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| Pulwama: India's response should be informed by history | | | Dinesh Singh Chauhan | 2/16/2019 11:44:54 PM |
| A shroud of sadness descended on the country as the news came in of the death of 40 CRPF men in a suicide bomb attack on February 14, 2019. The nation as one joins the shattered families in their hour of grief. Almost immediately after a suicide bomber rammed into a CRPF convoy in Awantipora, the Pakistan-based terrorist outfit, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), claimed responsibility for the terror strike. The attack bore the JeM's signature. But repeated rhetoric of a muscular kind has now been shown to be inadequate in addressing national security concerns. The daily kill count in the Kashmir valley and the extended political celebration of the surgical strikes, recently made into a testosterone-laden blockbuster movie, were insufficient to neutralise the consequences of a disastrous coalition experimentation, repeated governance failures and the sidelining of alternative political voices in the Valley.
Since 2000, when a 17-year-old blew up an explosive-laden Maruti car which he had driven to the headquarters of the Army's 15 Corps in Srinagar, suicide strikes have been one of Jaish's preferred methods. The 2000 Srinagar attack had announced the arrival on the terror stage of Maulana Masood Azhar. Released a few months earlier, in late 1999, from an Indian jail in exchange of the crew and passengers of an Indian Airlines aircraft that was hijacked and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan, Azhar took the help of the Afghan Taliban to form the JeM. Its attack on Parliament in 2001 almost pushed India and Pakistan to the brink of war. A few months earlier, Islamabad had used the term "terrorism" to condemn a JeM attack on the Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly. However, even though it outlawed the outfit in 2002, forced in large measure by international pressure, Islamabad has allowed it to operate under different names - Afzal Guru Squad, Al-Murabitoon and Tehreek-al-Furqan - while Azhar remains under nominal house arrest in Bahawalpur. Pakistan's denials of his involvement in terror flies in the face of the JeM's ownership of Thursday's attack. Its ally, China, has stone-walled India's attempts at the UN to have Azhar declared a global terrorist.
After lying low for nearly 10 years, the JeM has upped the ante in the last three years. In November 2015, it claimed responsibility for an attack on the Brigade Headquarter at Tangdhar, very close to the LoC in Kupwara district. India has also blamed the outfit for the January 2016 attack on the Pathankot airbase, in which seven security personnel were killed and the September 2016 Uri attack which claimed the lives of 20 soldiers. In the last two years, security forces have killed at least two JeM commanders in the Valley.
Thursday's attacks should bring into focus India's security challenge in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw his country's troops from Afghanistan. With Kabul's current regime under President Ashraf Ghani sidelined in the peace talks, the Taliban, which currently holds sway over 45 per cent of Afghanistan, looks set to return to the country's political centre stage. The outfit has maintained it will not go back to terrorism, but that could be a bargaining ploy.
On its part, the JeM has never shied away from its umbilical connection to the Taliban. Russia and China, both of whom have advocated a role for the Taliban in Afghanistan, have condemned Thursday's attacks. But it is evident that the first step towards addressing India's concerns would be bringing Azhar to book. It is time China reconsidered its position on the matter.
The detestable Pulwama blast is not about intelligence failure or the inability of security forces to act upon it, as the Government would want us to believe. It is about India lacking capability, capacity and political will for war escalation. And Pakistan being aware of it.
The unrelenting security operations with no political solution on the horizon may well have given way to complacency in the Kashmir's security infrastructure, leading to a grave intelligence lapse that permitted the accumulation of several hundred kilograms of explosives used in the attack. Pakistan is, of course, behind this attack. But we cannot forget that it was a local youth who rammed the car into the CRPF convoy. Continuing counter-insurgency strikes in the Valley are creating a contrarian conflict, which can only be addressed through a political process.
If the huge cache of explosives establishes the scale of intelligence failure, we need to ask how could 2,500 security personnel be ferried without following the standard operating procedure? We cannot afford to shed more blood in vain. If choppers are the answer, let the Government bring in a more expensive alternative. The maximum losses of security forces have happened on the Anantnag-Brijbehara-Pampore axis, yet there has not been sufficient surveillance to deter this murderous mayhem that reduced the CRPF bus to a mangled heap. Pakistan's deep state will try every dirty trick in its book but we should be militarily prepared to stop, expose and hit at its resources like Masood Azhar.
Things were made worse by the 2016 so-called surgical strikes, where India (a) clandestinely hit terrorists' temporary launchpads rather than Pakistan army posts, and (b) immediately informed Pakistan that it would not escalate matters - an acknowledgment of defunct political will. Instead of furtively building war-withal for strengthening border management, Indian Generals, notwithstanding incessant terror attacks and loss of lives, continue with counter-terror operations and hollow bravado.
As the pyres are lit and the Nation mourns the Pulwama martyrs, it must channel its anger to demand that the political and security classes rise above partisan politics, evolve a firm consensus on the way to end Pakistani sponsored terror and thereafter relentlessly walk that path. That would be fitting honour not only to the Pulwama braves but also the thousands who have lost their lives in almost three decades of Pakistan's calibrated low intensity war.
The outrageous attack has understandably caused immense anger in the country and has been widely condemned by national and local political parties. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has assured the nation that the sacrifice of our security personnel will not go in vain. Extremely tragic as this event is, we need to address it with equanimity. The Nation must deal with a firm hand with those who indulge in violence and their patrons across the border. Since the Pulwama attack is bigger than Uri but much less ambitious than Kargil, one would expect an Indian military response, if any, to be between the two strata of surgical strikes and the use of air power. This is a narrow window, and then there are the low-yield battlefield nuclear weapons that Pakistan regularly flaunts.
It is increasingly becoming difficult for India to impose costs on Pakistan that will instil some level of deterrence while, at the same time, not breaching any nuclear red lines.
Any significant response will either breach those red lines or demolish the Pakistani nuclear bluster for good.
Once the immediate needs have been taken care of, India should think of a long-term strategy. Everything from covert operations to counterforce strikes should be on the table. |
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