Here is an argument I heard a lot of six months ago, which, since 26/11, seems so facile that it has vanished from the debate. It is worth noting how dangerous this argument is right now, because this argument will find plausible new clothes and re-appear in six months, or a year, or in six years.
The argument goes roughly as follows:
Kashmir is not worth the bother. Let it go. Give it to Pakistan. Or give it independence. Once the vast resources invested in Kashmir are freed up, India can carry on realizing its manifest destiny as a great nation that all of humanity looks to for moral, spiritual, technological and economic leadership.
This argument was well expressed by Vir Sanghvi, in this piece in the Hindustan Times in Aug 2008. Vir Sanghvi is the Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times, the former editor of Sunday magazine, a fairly mainstream journalistic voice I've agreed with many times in the past.
What 26/11 made painfully obvious is the naivety of this notion: that a surgical excision of Kashmir from India would result in a quid pro quo reduction in violence on this side of the border. This notion now looks as shallow as the conceit, back in 1947, that partition would “solve” the problem of plural identities in India.
India’s federal, democratic structure is not perfect, but it is designed well enough to accommodate the many distinct identities within India. Vir Sanghvi correctly points out that secession movements inspired by language, race and religion have been successfully accommodated within India multiple times, in places like Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Punjab.
The reason the federal, secular, democratic framework of the Indian constitution does not work for Kashmir is that a scary number of the people who claim to speak for Kashmir are not Kashmiris, and don’t especially care about the political expression of a Kashmiri identity. They are international jihadists. Palestine, Chehnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, American tanks on sacred Saudi soil, Western decadence, apostate regimes in the Islamic world, insults to Islam in Danish newspapers – any grievance is grist to their mill. Understanding who these jihadist terrorists are and what these terrorists are trying to achieve is essential to understanding Kashmir in context, and to getting a sense for what it might mean to surgically excise Kashmir from India.
Terrorism is not especially Islamic. The personal psycho-drama that happens within a terrorist is neither mysterious, nor Islamic, nor the by-product of failed societies. It is commonplace. David Kilcullen, a brilliant Australian anthropologist who first learnt about terror as a soldier serving in Indonesia, gets his students to watch the film Fight Club to understand a terrorist’s psychology.
In essence, contemporary jihad, like all terrorism, is a rational political strategy. It was invented as a modern political strategy in 1946, when David Ben Gurion authorized the bombing of the Hotel King David in the then British Protectorate of Palestine. The consequence of this bombing was that Clement Atlee expedited the withdrawal of British forces from Palestine, thereby establishing the sovereign state of Israel. Wikipedia maintains that a former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, took part in celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of this attack, organized by the Menachem Begin center. The most ruthless terrorists in the world today are probably Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka. The consequence of their ruthlessness, especially in murdering dissenting Tamils, has been that theirs is the only audible voice that claims to speak for Lanka’s Tamil people. The PKK, led by Abdullah Ocalan, killed 40,000 innocent Turks in the name of Kurdistan, winning the sympathy of bleeding heart liberals in Western Europe as a "people without a nation". Danielle Mitterand, the French President's wife was an public supporter of Ocalan, and pleaded for clemency in sentencing when Ocalan was captured by the Turkish army. The hijack of IC 814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar in 1999 led to the release of Masood Azhar, a Jaish e Mohammad operative believed to the involved in the attacks on Mumbai. Another of the IC 814 terrorists released, Omar Sheikh, was involved in the murder of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl.
The most successful terrorist attack of all time, purely in terms of the political pay-off, must be 911. It resulted in the Al Queda being addressed by the world’s only superpower like it was a force of equal stature. Their preferred tactic, suicide bombings to murder non-combatants, is now dignified by the term War on Terror. Before the War on Terror, the Al Queda was a toxic but small fragment left over from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, with no easily identifiable outcome it was working towards. It felt, or could have been made to feel, like an anachronism. It might have struggled to capture the imagination of young people; it might have struggled to stay alive another generation. That is no longer a problem, not for the Al Queda.
It is now crystal clear that there is no morally justified use of terror, exactly like there is no morally justified use of genocide. It is also clear that terrorism is growing alarmingly because terror works. The only way in which the world-of-order can defeat terror is to make it a strategy that does not work.
