Desiccated Land, Part 2

In this post, we try to put the Jammu and Kashmir situation into perspective. You may wish to review Part 1.

First, a brief update on some news from the region.

We begin with an initial excerpt from 24 hour gun-battle leaves 2 ultras dead, trooper injured, dated March 14, 2011, which outlines an incident in the town of Sopore, in the district of Baramulla (the English is a little choppy):

SRINAGAR, Mar 13: In a 24 hour long gun battle in Sopore that ended this morning police claimed to have killed two militants, including a top Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) commander while an army trooper was injured. Suspected militants also hurled a grenade in area.

According to police, Wasim Ahmad Ganai a local militant of HuM who was holed up in Kralteng locality of Sopore town was killed in the fresh exchange of fire with a joint team of 22 Rashtriya Rifles and Special Operations Group (SOG) this morning. A trooper identified as Nitender Kumar of 22 Rashtriya Rifles was injured in exchange of heavy fire.

Police said that Wasim gave a stiff resistance to police and army and kept them engaged during last night in gunfight that ended this morning. The encounter started Saturday after troopers of 22 RR, SOG and CRPF cordoned off the private clinic of Dr Sofi Muhammad Ramzan.

As search party entered heavily armed militants opened fire on police and army triggering a fierce encounter. In the initial exchange of fire, police claimed the killing of divisional commander of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) Chhota Kalimullah alias Shamsher alias Talwar Bhai and Wasim managed to take shelter in drain and engaged the forces in 24-hour long gun-battle.

In the aftermath of the fight, security forces seized a "large" cache of weapons and ammunition.

It should be noted that Sopore was the scene of a 1993 event known as the Sopore Massacre, described in an article in Time thusly:

PERHAPS THERE IS A SPECIAL CORNER IN HELL reserved for soldiers who fire their weapons indiscriminately into a crowd of unarmed civilians. That, at least, must have been the hope of every resident who defied an army-enforced curfew in the Kashmiri town of Sopore last Thursday to protest a massacre that left 55 people dead and scores injured. It was India's latest blow in a three-year campaign to crush the predominantly Muslim state's bid for independence. In retaliation for the killing of one soldier, paramilitary forces rampaged through Sopore's market setting buildings ablaze and shooting bystanders. The Indian government pronounced the event "unfortunate" and claimed that an ammunition dump had been hit by gunfire, setting off fires that killed most of the victims.

In that incident, hundreds of buildings were destroyed; how many hundreds, and how they were destroyed, depends on who is asked.

This most recent incident is given some perspective, as we consider the first part of Rise in militancy related incidents, also dated March 14, 2011:

SRINAGAR, Mar 13: With the onset of spring the militant relatives incidents seem to be increasing in valley and in less than a week seven militants were killed in Srinagar, Shopian and Sopore. Police claim that around 100 militants are active in North and Central Kashmir.

The highest number of militants, police claim, are active in the apple rich Sopore town of North Kashmir. "The number of active militants in Sopore and Rafiabad is around 20-25," deputy inspector general of police North Kashmir Muneer Ahmad Khan told Kashmir Times. "We have groups of militants active in Rajwarad, Hafrudda Handwara and Lolab area in Kupwara. There is also a group of militants active in Bandipora district," he added.

The article goes on to explain some controversy over how a militancy-free zone was declared, though the officials in the zone don't know who declared it; but, they point out that in that particular zone, militancy is down. This is temporary, though, as the militants move around from region to region, and many of them infiltrate in from Pakistan. However, we are reassured, alert troops are watching the Pakistan border to minimize this.

A general alarm is sounded in an article entitled Target India: 700 militants waiting at Pak launchpads, dated March 17, 2011:

Pattan (J&K) Noting that turbulence in Afghanistan and Pakistan will have an impact on the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, Indian Army on Thursday said 700 militants were waiting at various lauchpads to infiltrate into the state.

