Praveen Swami Calling for Targeted Killing of Maoist Leaders!
Sukla Sen
The former Punjab Director-General of Police, K.P.S. Gill's signal contribution was demonstrating that alternatives to population-centric counter-insurgency could succeed. Instead of engaging in protracted, large-force operations, Mr. Gill focussed on offensive operations targeting the leadership and cadre of Khalistan terrorists. In effect, unconventional war-fighting methods were used to defeat unconventional
war-fighting methods. Evidence that such tactics work has piled up. In Jammu and Kashmir, the Special Operations Group succeeded in decimating the leadership of the Hizb ul-Mujahideen. Andhra Pradesh's Greyhounds destroyed a once-powerful Maoist insurgency. Tripura defeated an intractable tribal insurgency.
Unquote
Understandably, away from the battlefields. Dragged out of homes or on the city streets? A la Mossad!?
And deriding Chidambaram for not doing that. For being "conservative"!
He proclaims that "Indian forces are losing" - to justify his call for adoption of "unconventional" methods.
Evidently the execution of this fiendish call would call for drumming up of insane paranoia.
For a review of counter-insurgency doctrine
Praveen Swami
| Key to India's failure in combating Maoist insurgency is an ahistorical, one-size-fits-all security doctrine. |
Eric Hobsbawm wrote: “There is nothing in the purely military pages of Mao, Nguyen Giap, Che Guevara or other manuals of guerrilla warfare which a traditional guerrillero or band leader would regard as other than simple common sense.”
Last week, after the massacre of 76 police personnel in Dantewada, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram urged Indians to “remain calm, keep your nerve, and do not stray from the carefully chosen course that we have adopted since November 2009.”
The last of those recommendations may prove profoundly misguided. Few of the strategists charged with executing the Minister's ambitious counter-Maoist offensive appear to have grasped its doctrinal and tactical demands. Premised on the belief that counter-insurgency campaigns must be population-centric — in other words, dominate territories and thus deny insurgents contact with the population — the strategic foundation of India's war against Maoist insurgents is flawed. The bottom line is this: Indian forces are losing. Last year, 312 security personnel were killed to 294 Maoists. This year, too, the figures are grim.
For centuries, insurgents have known that a superior force can be defeated. Napoleon Bonaparte believed that his 1808 occupation of Spain would be a “military promenade.” Instead, France found itself bogged down by a protracted guerrilla struggle that lasted six years and compelled to commit three-fifths of its imperial army. Irish insurgents who fought the British in 1848 were taught to “decompose the science and system of war.” “The force of England,” advised the radical James Lalor, “is entrenched and fortified. You must draw it out of position; break up its mass; break its trained line of march and manoeuvre; its equal step and serried array.”
Much of this would have been familiar to peasant rebels and bandits in India. Back in 1813, Kallua Gujjar led a successful series of raids targeting moneylenders, travellers and police posts in the Saharanpur-Dehra Dun belt. His 1,000-strong irregular force was, on one occasion, able to loot a group of some 200 police personnel. Bhil insurgents staged a series of revolt between 1820 and 1860 — driven, among other things, by the large-scale expropriation of Adivasi land by the state and growing exploitation by moneylenders. Despite the use of irregular formations like James Outram's Bhil Corps and a policy of pacification that involved pushing the Adivasis to become settled farmers, the Bhil raids continued for decades.
Major-General Akbar Khan, who commanded the Pakistani irregular offensive directed at Srinagar in 1947, described the tactical mindset of such irregular warriors in his memoirs: “One Mahsud tribesman aptly described to me their tactics as being like that of the hawk. The hawk flies high in the sky, out of danger; he flies round and round until he sees his prey and then he swoops down on it for one mighty strike and when he has got his prey, he does not wait around, he flies off at once to some far off quiet place where he can enjoy what he has got.”
Ossified doctrine
Key to India's failure in combating Maoist insurgency is an ahistorical, one-size-fits-all security doctrine. In essence, state responses have consisted of pumping in forces for conventional, ground-holding operations in the hope of displacing guerrilla forces; maintaining high force levels over sustained periods of time; and, using this military presence to push forward with developmental and political initiatives to deprive insurgents of their political legitimacy.
