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Asymmetric Warfare: A View from India

S. Kalyanaraman Available online: 12 Mar 2012

To cite this article: S. Kalyanaraman (2012): Asymmetric Warfare: A View from India, Strategic Analysis, 36:2, 193-197 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2012.646438

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Strategic Analysis Vol. 36, No. 2, March 2012, 193197

Commentary Asymmetric Warfare: A View from India

S. Kalyanaraman

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oined a few years ago, asymmetric warfare is an umbrella term that includes insurgent and terrorist campaigns that Western militaries were forced to contend with in the course of external interventions. Asymmetric wars for Western countries are wars of choice, not wars of necessity. These countries can choose to engage in them if and when their interests are sufciently piqued and if and when their overall capabilities permit them to do so. Thus, in the wake of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the United States briey irted with the idea of engaging in extended stabilisation operations and nation-building efforts as part of asymmetric wars and even considered reorienting the military to be able to perform these tasks effectively. As former secretary of defence Robert Gates noted in a November 2007 lecture, asymmetric warfare will be the mainstay of the contemporary battleeld for some time and therefore we in Defense need to change our priorities to be better able to deal with this challenge.1 However, in the wake of the economic crisis at home and concerns about American decline, and impelled by the rising Chinese challenge, the United States has turned away from the idea of engaging in endless and costly asymmetric wars. The US combat mission in Iraq has ended, although the situation there continues to be marked by a high threat of terrorism. Similarly, the US combat mission in Afghanistan will end in 2014 irrespective of whether the situation in that country is stabilised or not. Such an option of choosing to engage or not engage in asymmetric wars is, however, not available for countries where such wars are prevalent today, especially in South Asia. They have to contend with the campaigns of terrorism and insurgency waged against them by both domestic and foreign insurgent and terrorist groups. For them, moreover, dealing with domestic insurgencies in particular is indeed a part of nation building; not somebody elses but their own. Consequently, it is not very helpful to use the term war to describe domestic insurgencies. However splendid the word war might sound, or however useful it may be to characterise domestic insurgencies as wars in order to mobilise the countrys resources to face these challenges, the fact remains that an ultimate solution to such conicts lies not in the nebulous battleeld but in effecting a political resolution and addressing the grievances and aspirations of the discontented people. When it comes to dealing with domestic insurgencies, the political and military establishments in India have indeed internalised the basic precepts of

S. Kalyanaraman is a Research Fellow at IDSA, New Delhi.

ISSN 0970-0161 print/ISSN 1754-0054 online 2012 Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09700161.2012.646438 http://www.tandfonline.com

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counter-insurgency. Firstly, popular support is the centre of gravity that needs to be positively impacted. Secondly, the calibrated use of military force is helpful only to contain violence. There is no military solution per se; a resolution ultimately lies in the political domain. And, thirdly, the counter-insurgency effort is essentially a part of nation building and national consolidation. Consequently, the essence of the Indian approach to countering insurgencies is not so much the physical attrition of the rebels but their psychological exhaustion over an extended period of time,2 accompanied by political concessions and socio-economic measures that address popular grievances and aspirations. This approach has evolved as an integral part of the very process by which modern India has been constituted and consolidated on a day-to-day basis since August 1947, namely politics;3 democratic politics, if you will. The positive results of this approach are especially evident in Indias North East, which has been wracked by multiple insurgencies over the last 50 years. For instance, the Mizo insurgency has been completely resolved. Similarly, a political accommodation was forged with representatives of the Naga rebel movement in the mid-1970s, but the insurgency was revived a few years later by a rebel faction that refused to accept this accommodation. However, over the last decade and a half, this former faction of the Naga National Council, now called the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, has been engaged in a negotiation process with the Indian government to forge a new accommodation that seeks to go further than the Shillong Accord of 1975. More recently, negotiations have also begun with the leadership of the United Liberation Front of Asom, even though, as in the Naga case, one faction of the rebel movement led by the groups military chief has chosen to stay out of the political process. Even the insurgency in Kashmir has waned over the last decade, as is evident from the considerable decline in the activities of the Hizb-ul Mujahideen, the principal militant group indigenous to Kashmir. The Hizb even agreed to a ceasere, albeit very briey, in the year 2000. It is the resulting split and fratricidal strife within its ranks that has debilitated the group over the last 10 years. The terrorist activities of Pakistani jihadist groups in Kashmir and elsewhere are a different issue altogether, and will be addressed separately later. Of course, the situation in Kashmir is far from settled, although it is also true that a relatively stable political process has begun to take root there. And, as in the case of other insurgency-affected states of the Indian Union, democratic politics and its key role in constituting modern India will bring about a reconciliation and resolution in Kashmir as well. This assessment of democratic politics enabling a political resolution also holds true for the Maoist insurgency in India, even though it is still in the ascendant phase. When talking about asymmetric warfare, it is also important not to conate the terms insurgency and terrorism, which are very different phenomena. Insurgents, by and large, target the security forces and the state apparatus because of their inherent inferiority in power, resources and capabilities. They work to mobilise the people, acquire popular support and eventually supplant the government or regime in power. Insurgents, in Maos famous formulation, are the sh and people constitute the water. In contrast, the people are the targets of terrorist violence today, although this was not the case when terrorism rst emerged in the modern era. When terrorism was rst employed as a strategy in the late 19th century, the targets were symbols of political authorityheads of state, viceroys and proconsuls, ministers, civilian and military ofcials, leading political gures, and so on. Further, the targeting of such symbols was intended as propaganda by deed in an era when terrorism was considered the nal resort, particularly against autocracies. In contrast, There are no