"India, Kashmir and Pakistan are all at the peripheries of the problem area of Afghanistan. So if peace does not exist in Afghanistan and there is turbulence in Pakistan, obviously there will be turbulence around us," General Officer Command (GOC) of Srinagar-based 15 Corps Lt General S A Hasnain told reporters here, 30 kms from capital Srinagar.

Lt Gen Hasnain was replying to a question about the impact on Kashmir after the US forces withdraw from Afghanistan.

"The problem is always that of turbulence. An area that is turbulent will always send waves of turbulence into the other areas," he said.

He said the Army has reports that militants across the Line of Control (LoC) will attempt to infiltrate into the state in the next few days.

So, there is immediate concern about further violence in Jammu and Kashmir, but in the long term, there is concern about how that situation could deteriorate if the US withdraws from Afghanistan without adequately stabilizing the situation there.

Of course, it is an oversimplification of the problem to point at Afghanistan. Instability there in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 was dealt with by Pakistan via proxy forces from across the Durand Line; we now call these forces the Taliban, but they are the same kinds of militants that infiltrate into Jammu and Kashmir.

But, to blame it all on Pakistan is also an oversimplification; were there not a volatile situation in Afghanistan and J & K, the "stabilizing" influence of Pakistani-supported militants would not be so profound.

For me, it is interesting to view the whole situation in a broader context.

To a recent article entitled China's arms sales to Pakistan unsettling South Asian security, I made the following comment:

China's strategic partnership with Pakistan serves China far more than it serves Pakistan.

If China needed to do so, it could move its powerful ground forces, supported by aircover, overland to defend the port facilities in Gwadar. Such inland lines of communication would be challenging even for the US to interdict. The trick would be getting Chinese naval units all the way around Southeast Asia and India to Gwadar.

Far more likely, though, is that the build-up of Pakistani power is intended to offset US influence in Pakistan, and to keep India otherwise occupied, allowing a freer hand for Beijing throughout the rest of Asia.

Pakistan needs to rethink its adversarial relationship with India. By defining itself as a Muslim country, juxtaposed against India, and by support of Islamic militants as proxies and for strategic depth, Islamabad has painted itself into a corner, where Pakistan's policy can easily be manipulated by Washington (though the US does not have the finesse to do so) and especially by Beijing. If Pakistan could reinvent its relationship with India, Islamabad would have a far freer hand in its foreign affairs, defense and other matters, and Pakistanis would benefit by less blowback from ISI's upport of militants.

For background, I suggest my Tale of a Tiger series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6), which paints a picture of growing Chinese influence in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, a drive towards a capability to challenge US naval power, a growing ability to project naval power into the Indian Ocean, and which addresses Sino-Indian issues. Furthermore, in Part 6, I point out the advantages of a Chinese strategic move into South Asia, which would help stabilize Xinjiang, a region where China is currently dealing with its own Islamic militants.

China's arms sales to Pakistan unsettling South Asian security details how China has benefited from arms sales to Pakistan; one benefit is a big, reliable foreign customer, allowing for development of China's arms industry.

However, China is not the only competitor nation to be building its arms industry.

An article from March 4, 2011, entitled US air power: Made in India? addresses how India's aerospace industry is growing in part due to a policy of "offsets". Basically, India agrees to purchase aircraft from the US, provided the aircraft are built at least partially in India.

The benefit to the US corporations is that manufacturing can be done in India, rather than in the US, where labor costs are higher.

This means Americans lose jobs so Indians can have them.

But, a big benefit to India is that the manufacturing facilities are in India, not the US.

In a hypothetical scenario where relations between the US and India deteriorated to the point of war (obviously, extremely unlikely), India would have the industrial base to support the war; an industrial base that belongs in the US, but which was exported for profit by US corporations.

But wait, there's more!

India hopes to qualitatively improve its aerospace industry through the technology transfer that would naturally accompany coproduction of late-model US combat aircraft.

On the US side, it is assumed that by the time India learns the ins and outs of the aircraft it is coproducing, the US will have fielded a newer generation.

