A History of the Pakistan Army by Brian Cloughley

The moron responds with more BS. So now he wants to tell us what "ruthlessness" is, first if he wants to present his theory of the greater the brutality and ruthlessness the greater the success, he must tell us how brutality and ruthlessness is measured in his system and the myopic fool that he is, he does not consider burning to the bone with napalm and white phosphorous as being brutal but considers cutting the neck as something "ruthless", and this as being "calculated" while dropping bombs in civilian areas that rip off heads as being "off the cuff" ruthlessness. The thing is that explicit, medieval ruthlessness which as measure is not at all more ruthless than the modern, current day one- casualties and long term consequences that the Vietnamese and Iraqis still have to cope with, are proof, do not do anything for the standard militaries to win against popular insurgencies, they ferment their opposition even further.

As I had said this fool supports the tactics employed by the thugs of the Pakistani military in Bangladesh where his propaganda numbers of hundreds of thousands (which seem low to him compared to the normally listed figures by non-Indian/Bangladeshi historians of one to three million), where civilians are attacked to quell a rebellion, to him worked but to people with half a brain note that if the Army tactics had worked Bangladesh would still be East Pakistan....and fools like these with brains of rats are running this country....

#250 Posted by bulleya,

Actually there's a third option. Join Taliban in fighting USA. That's the only natural option.

Fuzair #: the easiest way to end an insurgency is to drop a nuclear bomb on the area.......one would think that carpet bombing would end it.......but even that doesn't work.....

.....otherwise there is no other way.......not even the means you are suggesting......perhaps something along the lines that hitler did might work......

......the usa hasn't exactly been squemish.......nor have the soviets......the usa dropped more ammunition on vietnam than that used by all the countries in ww ii.....some of the figures i have read of individuals killed in vietnam is between 1 to 2 million.....while the figures for the usa is 50,000 or so (?)...similar figures for ussr in afghanistan are 1 million afghanis to 25,000 soviets.......the soviets even went to the extent of dropping bombs specifically designed for children.........

......the usa has spent 80 billion a year on its military in iraq.....the research figures given by credible agencies, put the deaths of iraqis in the hundreds of thousands.......india has been in kashmir for decades, with hundreds of thosuands of troops......the figures of kashmiris killed is beyond 60,000.......

i am not sure how much more brutal anyone can be......yet none of this has worked.......i will explain why.....

what you are suggesting is the simple wiping out of a population.......that works if the aim is not to occupy or keep land......however, when the aim is to, actually, hold land, massive killings and bombings become useless.......unless one will go the extent of wiping out the population, totally and indiscriminately.....a al hitler......

this becomes even more difficult if the area is geograpahically adjacent to ones borders, and becomes, nearly, impossible if it is a part of one's country.....if iraq was connected to usa or a part of usa, rest assured, us civilian areas would have been attacked by iraqis......and america would have been out in a day.......

this is what pakistan faces......and this is why all the theories you have proposed, will be counterproductive......unless pakistan has a totally fool-proof system of securing its cities against conter-attacks......which no country has, not even the usa.......

today, the taliban are primarily targeting military buses etc........what if they decide tomorrow that they will carry out a suicide bombing at every major hotel in pakistan.....then at every major children school.......then in every major market........can you provide one mechanism to prevent this........israel will all its security cannot prevent something like this, even though it is a tiny state with open apartheid........

this is what pakistan will head towards.....if it keeps going ahead will the military confrontation in waziristan....as i said, military actions, cannot win political wars against insurgencies......you have yourself now admitted it.....(though you are saying that it is because the occupiers aren't brutal enough).......they have been massively brutal.....yet still failed........there is no way pakistan can be this brutal in waziristan, without massive local attacks........

so, there are two options: nuke waziristan (not carpet bomb, but actually nukes)......or two, let it fight on its own with the usa, with pakistan not taking sides and not getting involved........

#240 Posted by pavocavalry on February 7, 2008 7:52:38 pm


The NATO in general and West Europeans in particular are far more civilised than Americans.


if the jihadis set off something on US soil, that might change...people will only take so much cr@p..

Bongdongs,

No, haven't seen it but I've heard of it, of course. I do want to see it; supposed to be one of the best films made.

#246

very interesting comments fuzair. On the topic of the French war in Algeria, have you seen this movie?

http://imdb.com/title/tt0058946/

If not you definitely must do so (there is an english version as well).

Major Amin,

If you look at French military tactics in Algeria it becomes clear what has to be done if a successful counterinsurgency campaign is to be waged. These include quadrillage, brutal collective punishment including systematic executions, using colons (settlers) on ratonnades (rat hunts; to kill young Arab men) and turning captured insurgents into govt-run death squads, depopulating the mountains and forcing their people to live in govt camps--like the British did to the Boers in S. Africa, physically fencing off and laying minefields on the borders, and so on. I agree that there is more than just ruthlessness here; it is intelligently planned ruthlessness and a willingness to employ whatever is needed to achieve victory.

No one would say that what the French did does not count as war crimes; of course they are. Massive ones. My point here is that if you are not there to win, you shouldn't be there in the first place. I think the US should never have invaded Iraq (which I have said more than once on Chowk; I was never a supporter of the Iraq War) and should leave it as soon as possible; preferably yesterday. Staying in merely prolongs the inevitable.

The Americans are far too squeamish for that level of face-to-face ruthlessness displayed by the French or, for that matter, our beloved jihadis who fight for the honor of beheading prisoners. In one sense ordering B52 cruise missile strikes on buildings which could well contain civilians may be "ruthless" but it is not what is going to win a counter insurgency. As far as the Pakistanis in E. Pakistan go, the Army violence there was never as systematically organized and planned as was the French in Algeria but it certainly succeeded in defeating the Mukti Bahini at the cost of heavy civilian casualties--NOT the 3 million of Indian and Bengali propaganda but probably upwards of 200,000-300,000 plus.

