[Who counted the dead bodies? And how? Were terrorists expected to remain amassed and asleep, waiting to be bombed? That too after Donald Trump issuing a warning signal two days back? And what does the global media say?
A negotiated peace, negotiated with all the stakeholders, has no alternative. A war has no real victor. Also look up: I. 'Surgical Strike in Pakistan a Botched Operation? Indian jets carried out a strike against JEM targets inside Pakistani territory, to questionable effect' at < https://medium.com/dfrlab/surgical-strike-in-pakistan-a-botched-operation-7f6cda834b24 >. II. 'Pakistani village asks: Where are bodies of militants India says it bombed?' at < https://in.reuters.com/article/india-kashmir-village/pakistani-village-asks-where-are-bodies-of-militants-india-says-it-bombed-idINKCN1QH29B >. III. 'Balakot Strike: Pakistan To Lodge Complaint At UN Against India For 'Eco-Terrorism'' at < https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/balakot-strike-pakistan-to-lodge-complaint-at-un-against-india-for-eco-terrorism_in_5c792e5ce4b0de0c3fbff6d6 >. ***The analytical account at sl. no. II. below is truly remarkable.*** <<Even if we were to give latitude for imperfect targeting, the second question is, would the airstrikes help in changing the behaviour of the Pakistani deep state qua sponsorship of terror? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Pakistan believes that the utilisation of semi-state actors has furthered its strategic objectives in the broader South Asian region. Despite all its treacheries, the United States still have to sup with Pakistan because the ISI-military combine substantively controls the most potent semi-state actor in South West Asia — the Taliban. A modus vivendi with the Taliban is the sine qua non for an honourable US exit from Afghanistan without making it look like a Vietnam moment. For a nation that believes that the use of terrorists is key to its strategic and tactical policy in the region, a hundred-odd foot soldiers and a “knocked-out camp” is really expandable. They will easily be replenished and the games will go on. That brings you to the third question: What happens when the next big terror attack takes place? For it would happen as it is not the end yet. Having responded to Pulwama with conventional hard power and “raised temperatures”, the nation will expect an even more pointed response. What would that be since even airstrikes have their limitations? Would next step be war then? That brings us to the fourth question: Is there space for a limited war under a nuclear overhang between India and Pakistan? The 600-pound gorilla in this equation is China that has huge investments in Pakistan courtesy CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). Is India really prepared for a two-front situation given that our defence expenditure last year was the lowest since 1962? ... Finally, why did Pakistan de-escalate? It perhaps concluded that the Balakot strike had not hurt it morally or materially, it had demonstrated its retaliatory capacity in broad daylight and it had downed an Indian asset and had a pilot in its custody. It was the perfect moment to show the world that while India was the belligerent one, it was the responsible state wanting peace. For Pakistan, this provided an opportunity to whitewash the stain of being the Somalia of South Asia. It was not the United States, the Chinese or Saudi-UAE pressure, as some would like to believe. Strategic calculations have to be based on hardheaded realism, not jingoistic hyper-nationalism.>> (Excerpted from sl. no. I. below.) <<And then the story took an extraordinary turn. On March 1, a report in The Indian Express, quoting an anonymous Indian military official, claimed that the IAF hadn’t crossed the border at all. In this version of the story, Indian aircraft fired the Israeli missiles used for the strike from inside the LoC. If this is true, then the image conjured up in the minds of Indians following the news, of Mirages streaking deep into Pakistani airspace and startling the enemy, has to be replaced by the considerably more prosaic picture of Indian fighter aircraft acting as firing platforms inside Indian territory. This isn’t entirely the fault of the official narrative: a diet of second world war movies has us stuck in an obsolete past where planes have to be vertically above the ground that they target. But it does make you wonder what the sound and fury of the last week was actually about. If the Indian air force claims to have attacked non-military targets from inside the LoC with little to show for it and if the Pakistan air force claims to have fired missiles from its side of the border and hit open ground, both sides can take issue with each other’s version of events, but to the wider world the exchange will seem like an expensive and dangerous charade pretending to be purposeful military action. ***Given that the one documented casualty was suffered by IAF (which, in turn, allowed the Pakistan military’s favoured client, Imran Khan, to act like a magnanimous statesman), it’s hard to know what the prime minister has to show for his vaunted boldness. A lost plane and a returned PoW seem to be the verifiable answers.*** [Emphasis added.] And what of our chickenhawk anchors? Edward Thompson, the great historian, once described an English journalist who specialized in publishing government leaks as “a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials… stand patiently leaking in the public interest.” Marvellously apposite though this is, it’s wrong in one particular: in the Indian case, the high officials are redundant. The ‘journalists’ in question collect their leaks at one remove, from news agencies as independent and as committed to the truth as the Soviet TASS.