(I'll bet that, when you began reading this article about militants in some Indian town that few Americans have ever heard of, you never suspected this article would turn in the direction it has!)

For India, this is a big plus, because India's aerospace industry is growing quantitatively and qualitatively, placing it well ahead of Pakistan's, and on a par with China's; this, in part, at American expense, just as China's military-industrial complex is developing in part at Pakistani expense.

(Of course, when you consider how much money the US government is giving to Pakistan, I could argue that China's development is also at US expense.)

In the long run, this will leave India in a much better position vis-à-vis both Pakistan and China for a fight with both that could be sparked by an incident in some town like Sopore.

But, my American readers may be asking, where will that leave US?

;)

Desiccated Land, Part 1

In Jammu and Kashmir, India is sure trying to do something (I'm not sure what).

From Terms of Kashmir dialogue finalised (July 24, 2010):

JAMMU: The Indian government has finalised the terms of dialogue that it intends to open with all the groups in Jammu and Kashmir, including the separatists, highly placed sources said on Saturday.

The sources here, in touch with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and union home minister P Chidambaram, told IANS that the central government would open dialogue with the groups in Kashmir with a straight offer to dilute the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the legal cover that shields armed forces from prosecution for any acts of omission and commission in counter-terrorism operations.

Other initiatives include efforts to find employment, to get local young people working instead of throwing rocks (or maybe even grenades).

But, meanwhile: Curfew imposed in Sopore, Kupwara (July 23, 2010):

Srinagar Curfew was clamped on Friday in Bandipora and Kupwara districts and Sopore town in view of a call given by separatists to hold demonstrations to protest the killing of several youth during clashes with security forces in the past one month.

Elsewhere in the Kashmir Valley, restrictions continued on the movement of people.

For some background, we consider Jihadis set to spill over into Kashmir, July 21, 2010:

LAHORE - There was hope but no great expectations for the dialogue between India's External Affairs Minister S M Krishna and Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Quereshi on July 15. And so the headline of a major English-language Pakistan daily read, "They talked but said nothing" - an outcome which proved pessimists' predictions.

Pakistan's bottom line had always been for progress on the disputed Kashmir region and the Siachen Glacier dispute, with the reduced flow of downstream water in the Indus River connected to the overall equation. The Indian side declined to take up these major issues, saying it did not have the mandate. Khrishna instead remained fixated on blaming Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) for terror activities in India, bringing the talks to a virtual standstill, according to people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The Siachen Glacier lies just east of the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, it has been the scene of an ongoing battle between the two countries since 1984. The glacier's melting waters are the source of the Nubra River in Indian-controlled Ladakh, which drains into the Shyok River and in turn joins the Indus, Pakistan's main water source. India abandoned plans to withdraw from Siachen after Pakistan's incursion into Kargil in Indian-administered Kashmir in 1999.

The larger Kashmir dispute encompasses much more than water rights. It is an emotive issue stretching back to 1947, when Pakistan was carved out of British India on the understanding that the sub-continent's Muslims constituted a separate nation. Religion alone determined the territorial demarcation of the two states. Kashmir was made an exception, which set the stage for two of the three wars between the two countries in 1947 and 1965. Whether this was contrived or accidental is moot, and both India and Pakistan suffer the consequences.

There are parallels to be drawn between Kashmir and many other contested regions in the world.

Skipping down:

In the South Asian smoke and mirrors game, encouraging India and Pakistan to work together will clearly take much more than the Americans bargained for. The LeT, the organization India accuses of masterminding the Mumbai carnage, has long been identified as a Pakistan proxy, bred to boost the independence struggle in Kashmir yet reportedly bending only to Pakistan's military establishment.

The LeT was given free rein to collect funds and recruit members in Pakistan before the 9/11 attacks in the US. Post-9/11, however, a large number of LeT "strays", or breakaways, were found in the company of al-Qaeda-linked jihadi groups that had adopted an anti-American position. This drew another picture and the organization was banned. But it was not disbanded: its leaders simply advised LeT members to keep a low profile in Pakistan, with the doors to India purportedly left open.

