An explosion that was visible from the window of the room in Baghdad from which a global television network correspondent was reporting live last week set me thinking.
Saddam Hussein's capture had been announced just a few hours before and, although US forces were on heightened alert, the resistance fighters were able to cause that explosion in the very area where the nerve centres of the occupation forces are located. In fact, the increasing successes of the Iraqis urban guerrilla attacks in recent weeks has shown once again that heavy duty armaments do not succeed in a guerrilla war.
Indeed, they often worsen the situation in the long term. After all, the US met its Waterloo in Vietnam after using astounding firepower. The Sri Lankans do not appear to have learnt that lesson. The Israelis certainly have not. The Soviet Union collapsed because it did not learn even after spending years trying to control Afghanistan. And the US does not appear to be able to take a lesson from any of these earlier guerrilla wars.
Strategy
Perhaps the difference in the Indian forces choice of tactics in Kashmir and those adopted in all the other situations I have listed is that the forces here think of Kashmiris as compatriots gone astray rather than an alien people. Of course, the Sri Lankan forces should think of the Tamil insurgents as their compatriots but maybe the key difference is that there are no Tamils in the Sri Lankan Army whereas there are Kashmiri Muslims in the Indian armed forces.
Indeed, one of the facts that used to be whispered by Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat's detractors was that he had appointed a Kashmiri Muslim who happened to be related to Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone as his staff officer.
Whatever the reasons, the restraint the Indian Army has shown in choosing weapons in Kashmir should be an object lesson for tacticians in future guerrilla warfare.
Indian forces have not used tanks or aircraft to deal with Kashmiri insurgents. Such weapons have on the other hand been liberally used in Palestine and Sri Lanka. And of course they were the mainstay of the Soviet effort in Afghanistan and the US in Vietnam. Now, one hears of helicopter gun-ships in Iraq. The US weakness lies is the absence of political consensus within the US and other major occupying nations and the flak their leaders face over the credibility of the reasons they had proffered for sending forces to Iraq.
Commitment
With such limited domestic commitment, they cannot even think of the sort of tactics Indian officers have employed. For example, on October 8, 1990, Lt Gen Mohammed Ahmed Zaki, who was then the Corps Commander in Srinagar, marched at the head of his troops through Nalle Mar, the widest road that winds through the old town of Srinagar. He was leading a flag march, meant simply to show that the writ of the state still ran there, but the senior-most commander in Kashmir risked his life to make that clear.
I cannot imagine a three-star US general marching through Baghdad at the head of his troops. The US fear of body bags, complicated by the panic that next year's US presidential election has set off, appears to have condemned the occupation forces to repeat Vietnam in Iraq.
They have not yet reached the point of using Napalm or Agent Orange but then of course that happened several years into their ten-year involvement in Vietnam. If they are forced to repeat the pattern of those mistakes, the price the West will have to pay may be much higher than that during and after Vietnam.
US strategists should see that military tactics employed in the past and at present have so alienated Palestinians and Tamils that it is almost impossible for an Israeli to roam without armed escort in Gaza or for a Sinhala to do so in Jaffna, leave alone the jungles of Vavuniya.
I have, on the other hand, been warmly welcomed into Kashmiri homes when I have roamed unescorted through downtown Srinagar and remote corners of the valley since at least 1995.
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