Why India needs to thank General Musharraf

Why India needs to thank General Pervez Musharraf

Pakistan needs to act on India's refrain to shut down the terror infrastructure and act in the spirit of the Ufa declaration.

POLITICS

 |  4-minute read |   29-10-2015

SANDEEP UNNITHAN

 @sandeepunnithan

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Pakistan's military dictators are mostly always larger-than-life individuals, divinely sanctioned to steer their country away from the anarchy of civilian rule. Or so they seem to believe. Untrammelled by civilian oversight, every military ruler from Field Marshals Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan and Generals Zia to Pervez Musharraf, have launched military expeditions that have ultimately proved ruinous. Ayub had a series of grandly titled military plans to seize Kashmir in 1965, Yahya Khan presided over a genocide in East Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, Zia, an Afghan War that forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan but injected the poison of Islamic fundamentalism into his country's body politic. And finally, General Pervez Musharraf, who launched the most recent attempt to redraw the boundaries of Kashmir, at Kargil in 1999, and finally oversaw a phase of terrorism that saw dreaded "fidayeen" or kamikaze terrorists spill out of the vale of Kashmir into the heartland of India. But none of these dictators have spoken about their exploits with the kind of clarity that General Musharraf did to an interview to Dunya News TV on October 25, 2015. The General's fortunes are admittedly at its lowest since a 2013 return from self-imposed exile backfired, and is technically on bail in a spiral of court cases. Every TV appearance is an opportunity to remind his countrymen he is available to fulfill his divine calling.

Responding to the anchor's queries on the cliché, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", in the context of the Lashkar-e-Taiba's Hafiz Saeed and Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, the General at first resorted to false equivalences. India too was playing this game, he said, suggesting somehow that the Shiv Sena's ink antics and ban theatrics could even remotely be compared with the LeT's slaughter of hotel guests in the Taj or a recent attempt to blow up a passenger train in Gurdaspur.

Also read: Why Pakistan doesn't want to normalise ties with India

Prodded further by the anchor, the General couldn't resist. He sucked in a deep breath to narrate a Shakespearean tragedy in five minutes: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 led to "a religious militancy we introduced in Pakistan's interest to eject the Soviets, we brought the mujahideen from all over the world, we trained the Taliban, we gave them weapons, we sent him inside… They were our heroes… This (Jalaluddin) Haqqani, "He's our hero!… Osama bin Laden, he's our hero!" he said in sarcastic allusions to the Mujahideen being feted as freedom fighters by the US in the 1980s.

Musharraf then turned his gaze to Kashmir, where Pakistan attempted to replicate the Afghanistan model. He traced the origin of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and a dozen other groups to the Kashmiri "freedom fighters" armed and trained by Pakistan against the Indian Army in the 1990s.

Now, the General noted regretfully, "the hero has become the villain" because this "fight for freedom" had now been "converted into terrorism". "This mujahideen activity, which had a positive impact on the world, now it has changed in the world and here as well… Now they are staging blasts, humeen logon ko maar rahe hain… (they are killing us)," he sighed like the dueler bloodied with his double-edged sword.

Also read: Why is America siding with Pakistan on Kashmir?

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The Pakistani ISI's umbilical links with the "strategic assets" like the Afghan Taliban and the LeT are well known and, as a 2010 Harvard University research paper quoted a Taliban leader, "as clear as the sun in the sky". For the man who oversaw the ISI in a crucial decade from 1998 onwards, to acknowledge these ties so openly, amounts to a public confession. Musharraf's candour now undermines Pakistan's attempts to create another false equivalence: "both India and Pakistan are victims of terrorism" because Pakistan, Musharraf now admits, created the monsters which are devouring it and attacking its neighbour. Pakistan now clearly needs to act on India's refrain to shut down the terror infrastructure and act in the spirit of the Ufa declaration that calls for eliminating the menace of terrorism from South Asia. The General's conclusion holds out some hope even as one wonders whether Pakistan's deep state shares their former boss' assessment.

"At this moment, they (terrorists) must be controlled and locked up, because we are affected, we are the victims of this."

Why Syria is the new Afghanistan

Why Syria is the new Afghanistan and Turkey is the new Pakistan

History repeats itself as Russia enters another complicated battleground.