May I suggest Alastair Horne's classic work on the Algerian War, "A Savage War of Peace" to understand how to fight a successful counterinsurgency and see how much that differs from what the Americans are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? The US strategy is bound to fail in these countries, the surge and turning some Sunni tribes against al Qaeda notwithstanding. Incidentally, Horne is a former British WWII infantry officer so knows something about armies and military operations.

Fuzair writes "The tactics used may not be to the liking of modern--more delicate--sensibilities."

More BS from the moron. Civilian casualties as a percent of all war casualties have only been going up WW2 and post, and not down, blowing away limbs through dropping j-dams in civilian marketplaces to assassinate one man is ruthlessness and barbarism par excellence, that the Americans have practiced in Iraq, in Vietnam they used defoiliants in order to starve the peasants by destroying crops, and napalmed whole villages, yet they were forced to put their damn tails between their legs and run off and this moron says that that barbarism was not "ruthless" enough. His kind that thought that if they were ruthless enough by killing millions they would quell the Bangladeshi uprising are the ones should be horse whipped and made an example of regarding "ruthlessness"...

Fuzair writes "Insurgents win when they don't lose"

Reminds me of John Kerry, " I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it"

or maybe the moron wants to tell us that Standard Militaries WIN when they lose..., the standard logic of the "lose every battle' but declare victory, Pakistan Army. Mashallah!

Fuzair writes "And before some moron screams "Iraq Sanctions," let me remind them that Saddam Hussein had more than enough money to build a few more palaces"

The moron speaks again, this time straight from the propaganda book of the US elite itself. Have you any clue about how economies operate. Why don't you then blame the homelessness situation in the US on the "palace building" of Donald Trump?

Since this BS was being propagated far and wide by the US corporate media, I had dismantled it back in my 2003 article, published on chowk in 2006, read by this idiot because he commented on it, and yet he repeats the same BS. Morons never learn:

(quote)Anyone who knows anything about basic economics will never conclude that the palace building of Saddam caused the preventable deaths in Iraq, despicable as such conspicuous consumption might be. Yet the media and Ari Fleischer, the President`s spokesperson, often presented them to be such in the days before the war. Iraq’s GNP fell by 75% after the first Gulf War due to sanctions. If you cut the GNP of the US by 75%, simple statistical projection can show that the rise in proportional deaths consequently, ceteris paribus (other things being equal), would be similar to what we see in Iraq, regardless of the real estate activity of the corporate elite. By 1994, according to the US department of Health and Human Service statistics, the mortality rate for black children ages 10 through 14 in the USA was nearly 65 percent higher than the rate for white children in that age group, 81 percent higher for children ages five though nine, and twice as high for children ages one through four. Are these numbers the result of the real estate activity of the elite in the U.S. or the de-facto institutional “sanctions” (based on race) built into our economic system? (end quote)
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Similarly atrocious is his claim of military versus political victory, now I can understand that the Pakistan Army morons fight with no aim or goals or strategy in sight but most miliary fights are not for the purpose of outgunning the other side but to achieve certain objectives, the reason why the fighting was necessary in the first place, claiming that skirmish victories are military victories but the exit of the "other side" in effect laying down its arms is no military victory is BS of the highest calibre, only befitting a product of the PMA...

i have only flown cessna 152 . this was a bell machine , quite new and well maintained being the div commanders helicopter, i dont buy the idea that this was a technical fault . could even be a lucky shot from 12.7 mm OR 23 mm or even an american drone...the USA has an interest that the contest between the paki army and the tribals stays hot

Amin sahib,

A slight digression. Was the chopper in which the Kohat garrison commander was killed shot down or was it a technical malfunction?

Regards

The west has a value system.It may be imperfect but they do have one.They cannot be compared to Russians or Syrian Arabs or Saudi Arabians with little judicial system and basically a barbarian background.What do you expect from Arabs who slaughtered the prophets family.

True that the west is burdened by its human rights system and free press.We have to give them this much credit.In Afghanistan they have a political mission.Here there is a distinction also.The NATO in general and West Europeans in particular are far more civilised than Americans.They are not the Punjabi Pakistani army slaughtering Muslim Bengalis in East Pakistan.They are a better material.

The final fact is that French lost Algeria and the Russians have not still won Chechnya.

Chechnya however is a special case.It contains a very large reserve of Russian oil.Further its population is so small that it can be deported which was done by Stalin in 1945.

Afghanistan and Iraq are altogether different cases.In Afghanistan the americans came for the bases which they occupied.They did not come to pacify the country.Iraq again is an American failure.Its not the question of ruthlessness alone.

#236 Posted by bulleya on February 7, 2008 12:01:38 pm


the tactic used is to exhaust them...to make it not worth their while to occupy the place.....to put international pressure on them.....to create domestic uproar in their country......


By all those measures, the insurgency has failed in kashmir...

of course, it doesn't help the paki cause that indians think of indian kashmir as being integral to india..not something americans think about iraq..

Getting Clausewitzian?

Invaders don't always lose the war: the British in Kenya and Malaya and the Americans in the Phillipines were clear victors in their respective insurgencies. The tactics used may not be to the liking of modern--more delicate--sensibilities.

Insurgents win when they don't lose; government forces lose when they don't win. Insurgent forces have won some significant victories: Cuba, Nicaragua and, apparently, Nepal also.