Indian counter-insurgency tactics and strategy, Vijendra Singh Jafa notes, “have remained fundamentally conservative and traditional, influenced substantially by accounts of British experiences.” Drawing on the British campaign against the Malayan Communist Party, Indian strategists believe that successful counter-insurgency campaigns must focus on winning popular support. New work, like that of historian Karl Hack, has shown that the back of the Malayan insurgency was, in fact, broken long before Britain set about winning hearts and minds. Little of this revisionist literature, though, has been studied seriously in Indian military academies.
Despite plenty of evidence that population-centric strategies do not work —witness the durability of insurgencies in the northeast and Jammu and Kashmir — the doctrine has never been reappraised.
The former Punjab Director-General of Police, K.P.S. Gill's signal contribution was demonstrating that alternatives to population-centric counter-insurgency could succeed. Instead of engaging in protracted, large-force operations, Mr. Gill focussed on offensive operations targeting the leadership and cadre of Khalistan terrorists. In effect, unconventional war-fighting methods were used to defeat unconventional war-fighting methods. Evidence that such tactics work has piled up. In Jammu and Kashmir, the Special Operations Group succeeded in decimating the leadership of the Hizb ul-Mujahideen. Andhra Pradesh's Greyhounds destroyed a once-powerful Maoist insurgency. Tripura defeated an intractable tribal insurgency.
In a thoughtful 1988 paper for the United States Air Force Airpower Research Institute, Dennis Drew noted that counter-insurgency operations called for an upturning of military thinking. Military professionals, he wrote, believe “that the basic military objective in war is to conduct operations that lead to the destruction of the enemy's centre of gravity.” India's policy of pumping company-sized formations into the Maoist heartland, and attempting to dominate the territory around them, is one manifestation of this thinking. The problem is successful insurgents have no fixed centre of gravity — no bases that conventional forces may overwhelm.
Population-centred counter-insurgency has received renewed legitimacy from the apparent success of the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, which was marketed as having subdued a growing insurgency. But, as scholar and soldier Gian Gentile has pointed out, the notion that the reduction of insurgent violence in Iraq was “primarily the result of American military action is hubris run amok.” In fact, Gentile argued, a “combination of brutal attacks by Shia militia in conjunction with the actions of the Iraqi Shia government and the continuing persecution by the al-Qaeda against the Sunni community convinced the insurgents that they could no longer counter all these forces and it was to their advantage to cut a deal with the Americans.”
Capacity crisis
For many in the Indian intelligentsia, the defeat of insurgents is an inevitability: part, as it were, of the manifest destiny of the state. Last week, Shekhar Gupta, editor of Indian Express, offered a ringing endorsement of this received wisdom, arguing that insurgencies “follow a pattern pretty much like a bell curve,” “The graph of violence,” he argued, “rises in the initial period, producing more and more casualties on both sides. But at some stage the rebels come to the realisation that the state and its people are too strong and resolute to be ever defeated, no matter what the score, in a particular day's battle in a long war. That is the point of inflexion when rebels see reason. There is no reason why the Maoist insurgency will not follow that same pattern.”
But will it? Back in 1954, when India first committed troops to battling Naga insurgents, just one State was hit by insurgency. Now, 265 of 625 districts are affected by one form or the other of chronic conflict — a figure that excludes areas with unacceptably high levels of organised crime, as well as cities periodically targeted by jihadist violence. It is far from clear if the resources exist to address the problem. Italy has 559 police officers for every 1,00,000 citizens; Bihar has 60, Orissa 97, Chhattisgarh 128 and Jharkhand 136. Even the Army, despite its apparently enormous size, will be stretched if it is committed to internal security duties. The United States has one soldier for every 186 citizens; India has one for 866.
Worse, it is far from clear if the Indian state has the capacity needed for rapid, transformative projects. The U.S., figures compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management's Ajai Sahni show, has 889 federal employees, and 6,314 state and local employees for every 1,00,000 citizens. India's Union government has 295 — and if one excludes railway employees, 171. Chhattisgarh has 1,067 government employees per 1,00,000 population; Bihar, a pathetic 472.
Even if forces are found to saturate the ground, experience shows, development will not necessarily follow. In both Jammu and Kashmir and the northeast, state spending has yielded only limited results. Funds have often been siphoned off by local contractors and politicians — and, worse, preyed on by insurgents. In effect, the injection of cash into troubled regions has subsidised insurgency.
