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The death of the TTP–chagrin in Delhi
Significant leaders of the Pakistani Taliban have been killed or captured in an onslaught of frontier ground and air attacks. “The militant command and control centres and their caches have been dismantled or captured,” said Major-General Tariq Khan, one of the country’s most experienced commanders in the frontier war with the Taliban. “The kind of hits the leadership has taken, the casualties they have taken, the TTP [Pakistani Taliban] is no longer significant,” he said. “It has ended as a cohesive force. It doesn’t exist any more as an umbrella organisation that can influence militancy anywhere.”
The claims come at a time of improved military co-operation between America and Pakistan, in which US drones have killed a number of key Pakistani Taliban commanders, and Pakistani security agents have arrested at least four senior Afghan Taliban leaders over the past month.
It was no coincidence that two US special forces soldiers waited in a courtyard near the general’s office in the Bala Hisar fortress in Peshawar. “The [US] Socom Special Ops Group has a few liaison officers with me,” General Khan said. “They iron out the issues on the border during combat.”
The general commands 45,000 troops from the Frontier Corps, the locally recruited federal paramilitary force based in North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
He is a central figure in Operation Rah-e-Nijat (“Path to Deliverance”) which began in the South Waziristan tribal agency in October, and has been killing or clearing the Taliban of the Mehsud tribe with a speed that British forces fighting there during the last century would have envied. The TTP have found themselves attacked by drones or harried by ground forces throughout all but one of Pakistan’s seven tribal border agencies, known collectively as the FATA.
“The military was keen to smash the myth of the Mehsud invincibility in Waziristan and to be fair it has done so,” said one Western diplomat. “And since, they have gone on to hit the Taliban throughout FATA with a shifting set of operations combining air power, artillery and assault.”
The TTP commander Baitullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone strike in August. His successor, Hakimullah, is thought to have died of wounds received in a US drone attack in January.
Whereas Baitullah’s death was followed by a dramatic upsurge in retaliatory terrorist attacks across Pakistan, violence has sharply subsided since the death of Hakimullah and the displacement of his forces from South Waziristan, suggests disarray in the TTP.
Hakimullah’s deputy and cousin, Qari Hussain, a central figure in the TTP suicide bomber campaign, was also probably dead, General Khan said. The Taleban leadership in five of the six remaining agencies was claimed to be either dead, on the run, or in captivity. More than 730 Taliban fighters have been killed since October, according to Pakistani officers, with the loss of 79 soldiers.
Of al-Qaeda, however, there seemed suspiciously little evidence.
General Khan said: “There was some Arab influence in terms of resources and money. We haven’t found a dedicated al-Qaeda command-and- control centre. My commandant in Bajaur . . . says it’s like a pinch of flour in a bag of salt — you get the flavour but can’t catch the individuals.”(The Times)
India’s Ex-Army Chief Reveals Hegemonic Designs
- General VP Malik confirms that Indian army’s aggressive policies created Kargil conflict
- Malik got Israel’s help to save troops during Kargil fiasco
- Calls for India’s readiness to fight war with China
- Former Indian Army Chief shows his poor knowledge about Pakistan Army, ISI
- Criticizes country’s political leadership for forgetting aggressive Chanakya’sArtshastra
- Sounds highly irked by Pak-China all-weather strategic relationship
The former Army Chief of India, General (Rtd) V.P Malik, who currently runs a RAW-sponsored think-tank with the name of ORF Institute for security Studies in India, in a recent lecture has revealed that India’s military leadership thinks in a far different manner that its political leadership and the military leadership of the country is harbouring alarming hegemonic designs, making the Indian Army a permanent source of massive threat to regional as well as global peace, reveal the findings of The Daily Mail.
According to The Daily Mail’s finding, in his lecture titled ‘India’s Strategic Culture and Security Challenges’, General Malik has indicated that top Generals of the Indian Army believe that India must maintain an aggressive and hostile policy towards solving its disputes with regional countries. In his lecture, General Malik gave a clear indication that it was his aggressive mindset that caused the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in the late 90s. General Malik, who was the main accused of causing immense military shame to India during the Kargil fiasco, owing to his ill planning and lack of strategic vision, now, in a bid to emerge as a highly successful military strategist, showed his continuous poor knowledge about Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s tri-force Intelligence agency the Inter services Intelligence (ISI).
The Daily Mail’s findings indicate that the level of knowledge of General Malik regarding the ISI and Pakistani army appears to be the same that it was before the start of the Kargil conflict and his lecture indicates that he perhaps refused to improve his knowledge in this direction. In his lecture, the former Indian Army Chief says that the ISI works under the Pakistan Army and the Army refused to place the ISI under the civilian political leadership. The poor General, it appears, while making this assessment, completely forgot that as is evident from the name; the Inter Services Intelligence, even a child gets the idea that it is a combination of Army, Navy and Air Force and not just a wing of Army. The General also had no knowledge that the ISI works under the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Defence is always headed by a politically elected member of the Parliament and is called Minister of defence so the ISI has always been working under the civilian political leadership of Pakistan and it was the defence Minister who refused to place one of his under command organizations to the Ministry of Interior.
The Daily Mail’s finding indicate that in bids to get out of the echoes of Kargil debacle, General Malik continues to make nonsense statements. These findings indicate that it was General VP Malik’s idea to initiate a small conflict with Pakistan in Kargil to measure Pakistan’s readiness to respond to a a military adventure from India. These findings further indicate that even the Americans had reported that India suffered Kargil debacle because of the flop planning of Indian military leadership.
The Daily Mail’s investigations indicate that a US report on the Kargil border conflict between India and Pakistan, says the crisis showed up shortcomings in the Indian Army “in intelligence, key equipment, and inter-services coordination” as well as the military leadership’s failure in planning and management.