Terrorists cannot be engaged and defeated in open battle. They need to be starved. They need to be deprived of the oxygen of media exposure, of new recruits, of arms, of money. Most importantly, they need to be deprived of the sweet smell of success.
The world-of-order needs to realize that this victory will be won slowly. This victory will involve intelligence, media management, paranoia, nonchalance, ruthlessness, mercy, narcotics control, anti-money-laundering operations, inter-national co-operation...lots of stuff. There will be no spectacular television-friendly signing of treaties that constitute a “solution”.
This is the context in which the Kashmir situation must be understood. India’s political class has got this one right. Kashmir needs to stay within the Indian Union, with as humane a police/ military presence as is possible. Not because of jingoistic nationalism. But because throwing a hunk of juicy red meat to the beast of international terrorism, breathing energy and life into the beast, is the most dangerous and irresponsible thing any civilized nation could do, today, or at any time in the foreseeable future.
The argument goes roughly as follows:
Kashmir is not worth the bother. Let it go. Give it to Pakistan. Or give it independence. Once the vast resources invested in Kashmir are freed up, India can carry on realizing its manifest destiny as a great nation that all of humanity looks to for moral, spiritual, technological and economic leadership.
This argument was well expressed by Vir Sanghvi, in this piece in the Hindustan Times in Aug 2008. Vir Sanghvi is the Editorial Director of the Hindustan Times, the former editor of Sunday magazine, a fairly mainstream journalistic voice I've agreed with many times in the past.
What 26/11 made painfully obvious is the naivety of this notion: that a surgical excision of Kashmir from India would result in a quid pro quo reduction in violence on this side of the border. This notion now looks as shallow as the conceit, back in 1947, that partition would “solve” the problem of plural identities in India.
India’s federal, democratic structure is not perfect, but it is designed well enough to accommodate the many distinct identities within India. Vir Sanghvi correctly points out that secession movements inspired by language, race and religion have been successfully accommodated within India multiple times, in places like Tamil Nadu, Mizoram and Punjab.
The reason the federal, secular, democratic framework of the Indian constitution does not work for Kashmir is that a scary number of the people who claim to speak for Kashmir are not Kashmiris, and don’t especially care about the political expression of a Kashmiri identity. They are international jihadists. Palestine, Chehnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, American tanks on sacred Saudi soil, Western decadence, apostate regimes in the Islamic world, insults to Islam in Danish newspapers – any grievance is grist to their mill. Understanding who these jihadist terrorists are and what these terrorists are trying to achieve is essential to understanding Kashmir in context, and to getting a sense for what it might mean to surgically excise Kashmir from India.
Terrorism is not especially Islamic. The personal psycho-drama that happens within a terrorist is neither mysterious, nor Islamic, nor the by-product of failed societies. It is commonplace. David Kilcullen, a brilliant Australian anthropologist who first learnt about terror as a soldier serving in Indonesia, gets his students to watch the film Fight Club to understand a terrorist’s psychology.
In essence, contemporary jihad, like all terrorism, is a rational political strategy. It was invented as a modern political strategy in 1946, when David Ben Gurion authorized the bombing of the Hotel King David in the then British Protectorate of Palestine. The consequence of this bombing was that Clement Atlee expedited the withdrawal of British forces from Palestine, thereby establishing the sovereign state of Israel. Wikipedia maintains that a former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, took part in celebrations to mark the 60th anniversary of this attack, organized by the Menachem Begin center. The most ruthless terrorists in the world today are probably Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka. The consequence of their ruthlessness, especially in murdering dissenting Tamils, has been that theirs is the only audible voice that claims to speak for Lanka’s Tamil people. The PKK, led by Abdullah Ocalan, killed 40,000 innocent Turks in the name of Kurdistan, winning the sympathy of bleeding heart liberals in Western Europe as a "people without a nation". Danielle Mitterand, the French President's wife was an public supporter of Ocalan, and pleaded for clemency in sentencing when Ocalan was captured by the Turkish army. The hijack of IC 814 from Kathmandu to Kandahar in 1999 led to the release of Masood Azhar, a Jaish e Mohammad operative believed to the involved in the attacks on Mumbai. Another of the IC 814 terrorists released, Omar Sheikh, was involved in the murder of WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl.
