down Lashkar-e-Tayeba camps and capturingsome important figures. Indians are being told that action started in Pakistan withthe arrest of the operational commander of LeT, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, and thehead of Jaish-e-Muhammed, Masood Azhar, though of course the Pakistanigovernment would not hand over any terror suspect to India. There is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the US in forcing Pakistan to addressIndian concerns, but it is also important to acknowledge that the US is primarilyinterested in preventing any further racheting up of tensions between India andPakistan. At a time when the Obama administration is finding it difficult to carvean effective policy response to the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan,it is unreasonable to expect it to pull India’s chestnuts out of the fire.We have witnessed a repeat of what happened after terrorists struck the IndianParliament in 2001, and how the Indian government declared its coercivediplomacy a major triumph after then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf madesome perfunctory pronouncements. Some seven years down the line, we are backto square one. No substantive change in Pakistan’s policy has occurred. It isapparent that only a fundamental restructuring of Pakistan’s military andintelligence apparatus, which allows it to move away from a jihadist foreign policy,is the one durable solution. But who can accomplish that feat? It is most certainlybeyond the capacity of the Americans at the moment. Moreover, they are justinterested in declaring some sort of victory in Afghanistan and going back.But India cannot change its geographical coordinates and has to find a long-termsustainable strategy to deal with the mess in its neighbourhood. India canmarshal all the world opinion and elicit all the international sympathy it canmuster, but ultimately the problem is for India to resolve. The fact that more thansix decades later Pakistan continues to be India’s biggest strategic challengeshows the profound failure that Indian statecraft has been. History for India hasnot been one damn thing after another, but the same damn thing again andagain.Unless it comes up with a war-fighting doctrine that allows it to imposesubstantive costs on Pakistan for its irresponsible behaviour, it will continue to bea victim of terrorist menace largely perpetrated from the territory of itsneighbour. The Indian Army did try to come up with a ‘Cold Start’ doctrine in theaftermath of Operation Parakram, but in the absence of any interest from thegovernment and dissonance within the three services, the doctrine has failed toevolve. The result is a strange paradox: One of the most powerful militaries in theworld has nothing to offer to the policy-makers in this time of crisis. The Indian military will have to find ways and means to launch a flexible,controlled and discriminating military response to counter the challenges to Indiansecurity interests. And it would involve shedding the largely defensive militarystrategy that India has been accustomed to. A start could be made by exercisingthe option of covert action, something that the Indian government hasinexplicably discarded since the late 1990s. Diplomacy not backed by thepotential use of force is impotent, and this poses enormous challenges to Indianforeign and security policy.Our enemies can run rings around India because half of the Indian politicalleadership has lost its intelligence and the other half has lost its nerve. The Indiangovernment told us that the use of force was not an option in 2001; it told us thevery same thing again after 26/11. But it must recognise that it is also telling thisto the nation’s adversaries – and they are listening and observing carefully, andlearning. So brace yourself for other attacks -- and don’t be surprised if it’s abiological or chemical weapon sometime soon.
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