http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140321/nation.htm#4
India, Pakistan move closer to power deal
Islamabad, March
20
The long discussed
Indo-Pak electricity deal has moved closer to reality with energy- starved
Pakistan handing over draft of an initial power trade deal to India.
The move comes as
the World Bank has offered to finance the feasibility study and transmission
line to import 1,200 megawatts (MW) of power from India.
"Now, the
World Bank has also offered to finance a feasibility study along with the
(installation of) transmission line to import 1,200 MW power from India,"
an unnamed government official told the Express Tribune daily. The official
said a draft of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was handed over to Indian
authorities in a recent meeting held in New Delhi. India would respond to
Pakistan after going through the draft of the initial deal, the official said.
Indian diplomats said Pakistan and India have constituted technical working
groups which would review the aspects of the export of 500 MW of electricity to
Pakistan. The Pakistani cabinet had decided in January to import electricity
from India. — PTI
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140321/nation.htm#9
Maj Gen gets disability pension after 13-yr
wait
Tribune News
Service
Chandigarh, March
16
Thirteen years
after his retirement, a Major General has been granted disability pension. The
Chandigarh Bench of the Armed Forces Tribunal today allowed his petition
challenging an administrative order denying him the pension benefits.
The Bench ordered
the petitioner, Maj Gen JS Kapoor, would be entitled to a disability element of
50 per cent. It also ruled that it would be open for the authorities concerned
to hold a re-survey medical board to freshly assess the petitioner’s
disability, if they so desired.
The petitioner
retired in 2001 after putting in 38 years of service, during which he developed
hypertension due to stress and strain of military service and later even had to
undergo cardiac surgery.
A medical board
had earlier assessed his disability as 20 per cent and attributed the same to
military service. The medical adviser attached to the Adjutant General’s branch
at the Army Headquarters, which deals with medical cases concerning officers,
however, had refused to sanction the disability element of pension, saying it
was not attributed to military service, without assigning any reason in support
of its decision.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140321/nation.htm#10
IAF copters roped in to douse blaze near
Tirupati temple
New Delhi, March
20
The IAF used its
aircraft including two Mi-17V5 choppers with huge buckets to control fire in
forests near the Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh, Defence Ministry said
today. "Two MI-17 V5 helicopters with 'Bambi buckets' with a capacity of
4,000 litres of water each, reached Renigunta Airport and commenced the task of
fire fighting. The helicopters carried out four sorties wherein all forest
fires burning near the Temple were extinguished," a ministry release said.
The IAF had also
deployed the An-32 and the C-130J Super Hercules aircraft for carrying out a
recce of the area to get a clear picture about the fire in the forest near the
temple.
The Ministry said
the Defence Crisis Management Group headed by the tri-services Integrated
Defence Staff had deployed assets soon after the state administration requested
for help yesterday at around 1500 hours.
The Army also
deployed around 150 personnel from Chennai to assist the state administration
in handling the crisis. "HQ Integrated Defence Staff is in touch with
Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam authorities and continuously monitoring the Armed
Forces response. The helicopter operations are likely to continue till
tomorrow," the ministry added. — PTI
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140321/edit.htm#1
Pakistan still has
to answer questions on Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden is
dead. His soul may not rest in peace, and neither do controversies and queries
that have followed the successful raid by the US Special Forces in Abbottabad
in 2011. How could he have hidden in plain sight a short distance from a major
Pakistani army cantonment, without anyone coming to know about it? Did the head
of al-Qaida have support from within the Pakistani establishment, if so at what
level? Who were the people he was regularly in touch with? The extensive
electronic surveillance that preceded the raid and the recovery of a large
cache of documents and computer drives gave US intelligence officers some
answers, but what they knew has largely been shrouded from the world.
Now an American
reporter has levelled the charge that bin Laden did indeed have the support of
the intelligence agency. She has named the then ISI chief, Lieut-Gen Ahmed
Shuja Pasha, as the person who knew about the hideout. Ironically, Pasha had
cordial relations with American officials and was often seen as an anti-Taliban
officer. Predictably, both Washington and Islamabad have maintained that there
is no evidence that the al-Qaida leader's presence was known at the highest
levels of the government in Pakistan.
