Open Letter to General Musharraf

sigalph

Do Indian Bengalis wander freely on their own land on the `green` side of the Radcliff line? What was all the fuss in 1947 all about, then? Why all those riots and killings of 1/2 a million people? Why couldn`t you (and those aspiring Greater Punjabis) remain united then? Oh, that was all Nehru and Gandhi, I get it.

I agree with cherym. And we have nothing to learn from our neighbours. They foster delusions of superpowerdom without even trying to be viable nations first and they want India to foot the bills territorially and emotionally for their own internal political failures of imagination.

Sadhana

Re Sadna

``Do Indian Bengalis wander freely on their own land on the `green` side of the Radcliff line?``

Actually, they do madam. Quite often and frequetly. Between January and April of this year alone, the Indian Border Security Force has made almost two dozen armed incursions into Bangladesh proper. In the one incident on Tuesday last, three indivuduals were abducted and over a hundred dwellings set ablaze in the Kurigram district. So, please save the jingoistic nonsense of holier-than-thou non-existent moralism.

Viable nationhood? Madam, it is not Bangladesh which is killing 5000 of its own citizens a year in Kashmir to keep its ``viability`` alive (or napalming Baluch villages for that matter). So preach viability after you folks have achieved it.

On the issue of building tight walls and borders, since it has been reiterated, I`ll glad issue a re-joinder. Try it and try it again. It will meet the same fate as another famous wall did eleven years ago which tried to keep a nation divided. In the immortal words of Richard Lovelace,

``Stone walls do not a prison make

Nor iron bars a cage,

Minds innocent and free,

Take that for an hermitage.``

Bengal is our hermitage, on both sides of the artificial Radcliff line.

The fundamental problem is that neither India nor Pakistan have psychologically come to terms with the fact that they cannot have ``spheres of influence`` in the sub-continent. Bangladesh is smaller than both, but it is here to stay; so, better get used to that.

You folks keep me asking what 1947 was all about? How would I know? I wasn`t around at that time. Perhaps you should direct those questions elsewhere. What I do know is that the last premier of united Bengal begged and pleaded with Nehru, Jinnah, and Lord Mountbatten to let Bengal stay together and separate; his pleas fell on deaf ears. The carnage and the rest is history.

What I also know is that we live in a nation-state system. Every nation, as far as viable, must have its state. The Bengali nation is undeniable. It has only half of its state so far. Bengalis are a nation by any strech. To paraphrase, in an ironic twist, the words of Mr Jinnah, we have our own history and heritage, culture and calendar, arts and architecture, folktales and festivals, language and literature. To say that the people of Tagore, Nazrul, and Michael Madhusudandatta are somehow different nations is absurd, to say the least.

RE: Sigalph

``As for those who claim India fought our war for us...give me a break! You guys couldn`t even stand up to the Tamil Tigers and had to beat a hasty retreat; ten years and you are still bleeding in Kashmir.``

Excuse me?! Your beard shaking behind was going to repulse the Paki army without Indian help? You give ME a break! Get some weapons other than the discount price second-hand Indian guns and learn to feed your people before making such claims. You - Bangladeshi man - wants to talk about Kashmir? India does not engage in Jehadi behavior or roll-tanks-over-the-opposition-antics-a-la-China and it pays a price for restraint (in the short term at least). Of course if there were ``forgive-anything-as-long-as-it`s-from-the-Ummah`` people like you in Kashmir, India could send its Muslim soldiers to do the deed. But I think we`ll leave the Jehad antics to you folks.

``As for the transborder refugees, good for them: they are moving about what is their own homeland. West Bengal is after all the the land of the Bengalis and no Radcliff line is going to change that.``

Excuse me again! Did you just suggest that you don`t respect the international borders and sovereignty of India? And your people (who, as much as they would like to be, are NOT Indian citizens!) are free to roam about as they please? You must have just returned from a trip to Amsterdam when you wrote that, so I`ll let it slide. And by the way, the ILLEGAL refugees are not just in Bengal but as far out as Bombay. Hence the drive 2 years ago in Bombay to round-up illegal Bangladeshis by the truckload and ship them back.

