The year 2016 has commenced with India seemingly under siege. The opening salvos of what might well turn into a long, hot summer have been fired, beginning with a major attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot by a group of heavily-armed Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist. This was followed by the attack on the Indian consulate at Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, a separate and unconnected incident in Kolkata should set alarm bells ringing. An Audi Q7 driven at a very high speed by a drunken young delinquent with local political connections, succeeded in crashing through multiple police barriers into the Republic Day rehearsal parade opposite Fort William, killing a corporal of the Indian Air Force contingent. The driver of the runaway car cheekily walked away from the scene, cocking a snook at the assembled Kolkata police which was responsible for the security of the parade venue.
It is disturbing to note that this is the behavioural pattern of a jihadi suicide car bomber. Are our security forces trained and familiarised with such incidents in order to enable a timely and adequate public safety response to such a contingency?
This question is relevant in context of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria threat to attack India’s Republic Day parade, at which French President Francois Hollande was the chief guest and a French Army contingent was amongst the columns marching on Rajpath.
The Kolkata incident, therefore, requires an intensive follow up by the police and intelligence agencies, both Central as well of the states. These multiple incidents, separate in location, yet roughly interlinked in time, are a matter of continuing concern.
The Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 and the Pathankot airbase attack are broadly identical in principle and in strategic concept, which is not surprising since both the terrorist strikes were executed by a common agency — the Pakistan Army and its covert warfare department the Inter-Services Intelligence. The timing of the Pathankot attack is typical, but ironic, because it occurred just as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif were on the way to develop a good working relationship from which much was expected. So, with negotiations underway, peace must be given a chance.
But now India too must craft its own operational responses against Pakistan’s rogue jihad in Jammu and Kashmir. What remains to be seen is India’s political and operational philosophy against provocations from Pakistan. Will India continue to be purely reactive? Or will it now move to a more proactive strategy of hitting back at the perpetrators in their own base areas and give them a dose of their own medicine?
Of all the attacks, the one on Pathankot was undoubtedly the hardest slap on the face for India. However, it did not do as much damage as it could have. This was just plain luck, because enough details of the attack are now available to suggest that matters could have been far, far worse both in terms of material damage as well as personnel casualties.
But, more disturbingly, it also threw up insidious hints of some kind of insider collaboration between the intruders and the drug mafia that holds Indian Punjab in its grip. Some senior figures in the local police hierarchy did come under the scanner in this connection, though they were subsequently declared to have been cleared. The sheer variety of security forces milling around at the scene created inter-agency logjams, “Pathankot 8/1” made for a real Keystone Cops situation, a re-run of Mumbai 26/11 where similar confusion existed.
The Indian Air Force is justifiably proud of its Garuda Special Forces, and is only too aware that air bases anywhere in the world are vulnerable targets to attacks by ground infiltration. The history of such raids goes back all the way to the attacks on German and Italian airbases in the Western Desert in the Second World War by the British Long Range Desert Groups.
Vast acreages on the base have to be deliberately kept overgrown by tall grass and trees so as to provide some degree of camouflage and concealment from the air. But unkempt vegetation providing cover from air also favours infiltration into the airbase, as India experienced during the India-Pakistan war of 1965, when Pakistani paratroopers were dropped around the Indian Air Force bases at Adampur and Halwara in Punjab.
The Pathankot attack has once again drawn attention to the urgent requirement for dedicated airfield defence units structured and equipped specifically for this important, but, nonetheless second-line task. Territorial Army infantry battalions, along with wheeled infantry combat vehicles, like the Russian BTR 70 are a suitable option.
Terrorists of organisations like the Hizbul Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Tayyaba or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan need to be specially brainwashed to undertake their trademark suicide bomber missions. The Quranic Concept of War, written by Maj. Gen. S.K. Malik of the Pakistan Army, is the motivational playbook for fidayeen suicide bombers.
In avowedly secular India, there is no equivalent methodology for developing a “deniable” transborder offensive “counter-jihadi” option to retaliate against regions in Pakistani Punjab. The Shakargarh Bulge is known to be a major fidayeen base area from where the “soldiers of Allah” — reportedly from the “Sohada Brigade” — have launched a series of fidayeen suicide attacks on Hiranagar, Samba, Gurdaspur, and now Pathankot. These were all “no return missions” for which India does not have an equivalent.
In his own time, Napoleon Bonaparte had made note of the ideological factor in military operations, and famously commented “The moral to the physical is as three is to one”. Today, this “Napoleon factor” is the strength of Pakistan’s fidayeen forces and India’s weakness.