Even as denials
ensue, there are signs that the establishment in Pakistan is re-evaluating the
efficacy of supporting terrorist operations as terrorist attacks continue to
take civilian lives there. The "strategic depth" police on
Afghanistan have brought home terror, further aggravated by ISI-supported
organisations that openly work for terrorists who target India. The political
leadership and even the military have not been able to reign in the ISI, which
has got entrapped in the very game it initiated. Further revelations will, no
doubt, show the world the true nature of the internal security agency that
supported terrorism. It is time we all realised there are no good or bad
terrorists, only mass murderers whose designs must be thwarted by all civilised
societies.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140321/edit.htm#7
Reading Henderson in historical context
Triggered by
India’s ‘forward policy’ and the leadership’s failure to read the Chinese
reaction, the 1962 war was lost before it was fought
Zorawar Daulet
Singh
THE partial
release of the Henderson Brooks Report (HBR) has affirmed a widely held belief
among historians and sections of the strategic community that a politicised and
incompetent higher defence and intelligence system in Delhi contributed to and
adversely affected the outcome on the battlefield in 1962.
To enable a better
understanding of the causes of 1962, however, the HBR should also be located in
its historical context. A study of Indian perceptions at the highest level is
vital to understanding the path to 1962.
The primary
objective of the Nehru regime, even as the dispute deteriorated after 1959, was
to avoid a frontal collision with China. The central puzzle, therefore, is why
did India find itself on the Himalayan battlefield in October 1962? There are
four factors that arguably shaped Indian behaviour leading up to 1962:
Contested
worldviews
It is useful to
appreciate the context that framed India’s geopolitical worldview since this
directly influenced the type of China policy adopted. The entry of Pakistan
into the Western alliance system in 1954 led to an ideological model of threat
assessment where an externally backed Pakistan was deemed as the primary
political and military threat. India’s engagement of China and the 1954
Agreement emanated from Nehru’s unwillingness to open a second front.
After 1959, there
appears to be one worldview embodied by Nehru and Krishna Menon favouring
non-alignment, resisting Pakistan, and avoiding conflict with China, and
another worldview from the right calling for an entente with the West, a common
defence pact with Pakistan and a more robust policy vis-à-vis China. This was
not simply a dichotomy of ideological threat assessments but a real military
dilemma since given fixed force levels the challenge was finding an appropriate
deployment mix for the Pakistani and Chinese frontiers.
If such a notion
of contested worldviews is plausible, it might explain the erratic pattern of
India’s policies and posture subsequently. Nehru in trying to placate the
Congress right was compelled to make a policy shift and adopt an unyielding
posture of no-negotiations and demonstrate resolve through the 1961 forward
policy that even though did not intend for conflict with China it inevitably
led to it.
India in world
politics
After 1959, the
Indian government began to perceive both the superpowers’ tilt toward India on
the dispute as some sort of restraint on Chinese behaviour. One could view it
as ‘soft’ external balancing. In 1959, India made requests to the Soviets to
rein in the Chinese. Soviet support via its neutrality, which was expressed in
the famous Tass statement of September 9, 1959, while a symbolic gesture could
have shaped India’s false sense of confidence in its dealings with China.
Although we also now know that Moscow had told Delhi the limits of their
influence on Chinese behaviour.
Nevertheless,
after 1960, India receiving strategic attention and material aid from both
superpowers, even as China was growing increasingly isolated, probably
emboldened the Nehru government to overestimate India’s importance in
superpower grand strategies. It probably also led to an assumption that Chinese
behaviour would be restrained by the international situation and it might also
have simultaneously reduced incentives for India to make any concessions on the
border dispute.
An interesting
anecdote exemplifies this: On October 13, 1962, a week before the war, in an
exchange between Foreign Secretary M.J. Desai and US Ambassador John Kenneth
Galbraith, Desai remarks that there “would be no extensive Chinese reaction
because of their fear of the US - ‘It is you they really fear’.” Of course, the
Chinese had received assurances both from the US regarding the Taiwan Straits
Crisis (June 23 and June 27) and the Soviets (October 13-14), thereby freeing
them to focus on the Indian front.
Strategic culture
The HBR reveals
that assumptions about Chinese non-use of force had permeated the national
security system. The perceptual roots were, however, deeper.