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innocents is the motto of contemporary terrorists who target democracies as the rst resort. Furthermore, unlike 19th -century terrorists who proudly proclaimed that they were indeed terrorists, their contemporary counterparts cloak themselves in the garb of freedom ghters and holy warriors. Given these differences, conating terrorism with insurgency is neither logical nor, more importantly, helpful in framing policy responses. The people do not constitute the centre of gravity in terrorism; rather they are the targets. And, ironically, they are targeted precisely to intimidate them into supporting the agenda of the terrorists. In other words, what terrorists seek is not the willing support of the people but the peoples meek and unquestioned acceptance of the agenda of the terrorists. For instance, during 1990 and 1991, the peak years of the terrorist campaign of the Khalistani terrorist groups in Punjab, over 5,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks. Moreover, of those killed in these attacks, over 3,500 were Sikhs. Consequently, counter-terrorism strategy must have at its core the physical attrition of terrorist groups who pose a clear and present danger to the lives of ordinary people. This is the lesson that India learnt during the course of its campaign rst against the Naxals in the 1960s and later against Khalistani terrorists in the 1990s. Furthermore, such a campaign, when it is conducted in the domestic sphere, is best led by the police force. This is another lesson learnt from these two cases. India must remember not to forget these lessons as it confronts the present challenge of terrorism. Asymmetric wars are not always a purely domestic phenomenon. Today, for example, the recognition of this fact in South Asia is reected in the appellation Af-Pak. Pakistans employment of asymmetric actors and strategies in pursuit of foreign policy goals, however, goes back to the time of its very creation. In October 1947, it mobilised and directed tribal lashkars to conquer Kashmir. Again in 1965, Pakistan organised a much larger guerrilla force to liberate Kashmir, an effort that was given the military codename Operation Gibraltar. Since the early 1990s, Pakistan has employed jihadi terrorists to liberate Kashmir and destabilise India, acquire strategic depth in Afghanistan and extend its inuence into Central Asia. This effort is likely to gather pace after 2014, an added reason for which is the imperative of diverting the energies of the jihadists outside Pakistans borders; energies that have come to be expended within Pakistan itself, especially in the last few years. Thus, there is likely to be an increase in terrorist violence emanating from the worlds epicentre of terrorism, and a good deal of it is likely to be directed towards India. Here, it is instructive to recall Gandhis judgement about the consequences of embarking upon a campaign of terrorism even for a justied cause like freedom. When Indian revolutionaries exploded a bomb under the Viceroys special train in December 1929, Gandhi immediately responded to this violent act by pushing through a resolution that condemned the cowardly deed of the misguided youth at the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress held the very next week. He followed it up with an article in Young India entitled The Cult of the Bomb, in which he warned that it is an easy natural step from violence done to the foreign ruler to violence to our own people whom we may consider to be obstructing the countrys progress.4 The violent terrorist campaign initiated by jihadi terrorists within Pakistan beginning in the 1990s, which in the last few years has become gravely virulent, tellingly demonstrates the underlying truth in Gandhis caution against embarking upon the path of terrorism. Even more relevant to our perspective on asymmetric warfare are the practical difculties associated with responding to the campaigns of foreign terrorist groups with bases and training grounds in the parent country, which not only tolerates them but

