Having seen the Kargil fighting up close and written books on the ’62 and ’65 conflicts with China and Pakistan, I know the horrors of war. I have also seen what low intensity conflicts can do, having covered terror attacks both in Punjab and Kashmir, and also the Northeast where I did a book on the Assam Rifles. Last thing we need is to send our young men and women into combat if we can avoid it, but when all else fails, we then have to fight and then fight to win. Uri and Balakot were watershed events in independent India’s history, and if the hydra-headed monster of terror strikes are not addressed, especially when they are state-sponsored, then we will forever be at the mercy of our enemies who can and usually choose the when and where of their attacks.
Pahalgam was fundamentally different because the Pakistan army chief, virtually green flagged the heinous attack on a public platform. The identity of the killers and those who helped them is relatively irrelevant, what is more important is that their handlers are known to be across the border. The irony is, for the last 78 years, India has known who they are but invariably those at the helm, chose to look the other way. The tribal lashkars unleashed by Pakistan in October 1947 were terrorists (denied but supported by the Pakistan Army), the raiders that made up Op Gibraltar in 1965 were terrorists (denied but supported by the Pakistan Army), as were the supposed “Mujahids” in Kargil in 1999 (denied but were the Pakistan Army). It is no secret that General Zia’s Op Tupac was based on employing terror tactics, but the Pakistani state always adopted a policy of denial.
We don’t have to tell the world the reality of the Pakistan Army, everyone already knows it. With pit vipers being cultivated in their own backyard, Pakistanis themselves started getting bitten, which gave the Army and their diplomats a smokescreen to play the victim card in front of the world as well. From a purely logical perspective, the fight against terror should be every person’s fight, regardless of his or her nationality. But then life isn’t quite that simple, for we have a candid admission from Pakistan’s defence minister, Khwaja Asif, who bizarrely claims in a television interview with Yalda Hakim that the West was fairly Ok with Pakistan doing the dirty work for them and that they were backing terror groups for three decades. He also claimed madrasas are Pakistan’s second line of defence while in a show of histrionics, Pakistan’s information and broadcasting minister, Attaullah Tarar, told the same Australian journalist deadpan that there are no terrorist camps in Pakistan.
Now that the gloves are off, and the real battle with terror has begun. Not content with just squeezing Pakistan by putting the Indus Water Treaty and threatening other punitive actions, India took the all-important step of launching missiles and targeting known terrorist centres inside Pakistan, most of which not too surprisingly are inside mosques.
The subsequent statement that then came from the Indian side was nuanced and clear—the attack was on terrorist hideouts, and not on military targets or the people of Pakistan. Two things happened at this point that were interesting. Hardly had the dust from the attacks settled down, the Pakistani side went to town using old footage on social media, claiming they had shot down five Indian fighter aircraft and a drone. At the same time, they also stated publicly that Indian aircraft did not violate Pakistani airspace.
Had it been a civil government in Pakistan (as was the case during the Balakot strike), my guess is that the Pakistanis would have used that propaganda and opted for a “we gave India a bloody nose” approach and sat tight. But in the case of the Pakistan Army, Asim Munir had to react in a fairly predictable manner. Pakistani artillery immediately bracketed the Naushera-Poonch axis and the guns that had been silent for a while, immediately opened up. In the past, those familiar with the Poonch bowl, know that Pakistani gunners would fire at outlying villages and did not bracket the town where people then ran for shelter. This time they changed tactics and in the process killed more than a dozen civilians. This like Pahalgam, was also cold blooded murder aimed to further infuriate the Indian side.
The attack on 15 Indian military establishments in various cities the next night was not surprising, nor was the choice of targets. Anyone familiar with their pre-emptive strikes in 1971 would see a similar pattern. India’s immediate response, and the ability of the country’s air defence units to deal with incoming drones, further puts the Pakistan Army into a corner.
WHERE DO WE GO?
So the big question now is, where do we go from here?
