Manipal, India — India has been at the
business end of jihadi-funded insurgency since 1981, the year in which
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) began to organize a
"Khalistan" movement that would in a couple of years launch a terror
campaign in India's Punjab State. Although local members of the Sikh community
declined to come on board, enough funds were raised from ethnic Sikhs in the
United States and Canada to provide the funding for a vicious struggle that
lasted till the mid-1990s.
The Khalistan movement blended seamlessly
with the other jihadist operation in Kashmir, an insurgency set off by those
who returned to the Indian-held part of the state after receiving training in
Pakistan from 1982 to 1988. It is still smoldering, and has thus far cost
73,000 lives, mostly in the killings of Muslims by Wahabbis.
In 1989 the USSR was defeated in
Afghanistan and the ISI transferred its attention to Kashmir. Unfortunately for
them, New Delhi proved a tougher proposition than Moscow, the reason being the
manner in which the security forces conducted anti-jihadist operations. Given
their low level of financial resources, these had perforce to depend on the
"software" of psychological warfare against the jihadis, placing emphasis
on changing of mindsets and preventing of unity between those disaffected with
Indian rule.
In contrast, the United States has thrown
into battle in Iraq a (usually wasted) flood of material resources, with far
less success than the Indian armed forces have shown in Kashmir, where the
jihadis have been beaten to the ground and are now desperately clutching at
diplomacy to rescue themselves from the pit they have been pushed into.
This victory has been won without recourse
to the helicopters, aircraft, heavy artillery and missile power that the United
States throws into the Iraq campaign. The Indian security forces -- principally
the army -- have used only sidearms throughout the counter-jihadi operations,
aware that the damage done to civilian infrastructure by heavier equipment
would create more jihadis than they would take out, apart from the reality that
such indiscriminate attacks as aerial bombardment or a helicopter-based volley
would usually kill many more innocents than combatants.
The extensive damage done to physical
infrastructure in Iraq by Coalition forces has, by its mindless intensity, lost
the hearts of the huge majority of the Iraqi population that welcomed the
defeat of the Saddamites. Rather than Osama bin Laden, it is the United States
and other NATO forces in Iraq that are serving as the recruiting agents for the
insurgency, by making clear to a proud (and sometimes vainglorious) people that
their country has been occupied by an alien force that has no reserve in
destroying their property and the amenities that they enjoyed even during the
bitter decade of U.N. sanctions.
As long as Coalition forces operate in
populated areas of Iraq rather than relocate to the borders, they will continue
to provide human fuel for an insurgency whose one pledge is to eliminate them.
Had the Coalition forces used Indian-style
tactics in Iraqi cities, they might have had more success. But judging by the
tactics and force posture of those engaged in operations, the primary objective
has been less the compression and elimination of the insurgents than force
protection. Unlike the Indian army, which accepts an increase in casualties as
a consequence of a more effective strategy, the obsession within NATO of
keeping casualty lists low has resulted in a strategy of denial of space to
Iraqi citizens, who have watched their country get slowly converted into a
bigger version of the West Bank and Gaza, where too the IDF sees normal life in
the occupied territories as an acceptable sacrifice in its primary effort of
keeping its men unharmed.
The steady rise in the deaths of
noncombatants by troops jumpy at any sudden human movement has created a
vicious circle in which the tactics flowing from such frozen panic themselves
create the medium in which the danger to Coalition forces multiplies.
Unfortunately, so total is the belief within the U.S. policy establishment of
the correctness of its present self-destructive course that any effort at
pointing out the contradiction between means and ends gets seen with suspicion
or contempt, as has happened to the present writer on several visits to the
Pentagon since 2004, when he first began expressing the view that the presence
of Coalition forces within the populated areas of Iraq were incompatible with
stability.
The new NATO commander, General David
Petraeus, is an expert on the Greek and Roman campaigns, knowledge that is of
as little value to the chemistry of Iraq as was the former U.S. Administrator
of Iraq Paul Bremer's ease of manner in the salons of Paris and Berlin.
Any Arab can testify that, like Texans, the
Iraqis are an excitable people, prone to loud voices and gesticulations. These
can very easily be misinterpreted as evidence of hostile intent and result in
shooting by troops whose effective mission is to return alive, and hopefully in
a single piece, to their families. Information from Iraq confirms that the bulk
of the "insurgents" that have been killed are ordinary Iraqis, even
though they may have possessed a weapon, as indeed, the majority of households
in that country did until the Coalition forces gave them the option of throwing
away their guns and dying at the hands of raiders or being killed by the NATO
forces as a "suspected insurgent" or even a follower of the fabled
Sheikh Osama bin Laden and/or the departed Saddam Hussein.
Between the thugs who prey on now
defenseless households and jumpy Coalition forces busily engaged in destroying
all "insurgent cover" (in other words, houses and places of work),
the citizens of Iraq now lead a life that is even worse than under U.N.
sanctions, with the numbers of dead (especially the young, the old and the
sick) rising steadily while U.S. President George Bush (weekly and these days
weakly) declares victory in the battle for democracy in the Middle East.
If purely Iraqi forces cannot establish
order in the towns, no other force can, certainly not a NATO force that is
using the equipment and mindset of a conventional war to do battle against an
unconventional enemy leveraging each mistake. In 2004, this columnist advised
the Pentagon's Andrew Marshall to get his troops out of the cities of Iraq or
"there would be chaos in two years."
One more year of the present tactics and
force levels, and suicide bombers will be spawning in the ruined cities of Iraq
as numerous as a swarm of hornets.
Democracy means giving back to the local
people control over their own lives. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
seems to have read a little too much of British imperial history, for he is
conducting himself less as an envoy than as the Viceroy of an imperial power,
tossing off diktats to be followed, or else. The irony is that the more Iraqi
Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki (who was himself pitchforked into the job because
of Coalition dislike of the far more capable Ibraham Al-Jaafari) listens to
Khalilzad, the faster will his country descend into a chaos that within a year
will become irretrievable.
The British partitioned India to avoid the
very Hindu-Muslim carnage that the division caused. This dismal history of a
toxic "cure" is being repeated in Iraq.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
Director of the School of Geopolitics at Manipal University.)
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