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actually considers them as strategic assets to be employed in pursuit of foreign policy goals. Americas $20 billion-plus in aid and assistance to Pakistan over the last decade and its stepped up drone attacks and diplomatic pressure have not helped, as has become tellingly evident in recent months. But will addressing the objectives of terrorist groups and by extension those of their sponsors work, as some people suggest? Let us take here, for example, the stated objectives of the Lashkar-e-Toiba to see how far these can be addressed. The Lashkars agenda is global jihad. Its ghters have been engaged in campaigns in India, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Iraq and possibly also Chechnya. There are reports that the Lashkar was in one way or another connected to the 7/7 bombings in London, to the shoe bomber Richard Reid, to a terror plot in Australia, and to the Times Square bomber.5 In a booklet entitled Why We Are Waging Jihad?, the Lashkar lists eight reasons: eliminating evil and facilitating conversion to Islam; ensuring Islams ascendance; forcing non-Muslims to pay the jaziya (historically, a tax paid by nonMuslims to Muslim rulers); assisting the weak and powerless; avenging Muslims who have been wronged; punishing the enemies of Islam for breaking promises and treaties; defending a Muslim state; and liberating what were historically Muslim territories during the Caliphate era. The list is rounded up with the statement that jihad is necessary to restructure the international order according to the wishes of Allah. According to the Pakistani scholar and diplomat Husain Haqqani, together all these reasons constitute an agenda for permanent jihad.6 With specic reference to India, the Lashkars leader Hafeez Saeed declared in June 1999 that his mujahideen were waging jihad not only for the liberation of Kashmir but also for the independence of Indias 200 million Muslims. He added that jihad against India would continue until Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Hyderabad, Uttar Pradesh and Junagadh achieve independence.7 In essence, the Lashkars goal is the disintegration of the Indian Union. In tune with this objective, the Lashkar has expanded its jihad to cover all of India, a campaign that began in December 2000 with a terrorist attack on Delhis Red Fort. The latest and most horrendous of its attacks occurred in Mumbai in November 2008. Needless to say, India is naturally reluctant to address the Lashkars and, by extension, Pakistans objective and dissolve itself into what Churchill once described as a geographical expression. Finally, there is a notion often expressed in the last few years that intra-state wars, which are predominantly asymmetric in nature, have emerged as the new face of conict in the post-Cold War era. Some even prognosticate that such asymmetric wars are likely to be the future face of conict. At rst sight, this notion might appear to be valid. After all, 115 out of a total of 122 recorded conicts between 1989 and 2006 (that is, 94 per cent) were insurgencies, terrorist campaigns, civil wars and external interventions in internal conicts.8 However, if we were to take a longer historical view, this notion proves inaccurate. According to the data sets of the Correlates of War project, in both the 19th and 20th centuries inter-state wars were greatly outnumbered by intrastate conicts, external interventions in such conicts and conicts among non-state actors. Out of a total of 294 wars between 1816 and 1899, 262 (about 89 per cent) were asymmetric in nature. Similarly, during the 20th century, 271 out of a total of 335 wars (about 81 per cent) were asymmetric.9 These statistics clearly demonstrate that asymmetric warfare has not suddenly emerged as the new face of conict in the post-Cold War era but has been the predominant form of conict over the last two centuries at least.

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There is, however, one signicant difference between asymmetric warfare as it came to be practised in the 20th century and its previous avatars. This difference lies in the union effected during the 20th century between asymmetric strategies of guerrilla warfare and terrorism on one hand and political and politico-religious ideologies like communism and jihadism on the other. Thus, guerrilla warfare and terrorism came to be envisaged and employed as instruments for effecting a communist revolution in several countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. Even though communism as an ideology and as a mode of economic organisation has now been discredited, some insurgent and terrorist groups, such as the Maoists in India, continue to draw inspiration from, and practise, its precepts. During the last quarter of the 20th century, a similar union was effected between guerrilla warfare and terrorism on the one hand and jihadism on the other, with the goal of reordering Muslim societies according to original religious precepts and re-establishing the Islamic Caliphate. These unions between asymmetric warfare strategies and political and politico-religious ideologies have provided greater vigour, focus and legitimacy for the groups engaged in such projects. Countering radical ideologies must therefore be an integral part of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaigns.

Notes
1. The Landon Lecture, November 26, 2007, at http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech. aspx?speechid=1199 (accessed November 22, 2011). 2. This phrase is an adaptation of Kissingers evocative formulation about the Vietnam War during which the United States sought physical attrition while Vietnam aimed for Americas psychological exhaustion. See Henry A. Kissinger, The Vietnam Negotiations, Foreign Affairs, January 1969, p. 214. 3. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1997, pp. 9, 4. 4. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 48, November 21, 1929April 2, 1930, p. 185, at http:// www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL048.PDF (accessed November 24, 2011). 5. Stephen Tankel, Lashkar-e-Taiba: Past Operations and Future Prospects, New America Foundation National Security Studies Program Policy Paper, April 2011, at http://newamerica. net/sites/newamerica.net/les/policydocs/Tankel_LeT_0.pdf (accessed November 22, 2011). 6. Husain Haqqani, The Ideology of South Asian Jihadi Groups, in Hillel Fradkin, Husain Haqqani, and Eric Brown (eds), Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 1, Hudson Institute, Washington, DC, 2005, at http://www.hudson.org/les/publications/Current_Trends_ in_Islamic_Ideology_vol_1.pdf (accessed October 26, 2009). 7. Cited in Mariam Abou Zahab, The Regional Dimension of Sectarian Conicts in Pakistan, in Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Pakistan: Nationalism Without a Nation, Manohar, New Delhi, 2002, p. 122. 8. See Table 2 in Lotta Harbom and Peter Wallensteen, Armed Conict, 19892006, Journal of Peace Research, 44(5), 2007, p. 624. 9. Chronological List of All Wars, at http://www.correlatesofwar.org/COW2%20Data/ WarData_NEW/WarList_NEW.pdf (accessed November 14, 2011).