India: Fleeting Attachment to the Counterinsurgency Grand Strategy

India’s success in dealing with insurgency movements was based on adherence to four key rules of engagement: identifying a lead counter-insurgent force, launching population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, non-use of excessive force and confining the role of the COIN operations to preparing a ground for a political solution. While the country does not yet have a COIN doctrine, these four rules of engagement do constitute what can be referred to a COIN grand strategy. Analysis of the several continuing insurgencies, however, reveals the country’s inability to adhere to the grand strategy. Political considerations, incapacity to manoeuvre through the demands of various stake holders, and even the wish to expedite the decimation of insurgent outfits through a force-centric approach has produced a long history of failures in dousing the fires of discontent.     

The Kashmir conflict in South Asia: voices from Srinagar

This article looks at the Kashmir conflict in South Asia, which has been going on since 1947, when India and Pakistan became independent from British colonial rule. After looking at some historical background, the article looks at both the external dimension as well as the internal dimension of the conflict. The external dimension tends to focus on Indo-Pak relations over Kashmir and the internal dimension looks at India's repressive state policies within the state of Kashmir. This article uses Mary Kaldor's “New War” thesis as a theoretical framework to understand the situation and pays special attention to the conflict's very complex and multifaceted nature. The article argues that although the levels of violence have differed from time to time in the region since 1947, today the conflict seems to have less to do with Indo-Pak relations or the external side of things and has more to do with the internal dimension and India's undemocratic ways within Kashmir. Today, Kashmir is one of the most militarised conflict zones in the world. The stationing of the Indian military and paramilitary forces in the region has only exacerbated the situation since it is the security personnel who cause much of the problem. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act gives these security forces extraordinary powers in the region, which they often abuse. The armed forces have no real understanding of the local culture or sympathy for local religious sentiments. Poverty, corruption, administrative failure, police brutality, identity politics and human rights abuses are some of the key features associated with this conflict. Methodologically, a number of interviews were carried out with the local people in the region recently. From the data gathered through the interviews, it is very obvious that the people still feel very oppressed and that the situation is still very volatile, fraught with uncertainty. Finally, after making an assessment of the situation, the article tries to suggest methods of peaceful building and conflict management as the way forward.     

Notes on contributors

In 1897 and 1898, Winston Churchill participated in what late Victorian Britain termed ‘small wars’, first on India's northwest frontier and then in the vast wasteland of the Sudan. Churchill chronicled his experiences in these conflicts in personal letters, dispatches to newspapers, and in his first two books, The Story of the Malakand Field Force and The River War. These writings provide a snapshot of a particular period in the formative years of the great statesman, demonstrating through Churchill's eloquent analyses many of the contradictions concerning the conduct of small wars that have emerged in the present era.     

Insights from a Database of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen Militants

This article uses a novel database of 1,625 posthumously published biographies of members of two Islamist militant organizations (Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM)), all of whom were killed in the course of carrying out militant attacks. In general, each biography provides data on the militant’s birthplace, education, recruitment, and training. The number of observations in this database is a full order of magnitude larger than those of previous databases assembled from militant biographies. While the sample of militants in this database is the product of multiple selection effects, analysis of the database undermines many common myths about Pakistani militants and casts doubt on current policy approaches to mitigating Islamist militancy in Pakistan.     

Jihad in Jammu and Kashmir: actors,agendas and expanding benchmarks

Militant jihad as witnessed in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is centred around the primary objective of finding a separate homeland for the Muslims of the state. Opinion on whether this homeland would be an independent entity or merged into Pakistan remains inconclusive. And yet, this externally sponsored violent extremism, spearheaded by interlinked militant formations with significant local participation, has remained deeply religious, highlighting the alleged machinations of the Hindu Indians, both in the state and in India in general, against the Muslim population. Over the years, the objective of liberating Kashmir from Indian control has been attempted not just through an armed movement that targets the symbols of Indian state sovereignty within J&K, but has invested resources carrying violence into the Indian heartland and also making the movement transnational in character by aligning with global terror formations like the al Qaeda and the Islamic State. This paper is an examination of the shifting agenda as well as the activities of three primary militant formations operating in J&K: the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad and an assessment of the transformation of the Jihad that has bilateral, regional and international security implications.     

Provocation,war and restraint under the nuclear shadow: The Kargil conflict 1999

ABSTRACT

The Kargil conflict was a limited war between India and Pakistan fought along the Kashmir Line of Control during the spring/summer of 1999. Named for the principal town in the combat zone on the Indian side, it was the first open warfare between India and Pakistan as declared nuclear weapons states and included the first combat employment of the Indian Air Force since 1971. Despite its intensity, it was also characterised by considerable restraint on both sides. The potential for conventional escalation, however, was high and the possibility of nuclear confrontation could not be excluded. It had significant long-term ramifications for both countries and constitutes an important part of the backdrop to their relations today.     

Grievance and the Kashmiri diaspora

Grievance theories that emphasize injustice as the primary cause of secessionist violence offer valuable insights into the motivations of sponsors and participants. However, they face a difficulty in explaining the participation and support of geographically dispersed populations of co-ethnics (diaspora) that is not shared by rival theories that instead emphasize self-interest. This article uses the Kashmiri diaspora in Britain to examine how appeal to nationalist factors of shared identity, mutual sympathy and common understandings might allow grievance theories to effectively explain diaspora support. It concludes that, while a hybrid grievance-nationalist model might offer a more accurate and nuanced explanatory account of secessionist violence, it does so at the cost of conceptual clarity. Finally, the article addresses the implications for states and strategies to reduce the mobilization of diaspora in order to deny secessionists’ valuable assistance.     

Why Pakistan failed: tribal focoism in Kashmir

The classical repertoire of insurgency types is under-specified, and does not apply well to the case of Pakistan's conduct of insurgency in Kashmir. Pakistan's approach to insurgency has been a consistent tribal variant of focoism, in which there is a reliance on imported itinerant insurgents to conduct raids to stimulate an uprising. This has its basis in the traditional warfare of the region, learned US insurgency doctrine in the 1960s, and an historical disregard for subject populations, which has led to an aversion to fostering grass-roots political movements.     

ANALYSIS OF CONFLICT WITHIN A CONTESTED LAND: THE CASE OF KASHMIR

This paper considers the case of Kashmir to examine the relation between the people of the contested land (Indian-occupied Kashmir) and one of the nation states claiming it (India, in this case) in a game-theoretic framework. The motivation for this paper was whether it was possible to rationalize the lack of democratic space in Kashmir, relative to other states in India (especially since the founding fathers of the country had announced such democratic practices to be the guiding principles of the new nation) and at the same time, a highly rigid stance of the Indian Government on the Kashmir issue. An otherwise standard political economic model is used to capture how the way in which citizens determine their allegiance to one or the other nation state (India or Pakistan) can, in turn, affect the nation state's (India's) policies towards the contested land. I conclude that if the Indian Government perceives allegiance of the citizens to be determined primarily by partisan preferences of the citizens, not so much by their preferences for policies, then the government rationally concentrates on minimizing its disutility due to deviations from its ‘most-favorite' policy. This understanding rationalizes the policies of the Indian Government towards Kashmir. More importantly, it points towards areas that need consideration for any peace-making process to take-off.