Regarding Bangladesh:

All we have to do is wait for global warming and see where the Bongs go. As it is, the Bongs are in Assam and other Northeastern states of India. One of the Bangladesh ministers has already said in a public meeting that in case of global warming, countries such as the US and England should take in tens of millions of Bongs as it is expected that Bangladesh would be under water. That would be one less country in SAARC. Maldives also would be under the sea so we Indians will be forced to exercise more of our hegemony over poor Pakistan. I mean, after all, how much hegemony could poor Nepal and Bhutan handle?

Re: Fuzair

Thanks for the detailed info....

Yeah, I would have to agree with you on a lot of things you`ve said, but I still think that an attack into Assam, no matter how immature, could have worked only if to force the Indians to think twice before doing something. It would have given the Indians a pause and in most cases, that is all you need to stop an adversary`s momentum.

As to the lack of air support; air support is crucial, but like you said the Pakistan Army should have opted for insurgency tactics. Besides, the greatest campaign of the Wehrmacht in the Second World War was the defense of Normandy from June-August 1944 and the Germans did it without any logistical support or an effective air umbrella plus the fact that Hitler was working against the German commanders.

Again, agreed on the tactical situation, but with a caveat. Pakistani Army should have defended cities and then under pressure should have retreated into their secondary positions, but still kept a modicum of mobility in their ops.

Anyways, that campaign was nearly 30yrs ago and the good thing is that Pak army`s new operational doctrine, Riposte, is based on mobility and local counter-attacks. The problem is that our war stocks, realistically, are only for 15-20 days of sustained combat to affect a strategic ascendency over the Indians, but the question still remains; what attacker to defender ratio are the Indians comfortable with? The recent Indian wargames in the desert were to test this theory and remember, Indo-Pak wars take place on the plains and in the desert around September to October when the temperture crawls down to just insufferable levels!

BTW, if you are interested there was a really good article on the BBC on the war in Kargil and it was based on a book writen by Indian highlighting the poor logistical performance of the Indian Army in the Kargil ops. You can get on the BBC`s South Asia web page. The thing that amazes me is that if Kargil was a failure, why in the hell are its lessons being taught as a classic example of how to fight in alpine/arctic conditions and why the Pakistani Army, despite its eventual withdrawal, is winning accloades from the Germans and Americans and rest on its the skill in planning its op in Kargil?

In our army, it is always the follow through that is lacking!!!!

Ciao!

Sigalph appears to be full of contradictions and sadly enough doesn`t seem to realize it. First he compares the interntational border to the Berlin wall and suggests that it will inevitably come down as `unnatural` borders do. Fine, he seems to be suggesting that Bangladesh becomes one with India (unless he`s harboring delusions about Indian Bengalis wanting to join Bangladesh - HAH, that`s a good laugh).

But then he loudly asserts Bangladesh`s identity and demands India and Pakistan to accept it`s existence.

So which is it Sigalph?

I`ve always been intrigued by this self-aggrendizing behavior. India wants neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh to be a part of India! Be assured that the 2 poorest nations far worse off than India are no boxes of mithai that India has designs of pocketing. We don`t need 2 more Bihars. This is a little different from China chasing the democratic and economically vibrant Taiwan.

Fuzair, may be Siglaph was not around in 1971, but I was. I was not too young to forget all those, neither too old to forgive all those. It did not take all these years, it was within two years, that Bangladeshis changed their tune! When after liberation Indira Gandhi visited, they were hysterical with ``Indira maiki jai`` slogan, within 1974 (even before Mujib was brutally murdered, the saying was ``Indure sab gam laiya gelo`` which means, the rats are taking all the wheat, rat in this case is Indira as Indur is rat in Bengali.

We have not learned any lesson from any of our history. Thus, when one Khilji killed his uncle to become Sultan, it is that history repeats when Mujibur (you know how he was transformed!)was killed by Major Dalim et al. It is the same history about Aurangzeb killing his brothers... It is the same history that two women in Bangladesh are fighting about, it is about power!!! They do not allow anybody to work for the good of their countries (true for the Indian rulers as well), and top of it they use the religion to their advantage and make all kinds of scapegoats!

