The News December 15, 2008
With limited military options, what can India do?
By Farrukh Saleem
ISLAMABAD: On Dec 13, IAF jets violated Pak airspace twice. No accident it was. This violation must have been deliberately sanctioned by the leadership of the Indian National Congress, firstly, to send a message to the Indian voters and, secondly, to keep up the pressure on Pakistan to continue crackdown on Lashkar camps.
Post-Mumbai, the Great Game is in play in the Sub-continent. The US, India and Pakistan, the three state actors, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the only non-state actor, are all-out entangled to extricate their own brownie points.
The US has invested a colossal $170 billion in Afghanistan and thus would not let India distract Pakistan from the ‘war on terror’. Within India, Indian politicians, up for re-election in another four months, are in the game to pile up political mileage. India’s intelligence and physical security apparatus, having been severely criticised for its massive failure, is in the game to shift its own failures on to India’s western neighbour. Pakistan’s intelligence infrastructure, having failed to control non-state actors operating on Pakistani soil, is cracking down hard on its ex-proxies in order to avoid an international crisis.
India has neither economic nor political leverage over Pakistan and is thus using the Uncle Sam to pressurise Pakistan. India’s military options are limited. The Indian Army, with 1.3 million active service personnel, the third largest army on the face of the planet, has little or no supply of Guided Bomb Units (GBUs) or Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs) and thus has little or no surgical strike capability. Indian Army’s Pinaka Multi Barrel Rocket Launchers have a maximum range of 40 km and can fire 12 rockets in 44 seconds (these were used in the Kargil War and have since been inducted in large numbers).
The army is also said to possess 38 systems of BM-30 Tornado 300mm Soviet multiple rocket launchers with a firing range of 90 km (24 additional system are to be delivered by 2010).
Then there are PJ-10 supersonic ‘BrahMos’ (from Brahmaputra and Moskva river of Russia) cruise missiles with an operational range of 290 km (India has conducted at least nine test-firings and serial production began some two years ago). Pinakas, Tornados and BrahMos can be fired and may very well hit targets in Pakistan but all that in strategic terms will achieve little or next to nothing. And then, there’s always a possibility of antagonising the US if Pakistan begins to shift military assets deployed on the western front.
The Indian Navy with 55,000 active-duty personnel and 155 vessels is the 5th largest navy in the world. According to GlobalSecurity, “The Indian Navy is relatively well-armed among Indian Ocean navies, operating one aircraft carrier, over 40 surface combatants, and over a dozen submarines (INS Viraat is the only aircraft carrier in Asia operating jet fighters).” It operates eight destroyers, 14 frigates, 24 corvettes, 14 minesweepers and two missile boats.
The Indian Navy may indeed be capable of blockading the Karachi Port. But then, Nato requires some 300,000 gallons of fuel every day and 84 per cent of all containerised supplies to Nato in Afghanistan pass through the Karachi Port (the International Criminal Court at The Hague will soon include naval blockades into its list of acts of war).
Not to forget, that the USS Theodore Roosevelt Battle Group, or ‘Rough Rider’, the Nimitz-class super carrier propelled by two Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactors is in the northern Arabian Sea.
The Indian Air Force (IAF), with 170,000 personnel and an active aircraft fleet of 1,353, is the 4th largest air force in the world (after the US, Russia and China). Its ground attack inventory includes MiGs, Jaguar IS and Jaguar IM. Its inventory of multi-role aircraft includes MiGs, Mirage and Sukhoi-30 MKI (Su-30 is one of the best air-superiority aircraft in the air today).
In effect, neither an army nor a naval action seems feasible. A limited air strike campaign may therefore be India’s only military option and that, too, shall be more symbolic than strategic (a few air strikes may be the only undertaking that would irritate the US the least).
At the political level things are a lot more serious as it now appears that the US and India are getting on to the same strategic platform. And that’s the stratagem that used to be referred to as the ‘doomsday scenario’ for Pakistan.
© Copyright 2008, The News
