Foreign Policy Blunder VI: Soft Responses

Israel is surrounded by enemies. Muslim enemies who hate them. As a result Israel gets attacked. On a regular basis, I might add. Their responses to those attacks are brutal and disproportionate. Nilly willy terrorist groups do not bother them. They are a hard state.

India is in a similar situation. Our Muslim neighbors (we get terrorists from Bangladesh as well) hate us and we get attacked as well. Our response to those attacks is very Christian. We turn the other cheek. Jesus Christ would be proud of us. We are a soft state.

Why are we a soft state? Is the Indian Defense force weaker than the Israelis? Hardly! Our boys have won under the worst possible conditions. It is our political leadership, which holds them back. Our politicians make us a weak and a soft state. They follow the laws of Physics very well. They always take the path of least resistance.

In fact look at a typical response to a Hindu-Muslim clash. Our leadership terms it as a communal clash where it gets reported in the media as people from two communities were fighting each other. Who exactly are they fooling? Instead of getting to the root of the problem and punishing the guilty party, they try to bury it. Why? The answer lies in the realm of cowardice, political correctness and vote bank politics.

That same attitude is seen in our response to terrorist attacks as well. Our leaders hide their cowardice behind tough talk and saber rattling. Our history is replete with examples of that kind. Something like that is EXPECTED from liberal leftists like Congress and others. What bothers me the most is that the BJP leadership also fell into the same trap and did not do much better than the Congress?

Atalji was the FM during the Janata Party rule. He must have known about the Pakistani nuclear weapons program and yet all he did was try to make peace with them despite of all our bad experiences with them. He belongs to the generation of people who seem to have some nostalgia associated with the lost portion of India. Atalji always had this soft “Mere Dushman, Mere Bhai” approach to the Pakistanis. In the aftermath of the attack on the India parliament, a lot of saber rattling was done. Operation Parakram was launched. Our boys sat on the border twiddling their thumbs because the leadership could not decide what to do. Maybe it was ineptitude or American pressure or a combination of both but Operation Parakram ended up being Operation Chai Samosa because that is what our soldiers did on the border.

Even worse was his government’s response to the Kandahar hijacking. It exposed our vulnerabilities in the worst possible way. It became clear that unlike the Israelis who rely on all kinds of contingency plans, we rely on hope and prayer. It exposed a serious disconnect between civilian and defense leadership. It exposed turf battle between the defense and home ministry.

In an excellent article that compares the Kandahar and Entebbe Hijackings, this is what it says:
The fact of the matter was the Indian Army's did not have the ready capacities for operational force projection beyond its western frontier, in a remote locale like Kandahar. The country had neither set superior ambitions nor trained extensively in trans-border operations in the near abroad. The Force had entirely missed tactical transformation, beyond sporadic acquisitions, which were themselves bogged down by logistic and corruption linked quagmires. Even Army lacked neither operable plans nor a feasible extraction unit which could storm and retrieve the passengers, even with collateral damage. Caught in a fight for survival on the country's borders and the Kashmir Valley, ambient, offensive, city specific capabilities simply did not exist, despite the availability of necessary technologies.
In sharp contrast, at Entebbe, the military and not the domestic crisis team handled the problem right from the beginning. With the IDF Chief sitting in Cabinet, the viability of a distant and risky operation was always present before the decision makers. The distance of Force commanders from key decision-making bodies and their replacement by civilian foreign policy experts and civilian negotiators cost India dearly in the final count.

The article goes into great details of what went wrong and where. We could have saved the country all kinds of problems by controlling the situation at Amritsar. But a series of mistakes led to the plane leaving for Afghanistan and then we were at the mercy of the Pakistan controlled hijackers.

The difference in softly dealing with communal riots is that the Muslims also suffer and thus are not very likely to indulge in encores with any regularity. Terrorists who are backed by another country and are willing to die for their cause have no compunctions like that. That is why they attack us. Incidences like the Kandahar hijacking cause irreparable damage to the psyche and the reputation of the country.

Maj. Gen. Suman in his article referred to the Kandahar Hijacking as a foreign policy blunder and he is right. It stamped “soft state” on our foreheads and has emboldened our enemies to ridiculous extent. So much so that they attack us and in a couple of years they get invited over for a cricket match and kabab / biryani.

Our leaders are responsible for turning us into a soft state.

The article comparing Kandahar and Entebbe Hijackings can be read at: http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultlines/volume20/Article3.htm
Maj. Gen. Suman's article can be read at: http://www.indiandefencereview.com/2010/07/seven-blunders-that-will-haunt-india-for-posterity.html