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India Strikes Across Line of Control in Kashmir
It’s a measure of the world’s instability that this story isn’t leading headlines everywhere. In a normal world, cross-border violence between hostile, nuclear-armed nations would merit the front page. India and Pakistan have already fought three wars over Kashmir, so the prospect of escalation to full-scale war isn’t at all beyond imagination.
For the past two months, Modi’s government has been struggling to contain deadly street protests in Kashmir. Residents have been clashing almost daily with security forces. Reportedly, 80 civilians have been killed.
On September 18, terrorists struck the Uri army base in India, near the Line of Control — the de facto border that divides Kashmir. The attack killed 18 Indian soldiers. India claimed the terrorists had come from the other side of the Line of Control. The Indian army’s director general of military operations said the attack was characteristic of Jaish-e-Mohammed, based in Pakistan, and said as well that the attackers’ equipment had Pakistani markings.
Asia Times’ Kadayam Subramian, a former Indian Director General of Police, was dubious; he believes the attack was “probably masterminded by discontented elements of the Kashmiri population rather than by Jaish-e-Mohammad.”
To a former intelligence official and policy advisor in the Union Home Ministry like the present writer, official intelligence reports are often motivated and misleading or over-classified to prevent close scrutiny by receiving agencies. They are often self-serving.
An intelligence specialist cites an inspector general of the Border Security Force posted on the Kashmir frontier to the effect that a large number of militants from across the border have sneaked into the region. This supports the Modi government’s view that Pakistan is instigating violence in the Valley. But Pakistan has no need to send terrorists across the border just to throw stones at security forces. Something more sinister is to be expected from Islamabad.
Pakistan vigorously denied the attack. Regardless of its provenance, it brought the Modi government under massive domestic pressure to retaliate. And yesterday, India claimed it had struck back with a raid on the other side of the Line of Control. According to the Telegraph of Calcutta:
Commandos of the Indian Army with shoulder-fired flamethrowers and plastic explosives crossed the Line of Control in the early hours today and raided at least five “terrorist launch pads” in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, officials and sources here said.
The “surgical strikes” inflicted “significant casualties to terrorists and those trying to support them,” the Indian Army said. The terrorists were aiming to carry out “strikes in Jammu and Kashmir and in various metros,” the army added.
In legal terms, India is portraying the strikes as pre-emptive self-defence in the face of an imminent attack by terrorists across the Line of Control, placing this in the context of Pakistan’s obligation to act against these groups and its refusal to do so. I doubt that any state will criticise India on legal grounds; the reasoning seems solid to me. Nor is this kind of raid unprecedented: Attacks across the Line of Control have taken place since, at least, 1993.
But in the past, when India has struck across the Line of Control, it has done so without admitting it. This avoided putting the Pakistani government under domestic pressure to continue the escalation. Even during the 1999 Kargil conflict, India denied conducting cross-border raids.
According to Calcutta’s Telegraph,
Sources in the Indian Army and veterans said such cross-LoC strikes had been conducted many times in the past. But they were localised, “tactical” moves that were not publicised. For instance, in 2013, after two Indian soldiers were mutilated, the then army chief, Gen. Bikram Singh, had said a tactical response was given.
In announcing the “surgical strikes” through a rare joint media read-out by the external affairs ministry and the army Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) this afternoon, the Narendra Modi government has raised what was a tactical measure to a strategic level. Such a move means actions on the LoC will now be treated as factors of national, not local Kashmiri, import.
Pakistani officials have denied that the raid took place at all, presumably in an effort to save face and keep their own public from demanding further escalation. According to Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, “Such falsified, concocted and irresponsible statements can only escalate the already fragile security situations in the region.”
The New York Times quotes an unidentified senior Pakistani security official as saying, “Pakistan would consider a cross-border strike by India an act of war.” The official, says the Times, “warned that Pakistan could use tactical nuclear weapons in self-defense if India initiates a war.”
Manoj Josh of India’s The Wire argues that both sides have inbuilt plans to de-escalate, and these plans are proceeding apace:
As a result of the Indian claim and Pakistani denial, both domestic opinions have been taken care of. The government of India has satisfied the public demand for action against Pakistan for the Uri strike … And by their [denial of the attack], the Pakistanis have signalled to their public that they remain firm against India.
Lt General Ranbir Singh took the precaution of adding that this was a one-time affair for the present. “We do not have any plans for continuation of further operations.” So clearly New Delhi has built de-escalation into its retaliatory action.
The Pakistani reaction is interesting: Since the action, by their official account, didn’t take place, there is no pressure on them to further escalate the situation. …
Despite the dramatic rhetoric of the past few months, both sides have signalled that they understand the rules of the game on the LoC and will continue to play by it.
I hope he’s right. But Pakistan has just confirmed reports that it captured an Indian soldier on its side of the Kashmir border, so this isn’t over yet.