POLITICS

 |  5-minute read |   12-10-2015

SANDEEP UNNITHAN

 @sandeepunnithan

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The Russian ground technicians in khaki shorts and summer hats could have been straight out of Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase in the 1980s as they refueled and rearmed fighter jets. But the pictures were recently taken in the Syrian air force base of Latakia and released by Russia as the bear flexed its muscles on the Mediterranean Sea. Since September 30, Russia has launched an aerial bombing campaign pounding opponents of President Bashar al-Assad. Russian ground-attack jets, Su-25 "Frogfoots" and the Su-24 "Fencers" identical to the ones that the Soviet Union used to bomb and strafe CIA-supported Mujahideen during its nine-year-long military occupation of Afghanistan. Further evidence of deja vu came from US statements that Russia was bombing "CIA-trained fighters", as opposed, presumably, to the vicious Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS). "That’s why the Russian position is doomed to fail," US defence secretary Ashton Carter said in Washington on September 30.

The Soviet Union’s eight-year-long military campaign in Afghanistan, a historically implacable battle ground 3,700km east of Syria, was the world’s last superpower proxy war. It was also one of the factors which accelerated the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union.

The Syrian campaign, in another historical crossroad, is the first deployment of President Vladimir Putin’s resurgent Russian military machine (not counting the brief five-day incursion into south Ossetia in August 2008). The intervention has taken attention away from Russia’s precarious economic position — its energy export dependent economy contracted by 3.5 per cent this year after oil prices crashed to $50 dollars a barrel last year — and boosted President Putin’s approval ratings.

Hundreds of Russian special forces, tanks and fighter aircraft have created a ring of steel around territories held by President al Assad’s forces and allowed the Syrian army to go on the offensives against rebel forces. . A four-year-long civil war saw rebel groups like the al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Al-Nusra and ISIS bite away vast swathes government-held territory, leaving Assad in control of less than a third of his country, mostly the Alawite-dominated coastal areas.

Even a month ago, Assad’s survival was in question, having lost 15 per cent more territory and an army unable to mount ground offensives against Syrian rebels. Putin blunderbuss against anti-Assad rebels — the newest, a barrage of 26 cruise missiles against rebel targets fired from warships moored in the Caspian Sea more than 1,500km away — have now given his Syrian ally a breather.

Reports suggest the Russian intervention was at Iran’s behest — General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Republican Guards’ Al Quds Force, is believed to have visited Moscow in July and sought assistance to bolster Assad’s tottering forces. Iran knows how precarious the military situation in Syria is. It has propped up the Assad regime since 2011 at great cost, losing three Brigadier-General ranked officers on the Syrian battlefront. The loss of senior Iranian officers — one each to strikes by the Al Nusra Front, Israel and ISIS — illustrates the bewildering complexity of Syria’s war. The country is now a witches’ brew of foreign fighters and a multinational bombing range. Fighter aircraft from four of the five P5 countries are now in the air over the shattered country. Russia and the US are now trying to ensure their bombers don’t clash in Syrian airspace just as Soviet and Pakistani fighter aircraft did, shooting each other down, during Afghanistan’s equally complex nine-year-long insurgency.  

The Mujahideen, as the disparate coalition of guerillas strung across the Afghan countryside were called, were armed, trained and equipped by a grouping of western nations, primarily the US and the UK, fronted by the CIA which pumped in cash and arms through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI); China whose ordnance factories churned out the assault rifles and artillery pieces used by the Mujahideen and Saudi Arabia which also funded the guerillas, contributed thousands of "Arab legion" fighters including the son of a billionaire Saudi Arabian construction magnate, Osama bin Laden. Pakistan bore the immediate brunt of the Afghan War: Three million Afghan refugees and the corrosive flow of drugs and weapons from the Golden Crescent.

Thirteen years after the Soviet pullout, the dregs of the Afghan war hit the United States. Al Qaeda terrorists, trained in camps that once housed the Mujahideen, plunged three hijacked airliners into the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon, heralding the beginning of the first wave of Islamist terror. The "War on Terror", a US coinage, found distant echoes with terror attacks in Bali and Madrid A war which, in 2003, inexplicably lurched in an unexpected direction: the invasion of Iraq. The US-led invasion destroyed Iraq as a cohesive entity, cracked open its centuries-old ethnic divide and spawned the even more vicious ISIS. The new group, built by Sunni Arabs and Saddam's former Baathists, quickly shook off their al Qaeda mentors to launch the second phase of the Islamist terrorism, one where the insurgent group captured and administered territory as large as the United Kingdom.

ISIS was emboldened by the withdrawals of US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, wars which a 2013 calculation by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of government reckoned, cost the US more than $6 trillion dollars. The US which lost more than 6,600 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, was unlikely to commit "boots on the ground" into Syria. Neither will Russia for that matter. President Vladimir Putin said in a October 11 interview to a TV channel there was 'no question' of committing ground troops to Syria. Russia, he said, was committed to a political solution

The Syrian war, one of three still-raging Arab Spring conflicts now into their fifth year, has meanwhile spilled into Turkey with which shares a 400km border and onto Europe. As of February this year, the UN declared Turkey to be the world’s largest refugee hosting country has spent $6 billion to host 2.1 million Syrian refugees.

