Dr. Manoj Kumar Mishra 23 July 2018
Cross-border terrorism has emerged as a formidable threat to India’s sovereignty with a steep rise in cases of terrorist attacks on the Indian mainland. Terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Gurdaspur attack in Punjab in 2015 and Pathankot terror attack in January 2016 and attacks on Uri military camp in September 2016 apart from other attacks finding lesser media attention pointed to ceaseless challenges posed by non-state actors on the territorial integrity of India primarily targeting army and air bases, railways, bus-stands and police stations particularly to demonstrate India’s security vulnerabilities and arouse public fear. These attacks have been carried out by terrorists operating from across the border are well-documented and long-hours meeting between the Indian Prime Minister Modi and American President Trump in June 2017 resulted in the joint statement which called on Pakistan to bring the perpetrators of Mumbai, Pathankot and other cross-border terrorist attacks to justice and the US Department of State designated Hijbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin – allegedly the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks – as a global terrorist.
Apart from attacks on the Indian mainland, border areas between India and Pakistan witness cross-border terrorism as a regular phenomenon resulting in deaths of military personnel and civilians every day. While India’s armed forces in their numerical strength and application of modern equipment and technology of warfare are superior to those of Pakistan and conveniently defeated the latter in all the regular and declared wars, the puzzle that India has been encountering and the threat that has been spilling more blood than regular warfare is the rise of intertwined phenomenon of proxy wars and cross-border terrorism which is neither declared nor regular. India has many Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) agreements with Pakistan to ensure peace along the border, but they depend more on mutual goodwill to be operational in the absence of any monitoring mechanisms and verification protocols. It is noteworthy that India and Pakistan signed a ceasefire agreement in 2003 which has continuously been violated since then.
Indian embassy, consulates, and construction-sites in Afghanistan have become soft targets for radical Islamic elements which are spreading their sway in the adjacent regions which could spill over to the Indo-Pak border areas. On July 1, 2018, a suicide bombing in the Afghan city of Jalalabad which killed 19 people and 17 of the dead were Sikhs and Hindus pointed to the religious dimension of the carnage and overbearing influence that radical elements can threaten almost 70 percent of the Afghan territory. The ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has claimed that it has perpetrated the attack. Similarly deadly attacks on Indian embassy in 2008, the terrorist attack on Indian consulate in Herat in 2014 which was earlier considered a relatively safer place in Afghanistan- to mention a few – pointed to the seriousness of terror threat that India must encounter to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity in the long-run.
India’s superior conventional military capacity has not able to deter Pakistan from engaging in proxy wars instead Pakistan invigorated its nuclear weapons programme and became a nuclear power which not only enabled Pakistan to balance India’s superiority in conventional warfare, it allowed the flexibility to continue low-intensity proxy wars by frequently resorting to nuclear threat while preventing India from escalating violence against it.
Many scholars have pointed to several factors that embolden the radical groups vis-a-vis state-actors, for instance, David McDonough argues in an article in Orbis that “democratisation of technology”, the “privatisation of war” and the “miniaturization of weaponry” have strengthened the capacities of militant groups to impose unacceptable damage on the states in the era of globalization. It is not farfetched to believe that asymmetric wars cannot be won and even the nuclear missile defence technology developed by the US will not be able to detect such operations if planes and buses are used for terrorist operations, and people sneak in through fake passports and visas. Like a conventional regular army of the opponent, there is no identifiable enemy in such kind of asymmetric warfare. They mingle with civilians, and they can even enter into the territory of some other states from where they can wage war.
India’s Diplomatic Efforts and Soft Power Image to Contain the Menace of Terrorism
India’s military restraint in response to provocations following major cross-border terrorist attacks and in pandering to the hasty decision of waging war against Pakistan has brought it diplomatic gains. Many principal actors in international politics including the US showed their sympathies for India’s predicament on account of its restraint. For instance, the Clinton Administration admonished Pakistan during the Kargil War in 1999 to withdraw its forces sent across the Line of Control. India’s diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with China in the 1990s and the visit of India’s then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh to China in the midst of Kargil War led China to maintain neutrality during the war. When the Obama Administration was on the verge of ending its second term in office, two US Congress legislators made a move to introduce a bill designating Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism and showed signs of a promising strategic partnership between India and the US following the terrorist attack on Uri military camp.
