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.
