India’s Army is Economically Unprepared to Engage
in Conventional Warfare with Pakistan
An analysis of various reports shows that it is highly unlikely that India
has the artillery and ammunition resources to fight another war like Kargil.
The current India-Pakistan tension in the wake of the
Uri attack seems like another round of hostilities meant to re-define the
military-strategic red lines of the two countries.
It
was in the wake of the Kargil war that the current threshold was marked. What
both sides learnt from that conflict, especially General Pervez Musharraf’s
army, was that the military option could not be relied upon to solve the
Kashmir dispute. But Kargil also changed the nature of bilateral conflict.
The
primary lesson learnt by Pakistan was that a military victory was almost
impossible – especially if India could expand the conflict not just through the
use of firepower but also tactful diplomacy and media management. Since what
followed eventually were peace overtures – with even Musharraf, the architect
of Kargil, coming up with his ‘out of the box’ solution for Kashmir – it was
generally assumed that this was a strategic shift and a new milestone in bilateral
relations.
However,
the Pakistani establishment still believed in the utility of using
non-state militants willing to fight the war in Kashmir, and against India
more generally. Avoiding conflict through the use of a nuclear deterrence
umbrella while pushing conflict with the help of jihadis was the new
formula used to bring attention to unresolved issues.
It
was obvious from various incidents starting from 2002 through to 26/11, right
up to the present, that the Lashkar-e Tayyaba/Jamaat-ud-Dawwa (LeT/JuD)
network, Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and certain elements of Sipha-e-Sahaba Pakistan
and Lashkar-e-Jhangavi were being used to challenge India in a manner
which would raise tension without a high risk of major retaliation.
Of
course, in the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, New Delhi played
its diplomatic cards well. It also tried to silently put pressure on
Pakistan by aiding insurgents in Balochistan. However, the threat was
never comparable – mainly due to the Baloch insurgents lacking the capacity to
take on the Pakistani state.
Except
for claiming a terrorist attack in Islamabad in April 2014, there is nothing
that the various Baluch insurgents ever managed to do to challenge Pakistan.
Even today, they continue to lack that capacity despite the Pakistan
military’s public relations machinery successfully depicting them as a
force on par with anti-state religious militants like the Tehreek-e-Taliban
Pakistan. Thanks to this hard sell, Pakistanis today, especially the younger
generation, have more or less bought the idea that LeT/JuD and
JeM are Islamabad’s response to the various Baloch groups that India is accused
of supporting. But the reality is that these groups in Balochistan can never
inflict the kind of damage that the jihadi groups can do in Kashmir and
India.
It
appears that post-Uri, New Delhi is trying to find a method to counterbalance
the threat by targeting jihadi camps across the border. By increasing the
stakes for Islamabad, India hopes to pressure it into reducing and abandoning
its support for these groups. Behind the noise of the past few days, that is
what is happening. The Indian announcement of ‘surgical strikes’ and the
Pakistani response to that has set in motion a slow process of recalibrating
the threshold between the two countries. This process will continue until
both sides understand their own limits.
A limited operation
Contrary
to the impression created by India’s DGMO, the operation across the border was
limited in scale and less gargantuan than claimed.
Reportedly,
Indian troops crossed over not more than 200 meters inside the Pakistani side
of the Line of Control to attack an LeT camp located some 100 metres away
from an army check post at Dudhnial. The fact that it was a limited scale
operation made it possible for Pakistan to couch this as nothing more than
firing and a border violation. While it attained some goals in the form of
killing 5-6 militants, the use of the term ‘surgical strike’ was misleading.
Perhaps, a better term was a ‘targeted’ operation in which the risk of further
escalation was avoided by not killing military personnel at the nearby check
post. Reports indicate that only 3-4 army personnel were injured due to the use
of grenades against the post. Furthermore, the Indian troops did not come three
or four miles inside the LoC as some defence sources in India have suggested.
The short distance is the reason why Pakistan could claim that what
happened was nothing more than an unprovoked incursion of the sort that
takes place all the time.
Indeed,
this is how the attack was presented to a team of journalists taken to the
border areas by the Pakistani army’s Inter-Services Public Relations
agency. Although the media were not taken to a couple of other places such
as beyond Kotli at Tatta Pani and one other place, the fact is that even if
journalists were taken to the exact location, they might not have
been too impressed by the destruction caused given the limited nature of the
target.
The
attack at best denotes the testing of waters to check the Pakistan army’s
threshold for retaliation but also the Indian Army’s current capacity to
carry out surgical operations without the threat of escalating the cost of
conflict to an unbearably high level. The Pakistani side at the moment is trying
to keep a tight lid on the issue so that it is not forced to escalate. An
admission of an attack without meeting public expectations of retaliation would
exact a high political cost for GHQ Rawalpindi. People would be most
disappointed if they found out that an attack actually happened inside
Pakistan, raising concerns about issues of national sovereignty.
These
are indeed tricky times for the subcontinent in which excessive or incorrect
claims can both be dangerous. They could raise expectations that could
later force the hand of political leaders to act less rationally or even
irrationally.
The
impact of the post-Uri targeted operation is hard to read but it may have
strengthened some existing assumptions on both sides. For India, the
understanding might be that Pakistan is still not in a position to escalate
tension – just as it was unable to do during Kargil. But Delhi must understand
that a reaction did not come mainly due to the scale of the Indian ‘strike’.
The lack of a response, however, must not be misread or taken as denoting
the absence of a future reaction.
In
Pakistan’s case, on the other hand, the assumption might be that the Indian
Army still will not dare to come deep inside Pakistan to strike other
camps located deeper behind the LoC other than the one mentioned above,
which was quite close to the line. Nevertheless, Islamabad is likely to
watch carefully India’s willingness to shift the goal post as far as its
security is concerned. The operation, thus, can’t be brushed aside
casually even if there was no response to it.
Thus
far, the conflict seems manageable. The influence of the army in Kashmir,
particularly on people living close to the border areas has helped tremendously
in keeping secret the fact that an LeT camp was there and was hit. The fact that
the number of militants killed is 5-6 militants also helps the incident go
unreported. The security culture in Kashmir on the Pakistani side of the LoC is
such that people are either in sync with the army or dependent upon the
organisation for meeting their needs during tough times. Typically, those
living close to the borders are either informants or too scared to tell.
However,
these are tough times for peace and stability in the region as the two
militaries test and re-define their thresholds. Any miscalculation could result
in an inadvertent but costly escalation. At the end of the day, there are no
prospects for a decisive victory by either side and sacrificing over a billion
lives or more is too big a risk to take.
Ayesha Siddiqa is an independent social scientist based in
Islamabad and author of Military Inc: Inside
Pakistan’s Military Economy
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