By
Raghu Raman
13 April
2010
With conventional
methods failing against insurgency and terrorism, there is a need for new
thinking
The global war on
terror offers opportunities for imbibing lessons that other countries have
learnt at high costs—often paid for in blood. The last decade of anti-terror and
anti-insurgency operations conducted the world over offers valuable insights for
the conduct of such operations in the future.
Historically,
conflicts have had four distinct eras. After World War II, there was a race to
achieve arms superiority, culminating in the nuclear détente between two
superpowers and the other members of the nuclear club. The next era of the Cold
War saw the superpowers’ ideologies being played out in proxy wars all over the
globe. The third era was a variation of the arms race, but backed by economic
power. During this, the US, under Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” programme, broke
the Soviet Union’s back by upping the economic ante so high that the Soviets
couldn’t afford to stay in the game. The emerging doctrine at the end of this
era was that strength ruled the world. Conventional, nuclear and economic
supremacy was the strategy that guaranteed security and safety. Photo:
AFP
Though India faced
challenges of secessionism, insurgency and terrorism virtually since its
independence, much of the world’s attention was occupied by the US-Soviet
conflict. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, terrorism and guerrilla
warfare started occupying global centre stage. And while this was a game
changer, the Western world relegated it to a Third World or West Asia
problem.
The 9/11 attacks
changed that dramatically. The much vaunted two-ocean defence assurance (the
idea of being guarded by the existence of two oceans on its two sides) that the
US had historically banked upon evaporated overnight. Al Qaeda showed that it
was possible to strike the world’s sole remaining superpower, just like 10 years
earlier the Taliban had shown that they could take on the mighty Soviet Union.
And while the US responded with its own and allied military might, it was
hobbled by a doctrine that was woefully out of date. Several hundred thousand
troops and kilotonnes of bombs later, its enemy was very much alive and kicking.
Around seven years after George W. Bush pronounced “Mission Accomplished” in
2003, the world has discovered that when it comes to terrorism, the mission
itself has to be redefined. Killing insurgents does not equate to killing
insurgency.
The basic strategy
behind 9/11 and other terrorist incidents such as the London bombing in 2005 or
the Mumbai attacks in 2008 is not new, though. They have their origins in the
early 1940s when, in the midst of World War II, British Lieutenant David
Stirling drew up the concept of small raiding parties (of about five highly
trained and motivated commandos) being inserted deep behind enemy lines to
create havoc. His idea was initially rubbished until Stirling convinced General
Neil Ritchie to give him a shot. The unit he founded was called the Special Air
Service, or SAS, which is considered the forerunner of Special Forces, including
counterterrorist units such as GSG9 and the National Security
Guard.
Raiding parties and
guerrilla tactics attack the weakness of the old war doctrines. Conventional
forces are useless against them because the enemy is small in number and
interspersed among the local population. Guarding frontlines doesn’t help
because the raiders are already inside the country. Spy satellites don’t work
because they are designed to detect large formation movements, not a few men
slipping through. As a matter of fact, powerful divisions, fighter aircraft and
every other form of conventional weaponry is rendered impotent because they have
no target to hit. And those are the same strategies utilized by terrorists,
guerrillas and insurgents—from Al Qaeda to the Mumbai
attackers.
Case studies of the
Russian and US imbroglio in Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that
insurgency is a beast requiring different treatment. At the core of the problem
lies the fallacy that old war doctrines will work against the “new warriors”.
But there are some fundamental paradigm differences between conventional and
irregular war doctrines. Not surprisingly, it is the guerrillas and terrorists
who have seized the initiative in leveraging these
differences.
The first of these
is that numerical superiority doesn’t matter much. Guerrilla tactic hinges
around choosing the time and place of attack, striking hard and disappearing
swiftly. This allows insurgents and terrorists to retain initiative. Since they
don’t engage in pitched battles, the advantages of superior manpower or weaponry
of security forces is largely nullified. The smaller size works in favour of
terrorists. They can find motivated recruits easily because they need just a
handful, they can train them better with frugal facilities. They don’t have to
maintain establishments, fixed infrastructure or elaborate administrative
echelons. And their ability to choose the target pins down security forces far
in excess of the terrorists’ numbers. They know where they are going to hit, but
security forces have to protect everything.
The second is their
ability to work closely with ideologically similar or divergent groups spread
across the world—regardless of legality and protocol. For instance, the Basque
separatist groups specialized in kidnappings not just to press their political
demands, but also to fund their movement to the tune of $2 billion. Terrorists
can work with drug cartels, human traffickers, pirates, forgers, money
launderers and other terrorist groups with different agendas—sometimes without
even meeting each other. Compare that with the challenges governments face in
the extradition of even known criminals between friendly
nations.