The main political parties in Kashmir are begging both sides to cool down:
Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti chided the neighbours for behaving like “siblings locked in an endless rivalry” and said: “This confrontation could lead to a disaster of epic proportions if urgent steps are not taken to bring down heightened tensions….
“We in [Jammu and Kashmir] have suffered immensely because of the violence and know very well its dangers and consequences. New Delhi and Islamabad must open channels of communication.”
Herself besieged by protracted street turbulence since the July killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani, Mehbooba called the current air “gloomy and dangerous” and said: “War is never an option to resolve issues between two nuclear neighbours … The future of this troubled region has to be defined by common economic interests, not hostility.”
One thing I wonder about is whether the growingly wide use of social media makes it more difficult to de-escalate crises like these. The Indian and Pakistani publics are not behaving as their nation’s most impressive diplomats on Twitter, to say the least. People in both countries can now easily read what the other countries’ newspapers — and other countries’ Twitter users — are saying about them. It’s not as if India and Pakistan needed Twitter to hate each other, but I wonder if this changes the crisis dynamic away from face-saving and in favor of escalation.
Thoughts?
Published in Foreign Policy
Boys will be boys.
If social media affects how leaders make their decisions, then maybe democracy is a bad idea.
There has always been bad blood between warring nations. Call it xenophobia or racist or whatever. Part of the propoganda machine is to raise the morale of your own people to be willing to fight the other side. This is normal behavior and should be a null set when it comes to leaders making decisions about war and peace – regardless of where it is expressed.
The only place where this would be a concern is if these leaders were elected and they fear going against their own populace and losing power. This creates a self-feeding loop.
Thank goodness the next President will be equipped to…uh…nevermind.
For a minute after seeing your headline, I felt like we were back in the 1970s or ’80s, when I had a sense that the region was in the news a lot. Then reading further, I see this has actually happened several times in the past twenty years, and I’d forgotten about it.
I suspect you’re right about the potential effects of social media. I enjoy keeping in touch with friends on Facebook, and I like Twitter for getting breaking news quickly. But the format of both of these encourages the quick, emotional response, and the sharing and retweeting buttons make these gut reactions so easy to spread. This makes it easy to pile on somebody over a triviality, with a whim that you might forget in a few hours. But the person on the receiving end of this (think of Justine Sacco) could wind up with a thousand of these directed his way, within days or even hours. Multiply little feelings by thousands of people, and they can have real-world effects. People get fired. Maybe countries go to war.
Piling on spreads like wildfire, while civilized, thoughtful reactions take time to compose and aren’t as emotionally satisfying to read and react to. It’s a slow, tough effort to control the fires.
As useful and often beneficial as the technology is, I think it has also unleashed our “monsters from the id,” to quote Forbidden Planet.
One more thing: One of the strengths of Ricochet is that its setup encourages the thoughtful comment more than the gut reaction. I think we put more effort into our responses here.
What website are you looking at? :)
Interesting.
Someone, at least, is trying to take this back down the stairs.
Very concerning, hoping both sides can show a little restraint.
They’re both positioning it to cut off further escalation. Makes me think they’re happy to have the spotlight on Kashmir rather than anything else. But what?
I don’t know, but Modi would have had more latitude for non-action, or quiet retaliation, if he were generally seen as having fulfilled campaign promises. The strike seems to be the most popular thing he’s done since being elected. He’s even got Rahul Gandhi praising him, in a back-handed way.
I have no idea how credible it is to say that the Uri attack may not really be traceable to Pakistan. Both Indian and Pakistani media are reporting that “all efforts are being made to secure the release of an Indian soldier who was captured by the Pakistan Army at the Line of Control.”
That he hasn’t yet been released suggests to me that a) The Pakistani Army doesn’t want to de-escalate, at least not yet; b) Pakistan’s sensible people don’t have adequate control of the Pakistani Army; or c) subcontinental bureaucracy — someone is slowly filling out the form, in triplicate, for “Releasing Captured Jawans as per the Gazette of Pakistan (Part-VII, Section-IV) published on 30.09.1973 … ”
I have no insight about which is most apt to be correct, but it’s got to be one of them.
Another oddity: On Wednesday, before the Indian strike, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif threatened to nuke India if it went through with the plans for a so-called surgical strike:
Did India so telegraph this punch that he knew on Wednesday that a strike was at hand on Thursday? And are threats to use nuclear weapons now so completely quotidian that they barely cause a shrug? What happens when Pakistanis find out, on social media, that a billion-plus Indians believe India’s carried out precisely this provocation, and they’re utterly thrilled about it? I mean … can this be kept a secret from all of Pakistan?
I would bet on c. Never attribute to malice what is perfectly explainable through bureaucracy.
