(terrain permitting) was precisely the key to the military situation. It is extremely unlikely that any sweeping mobile manoeuvres will take place in the broken ground that lies between Islamabad and the borders of undivided Kashmir.
Far more likely is the traditional battleground between Amritsar and Lahore. Neither the Indian nor the Pakistani general staff have ever displayed the imagination to consider any other approach but to take on each other's main armoured concentrations head-on in this area. If we needed neologism, we would need it for this situation, to describe what the remnants of Liddell Hart and Fuller must be doing in their respective graves. So much for 'indirect approach'. The open territory in Rajasthan, facing Multan, has never been tested seriously in battle. On one occasion, a Pakistani armoured sweep failed to focus on its objectives, and was caught at dawn by a squadron of Hawker Hunters, which then started behaving as if Christmas had come early. Indian Army myths about heroic resistance at isolated border outposts have been enshrined in those repositories of undisputable integrity, war films, but unfortunately, a mad Major General, entrusted with investigation into the incident, keeps bobbing up at Army conferences and has had to be asked to shut up and sit down. I don't know that either Pakistani or Indian doctrine puts much money into this sector. There has been discussion, a couple of papers, on a line of attack even further away from Amritsar-Lahore than the Barmer sector, but this should be allowed to come out into open view on its own. To sum up, don't expect any armoured thrusts towards Islamabad from Kashmir, in the hugely unlikely event that India annexes these territories.The last time any intelligent plan was made by India, it was the decision of Jacob + Aurora + Manekshaw to enter East Pakistan (=Bangladesh) from the East, from Tripura. Perhaps we need the same volatile ethnic mix to reproduce it! bonobashi --- On Fri, 22/8/08, Thaths <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From: Thaths <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [silk] BBC on Kashmir settlement scenarios To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Date: Friday, 22 August, 2008, 1:28 AM On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 6:44 PM, Perry E. Metzger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > By pure coincidence, this seems to have shown up on the BBC web site. > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/south_asia/03/kashmir_future/html/default.stm Thanks for the link. Looking more closely at the map, it appears to me that it is not in Pakistan's interest to have an independant Kashmir or a re-unified Kashmir that was part of the Indian union. (terrain permitting) Indian tanks would able to roll into Islamabad in much shorter time than Pakistani tanks rolling into New Delhi. Thaths -- "I saw this in a movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode. I think it was called, 'The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down'." -- Homer J. Simpson Unlimited freedom, unlimited storage. Get it now, on http://help.yahoo.com/l/in/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html/
