Rule of thumb, India is 1 percent reality and 99 percent noise.
MANOJ JOSHI
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
NEW DELHI: Jaswant Singh, George Fernandes and L K Advani have said India does not intend to cross the 740-km Line of Control and strike at terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
To assuage the domestic constituency, periodic statements to the contrary also surface, fuelling tension with Pakistan and concern across the world. ** But, according to a senior government official, the reality is somewhat different. As he puts it, ‘‘India lacks the political and military capacity to conduct such a strike, **especially at this juncture.’’
‘‘Military compulsions’’ is another term used for saying that India lacks the military capacity. Defence specialists say that a strike can be conducted either with an Air Force strike or an action by a commando team ferried by helicopters. ‘‘Both are fraught with hazards,’’ says one former IAF officer. ‘‘Only the US and Israel conduct such strikes,’’ he says, ‘‘and they do so in conditions where they have an overwhelming military superiority over their adversary.’’
This is not the case with India and even a hit-and-run air strike will be strongly contested by the Pakistan Air Force. There is no question of a helicopter-based assault since the IAF cannot provide assured protection by maintaining air superiority over even a limited area of the strike.
An overland commando hit-and-run raid is a bigger problem. As far as the LoC is concerned, it is a militarily ‘‘live’’ border and heavily defended.
In the 1971 war, both India and Pakistan conducted offensives against each other. Pakistan launched a major offensive to capture Poonch and failed, as did India’s attack towards Muzaffarabad.
Neither armies were able to penetrate more than a few kilometres into the other territory because of the effective defence.
But the bigger check against a cross-LoC action is political. Such an action could spin out of control and touch off a larger war, an event that is certainly not in India’s interest. Despite clear evidence of Pakistan crossing the LoC in Kargil in 1999, the government was compelled to order the Army to undertake near-suicidal frontal attacks against entrenched Pakistani positions on the mountains, rather than adopt the militarily sound strategy of outflanking them by crossing the LoC.