Learning from its own success stories, India needs to fight insurgencies in smarter, leaner ways. Like Andhra Pradesh, States must invest in training facilities that meet their particular needs; expand intelligence capabilities; and use technology effectively. Instead of focussing on simply expanding the size of Central forces, the Union government must understand the need for them to be properly trained and equipped. Soldiers without skills have only one fate: defeat.
In time, it is true, Indian forces may succeed in wearing down the Maoist insurgency, albeit at a horrible cost of lives — but there are reasons to worry that they may not. India's strategic strengths are manifest. But as the work of military scholar Ivan Arreguin-Toft teaches us, the weak do sometimes win. Instead of despatching ever-greater numbers of men to support those already flailing in the face of insurgent fire, a dispassionate review of both doctrine and tactics is needed.
--
Peace Is Doable
venukm
> *For a review of counter-insurgency doctrine*
>
> Praveen Swami
>
> *Key to India's failure in combating Maoist insurgency is an ahistorical,
> one-size-fits-all security doctrine.*
Kavita Krishnan
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Shaji K A
Will somebody come out with more information on him. His political orientation? Why The Hindu is giving him so much space? The major instances when he torpedoed public interest by siding with the establishment?
venukm
26th April 2010
Praveen Swami’s not so fabulous fables
If there is one infallible indicator of what the top Indian
Intelligence agencies are thinking or cooking up, it is this: Praveen
Swami’s articles. Each time the security establishment wishes to push
a certain angle to this bomb blast or that, Swami’s articles appear
magically, faithfully reflecting the Intelligence reports. After the
Batla House ‘encounter’, he launched a tirade against all those who
were questioning the police account of the shootout labeling them all
‘Alices in wonderland’. He went so far as to identify ‘precisely’ how
Inspector Sharma was shot by claiming that "abdomen wound was
inflicted with [Atif] Amin's weapon and the shoulder hit, by Mohammad
Sajid".
And no sir, Swami’s conclusion was not based on post mortem reports of
the killed, fire arm examination report or ballistic report but on
this innocent fact: “the investigators believe that…” He certainly
brings in a whole new meaning to ‘investigative journalism’. Swami
however felt no need to pen an article when the postmortem reports of
Atif and Sajid revealed that they had been shot from close range and
that neither of them sustained gunshot wounds in the frontal region of
the body—an impossibility in the case of a genuine encounter. Was it
because the police and the Home Ministry chose to remain quite after
the revelations—hoping that the storm would quietly blow over.?
Flip Flops on German Bakery Blasts
And meanwhile there was the German Bakery blast in Pune. Writing less
than a week after the blasts, Swami hinted at the possible involvement
of the Hindutva groups, namely Abhinav Bharat (“Hindutva Terror Probe
Haunts Pune Investigation”, 19th February 2010). Indeed, this was mood
in the ATS (though this was no deterrent to the large scale illegal
detention and brutal interrogation often at private premises, of
scores of Muslim youth in Pune.) Even the following week, the Home
Department officials were not ruling out the possibility of the
involvement of the Right wing Hindutva groups. But that was February.
By March, political impatience at the probe taking such a turn was
palpable. Responding to a riled Shiv Sena in the legislative assembly,
the Maharashtra Home Minister, R.R. Patil thundered: “I will inquire
if Raghuvanshi really indicated to the media about involvement of
Hindu organisations in the Pune blast and if he did, action will be
taken (against him)." As if on cue, two days later, Rakesh Maria was
installed as the new ATS chief. This was of course only after a few
months when Vinita Kamte, widow of the slain ATS officer Ashok Kamte,
made serious allegations casting aspersions on Maria’s role in
responding to the then ATS chief Hemant Karkare’s call for
reinforcements during 26/11.
CCTV Footage:
Since its start, the probe had little to go on by way of leads except
for the CCTV footage. While the Pune police commissioned experts to
draw sketches of the suspects based on this footage, ATS dismissed
this exercise as “anything but useful”, as their source, the CCTV
footage, was itself grainy. (Siasat, April 12). Where does Swami stand
on this? He wrote in his 19th February piece: “All that investigators
have by way of suspects are three men recorded holding brief meetings
before the blast by a poor-quality closed-circuit television camera.