The Daily Mail’s findings indicate that the report on political and military ramifications of the Kargil crisis, prepared by the Joint Intelligence Centre of the US Pacific Command said India inducted “ill-equipped troops” in Kargil-Daras sector to combat Pakistanis.
“After suffering heavy casualties with little success, it took several weeks to build up the troops and equipment needed to launch an effective counterattack,” it said, adding that India’s armed forces learnt several “hard lessons” about operating jointly at high altitudes.
India lost some 520 soldiers during a 50-day campaign that saw battles being fought at heights of up to 15,000 feet. Nearly 1,000 soldiers were injured.
“Acclimatising troops for fighting in Kargil was a stumbling block to operations,” the report said, noting: “it takes about a month for troops to acclimatise to the altitude, let alone fight.”
The report spoke of how units from the Indian Army’s 15th Corps that pursued the enemy towards the ammunition depot at Kargil on May 9, 1999, into the heights overlooking the town, were confronted by Pakistani troops.
“Expecting to encounter a ragtag band of Kashmiri insurgents, the Indian Army instead faced a well-equipped force in shape of Pakistan Army units, standing ready to retaliate from the high ground overlooking the critical Srinagar-Leh supply route. “India used frontal assaults supported by limited artillery in the first weeks of the conflict,” it said. After suffering heavy casualties in such strikes, Indian forces made preparations for an effective counter-attack.
“The Indian Army began its offensive in the first week of June and, using high volumes of artillery fire and supported by Indian Air Force strikes, Indian Army troops recaptured the heights in the Drass and Kargil area.
“The uphill, daylight assaults proved costly in casualties,” it said, and noted that consequently, India made “plans to secure more individual night vision devices.”
It predicted that at the tactical level India would now deploy more remote ground sensing systems to monitor the LoC and unmanned aerial vehicles would also help keep an eye on many infiltration routes “into Indian-held Kashmir.”
“(Then) Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh travelled widely to press India’s view of the Kargil crisis and to reassure world leaders that India would show restraint. His efforts, plus US-led international pressure on Pakistan to withdraw from Kargil, contributed to a diplomatic thaw in Indo-US relations,” the report said.
The Joint Intelligence Centre provides direct intelligence support for all forces assigned to the Hawaii-based US Pacific Command, which is responsible for American security interests in the South Asian region.
The centre conducts current situation analysis, long-range assessments and threat estimates.
The centre, however, said any increase in Indian defence spending in the wake of the Kargil conflict would not be enough to make up for the deficiencies in its armed forces caused by “years of inadequate funding and limited modernisation”.
These shortcomings will “continue to challenge the Indian armed forces to prepare for future conflicts and at the same time, the Indian army needs sane and visionary leaders, not like the ones it had during Kargil debacle.”
The Daily Mail’s findings indicate that General Malik was not only grilled by country’s political leadership for misadventure in Kargil but his own colleagues and even sub-ordinates also gave him a tough time for his failure in Kargil. The findings further indicate that a senior Indian Army officer sacked for failing to take effective action during the Kargil conflict of 1999 has challenged the action against him.
Brigadier Surinder Singh told the Delhi High Court that his removal from the Indian Army was due to the “bias” of the then Army Chief, General V.P. Malik. Judges B.A. Khan and J.D. Kapoor issued notice to the Defence Ministry and Army headquarters.
Singh contended in his petition that he had briefed Malik during his visit to Kargil on August 25, 1998, about the lapses in his planning and strategy to gauge Pakistan Army’s readiness for an Indian attack through Kargil episode. . In May 1999, “the Brigade intelligence team had detected that Pakistan army was preparing itself for an attack by India but senior commanders disagreed” with him, Singh said.
Singh maintained that there were no adverse remarks in his annual confidential report (ACR) that was written on July 9, 1999.
He also sought an independent investigation into the Kargil episode to bring forward the loopholes in VP Malik’s abilities to lead the army and pointed out that similar probes had been ordered by Israel after the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and by Britain after the Falkland crisis in 1982. The Daily Mail’s investigations further reveal that General Malik, who today talks of teaching lessons to Pakistan and China, following General Deepak Kapoor’s war doctrine against China and Pakistan, during the Kargil conflict, went all out to seek Israel’s help to save his skin and Israel did help the Indian Army.
The Daily Mail’s findings indicate that although Indo-Israeli relations for a large part had remained “very quiet,” the Jewish nation had in fact helped India at the time of the Kargil crisis
Jason F Isaacson, International Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee, told India Abroad in an exclusive interview with the newspaper’s News Editor Suman Guha-Mozumder, Isaacson acknowledged that the “Israeli involvement, the help that Israel was really able to give to India at the time of the Kargil crisis as a friend and ally, had not taken place before.”
“It is becoming clear that democracies like India, Israel and the US have to stick together and nothing has made that clearer than the event [9/11] two years ago,” he said in the interview published in the September 12, 2003 edition of the newspaper.
The Daily Mail’s findings further indicate that General VP Malik also made a mockery of himself when he stated in his lecture that Pakistan Army was supporting and funding the religious militants. He made these remarks at a time when the entire global community was very much appreciative of Pakistan army’s efforts to eliminate militancy and when the troops of Pakistan army are fighting a comprehensive war against the so-called Jihadis and religious militants.
General Malik raised alarms for global community when he urged for preparing a comprehensive military strategy to counter China in his said lecture. He also sounded highly irked by Pakistan-China’s strongest all-weather strategic partnership and stated that that focus of Pak-China relations was to undermine the Indian interests and security.
Siyasat Aur Pakistan 
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