Talking about communality of educated people, a ten year old boy going to International school, getting finest of education(very bright boy as well)can recite the verses of Koran without knowing any meaning of it. While he was asked, can he explain any of those verses, he admitted that he did not know them since this is all in Arabics. Seeing him uttering those verses like parrot, I was reminded of the recently aired ABC program on Madrasha education in Pakistan.

See what communalism has done to otherwise rational person like Sigalph! He really believed Bangladeshis won the war by themselves, and he also believes India can not fight LTTE. Can any discussion continue after this? However, I am glad that he still considers bengalis of West Bengal closer to his heart and although I am grateful for that, like many other bengalis, I am more happier with my Indian passport.

Temporal...where are you?

ferozk:

the kargil report by the indian govt places a lot of blame on the intelligence units for not detecting the incursion in advance. do you think if such intelliegence were employed properly (perhaps negelected due to the potential of `bus diplomacy` or lack of capability, or both), the `brilliant tactical success` would not have materialized?

``Quite often and frequetly. Between January and April of this year alone, the Indian Border Security Force has made almost two dozen armed incursions into Bangladesh proper.``

Ah, even taking your word for it(which I donot), I didnot know BSF was composed solely of Indian Bengalis looking for employment.

I guess 1/2 million people were killed by Nehru Gandhi and Mountbatten, personally, oh no, thats not it, it was all those who wanted desperately to live together who were killing each other. Good thesis, hope to hear more on this.

Nation-state: First you must have a nation then you can have an empire. Empire-building has to succeed nation-building. First manage your affairs then look who else`s affairs to manage. One doesnot need a dead white man to tell you that, look around at your friends and neighbours.

If you think the lack of Indian Bengalis` allegiance(due to the perfidious Indian nation-stater) is what is holding back your country from its true destiny, first convince the Islamic parties in your country to cut your own resident nonMuslims some slack, else you will find it as hard to convince Indian Bengalis and the world about your case as Pakistan is finding it.

You won`t be able to similarly blame this lack of understanding on those huge markets in India, either, those guys have their eyes on your natural gas reserves and want peace and good governance more than anything and maynot want to fund Bangladeshi foreign policy with the same generosity they extended Pakistan.

The Saudis, now, what would they want with Hindus, except to convert?

Sadhana

In the context of the posts on chowk from nationalities suppressed by the perfidy of India(for eg the Greater Bangla Nation) and in the context of Partition(which happened whether you want to admit it or not), I now understand what TNT stands for, so far.

It stands for a nation of Muslims, where Muslims can rule over others(in this case only other nonMuslim S.Asians are available).

What is a nation, if you cannot get the right to rule, and what is the use of getting the right to rule and a nation-state all to yourselves to do it in, if there is no one to rule over, except yourselves(who were all rulers to begin with, anyway).

TNT is a perpetual search of a nation(now two nations, in the East and West) for subjects to rule over.

Thanks for the insights, guys.

Sadhana

sigalph: Let us appreciate the best of each others cultures. I have great admiration and respect for Bengali culture, on both sides of the Radcliffe line, but lets respect the blood split on such hard-fought sovereignity of boundaries for at least a few generations. While a logical time and place may well come in future for what you dream, I think realistically this is not that logical time.

Re: Ferozk #71

Aah, the famous Riposte of Aslam Beg, as exemplified in Zarg-e-Momin. If I remember correctly, the Riposte is supposed to be the ``strategic defensive but tactical offensive`` theory of warfare. For such a battle strategy to succeed, you need, as you point out, highly trained and mobile troops. Granted that the Pakistan Army is certainly more mobile now than in 1971 and better trained and led, I still have my doubts about its ability to carry out such a battle strategy.