The most successful terrorist attack of all time, purely in terms of the political pay-off, must be 911. It resulted in the Al Queda being addressed by the world’s only superpower like it was a force of equal stature. Their preferred tactic, suicide bombings to murder non-combatants, is now dignified by the term War on Terror. Before the War on Terror, the Al Queda was a toxic but small fragment left over from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, with no easily identifiable outcome it was working towards. It felt, or could have been made to feel, like an anachronism. It might have struggled to capture the imagination of young people; it might have struggled to stay alive another generation. That is no longer a problem, not for the Al Queda.
It is now crystal clear that there is no morally justified use of terror, exactly like there is no morally justified use of genocide. It is also clear that terrorism is growing alarmingly because terror works. The only way in which the world-of-order can defeat terror is to make it a strategy that does not work.
Terrorists cannot be engaged and defeated in open battle. They need to be starved. They need to be deprived of the oxygen of media exposure, of new recruits, of arms, of money. Most importantly, they need to be deprived of the sweet smell of success.
The world-of-order needs to realize that this victory will be won slowly. This victory will involve intelligence, media management, paranoia, nonchalance, ruthlessness, mercy, narcotics control, anti-money-laundering operations, inter-national co-operation...lots of stuff. There will be no spectacular television-friendly signing of treaties that constitute a “solution”.
This is the context in which the Kashmir situation must be understood. India’s political class has got this one right. Kashmir needs to stay within the Indian Union, with as humane a police/ military presence as is possible. Not because of jingoistic nationalism. But because throwing a hunk of juicy red meat to the beast of international terrorism, breathing energy and life into the beast, is the most dangerous and irresponsible thing any civilized nation could do, today, or at any time in the foreseeable future.
3 comments:
Great post - really enjoyed reading it, and agree with a lot of what is said. Also loved the George Packer NewYorker article that you linked to, especially the articulation and stark statistics on the Western worlds lack of strategic focus on how to influence these situations.
I have a few other thoughts that you don't make mention of but feel important. I do recognise the arrogance in doing this, since I am a dilettante in understanding the problem. I have spent little effective time on it ... but even with that little thought, some areas such as the US response that allowed torture via legal niceties are so obviously broken that I feel OK in commenting.
First up, and particularly pertinent in issues such as Kashmir, Israel and Northern Ireland is the difficulty of agreeing baselines. To take the Israel example, there are groups who do not believe in the 1940's baseline that created the state of Israel. At the same time there are groups within Israel that put settlements in the occupied territories to establish legitimacy. Each group form their groups of what is right and wrong based on their own personal baseline. And, given that people recognise perceived wrongs much more acutely than perceived rights, it is hardly surprising that they choose baselines that maximise their perceived opportunity more than those that would force them to give something up that they consider theirs. Kashmir feels like a classic baseline problem.
Next is the danger of religiosity that ranks 'belief' and 'passion' above rational thought and debate. I am not so naive as to consider that teh precepts of religion is an issue per se. Indeed, the core moral framework in many religions appears fine. But, the mental processes involved in being religious simply do not feel helpful. The vast vast majority of religious people seem well able to handle the inconsistencies without falling back on violence, but for the tiny number who do not it provides scant support. Maybe there was a time when education could be less robust when religion was a useful group mental heuristic , but I firmly believe that that time has passed - indeed it probably passed when the Greek philosophers were in force. I struggle to see what value it adds now. Why can we not go to philisophy again? If someone wants to set themselves up as having a worthwhile moral position then it is on the basis of the presentation and defence of an argument, not a matter of Faith.
Moving on, you mention the oxygen of publicity. I don't think that the issue is publicity per se - and don't think that it is reasonable to try and contain that anyway - that just prompts terrorists towards bigger or nastier 'spectaculars'. I think a big part of the issue is the lack of training and use of critical thinking in the consumers of the media. That, combined with the personal baselines (aka grudges and 'rights') different groups carry with them, allows the most specious positions of different groups to get credibility they do not deserve. It might sound even more hopeless to rail against poor readership standards than poor editorial standards, but as you say, it is a long long exercise. Whilst we mis-educate people in thinking at the scale we allow today then we should not be surprised at the group-think responses to terrorist acts or even the more benign pre-cursors such as grandiose positions being made that can lead to terrorism. Yes, I am thinking of religiosity again, but also political grandstanding and the intellectually broken drivel that the Daily Mail puts out daily.