On October 10, twin suicide bomb blasts in Ankara killed 128 persons, the deadliest attacks on Turkish soil. The attacks, believed to masterminded by ISIS, have brought the focus back to the murderous Islamic State.

This July, the US army’s outgoing chief General Ray Odierno said that the fight against ISIS would last decades, a stunning expansion of older timelines suggested by the Obama administration. "In my mind, ISIS is a ten to twenty year problem. It’s not a two year problem," General Odierno said in Washington. That was before Russia’s military surge into Syria. The dramatic Russian entry could possibly shorten the war but as with Syria’s distant echo, Afghanistan, the blowback on the rest of the world cannot be predicted. 

#ISIS, #Turkey, #Syria, #Vladimir Putin

Why the Navy needs fewer INS Kochis

Why Indian Navy needs fewer INS Kochis

It needs larger numbers of patrol vessels and light frigates, not expensive destroyers.

POLITICS

 |  3-minute read |   01-10-2015

SANDEEP UNNITHAN

 @sandeepunnithan

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The guided missile destroyer INS Kochi that joined the Indian Navy in Mumbai on September 30 is a fearsome combatant. This 7400-tonne warship bristles with supersonic cruise missiles, two multi-role helicopters, long range anti-aircraft missiles, guns and torpedoes. This is the reason every Admiral would want to have several such powerful floating arsenals in his fleet. The Indian Navy sees itself fielding a force of 150 warships by 2027. A bulk of these warships will be frigates and destroyers like the INS Kochi capable of neutralising enemy aircrafts, warships, submarines and attacking targets on land and escorting merchant vessels transiting near enemy waters. However, the last major naval conflict was over three decades ago, in the Falklands.

Peacetime mission for the Indian naval fleet includes overseas diplomatic flag-flying missions: in the past year, the Navy has sent its warships to 40 countries across the globe; has been patrolling the Indian coastline to prevent 26/11-type terror attacks, providing humanitarian assistance missions like the rescue of over 4,000 Indian nationals stranded in Yemen and, since 2008, the deployment of one warship in the Gulf of Aden to counter Somali pirates.

There are time and cost constraints in achieving a fleet size the Navy wants. Each Kolkata/Kochi class destroyer costs over Rs 4,000 crore to build. The Navy can afford only a limited number of such warships. Expensive combat platforms will always be subject to the vagaries of budget cuts. This year, the NDA downsized the IAF’s (Indian AirForce) ginormous $20 billion proposal to buy 126 twin-engined Rafale fighter jets, to a modest buy of just 36 aircrafts for $4 billion. There is another instructive lesson in the IAF’s Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) tender that the Rafale won. The MMRCA project began in 1999 as a modest buy of 126 single-engined Mirage 2000 aircrafts.

The Navy currently has five Project 15 "city class" destroyers which it has been inducting rather slowly since 1997. Current plans call for adding ten more such expensive destroyers, costing upwards of $1 billion, by 2027 or at an ambitious rate of one warship a year.

It is unlikely the Mumbai-based public sector shipyard Mazagon Docks Ltd (MDL) can handle this rate of construction. The MDL takes upwards of five years to build a destroyer like the INS Kochi because of inadequate investment in modern ship construction technology. That’s not good news for the Navy which is struggling to replace its ageing warships.

There is a far more cost-effective option within the Navy: the Naval Offshore Patrol Vessel (NOPV) or the INS Saryu class of vessels, four of which are in service. These 2,300-tonne warships are armed with 76 mm main guns, two 30 mm cannons, a helicopter and carry marine commandos. Its economical diesel engines boast of an impressive range of 6,000 nautical miles. Compared to the city class destroyers, the NOPVs are dirt cheap. For the price of one Kochi destroyer, the Navy can buy nine NOPVs. It takes just 36 months to build one such vessel which can perform all the Navy’s peacetime constabulary and flag-showing roles. They can also be used for escort duties in wartime by adding modular plug and play weapon packages — containerised missiles and towed array sonars — which can dramatically increase their combat profile. NOPVs will allow the Navy to field dozens of such inexpensive warships in quantities which will give them a quality of their own.

The trouble is, the Navy is not buying enough NOPVs. It plans to field only nine vessels as opposed to over 20 pricey frigates and destroyers.

This is possibly because, as Robert Kaplan notes in his book Monsoon, the Indian Navy, like the Chinese Navy, is preparing to fight titanic doomsday sea battles which are increasingly unlikely to happen.

#Rafale, #Ins kochi, #Indian Navy