>> (Excerpted from sl. no. II. below.)] I/II. http://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/030319/did-india-kill-300-terrorists-in-balakot.html?fbclid=IwAR07pZzS2qiqEW-T17YIqn0umM4KkTmpDEZmJ-wIl5caEdZ9CJgkqmn3eic Did India kill 300 terrorists in Balakot? Manish Tewari Manish Tewari is a lawyer and a former Union minister. The views expressed are personal. Twitter handle @manishtewari Published : Mar 3, 2019, 1:08 am IST Updated : Mar 3, 2019, 1:10 am IST Pakistan claimed that it had deliberately targeted open spaces around the military bases to demonstrate its capacity to retaliate. The airstrikes carried out by the Indian Air force on February 26, 2019, at Jaba Top, a Jaish-e-Mohammed facility in Balakot, has injected a new dynamic in Indo-Pak relations. India demonstrated willingness to utilise conventional hard power to contain and combat terror orchestrated by the Pakistani state against India from 1979 onwards. Pakistan retaliated the next day by bombing Indian military installations in Nowshera. The bombs fell in the vicinity of these establishments without causing any damage. Pakistan claimed that it had deliberately targeted open spaces around the military bases to demonstrate its capacity to retaliate. The Indian operation raises germane questions having long-term implications. First, did the operation achieve its intended objective? Indian Air Force’s chief, Air Vice-Marshal R.G.K. Kapoor, in response to a question, stated: “It would be premature to say what is the number of casualties that we have been able to inflict on those camps and what is the number of deaths.” This factual statement belies the source-based “plants” in pliable and jingoistic media outlets that 300 terrorists, trainers, indoctrinators and their handlers had been eliminated in the airstrike. Credible Western media outlets with access to the region like the New York Times reported, “The view that little had been damaged was supported by military analysts and two western security officials, who said that any militant training areas at the site in the Pakistani province of (KPK, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), had long since packed up or dispersed.” Washington Post stated: “Initial reports from local police officials and residents who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed that a strike took place in a mountainous area a few miles outside town, but they said they saw no signs of mass casualties.” Daily Telegraph wrote: “Villagers in the area told Reuters they heard four loud bangs in the early hours of Tuesday but reported only one person wounded by shrapnel.” “We saw trees fallen down and one house damaged and four craters where the bombs had fallen,” the Guardian said. “The attack was celebrated in India, but it was unclear on Tuesday whether anything significant had been struck by the fighter jets, or whether the operation had been carefully calibrated to ease popular anger over the February 14 suicide bombing without drawing a major Pakistani reprisal.” Gulf News recounted: “From what villagers could see, the Indian attack had missed its target as the bombs dropped exploded about a kilometre away from the madrasa. Fida Hussain Shah, a 46-year-old farmer, said he and other villagers had found pieces of Indian ordnance that had splintered pine trees on the hill but the only casualty was a man sleeping in his house when shrapnel broke the windows.” An analysis by the Digital Forensics Lab of a leading US think tank led with the headline —”Surgical Strike in Pakistan a Botched Operation.” It pronounced: “Using open-source evidence and satellite imagery, @DFRLab was able to confirm the location of the Indian airstrike to be near Balakot, rather than inside it, and firmly within Pakistani territory. The target was supposedly a JeM-led madrasa, but @DFRLab was unable to confirm that any bombs reached buildings associated with it. The SPICE-2000 is a precision-guided bomb that should not miss its target by the approximately 100 metres that the impact craters were from the nearest structures. The autonomous nature of the SPICE-2000 adds mystery to why the bombs seemed to miss. Satellite imagery did not suggest that any damage was inflicted to nearby buildings. Vegetation and low imagery resolution could hypothetically obscure structural damage, but this remains highly improbably. Something appears to have gone wrong in the targeting process?” In a nutshell, influential sections of the international media and strategic community are of the view that the operation did not achieve its purported objective. Even if we were to give latitude for imperfect targeting, the second question is, would the airstrikes help in changing the behaviour of the Pakistani deep state qua sponsorship of terror? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Pakistan believes that the utilisation of semi-state actors has furthered its strategic objectives in the broader South Asian region. Despite all its treacheries, the United States still have to sup with Pakistan because the ISI-military combine substantively controls the most potent semi-state actor in South West Asia — the Taliban. A modus vivendi with the Taliban is the sine qua non for an honourable US exit from Afghanistan without making it look like a Vietnam moment. For a nation that believes that the use of terrorists is key to its strategic and tactical policy in the region, a hundred-odd foot soldiers and a “knocked-out camp” is really expandable. They will easily be replenished and the games will go on. That brings you to the third question: What happens when the next big terror attack takes place? For it would happen as it is not the end yet. Having responded to Pulwama with conventional hard power and “raised temperatures”, the nation will expect an even more pointed response. What would that be since even airstrikes have their limitations? Would next step be war then? That brings us to the fourth question: Is there space for a limited war under a nuclear overhang between India and Pakistan? The 600-pound gorilla in this equation is China that has huge investments in Pakistan courtesy CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). Is India really prepared for a two-front situation given that our defence expenditure last year was the lowest since 1962? Fifth, if a conventional response to terror in addition to being escalatory is inefficacious, where do we go from here? The only answer is to redevelop, expand and deploy lethal covert capacity that allegedly former Prime Minister IK Gujral dismantled in the late 1990s. For ghost wars can only be fought using ghosts, not conventional means. The Indian state must surmount its dilemmas about outsourced responses to terror. Finally, why did Pakistan de-escalate? It perhaps concluded that the Balakot strike had not hurt it morally or materially, it had demonstrated its retaliatory capacity in broad daylight and it had downed an Indian asset and had a pilot in its custody. It was the perfect moment to show the world that while India was the belligerent one, it was the responsible state wanting peace. For Pakistan, this provided an opportunity to whitewash the stain of being the Somalia of South Asia. It was not the United States, the Chinese or Saudi-UAE pressure, as some would like to believe. Strategic calculations have to be based on hardheaded realism, not jingoistic hyper-nationalism. II. https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/reporting-balakot-the-truth-of-a-pantomime-war-after-the-pulwama-terror-attack/cid/1686059 Reporting Balakot: the truth of a pantomime war It’s hard to know what the prime minister has to show for his vaunted boldness besides a lost plane and a returned PoW By Mukul Kesavan Published 3.03.19, 9:15 AMUpdated 3.03.19, 9:16 AM 5 mins read Indian Air Force officials in New Delhi on Thursday, February 28, show sections of an exploded Amraam missile said to be fired by Pakistan PTI Photo The ongoing reportage on the cross-border skirmishing this last week has been bewildering. The average news-consuming citizen could be forgiven for wondering if anything he thought he knew about the Indian bombing of Balakot and Pakistan’s response actually happened or whether every event in this narrative was subject to continuous and radical revision. The first impression anyone watching Indian news channels or reading its newspapers would have had of the Indian raid was this. Indian aircraft crossed the Line of Control for the first time since 1971. They didn’t merely venture into Pakistan- occupied Kashmir; they flew into undisputed Pakistani territory, into Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, within a hundred miles of Islamabad, and bombed a terrorist camp. Their attack left hundreds of terrorists dead. All Indian aircraft returned undamaged from their daring and unprecedented raid on Pakistan. The main takeaway from this first draft of history was this: India had finally broken with the policy of restraint in the face of Pakistani provocation. Instead of being blackmailed into quiescence by Pakistan’s nuclear capability as Manmohan Singh’s government had been after the terrorist rampages of 2008, Narendra Modi’s regime had boldly chosen to draw new red lines. It had shown Pakistan’s deep State that India’s response to ISI-sponsored terror would not be constrained by precedent or convention, that India was willing to escalate the conflict in a precise and targeted way. Pakistan denied the existence of such a camp or any casualties and showed photographs of a ploughed-up grove of pine trees, claiming that the swift response of its air force had forced Indian pilots to hastily dump their missiles on untenanted landscape. (Pakistan’s climate change minister, manfully striving to establish an equivalence of terror, subsequently accused India of bombing a forest reserve and being guilty of “eco-terrorism”.) Gradually, through the fog generated by shock-jock boosterism, the outlines of another story became visible. In this version, the Indian government had never formally put a number on the terrorists killed. That had been a bit of colour attributed to ‘sources’ cited by patriotic news agencies. Nobody knew the extent of destruction or the number of casualties. This was either because satellite cameras had been obstructed by cloud cover or because the Pakistanis had restricted access to the camp and repaired the damage before it could be reported on, or because there had been no tenanted camp there in the first place. Sober national security pundits dealt with this mutating story by encouraging their readers not to miss the wood for the trees. Whether India’s aircraft had killed militants or pine groves was irrelevant. The big picture was made up of India’s willingness to use air power to answer