For Nehru, the
China threat was a long-range one that could only be dealt with by India’s
industrial revival, and, that the “Chinese could not sustain any major drive
across the ‘great land barrier’”.
Such a conviction
was reinforced by a broader strategic belief that a limited high intensity war
had become impossible in a nuclearised bipolar system. India’s calculus was
shaped by a one-step escalation scenario: any Chinese use of force would
involve an automatic escalation to the global nuclear level, and, such a
spectre of a global conflagration would somehow deter a conflict on the
Himalayan border.
The contrasting
assessments of Nehru and Mao were evident from their 1954 encounter: Nehru
argued that the nature of force had undergone a radical shift in a nuclear
world and the next war would be truly global in both scope and destruction.
Mao’s response was that despite the introduction of nuclear weapons the basic
nature of warfare remained unchanged except the casualties would henceforth be
higher. The role of force still mattered and could not be ruled out. Clearly,
there was a difference in strategic culture and how each side viewed the
relationship of military power to politics.
In a December 1961
Lok Sabha speech, Nehru remarked: “One must not go by all the brave words that
are said in these communications to us by the Chinese government. But other
factors work also.” This miscalculation is captured in Nehru’s view as late as
on October 2, 1962: he “had good reasons to believe the Chinese would not take
any strong action against us”.
Overestimating
Chinese weakness
The economic and
ideological crisis after the debacle of the Great Leap Forward led India to
overestimate China’s internal problems. The assumption drawn was that given
China’s deteriorating strategic and domestic environment after 1959, China
would bark but not resort to overwhelming force. The 1961 forward policy of probing
disputed pockets and showing the flag up to India’s perception of the border in
the western sector probably emanated from this overall geopolitical assessment
that was perceived as advantageous to India.
Even on the
frontier, most standoffs between 1959 and the spring of 1962 were local, and in
most cases the Chinese backed off without attacking Indian posts. These
experiences shaped intelligence and military perceptions that the Chinese were
not interested in a serious conflagration.
The real reason
was that since the end of 1959 China had reduced the intensity of its
patrolling and this only resumed in the summer of 1962. After two bloody
skirmishes in the eastern and western sectors in August and October 1959, Mao
instructed the PLA to cease patrolling in the forward zone within 20 km of
China’s line of actual control. Using this limited time range as their
reference, the Intelligence Bureau estimated that the Chinese were unlikely to
use force against any Indian post even if they were in a position to do so. It
was during this phase that the forward policy found expression.
The reality was
the Chinese had already accomplished most of their objectives by their own
forward policies of 1956-1959, and, by 1960, had established a line of actual
control in the western sector (Aksai Chin). They would henceforth adopt a
holding pattern until the summer of 1962.
From March 1962
onward the Chinese policy began a process of gradually reacting to India’s
forward policy. As one historian writes, these measures included, “…ceasing
withdrawal when confronted by Indian advances and adoption of a policy of
‘armed coexistence’, acceleration of China’s own advance, building positions
surrounding, threatening, and cutting off Indian outposts, steady improvement
of PLA logistic and other capabilities in the frontier region, increasingly
strong and direct verbal warnings, and by September 1962, outright but
small-scale PLA assaults on key Indian outposts — [but these] did not cause
India to abandon its illusion of Chinese weakness.” The HBR shows that the
Western Army Command did alert Delhi on Chinese activities during this time but
did not receive the resources or a re-appraisal to modify the forward policy.
Politically, there
was a renewed attempt by the Nehru government to explore a détente in the
summer of 1962. These initiatives, however, were half-hearted and did not
explicitly abandon India’s pre-conditions for negotiations: namely, Chinese
evacuation of Aksai Chin.
Sleepwalking into
conflict
By the summer of
1962, India was in an extraordinary position where the regional commanders did
not have the resources should China call the bluff on India’s forward probing.
Delhi did not have the policy and intelligence agility to re-appraise the
efficacy of the forward policy given renewed signalling by the PLA, and the
Nehru regime was unable to lower tensions with China.
India’s
no-negotiation stance with China, however irrational in retrospect, was
exacerbated by the careless and reckless implementation of the forward policy.
It was this latter development that converted what would have probably remained
confined to a political argument into a military confrontation with Mao’s
China.
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