Inevitably, the LeT was seen by the Indian ruling elite as complicit in terror attacks that rained down on India. These include the December 2001 assault on the Indian parliament that killed 12; the October 2005 Delhi bombings that killed 62; the September 2008 Delhi bombings that killed 30: the November 2008 Mumbai assault which left 175 dead after a three-day rampage; and the February 2010 Pune blasts that killed nine. However, the organization denied any connections to the assaults, claiming that targeting civilians went against its religious principles.

Pakistan meantime was confronted by a vicious campaign of terror, beginning in 2001. This ran all the way up from Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi to the Khyber Pass in the north. The restiveness in Pakistan's Balochistan province was an added problem. Bomb blasts from 2007 through 2009 alone accounted for 5,500 civilian deaths, and nearly every Pakistani was convinced that India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was behind the killings.

Elements in Pakistan are supporting the militants/ separatists/ terrorists, and that support is causing blowback in Pakistan.

Skipping down again:

The "clear and present danger" spelled out from the failure of the Indian-Pakistan talks and the conference episodes, is that the jihadis are gathering momentum and set to spill over into Kashmir. From there, or so the region's political pundits have it, al-Qaeda had planned to move on into India to secure "strategic depth" with heightened terror tactics. Then it can trek onto Central Asia to forward the jihadi movement for the liberation of Palestine.

Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, in the introduction of his new offering Descent into Chaos, described the support system of al-Qaeda's human resources succinctly when he wrote, "to a handful of Muslims, al-Qaeda posed a civilizational solution - albeit an extreme one - to the justice denied to Muslims in Palestine [and] Kashmir". The failure of India and Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir dispute will provide the international jihadi movement with all the space it needs.

Honestly, for the jihadists "Palestine" and "Kashmir" are merely buzzwords, excuses to do what Mohammed commanded but which many Muslims had outgrown.

For some analysis regarding India's actions in Kashmir, we go to India's strategy of suppression in Kashmir could backfire, July 23, 2010:

Police say only four protests occurred across the Indian-controlled Kashmir region. One protest in Srinagar swelled to 1,000 people, though tear gas quickly broke its ranks. In the village of Palhalan, someone from within the protest crowd shot a police officer twice in the leg.

But separatist leaders and police officials are now warning that the government's apparent strategy of curfews and suppression lacks a political roadmap and could, in the long run, send the current generation of rock-throwing boys back to the gun-and-grenade warfare that dominated the 1990s. Human rights groups say 19 civilians have died since June 11 in clashes between protesters and security officials.

Kashmir back to the future

"You have the environment that you can push the people again toward what had started in the early '90s. But we don't want that to happen," says Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, one of the two top separatist leaders. Both are currently under house arrest. "Today boys are out pelting stones. Tomorrow these are the same boys who will probably pick up the gun."

He and most Kashmiris say their struggle is not religious at its root, but about self-determination. However, Mr. Farooq warns that the closure of main mosques – smaller mosques have remained open – starts down a dangerous path.

"If the government is not letting the people pray then it's mandatory for the people at a certain time to declare war against the state. And I think this is something the muftis and the religious scholars will have to think about," he says.

What separatists want

New Delhi has called for meetings that would involve a wide range of voices, including separatists. But before any dialogue begins, separatists have demanded an easing of draconian security laws, release of prisoners, and pullbacks of street forces. The two sides appear at a standoff.

Though economics is a factor - there is a need for more job opportunities, and many of the job opportunities that the region offered are now gone due to the standstill caused by the crackdown - many of the rock-throwing youths say economics is not the reason, but rather the crackdown is causing the problems: if they can't vent peacefully, then simmering problems will boil over into violence. The issue: self-determination, promised during partition in the 1940's, but never realized.

However, the mixture is made more potent by support for militants from across the border in Pakistan.

But, India's response as if all the protesters are Pakistani-backed instigators is itself helping to foment the trouble, and simultaneously giving militants an issue.

More to follow on Jammu and Kashmir.