Back when I used to be interested in such things, I remember reading about Hans von Seeckt and the interwar Reichswehr and how he and the German (no longer Imperial) General Staff analyzed WWI battle by battle to figure out how to win the next war--which they came within an inch of doing. To the best of my recollection, the E. Pakistan debacle is not studied at either the Staff College level or the War Course level. Certainly we make no attempt to ``learn`` its lessons beyond (i) blaming Yahya for being a drunk, and (ii) Niazi for being incompetent, and (iii) the Bengali traitor officers who gave away the Pakistan Army`s battle plans to the Indians. The first two may be true but are also irrelevant since the war was lost by the entire Army as a whole and not by one or two men. The vast majority of Bengali officers in W. Pakistan were loyal (with some minor exceptions) and certainly the Pakistan Army`s failures in the West were not due to our plans being betrayed to the Indians.

I am not sure how useful the Riposte strategy is given that we haven`t even analyzed why we (i) suffered the E. Pakistan debacle and (ii) why we failed so miserably in the West. The Army as an institution has learnt nothing from its past failures and that is what concerns me. Perhaps if Gen. Asif Nawaz, a blunt man not afraid to call a spade a spade, had lived, he might have instituted some institutional reform in the Army.

Thanks for the tip on the Kargil operation. I`ll check out the site. I don`t think of Kargil as a tactical defeat but a strategic one. Leaving our troops to die without any support on the Kargil heights was and is an indefensible decision. I have uncles/cousins who have served with NLI battalions and they say that these men are superb soldiers and unbeatable on a mountain. Any old Brit who served with the Gilgit or Northern Scouts would not have been surprised at this.

The only problems with the Pak Army`s NLI battalions is that they suffer from not having their own officers but merely having ones seconded to them. This makes their JCOs/NCOs far too powerful and undermines officer authority and is overall bad for discipline.

Gen. PM`s ``reward`` to the NLI for its outstanding performance in Kargil was to convert it from a CAF formation to a regular Army infantry regiment, Pakistan`s sixth, but as far as I know this hasn`t yet been implemented. The NLI still doesn`t have its own officers or independence.

Regards.

Re: Ferozk #71

I couldn`t find the Kargil article on the BBC website. Could you please send the URL?

Thanks.

Cheraym#59

It is the intention Mr. Cheraym.

Indian attitude towards Bengladesh and Bengalis on this board is reflective of the superiority complex You are suffering.

Intention of India was only to inflame the contradiction between Bengal and West Pakistan to weaken Pakistan. They in their mind succeded.

So why do you demand respect for your doing. What you did you succeded, and it was not respectful. You seem to have more abdominal cramps for all other nations, and listen if your neighbours are calm. Wait for your seeds in Srilanka in the form of Tamil. Wait for Kashmir and Pakistan and wait for Assam and West bengal. You will very soon realize that reality exists on ground and is not greatly influenced by propaganda.

re zz who said

``who were the masters of carnage in noakhali and tried to blackmail for pakistan with threat of riots. your papa did.`

Fancy that! My papa was not even two in 1947. And to imagine a toddler responsible for blackmail, carnage etc etc. No wonder Bengalis are considered supermen.

In all seriousness, earlier when I mentioned Indian ``gentlemen`` taking umbrage I was obviously wrong. The highly personal, invective filled tone of ZZ and Saxena is hardly those of gentlemen. As for you Saxena babu, ``aap seyane hain; aysi bhasha aap ko shobha nahin deti`` I say that because I see your posts often in various threads and generally they are more elevated than the ones directed my way. Calling me a communalist(when you don`t know my faith; if you`re guessing, you`re most likely wrong) or bashing Bangladesh and its inhabitants doesn`t change anything. It only makes some of you look like the Indian edition of our old pal Farangi_Kush.

One post mentioned India vis-a-vis China. No doubt that China cannot be compared; I have said it in different threads that India is a secular democracy whose record of dealing with dissent and its minorities is far superior to that of neighbours. I didn`t see any one of you remebering that.

For another bright fella who asked ``Which one is it sigalph``, let me put it in plain terms. Of course I don`t want to be politically amalgamated with India or Pakistan. And that is not mutually exclusive with wanting the intra-Bengal border to come down. At the expense of sending shivers down several spines, the idea is to have a complete Bangladesh with the ominous Radcliffe line gone. Once that is done, we will consider importing UPites, Biharis, and Punjabis to sweep the streets too.

