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India needs to keep a decisive military presence "Up in the mountains" of Kashmir, because the next big war WILL be in the mountains, despite what the defense minister AK-47 Anthony thinks with his big ticket Jew coded naval purchases which make very little strategic sense. India needs to maintain at least 600,000 regular army in Kashmir. It simply does not make sense for a poor logistics based Third World military moving slowly, lacking significant transport planes, and helicopters to station it self in the plains of India, and then in a time of WAR for the 5TH time move slowly through the Choak points of Himachal/Jammu towards the theater of action in Kashmir................Does not make sense.
On the other hand security people by their nature are a breed apart. We hear stories of what American soldiers do to locals in Korea or Japan near their bases, and that the same must apply to Indian soldiers in Kashmir. Young men pumped up for war and violence, leading extremely monotone lives, poor food, lonely not seeing their wives & families for years........drawn largely from the common man of Indian society which is not particularly sophisticated at many levels, from the right of Indian society with perhaps RSS tendencies with some (Major Pirohit is an abberation ? As a serving fully paid military officer into 2010?).
These types of animals should not be stationed near civilians, especially in "sensitive" areas, but should be brought out from their remote camps in Kashmir ONLY when the needs arises. Kashmir is a big country, with many remote spots for military installations, but not near civilians.
One is not suggesting Indian soldiers should be pink underwear wearing Gandhis. Most emphatically they should be drawn from the "marshal races" of Indo-Aryan stock fighting aggressive wars in the defense of India.
But I do not favor using the Indian military in civilian areas. I do not favor using the Indian military in the Naxal/Maoist problem. It politicizes the military. Such problems should be dealt with by the police only, along with RAW, and more resources for the civilian population and local security.
The current Kashmir Valley problem dates back to 1989 when the victorious Pakistani military (ISI) in Afghanistan seeing the flight of a Kafir Superpower at the behest of the Afghan Mujaheddin which they had armed, trained and supported decided to divert some Jihadis to the Kashmir theater from Afghanistan. An estimated 80,000 people have died since, BUT the GENERAL TRAJECTORY over the last few years is a slow down of violence. Until very recently.
Leh is fine, Jammu is fine. The problem is the small Kashmir valley. Here India needs to show a little love and sensitivity to its own people. More money from the center, and a cutting of some slack. NO MILITARY in the area, no paramilitary BSF etc..........local Kashmiri police armed with AK-47 is sufficient to deal with any security problems. The Kashmiri insurgency is not armed with tanks and heavy stuff. There does not need to be highly provocative parades of Indian military through the Valley a day or two after yet another hapless civilian has been killed.........not good.
In Northern Ireland covering the 20 years 3,500 people died. 10,000 British troops were stationed there, and what the reality of the conflict was (Catholics 43% being discriminated against; poor job opportunities, economic opportunities, treated as second class citizens by Protestants 57% many of them Scottish/English settler descent) A lot of the deaths and violence were committed by..........BRITISH SECURITY.....ARMY/MI/INTELLIGENCE. I wrote about it at university. Rather than dealing with the fundamental grievances of the Catholics who were being treated as second class citizens in their own country, the British security system waged war against the Catholics and were the cause of most of the deaths in that province and the UK....MAYBE even 80%. YES stone throwing youths shot by British troops; youth had too much to drink, been to a party and did not slow down at the numerous....too many check points...killed by troops. There were even sinister hints that the IRA and Real IRA were in fact run by British Intelligence through their USA network.
Of the 40 odd resistance outfits in Kashmir many are run by RAW, for sure.
Majority of Kashmiris want peace. Most Valley Kashmiris don't want to join failed state Pakistan with its even greater levels of STATE instigated internal terrorism through the American run AND FUNDED ISI...........Huj and LeT are not independent entities operating on their own, BUT run by the ISI, which in turn is funded and run by the USA. Huj and LeT must not be seen as isolated aberrations but must be put in the context of the bigger picture.
A few people frustrated and angry shouting anti-India slogans in the Valley MEANS NOTHING, fundamentally. They are reacting to their natural situation, and India psychologically and quickly needs to separate them from the LeT/ISI menace through a variety of measures as hinted at.
Man Mohan Singh with his rather child like passion for the USA, is not the leader who is going to solve this problem in a million years. He is in fact going to let it fester as the night watchman keeping the seat warm for playboy Rahul.
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Oh, it’s not nice to be treated like a perpetrator. Especially when you’ve been weaned on tales of you being the victim. If the Shoah (Holocaust) has provided the Jews a protective sheath against any guilt for the Nakba (Catastrophe) of the Palestinians, it would be fair to say that India — victim of colonialism, victim of global capitalism, victim of terrorism, victim of plain old bad luck — is gobsmacked to even think that it could be the bad guy.
Right on top of every Kashmir pundit’s priority of worries is the concern that he may be seen as naive. So in a perpetual attempt to not be caught as a simpleton, we hear him say things that make the Kashmir problem complex. The very term ‘Kashmir problem’ itself is a giveaway. The pundits will yank things back to 1947, when the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir Hari Singh hastily gave into Nehru-Patel’s Princely State stamp-collecting spree to protect his independent kingdom from Yusufzai raiders sent by Pakistan to expand its two-nation theory eastwards into Muslim-majority Kashmir. The pundits will talk about Pakistan, the anachronistic diplospeak of ‘plebiscite’, the need or not for ‘tripartite talks’, the Simla Accord, Pakistan, terrorism, Kargil, the Agra summit, ‘vested interests’ and, for good measure, more Pakistan.
But never in their living daylights are they able to realise the wisdom of that old chestnut of William of Occam: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And in the context of what’s happening in Sopore, Srinagar and other parts of the Kashmir Valley since July, the simplest explanation — a.k.a. a simple observation — is: people are protesting against police forces killing people who are protesting against police forces killing people who...
This isn’t a chicken-and-egg cycle. It’s a variation of Newton’s third law of motion: every police action of death or disappearance has an opposite, if hardly equal, reaction of stones hurled at policeman and violent mobs beating them up and burning down police stations.
It’s difficult to think that the stones being hurled at security personnel have been smuggled in from Pakistan or that their hurlers, overwhelmingly teenagers but most visibly younger kids, are all being mobilized or goaded on by nefarious agents of the ISI. When you see the corpse of an eight-year-old boy, killed in a stampede caused by police firing on protestors, wrapped in white funereal cloth being carried by crowds, you come to either of the two conclusions: that the people who think that the policemen and their bosses are the victims must be mad; or, that by simply hurling stones at those who have, since July 11, regularly killed civilians — just to underline the fact that these people haven’t yet morphed into ‘terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’ — Kashmiris are mad to have stopped at stone-throwing, police-beating and burning down police stations. We can think of doing those kind of things in helpless anger when stuck in bad traffic.
You don’t have to be a Kashmiri pundit to realise that a new generation of Kashmiris are thrashing out against a high-handed ‘shut up or we shoot’ force. To think that all this is being orchestrated by a Geelani or an Alam or an Andrabi is like believing that the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in 80s Afghanistan were working solely for an American purpose. It’s one thing to make hay while the sun shines and quite another to be the sun shining.
You do have to be a proverbial Kashmiri pundit to figure out why on earth New Delhi is not pulling out of the Valley. But surely you don’t have to be the (strangely quiet?) prime minister to know who are the victims here. A week away from India’s Independence Day and 79 days away from Jammu and Kashmir’s Dependence Day (J&K acceded to India on October 26, 1947), young Kashmiris with forceful and angry bowling actions don’t much care for history like they did some 20 years ago. All they care for is not one of their own to be shot dead by what any fool can see to be an occupying force.