In saying this, there is one aspect that cannot be fixed by the consumer which is the absence of balance. As an example, every death of a UK serviceman in Iraq is reported. In 2007 there were 2940 road deaths on the UK. But to date, 136 UK servicemen have died as a result of hostile action in Iraq. Each is a tragedy for the families and friends, but I'm sure that the road deaths were as well. But, road deaths aren't 'newsworthy', so feel invisible.
Lastly, I confess that I don't really know what a world that is 'safe from terror' really looks like. But I strongly suspect it is more about changes in human behaviour of folks at the extreme margin of normal societal norms than extra fences. The latter just makes people feel nervous. And, we must be very very careful about assuming that the right baseline is the one we have now, whether that is in Kashmir or ex. Yugoslavia. History is littered with examples of where that has failed. So, what I would like to see is a way of defusing issues such as Kashmir that did not pander to terrorism ... but did not rely on hardline enforcement of a status quo.
Prithvi -
For once, I beg to differ from your eloquent and well thought out positions. I am not at the opposite end of the spectrum from you, but the argument you are making is disingenuous. It is not as black and white as you make it.
It is all fine and dandy for you and me, from the comfort of our arm-chairs, to espouse a principled position in favor of the long-term interest of mankind. I wonder if you were a soldier posted on Siachen, would you think that dying of cold or being maimed by frostbite (rather than be glamorously martyred in combat) or being grievously injured due to constipation (yes!), or to simply lose your mind in the hardest, most inhospitable conditions known to man, is a just price to pay in this war? Yes, you could invoke the convenient aphorism about the greatest good for the greatest numbers, but not sure that applies here. The solider on Siachen glacier is not the key point in this debate. The real point is what is the right thing to do? We in the free world espouse democracy, but conveniently make an argument to ignore the will of a large number of people in the Kashmir valley. The truth is, Kashmir was ill-gotten by India. It was a sleight of hand. In the war that ensued, as a sovereign nation, we agreed to a cease-fire and committed to the United Nations that we will conduct a referendum and give the Kashmiri people the right of self-determination. 60 years on, we are happy to let that be a lie. We have been postponing fulfilling that promise on some pretext or the other to the point of irrelevance. Here is our latest excuse: letting Kashmir go will throw a hunk of red-meat to the terrorists. Had we taken 35 years instead of 60, there would have been no terrorists in Kashmir. It would have been even better if we had taken only 5.
Indeed if we had the balls, it would be entirely democratic, not to say honorable, to give the Kashmiri people the voice and that choice that we have been suppressing with brutality for so many decades. Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. Yes, giving the people in the valley the right of self-determination will be fraught with all kinds of dangers and unintended consequences. Yes, it won't even solve the problem of violence in India mounted by the jihadis. But taking that unthinkable step, has as much possibility of showing the virtue of democracy to undemocratic states, as it has of emboldening the terrorists. We can't keep holding on to past mistakes, just because it is painful to fess up at this time. Let democracy prevail. Yes, sometimes that results in outcomes like Hamas being handed the keys to Gaza, but let us not legitimize mistakes in the name of not giving in to terrorists. The Indian politicians haven't gotten this right in 60 years and they are incapable of running that coherent, patient, multi-pronged campaign you propose. What they are doing is not a principled, anti-terrorism ploy. It is an act of pusillanimity of the highest order, an ode to the status quo, an unwillingness to pay the price for past sins and hence a reflexive choice to keep on sinning.
Neither Pakistan nor Kashmiri separatists are angels of virtue. They won't even acknowledge India's potential willingness to give Kashmiris the right of self-determination as a virtuous act. They will spin it as an act of cowardice. As an admission of defeat by India. As a mea culpa on the part of India. They will seek to spin it as vindication of their past acts of subversion and terror. But to lack courage to do the right thing for fear of such exploitation by terrorists, is to lose to them already.
Yes we need to run that coherent, patient, multi-pronged campaign to attack the roots of terrorism. Rectifying the error of our ways in Kashmir takes nothing away from it.
Greg, Vikas, thanks for the comments. These are very serious questions, and there are many points here worth thinking through carefully.
The purpose of this blog is not especially serious, but nonetheless, terrorism identity and Kashmir are topics is worth coming back to. Talking about these serious questions in a honest and reflective way may be a part of the solution, a part of the healing process.
More later...
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