Until we meet in another thread, best wishes, then.

PS: Sadna, thank you for the good wishes. With your singular exception I would`ve thought the rest of the pack was out to get Bengalis.

Rsaxena # 69

``Hence the drive 2 years ago in Bombay to round-up illegal Bangladeshis by the truckload and ship them back.``

Bal Thackeray might be wrong on many counts but he is absolutely right on this.This might provide some breathing space to the residents of Bombay.

Re: concerned # 77

The reason, as you pointed out, about Kargil being a brilliant tactical plan was because the Indian intelligence did not pick up the Pakistani trends and intentions. If the bus diplmacy was a ruse, then it worked and credit must be given to the Pakistanis for fooling Indians. The fact that the Indians needed a shepard to tell them about the Pakistani troops in the Dras-Kargil region does not detract anything from the Pakistanis. Despite the end result, the Kargil operation was a piece of brilliant tactical application and it caught the Indians off guard.

Military tactics are about ensuring suprise and not allowing the enemy to discern ones` intentions and in this scope, the Pakistani plan worked and what doomed the plan, was the Pakistani failures to institute an effective logistical support to the initial suprise.

Concerned, just look at the plan without any national bias and seek to understand what it was trying to do and whether you disagree or not with its intentions is your prilivilge. There was nothing wrong in the plan`s tactical aspirations, but it was the execution of that plan by Pakistan, which left a lot to be desired. However, it was a Phyrric victory for Pakistan. It confirmed to the Indians that though they could not conventionally defeat Pakistan without bloodying their own noses and gave pause to the Indian bravados after the May 13, 1998 tests.

Re: zz #

To find that information, please go to the offical websites of the German Army and its alpine/mountain training school located just outside of of Munchen/Munich. Go to the West Point`s official web site and the site of the American War College and scan through their course requirements/class descriptions. Also, please try the American mountain warfare school`s web page. The American armed forces have a huge training facility in Colorado for training their troops in mountain warfare/tactics.

The info is out there, but it is not available in your local newspapers and also, if you have the time, please surf through the specialized defense articles, like Jane`s, which cover such topics. The reason that I came to know about this info, was because some of my friends are in the American special forces and they told me they were being taught to ``avoid the mistakes made by the Pakistanis`` by their instructors.

Also, read the report presented by General Antony Zinni, the commander of the American Central Command, to the congress just prior to Clinton`s visit to the sub-continent. In that Zinni urged that Pentagon would like to keep its ``contacts`` open with Pakistan for the reasons of ``interoperability`` of their forces.

Why?

Despite Pakistan internal mess and externally bad image, Pakistan`s geo-strategic location at the enterance of the Persian Gulf and its avenues of access to the Central Asian Republics, especially in light of the CARs oil and gas desposits and their access to the outside world, can not be ignored by the Americans, no matter how much India seeks to convince the Americans otherwise.

ZZ, just for your info, given the fact that the Iraqi air force was neutered by the Americans within 24hrs of the Desert Storm, did you know that the Iraqi air forces` attacks on the Iranian oil platform, near Bandar Abbas as instructed by their French inteructors, were studied by the American air force as a classic example on how to conduct attacks on oil platforms in the congested airspace of the Persian Gulf.

Just because a side loses, does not mean it can not teach you a few new tricks! :)

Re: Fuzair # 71

Yeah, like I said before, it is the ability of the Pak Army to follow through and implement that is always lacking!

I think that you have covered the major points well. Et tu Fuzair? I am a military history buff myself, with my area of interest being the WWI and WWII and in WWII, I am obsessed with June 6,1944 - D-Day. If you have time, read my article, ``Remembering Private Ryan`` on Chowk. German Panzers tactics, from the Maginot to Krusk, are favorite of mine and since you know about der Reichwehr, some of the best German Panzer minds came out of it; Guderian, Rommel, Meyer, Speidel (Rommel`s chief of staff in Normandy and later NATO`s SACEUR`s deupty).

Ciao!