People have an enormous capability to fool themselves.
Look at Israel’s international standing – Hamas is building kidnap and/or terrorism tunnels that come up next to school yards, they launch hundreds of rockets indiscriminately into Jewish settlements and yet Israel is evil.
Pardon my showing my lack of knowledge, but what is it about Kashmir exactly that prevents the two nations from resolving this dispute that has simmered and occasionally flared up ever since partition 69 years ago?
It is always the stunningly beautiful places that nations go to war over. The Taj Mahal:
Not an unreasonable supposition.
Social media has certainly been shown to provoke mob like responses elsewhere, why not India and Pakistan as well?
History and realpolitik.
https://youtu.be/p5mWQFGF7w8
Regards,
Jim
No need to apologize, I bet that’s the question a lot of people had on reading this — I was thinking, as I wrote this, “Should I explain the whole background to this conflict, or do I risk losing all my readers before I get to the ‘this could actually cause a nuclear war'” part?”
The conflict originated in the partition of India in 1947. There are three nuclear powers that dispute the territory, and three largely irreconcilable views of the conflict — India’s, Pakistan’s, and the Kashmiris’. The region is strategically vital and resource-rich, which of course makes the conflict harder to solve.
India believes the region was assigned to them by the last Hindu king when India gained its independence. Pakistan claims that Kashmir should be part of Pakistan because it has a Muslim majority, and it demands that India hold a plebiscite to determine the desires of the people who live there. Pakistan charges India with almost innumerable human rights abuses in the region — and is almost certainly correct about some of them. India in turn accuses Pakistan of waging a proxy war against it by funding terrorists in the region and stoking up anti-India sentiment to sour Kashmiri opinion against Indian rule.
A bit less than half the population, when polled, wants independence from them both. But we don’t really know what Kashmiris want, because India refuses to hold a plebiscite. (Because it would lose.) But to make things even more violent, there’s also been an indigenous Kashmiri insurgency.
I just started watching this documentary about it and it’s so far very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=68&v=4d1-Zgo4nO8
This is like watching a three-way dance and they all seem to know the steps but I’m scratching my head! I wonder if their histories with each other along with the cultural differences are giving the story such a bizarre flavor? I just hope the “dance” doesn’t deteriorate into a nuclear ballet.
We get too tied to borders, forgetting that the locals don’t see things as the westerners did when they created artificial borders. We saw the same thing in the Middle East where we were too concerned about what country we attacked and what one we should have stayed out of. In reality, it is all sand and clan.
Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have already fought wars over Kashmir, so maybe the prospect of escalation to nuclear war isn’t entirely likely.
This is far from the first time terrorists headquartered in Pakistan and supported by the Pakistani government have broken into India and butchered Indians. The last several times, the Indians have done little more than shake their fingers very firmly at the Pakistanis–with more seriousness than John “Motorboat Skipper” Kerry, to be sure, but that’s a low bar. There comes a time when a nation must defend itself from such attacks and take more overt, direct action.
And yet Pakistan does send terrorists across borders–Afghanistan as well as India–to do far more than throw stones. Subramian also disparages the Indian government’s claim: official intelligence reports re often motivated and misleading or over-classified to prevent close scrutiny by receiving agencies. They are often self-serving. Yet he styles himself as just such a former intelligence official and policy advisor in the Union Home Ministry. On what basis should we believe his characterization over the Modi government’s claims on this matter?
Regarding social media use by the two publics, that’s also a means of blowing off steam.
I don’t see nuclear war in the offing. Pakistan has far more to lose. It’s already been partitioned once, the next failure could easily see the dissolution of Pakistan into its constituent satrapies and warlord-run regions.
Eric Hines
And yet even in those rare precincts of modern journalism where foreign affairs are taken seriously we got this clunker last week.
In fairness, it’s written with depth and intelligence, but with the Economist’s default faultfinding and didactic style.
Money quote retrieved from the paywall:
Yet despite electoral promises to be tough on Pakistan, the Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi has trodden as softly as its predecessors. On September 21st it summoned Pakistan’s envoy for a wrist-slap, citing evidence that the attackers had indeed slipped across the border, and noting that India has stopped 17 such incursions since the beginning of the year. Much to the chagrin of India’s armchair warriors, such polite reprimands are likely to be the limit of India’s response.
Ouch.
Absolutely, imho. Nobody materially gains from a nuclear war on subcontinent. The Indian and Pakistani “heartlands” are too close for that.
From Outlook India:
(This kind of politics is, sadly, universal. *ahem*)
And of course:
The King of Passive Aggressive, poor thing.
imho not credible at all.
Or to be seen to de-escalate quickly. They have to look tough or lose (more) credibility/ground to the extremists who outflank them.
They never have. Pakistan’s issue in a nutshell: the army has a country.
This once I think it’s unlikely.