terrorism, the depth of the incursion and the indelible lesson the Pakistanis had been taught: namely, that India would not hesitate to strike Pakistan’s mainland if it didn’t mend its rogue ways. This was not exclusively a bhakt position; sage security experts, committed to the national interest, not Mr Modi’s electoral fortunes, saw the attack as a necessary, if long-deferred, lesson. The Pakistani retaliation that followed almost immediately in broad daylight was first successfully repulsed by India’s news channels, with ranks of F-16s sent packing by the IAF’s MiG-21s. Pakistan had another story. Its spokespersons claimed that two Indian planes had been shot down and two pilots captured. After hours of silence, an official Indian statement acknowledged that one of the IAF’s pilots was missing. In the meantime, Pakistan had uploaded photos and videos of a captured pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman. Later in the day, Pakistan walked back its claim that it had captured two pilots but continued to maintain that it had shot down two Indian aircraft. Meanwhile Indian officials claimed that a MiG-21 had shot down an F-16 and its pilots had been seen parachuting into PoK. So, from the precise and bloody destruction of a terror camp, the official version had shifted to the symbolic significance of raiding Pakistani territory (never mind the damage) and from there, in the face of the undeniable fact of Wing Commander Abhinandan’s capture, to a bid to establish parity in terms of planes lost. India hasn’t yet produced radar, video or AWACS evidence for its claim. The one factor in favour of the downed F-16 story is Pakistan’s own claim that it shot down two Indian planes. Since there is no evidence to show that India lost a second plane, it might just be the case that Pakistani spokesmen ran with the two-plane theory and then backtracked because one of the planes was theirs: an F-16 perhaps, or one of its Chinese fighters, the JF-17 Thunder. Without concrete proof of camp destruction or the shooting down of the F-16, and faced with the embarrassment of a lost jet and a captured pilot, the Indian story shifted again. The return of Wing Commander Abhinandan became the new horizon. Politicians and anchors demanded his release... and received it. Imran Khan, keen to earn global brownie points by de-escalating and with the propaganda advantage of having made the only documented ‘kill’ in this skirmish, promptly announced Abhinandan’s release as a “gesture of peace”. >From exacting vengeance for the 40 Indian soldiers killed by terrorists to demanding the return of a single captured pilot, India’s strategic objectives seemed to shrink. The Indian government staged a novel media event where senior military officers appeared outside South Block, and took turns to hold the shards of an AMRAAM air-to-air missile. Since this was a missile only carried by F-16s, the point of this demonstration was to show that Pakistan had used these planes against India in combat in breach of its agreement with the US. From drawing bold new red lines to litigating the use of military hardware, the official narrative had run aground. And then the story took an extraordinary turn. On March 1, a report in The Indian Express, quoting an anonymous Indian military official, claimed that the IAF hadn’t crossed the border at all. In this version of the story, Indian aircraft fired the Israeli missiles used for the strike from inside the LoC. If this is true, then the image conjured up in the minds of Indians following the news, of Mirages streaking deep into Pakistani airspace and startling the enemy, has to be replaced by the considerably more prosaic picture of Indian fighter aircraft acting as firing platforms inside Indian territory. This isn’t entirely the fault of the official narrative: a diet of second world war movies has us stuck in an obsolete past where planes have to be vertically above the ground that they target. But it does make you wonder what the sound and fury of the last week was actually about. If the Indian air force claims to have attacked non-military targets from inside the LoC with little to show for it and if the Pakistan air force claims to have fired missiles from its side of the border and hit open ground, both sides can take issue with each other’s version of events, but to the wider world the exchange will seem like an expensive and dangerous charade pretending to be purposeful military action. Given that the one documented casualty was suffered by IAF (which, in turn, allowed the Pakistan military’s favoured client, Imran Khan, to act like a magnanimous statesman), it’s hard to know what the prime minister has to show for his vaunted boldness. A lost plane and a returned PoW seem to be the verifiable answers. And what of our chickenhawk anchors? Edward Thompson, the great historian, once described an English journalist who specialized in publishing government leaks as “a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials… stand patiently leaking in the public interest.” Marvellously apposite though this is, it’s wrong in one particular: in the Indian case, the high officials are redundant. The ‘journalists’ in question collect their leaks at one remove, from news agencies as independent and as committed to the truth as the Soviet TASS. mukulkesa...@hotmail.com -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to greenyouth+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to greenyouth@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
