India's counter-insurgency experience: the ‘trust and nurture’ strategy

The Indian Army, a force trained primarily for conventional warfare, has been engaged in internal counter-insurgency operations since the 1950s. Despite such a long innings on a counter-insurgency mode, little attention has been accorded within military circles to doctrinal innovation for waging sub-conventional warfare in India's democratic political context. At best, the Army continues to view counter-insurgency duty as secondary to its primary duty of defending India from external conventional threats. By conceptualizing a counter-insurgency strategy of ‘trust and nurture’, this article aims to fill this critical doctrinal gap in India's military policy. The author argues that a counter-insurgency strategy of ‘trust and nurture’ based on democratic political culture, measured military methods, special counter-insurgency forces, local social and cultural awareness and an integrative nation-building approach will result in positive handling of India's internal security problems. The author utilizes India's counter-insurgency experiences in Assam, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, and Operation ‘Sadhbhavana’ in Jammu and Kashmir as illustrative empirical indicants in order to validate the ‘trust and nurture’ strategy.     

Turning gangsters into allies: the American way of war in Northern Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

The American way of war in Afghanistan presents a conundrum for proponents of 21st-century state-building projects. How can liberal peace proponents engage in efficient state building without sacrificing their ideals? The US learned that state-building allocates a degree of command and control to powerbrokers operating in the shadows to launder aid money, traffic illicit narcotics, and engage in extrajudicial punishments. These clients failed to represent the liberal values foreign patrons endorsed, because the latter not only offered resources without conditions but also rewarded bad behavior. This issue is examined by looking at the case of post-2001 northern Afghanistan, where powerful warlords should have held greater control over their paramilitary forces, limited predatory behavior, and built stronger relationships with the community. Instead, warlords-turned-statesmen expanded their material and social influence in the north, while holding onto the informal instruments of racketeering and patronage that overwhelmed Western ideals and shaped the predatory state present in Afghanistan today. Moreover, paramilitaries were influenced by material, social, and normative incentives that rewarded violent and predatory behavior and further eroded already weak community control mechanisms at the subdistrict level.     

A nation-in-the-making,in arms: control of force,strategy and the Ukrainian Volunteer Battalions

At the core of waging war and strategy is the creation, control and use of force. This article investigates the volunteer battalions that mobilized in Ukraine during the spring of 2014. It contextualizes the volunteer phenomenon and focuses on the state strategies to establish control over these militias. As ambiguous entities arising from a situation characterized by rapid social change – revolution and war – the volunteer battalions threatened existing hierarchies and questioned state authority. The situation was exacerbated by the war, which deviated from the expectations of Ukrainian combatants and Western military observers alike. The state nevertheless enjoyed a modicum of success in reining in the militias through four strategies of undermining, co-option, incorporation and coercion. While predominantly integrated into a more rigid category of paramilitary forces, the volunteers continue to play a role in both the Ukrainian society and security sector to the unforeseeable future.