A year after 26/11, drift prevails

INSIGHT: 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 that
nothing 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 prestige
and grandeur, you can enter our territory with impunity and kill our citizens, yet
we won’t resort to the use of force.

It’s a dangerous trap India has set for itself. India’s adversaries have
systematically and incrementally probed its defences and have found them
wanting. They have crossed the Line of Control and occupied strategic mountain
tops, they have penetrated the security ring around Parliament, they have found
Indian cities and major institutions vulnerable. Make no mistake, they are learning
their lessons. One just has to see the increasing Chinese intrusions into Indian
territory and the never ending assaults on Indians by insurgents of various hues.

Everyone knows that large scale conventional wars are not possible in a nuclear
environment. But that doesn’t imply that the use of force is out of the question. It
is 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 Indian
policy makers to assess these options on their merits rather than merely creating
false dichotomy between war and no war. As of now, Indian foreign policy is stuck
between issuing threats that its adversaries know well it won’t be able to carry
out 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 the
Mumbai carnage or even that India should have gone ahead and bombed terrorist
camps in Pakistan. The regional context in which India is operating today is being
shaped by the presence of American and western forces in Afghanistan. India can
and 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 Prime
Minister boldly declared that India ‘will go after these individuals and
organisations and make sure that every perpetrator, organiser and supporter of
terror, whatever his affiliation or religion may be, pays a heavy price,’ the Indian
government 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. And
Indian response has been relegated to issuing statements that the terrorist be
apprehended. When such statements are ignored, the government gets
aggressive and lo and behold, issues another statement!

It is important to recognise that the strategic end-state that India seeks is rather
different from the one that the US or the West at large is seeking. For the US, the
priority is preventing an India-Pakistan conflagration so that the war in
Afghanistan can go unhindered. A narrative has emerged in the West which India
should 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 in
Pakistan have attacked India primarily to divert Pakistan government’s attention
and resources away from the western frontier. If only the Indian government
could resist domestic pressure to pressurize Pakistan and start engaging with the
Pakistani government, the situation on the ground could be prevented from
becoming worse.
And so India has been told that the US is putting pressure on Pakistan to
cooperate with India in shutting down Lashkar-e-Tayeba camps and capturing
some important figures. Indians are being told that action started in Pakistan with
the arrest of the operational commander of LeT, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, and the
head of Jaish-e-Muhammed, Masood Azhar, though of course the Pakistani
government would not hand over any terror suspect to India.

There is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the US in forcing Pakistan to address
Indian concerns, but it is also important to acknowledge that the US is primarily
interested in preventing any further racheting up of tensions between India and
Pakistan. At a time when the Obama administration is finding it difficult to carve
an 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 Indian
Parliament in 2001, and how the Indian government declared its coercive
diplomacy a major triumph after then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made
some perfunctory pronouncements. Some seven years down the line, we are back
to square one. No substantive change in Pakistan’s policy has occurred. It is
apparent that only a fundamental restructuring of Pakistan’s military and
intelligence 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 certainly
beyond the capacity of the Americans at the moment. Moreover, they are just
interested in declaring some sort of victory in Afghanistan and going back.

But India cannot change its geographical coordinates and has to find a long-term
sustainable strategy to deal with the mess in its neighbourhood. India can
marshal all the world opinion and elicit all the international sympathy it can
muster, but ultimately the problem is for India to resolve. The fact that more than
six decades later Pakistan continues to be India’s biggest strategic challenge
shows the profound failure that Indian statecraft has been. History for India has
not been one damn thing after another, but the same damn thing again and
again.

Unless it comes up with a war-fighting doctrine that allows it to impose

substantive costs on Pakistan for its irresponsible behaviour, it will continue to be
a victim of terrorist menace largely perpetrated from the territory of its
neighbour. The Indian Army did try to come up with a ‘Cold Start’ doctrine in the
aftermath of Operation Parakram, but in the absence of any interest from the
government and dissonance within the three services, the doctrine has failed to
evolve. The result is a strange paradox: One of the most powerful militaries in the
world 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 Indian
security interests. And it would involve shedding the largely defensive military
strategy that India has been accustomed to. A start could be made by exercising
the option of covert action, something that the Indian government has
inexplicably discarded since the late 1990s. Diplomacy not backed by the
potential use of force is impotent, and this poses enormous challenges to Indian
foreign and security policy.

Our enemies can run rings around India because half of the Indian political
leadership has lost its intelligence and the other half has lost its nerve. The Indian
government told us that the use of force was not an option in 2001; it told us the
very same thing again after 26/11. But it must recognise that it is also telling this
to the nation’s adversaries – and they are listening and observing carefully, and
learning. So brace yourself for other attacks -- and don’t be surprised if it’s a
biological or chemical weapon sometime soon.
Harsh Pant teaches at King’s College, London and is currently a Visiting Professor
at IIM - Bangalore