[Mb-civic] Lessons From Another Insurgency By ANIT MUKHERJEE

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 4, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Lessons From Another Insurgency
By ANIT MUKHERJEE

Washington

DURING his trip to South Asia, President Bush has done his best to whistle
past the diplomatic graveyard of Kashmir, issuing only bland encouragements
to the leaders of India and Pakistan to resolve the status of the disputed
territory. That's a shame, because instead of ignoring Kashmir, Mr. Bush and
his administration should be studying it as a case study in dealing with an
insurgency.

"I joined the insurgents only because of you," the young Kashmiri man told
me, sobbing, "because of the way you humiliated me, they way you tormented
me. To regain my honor, I picked up the gun." It was one of my more shocking
encounters during my two and a half years of counterinsurgency duties as an
Indian Army officer in Kashmir. Shocking, because it was the antithesis of
everything I had worked toward. The self-awareness that inevitably dawns on
all soldiers in a combat zone came upon me: I was not a part of the
solution; I was the problem, or at least part of the problem.

I had regularly summoned that young man to my post to ask him about
militants in my area of responsibility. I singled him out because other
villagers had told me that he was in the know. As I subsequently discovered,
this information was false, fed to me by the villagers because this boy,
from the wrong side of the tracks, had fallen in love with a rich man's
daughter. Later, upon his word that he would have nothing more to do with
the insurgents, I let him go, promising, in turn, to leave him alone. I
never saw that young man again and hope that he is safe, wherever he may be.

During the first year of my counterinsurgency duties, I believe I created
more insurgents than I, for want of a better word, eliminated. This was not
only because of inexperience, but also because I lacked fundamental
knowledge of the terrain, the people, the culture. I also didn't know how to
sift through local intelligence effectively.

As a result, I mostly drew on tips and informants who, with hindsight, were
mostly unreliable. The motives for giving me this information were usually
property and land disputes, family feuds, tribal and ethnic conflicts and
other causes unrelated to the insurgency. Thus, a combination of my own
naïveté and enthusiasm, not to mention pressure from senior commanders to
deliver results, resulted in actions that alienated the locals and,
inadvertently, helped the insurgency.

It was only after a year of combat operations that I was able to build up my
own intelligence network and gained the experience to be effective. Although
conventional wisdom says that the tours of duty should be short, in my
experience militaries fighting insurgencies should instead keep junior
officers in the field for as long as they can. Successful counterinsurgency
campaigns have usually been small-team operations led by junior officers
with intimate knowledge of their areas of responsibility.

After the first year of conducting operations with questionable results, my
unit made a significant shift toward people-friendly operations. That meant
taking off shoes before searching mosques, deciding not to search old men,
women and children and even letting insurgents escape rather than risking a
firefight in a built-up area.

Over time, our hard work paid off. Tips became more frequent and reliable.
As we gained the trust of the locals, we succeeded in preventing recruitment
while eliminating insurgents.

As the insurgents in Kashmir lacked the ability to mount conventional
attacks, their weapon of choice was the improvised explosive device.
Eventually, we largely neutralized this threat by constantly changing our
tactics. By being unpredictable and undertaking intensive offensive
operations, admittedly a function of abundant manpower, we seized the
initiative and became the hunter rather than the hunted.

One of the few, and rarely noticed, successes of Indian security agencies
has been their ability to subvert an insurgency. For example, in Kashmir,
Indian intelligence services were able to buy out an entire strand of
insurgents in the mid-1990's and create local counterinsurgents called
Ikhwanis. For a time, they were extremely effective, and were able to wipe
out the local insurgency before the foreign-born jihadis poured into the
valley. By the time we deployed in the valley in 1999, the Ikhwanis
themselves had become corrupted and were being phased out. But that
experience taught us how critical it was to co-opt the locals into our
counterinsurgency strategy.

Undoubtedly, the Indian Army has learned a lot after 16 years in Kashmir,
but its experience raises the question ‹ can a military learn without
bleeding? The sad answer is no.

Almost four years have passed since I left the Kashmir Valley. Although the
conflict gets less public attention, civilians, soldiers and militants still
die every day. Despite the seemingly endless daily toll, a few months ago
the commander of India's Northern Army at the time, Lt. Gen. Hari Prasad,
had the confidence to declare that "normalcy is round the corner."

True, the level of violence in Kashmir has decreased and this augurs well
for peace in the valley. But the Indian Army has not, and can never, quash
the insurgency. On the contrary, one of the first lessons taught to all
soldiers deploying in Kashmir is that an insurgency can never be militarily
defeated. It can only be managed until a political solution is found ‹ a
lesson that the Bush administration would do well to remember.

Anit Mukherjee, a doctoral candidate at the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins, served in the Indian Army for nine years.

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