It is highly unlikely that India on its own has the ability to stymie the power of the Pakistan Army. I had said last week, that it would be a mistake, as some Indian television channels and analysts are saying, to believe that the state of the Pakistani economy has a direct correlation to the state of their army. In any case, so long as Pakistan has support of the PRC, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and a few Western countries, they will continue to try and rattle the sword and hope the world pleads with them to “deescalate”, a tactic that is nothing but nuclear blackmail, not just against India but against the entire planet. Yet, there is one important key player which probably has the power to take that sheen away from Pakistan’s men in khaki, and that is the people of Pakistan themselves.
In the long term, even though I am no apologist for Imran Khan, India must ensure he emerges as the Mujibur Rahman of West Pakistan, while those already fighting the Pakistan Army like the Baloch, take on the mantle of the Mukti Bahini. As it is, even though the current period is separated by more than half a century, the similarities are eerie. Mujib was the elected prime minister and he was denied by the generals and thrown into jail. Imran too has the same distinction. The difference was, the Bengalis stood up and even though 3 million were massacred, they took on the Pakistan Army.
Pakistani generals wrap up the dead bodies of terrorists and give them state funerals and happily lead their people into a war-like situation, for what? Sooner or later, even the most die-hard Pakistani will start asking questions. Towards that end, it is also important for the Government of India to rein in the television networks who seem to have declared a war of their own with Pakistan, making a laughing stock of themselves with jingoistic banner headlines. The people of Pakistan today may not be our friends but they are not our enemies either. Only the people who control the Pakistan Army for their own use and periodically resort to terror as a weapon are our targets. India also cannot and should not be seen as an existential threat for Pakistan, for then the generals will again get the quick-fix to rally people around them.
The generals are playing a dangerous game because their survival depends on it. The narrative emanating from Pakistan almost immediately—true, false, or somewhere in between—is also indicative of the Pakistani generals’ mindset. The talk around shooting down 5 aircraft is intriguing especially since by their own admission, the Indians did not ingress into Pakistani territory. Whoever wrote the initial script probably did so on the strength of the fact that the People›s Republic of China developed through reverse engineering the S-300 PMU as the HQ-9. These were fitted with the FT-2000 system that guides the HQ-9 to counter AEW and AWAC targets as their honing systems lock on to the targeted aircraft’s radar rather than the other way around. While Trump and the US are talking of being good friends with both countries, India is probably being given the time to take out these and other known existing weapons in Pakistan’s possession given to them mainly by China and also Turkey.
From India’s perspective, de-escalation has to be restricted to the physical fighting only, for the other measures have to stay in place until Asim Munir and the existing army structure in Pakistan is revamped. Easier said than done perhaps, but that has to be the only way forward. Asim Munir on the other hand has no option but to try and increase the level of tension, but the rest of the army can also see for themselves how his own personal motives have brought about this situation.
On the Indian side, Indian politics also needs to come of age. Optics cannot override strategy and the tendency to crow about minor battles perceived to have been won has to eschewed. The political class in Kashmir seem to have, at least overtly, been seriously shaken by what has happened in Pahalgam and they have also seen Pakistani guns bracket Poonch while missiles were launched at targets in Jammu and Kashmir. For a country that claims all people of Jammu and Kashmir are their brothers for whom they will fight to the last, it’s ironical they should target and kill civilians in Poonch.
The Indian higher command, in my opinion, is today in a completely different league and they have so far not done anything that takes away from the biggest weapon they hold. During the 1971 War, every Indian soldier, be he a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jew or a Christian, knew we were fighting for a just cause. India has been more than restrained in its reactions and how this crisis plays itself out will determine India’s future standing in the world as well. At a time when everything in the world is rapidly changing, this is an opportunity that also lays to rest a lot of other misconceptions about the country’s leadership as a whole.
For Prime Minister Modi and his immediate think tank to presume that all is good would be to only delude themselves. Serious institutional reforms, maybe on the fly, need to be brought into play. The police today in most states are impossible to deal with, more often than not turning on the victims themselves especially if the perpetrators have deep pockets. India’s judiciary needs a reality check and the less said about the bureaucratic system, the better it is. The Pahalgam massacre was a major intelligence failure and if serious questions are not asked and honestly answered, we will always be vulnerable to other Pahalgam and Pulwama-like incidents. The intelligentsia across the board must reach out to the youth of India and drill home the message of Fortress India. Any existing cracks can so easily become fissures.
* Shiv Kunal Verma is an author and military historian.