In 1985, a Trans
World Airlines flight from Athens was hijacked by Islamic Jihad and diverted to
Algiers. A US Delta team reached the Algiers airport and was cleared by then US
secretary of state George Shultz to mount a rescue attempt after negotiations
with the Algerians. However, “paperwork” delayed the assault and the hijackers
flew the plane to Beirut where 32 hostages were taken off and distributed in
various parts of the city, making a rescue attempt impossible. The US was forced
to cave in and pressurize Israel into releasing 700 prisoners. The good guys
have to fight by Queensberry rules (and often fight allied and their own
government’s bureaucracy as well) whereas the terrorists fight no holds
barred.
The third
difference is the leveraging of the media at strategic and tactical levels. The
ability of the Mumbai attackers to hold the world’s attention for 72 hours was
because of this, as was the ability of the handlers to direct operations at a
tactical level. NSG was severely disadvantaged because of the very same reasons.
A constant harangue of “10 men holding one billion people to ransom” was putting
pressure on them to end the operation as soon as possible, yet any collateral
damage would have been interpreted as ineptitude on their part and publicized
worldwide.
The fourth and
perhaps the most important game changer is that in irregular warfare, tactical
and strategic aspects are fused together. In a conventional war, say, Kargil,
tactical gains and losses are separated from strategic ones. Loss of a post,
peak or a couple of aircraft has relatively minor effects on the overall
campaign. Compare that with an atrocity such as rape or custodial death
committed by a soldier in a counterinsurgency environment. The latter can
inflame the entire region and result in the loss of the moral high ground and
goodwill gained laboriously over the years by thousands of troops. This fusing
of tactics and strategy means that every event, no matter how insignificant, has
the potential of turning into a strategic blunder or immense success. Imagine
what could have happened if Ajmal Kasab had not been captured
alive.
Fighting a new war
with old doctrines loads the dice in favour of terrorists and insurgents. To
rout them, we have to attack their weakness. For all their advantages,
terrorists and insurgents have one major Achilles heel: They have to depend on
the environment for survival and conduct of their activities. They have to live
within the society, rent places, use phones, financial networks and public
transport, cross transit points and so on to remain plugged into the social
ecosystem. Bomb makers have to buy chemicals, planners need to survey targets,
financiers need to move funds. There are many traces of surreptitious behaviour
that are buried in the information repositories of our environment, which stay
buried because we are used to looking for specific tactical information within
each individual repository, usually post facto.
One way to beat
terrorists at their own game is to start recognizing the early warning signs by
correlating discrete pieces of information and looking for tell-tale signs of
their presence, preparation and action. Security forces globally are realizing
the flaws of relying on silos of piecemeal data rather than aggregated
information. Insightful intelligence is the product of cross-linking different
sources of information rather than in-depth knowledge of just one source. Often,
a single source can spur decisions that seem obvious but are actually incorrect.
For instance, a well built by US forces at the centre of an Afghan village was
destroyed—not by the Taliban, but by the women of the village. Before the well
had been built, the women had to walk some distance to fetch water, which is
exactly what they wanted because it gave them an opportunity to interact
socially.
Such “tribal” and
undocumented knowledge exists in abundance within the society where insurgents
and terrorists operate. And the local populace is best placed to discern the
earliest sign simply because they have their ear closest to the ground. The
problem is that much of this knowledge exists in silos and at times individual
levels. In the absence of capture and aggregation of this gold mine, security
personnel are forced to look at specific instances rather than environmental
trends. And this limits the search to known tactical instances that have
occurred in the past, rather than strategic environmental signals that predict
future risks or opportunities. So, despite the ability to respond hard, security
forces simply don’t know where to respond until it is too
late.
The good news is
that much of this ability already exists in our country. There is a great deal
of automation in different domains such as immigration, finance, banking and
telecommunications. More importantly, several other domains such as vehicle
registrations and train travel will have to be automated and connected to a
central database for efficiency purposes in the future. So, all the information
is already or soon will be available. This needs to be stitched into an
analytical view that gives security forces the visibility they need to do their
job. Just improving our force’s capability to respond to situations is not
enough—their capability to anticipate those situations is equally important. In
the war against terror, we also need John Nashs—not just John
Rambos.
Raghu Raman is an
expert and commentator on internal security. These are his personal views.
Source: Mint, New
Delhi
10:23 PM
Sultan Shahin
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