From the videotape, it is unclear if the men had anything to do with
the attack.”
Exactly a month later, Swami conveniently develops an amnesia about
Abhinav Bharat and even about the poor quality of CCTV footage. What
was earlier ‘unclear” and hazy has in one month segued into solid
shape: in the form of top Indian Mujahideen (IM) operative Mohammad
Zarar Siddi Bawa ie., Yasin Bhatkal. Suddenly imparted with
enlightenment, Swami writes dramatically of how a closed circuit
television camera ... “recorded evidence that Bawa had returned to
India—just minutes before an improvised explosive device ripped
through the popular restaurant killing seventeen people and injuring
at least sixty.” The poor quality (by Swami’s own admission) and
useless (by the ATS’s admission) visual evidence has morphed into
precious footage of Bhatkal, “the fair, slight young man with a wispy
beard” … “dressed in a loose-fitting blue shirt, a rucksack slung over
his back.”
Clearly, Swami’s changing perceptions about the CCTV footage is in
accord with the shifting attitude of the ATS itself. The ATS began by
keeping the option of probing Abhinav Bharat open; developed cold
feet, preferred to lapse into the usual Lashkar-IM litany,
‘rediscovered’ hitherto worthless footage and resurrected the IM. In
an unequivocal reference to the manner in which innocent Muslim youths
were arrested earlier by the ATS in its pre-Karkare days, a senior
officer of the Pune Police admitted that “There have been some
arrests in the Pune blast incident just as in the case of the 2006
Malegaon explosions. But we would never know whether those arrested
were actually the men who triggered the blasts.” (Siasat, April 12,
2010). Rumours that the probe might be handed over the National
Investigative Agency must have also pressured the Maharashtra ATS to
show ‘results’—and viola, within two weeks of taking over, Maria
submitted a preliminary report to the state government identifying the
hand of Bhatkal and IM in the blasts. This was of course promptly and
proudly relayed by R.R. Patil to the legislative assembly (surely to
the relief also of the Shiv Sena legislators). Is it a coincidence
that the Pune Police Commissioner has been transferred, ostensibly for
the rising crime graph a couple of days ago? It seems improbable that
the running battle between the Pune police and the ATS—whose current
chief Maria had thrown a tantrum following Vinita Kamte’s accusation,
demanding the support of the state Home Ministry—had no role to play
in this.
The Bangalore Blasts:
When two crude bombs went off outside the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium ahead
of the match between Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bangalore on
17th April, the Karnataka Home Minister V.S. Acharya announced that
the state Police were investigating the alleged involvement of the
cricket betting lobby. He forcefully denied any link with the earlier
blasts in the city in 2008.
But Yasin Bhatkal seems to have preoccupied Swami’s mind on 19th April
for he evokes him again in connection with the stadium blasts
(“Stadium Blasts herald new IM offensive”). Citing the ever
cooperative ‘investigators, he says that the ‘similarity in design’
and the manner in which some bombs failed to explode are a sure
indicator of the IM hand. Beyond this, he has nothing to link
Bangalore bombs to Bhatkal. But good stories can always compensate for
lack of facts. His piece, “To Bangalore with Hate” on 21st April
(which has charming subtitles such as Jihad at ginger Plantation”), is
no less crude then the two bombs at the stadium. Swami here details
the biographies of SIMI activists in South India, making the link,
ever so cleverly, between SIMI—and yes, IM—and the stadium blasts,
without providing any evidence of their actual linkage. Life stories
of these men are proof enough, he assumes.
It is quite clear that Mr. Swami has provided a (sometimes
entertaining) dramatized version of the charge sheets files by the
various police departments across the country. While it may make for a
good script, we do hope that Mr. Swami understand what charge sheets
are: a list of charges or allegations, which the police has still the
burden to prove in a court of law--not irrefutable or established
truth. Perhaps, Mr Swami fancies himself a literary genius who
believes in narratives acquiring their own lives. In which case, he
has manufactured a large corpus of mediocre short stories.
Released by JTSA (www.teacherssolidarity.org)
venukm
put in by the likes of Parveen Swami, one recently feels that even
without 'the Hindu', your updates are OK.