Modi’s attempts at the invigorating campaign against terror at international platforms were not only successful in persuading many countries to notice India’s victimhood to terrorism, but it was also able to muster diplomatic support in the region when some of the South Asian neighbors declined to attend the SAARC Summit hosted by Islamabad. The outcomes of the Trump-Modi meeting are also indicative of India’s diplomatic success in putting across its security concerns. So far as threats emanating Afghanistan are concerned, India tried to contribute more towards significant reconstruction and development work and aimed at earning the goodwill of Afghans. It focused its efforts on the development of infrastructure, communications, education, health care, social welfare, and training of officials, economic development and institution-building – sectors which have been identified by the Afghan government as priority areas of development. India has been working through consultations with local communities, and many polls suggest that Indian aid projects have been able to generate massive goodwill among the Afghans. India is the largest regional aid donor with more than $2 billion dispensed towards all these projects since 2001 with $1billion new aid announced in 2017.
India’s Military Posture
India undertook aggressive measures in the form of surgical strikes across the Indo-Pak border in response to rising incidents of cross-border terrorism with the expectation that Pakistan would take notice of the reprisal and would tone down its anti-India operations believing that further terrorist attacks on the Indian soil would invite counter-offensive strategies from India. However, contrary to Indian expectations, Pakistani sources not only flamboyantly denied such operations, but the incidents of cross-border firings also have not abated instead increased. New Delhi corroborated its reality with photographic evidence only in vain.
So far as India’s defence preparedness is concerned, it seems directed more towards China rather than combat terrorism.
The only war that India fought against China was the 1962 border war apart from the 74-day long India-China military standoff in Doklam located on the strategic tri-junction of Bhutan, China, and India which ended with results in India’s favor. However, the defeat in the 1962 border demonstrated dearth of India’s conventional military ability vis-a-vis China which plagued Indian strategic thinking ever since and the Chinese economic penetration into the South Asian and Indian Ocean region in the form of ‘One Belt One Road’ project has been conceived as the Chinese attempt to encircle India through a ‘String of Pearls’ strategy – the Doklam standoff is not just one-off case rather it indicated the possibility of more confrontations to come. Hence, India is more focused on developing its military capacity by modernizing and investing a larger portion of its budget towards defence preparedness.
As per data on arms transfers released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), arms imports by India increased by 24% between 2008-12 and 2013-17 periods. More intriguingly, the data project India as the world’s largest arms importer accounting for 12% of the total global imports for the period 2013-17. India expressed its willingness to divert some its defence equipment towards the Afghan theatre as New Delhi agreed in November 2016 to hand over four MI 25 attack helicopters. It entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan in 2011 and was engaged in training the Afghan army and later expressed its willingness to train Afghan police. However, it consistently ruled out the possibility of sending troops. It is likely that limiting its military role to training and equipping the Afghan security forces with defence equipment will not go a long way in containing the menace of terrorism and even sending troops to the troubled area would be a more disastrous step.
In 2016, a Parliamentary Committee on Home Affairs (constituted by the Indian Parliament) pointed to intelligence failures and security lapses leading to a spate of terror attacks on defence installations within India. India’s strategic experts seem less interested in tightening intelligence operations and get over security lapses as their priority on the modernization of defence and purchase of conventional weapon systems suggest. Denying a threat by gathering credible intelligence inputs and tightening defence mechanisms by working on current security lapses would go a long way in containing the menace of terrorism than mounting offensive strategies which most of the times do not work and chances of backfiring cannot be ruled out. India must aim at mustering more diplomatic capital by continuously engaging itself with countries sharing similar concerns in Afghanistan such as Iran which fears the rise of Sunni Islamic groups to ascendancy, Russia which perceives from these groups severe threats to and rising influence in Central Asian states which are predominantly Muslim populated and China which is witness to Islamic uprisings in Xinjiang province.
India cannot expect the American forces to stay there for long and the radical groups are ready to wait out its withdrawal. Given the complexity in relations between the US and Iran and India/US on the one hand and China on the other and instances of Russia cozying up with Pakistan, mustering diplomatic capital on Afghan predicament may prove to be an uphill task. Notwithstanding these hindrances, India must strive to promote terrorism as a common ground to develop bonding with these countries which can alone prevent the vacuum left by the American withdrawal from being exploited by radical religious groups and prevent the lingering threat from taking a more strengthened shape across India’s border.