Pak Tea House » Uncategorized » The Concept of Strategic Depth: Can the Compass Move?
The Concept of Strategic Depth: Can the Compass Move?
By Vithal Rajan
Military planners in Pakistan have landed themselves in an existential mess by backing their American allies a few decades ago to convert free-living tribals into the Taliban. They took this dangerous step to help create strategic depth in Afghanistan against any Indian offensive. Now, a flaming frontier has appeared on the western border of Pakistan, and extremists from these border regions are eating away the integrity of the state through uncontrollable terrorist incursions even as far east as Lahore. Undoubtedly the people in the heartland of Pakistan, in Sind and Punjab, wish to stabilize their western frontier and bring internal peace to their country. Can the military do this swiftly enough without moving the compass 180 degrees to the locus of threat in the west? Can this be done without refiguring Pakistan’s strategic depth as lying to its east, in India? What will it take the governments of both countries to achieve this shift in policy and military thinking?
The political animosity of over sixty years cannot easily be forgotten by anyone, and so-called confidence-building measures will be blocked from time to time by bitter memories and fears that the enemy now coming in the guise of a friend is cleverer than he really is. However, history affords some heart-warming examples, notably the cemented friendship between France and Germany in a new Europe after several centuries of warfare, conquest, and counter conquest. The leaders who cautiously built up war-torn Europe with the beginnings of the European Economic Community would, if called to account today, quickly disown having held any intention of building the future European Union. But what is an undeniable fact today is the wealth and security of Europe. So, can we hope for a coming rapprochement between India and Pakistan?
What moves perceptions around quickly enough is money, or the prospect of more of it. Undoubtedly, the leaders in both countries, as well as leaders in countries selling arms, have a lot invested in the present military face-off. It would be impossible to bring peace to South Asia without holding out the real prospect of the leaders being immeasurably better off by peace breaking out. The roadmap for such a consummation, however devoutly to be wished, is unclear, muddy in parts, and most of it is trackless. But none can deny its potential as none can deny how wonderful life would be if there were no poverty in South Asia.
An economically vibrant South Asia could achieve the dual blessing of peace and prosperity. The second most powerful man in the world, in terms of the assessment made by Forbes, and its greatest salesman visited India, primarily to sell arms and create jobs in America. Two years ago, the world looked to Obama to create the miracle of change in the world’s most conservative country. Failing in that attempt, can he accomplish a greater miracle by cementing peace in South Asia to bring about an economic upturn? Can cross border trade be vitalized through American initiative to further enrich the rich of both countries, and incidentally relieve the poor of abject misery? Obama should go for this tantalizing objective, for not only would he bring many more jobs home, but he would end the menace of terrorism and become more popular in American memory than FDR himself! The only other option he has if he wishes to get re-elected in two years time is to bomb some unfortunate country, which knowing his sensibilities should be repugnant to this gentleman.
Even if the American President on this momentous visit could miraculously come out with a plan for peace and prosperity in South Asia, someone is bound to raise the question of Kashmir. Oddly enough, Bollywood reminds everyone that Kashmir is very like Switzerland, to which mountainous country its filmmakers have shifted their crew under present unsafe circumstances. Now, Switzerland was war-torn at the end of the Napoleonic period, riven by two religions, divided by at least three languages, dirt poor, and an environmental disaster. Wise leadership, hard work, and above all community cooperation have made this little country a heaven on earth within a century. And French and German leaders must be blessing their own good luck that they did not try to hold on to Switzerland. So let us present this thought to Obama and hope he can make something of it.
Vithal Rajan, Ph.D.[L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast; as faculty at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He has founded several Indian NGOs. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Filed under: Uncategorized · Tags: Asia, Pakistan, peace, south asia
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Every sane voice wants to thinks on those lines elaborated in articles. But when a mindset of an Institution is against the friendship, when its existence is depended on anomisity and when this institution happens to be most powerful institution of that country, how can you expect friendship? Yes I’m talking about Pakistani army, who will change their behaviour and bring them on peace table. I don’t think in respect of French and Germany any powerful institution was against peace.
First of all, it took the defeat of the German army in the Second World War to rid the German soul of its militarism. As to France, France was bribed by the Americans, courtsey of the Marshall Plan, to accept Germany into the European Coal and Steel Community. The bargain was that France would support the entry of Germany into NATO and the European Coal and Steel Community and in return, the United States would support France in Indo-China (Vietnam) in maintaining its colonial possessions.
As to the Pakistani army and its concepts of strategic depth and the questions, whether this view can be changed; the simple answer is yes. First of all, the concept of strategic depth has no military value, because Pakistan has no depth to its territory and it cannot, politically, afford a miliary strategy based on the idea of strategic depth as that would imply, realistically speaking a military and a political defeat.
The idea of retreating into Afghanistan, as a military option, makes no sense because that would suggest in real terms, that Pakistan has been over run and occupied and in a political sense, it would be the end of Pakistan as a territorial concept and Pakistan would not be in any position to debate the nature of the final peace settlement that would follow such a possibility.
Hence, the concept of strategic depth is a chimera of military wishful thinking at its most worst, because it has no political rationale to it. Military strategies, to be successful, need to be grounded in a political reality, whose preserverance and attainment, in a war, is the primary objective of a military effort and that effort must always be guided by the politics of a war.
(If interested, please go to my blog and read the article The Politics of War as that article deals with this issue and if the PTH editors, wish they can post that blog/article here).
Pakistani army will change its mindset, over a period of time, due to the logistics of this war and the sheer, gross, mismanagement of the financial resourses needed to wage this conflict. Wars are not about strategy and tactics and battlefield guiles, but tasks of a financial strenght and as the old Spanish dictum suggested; he who has the last ducat wins the war. In other words, wars are won and lost on the ability to finance them and to wage them costs money and the virtue of a successful civilian leadership, in times of a war, as a military strategist is to know how to balance the accounting sheets of a war.
A better question is not, whether the Pakistani army can change its mindset, but whether the state of Pakistan has the financial ability to finance the wars of Pakistani army?
Pakistani army is, at the present moment, engaged in a two-front war and its fighting the Taliban insurgency in the west and is also preparing to fight a potential conflict with India at the same time.
However, it does not the have financial resources to finance both these wars at the same and its attempts to do so, has put such a severe strain on the Pakistani economy that the entire economy has collapsed. Pakistani economy was a never a war economy designed to support a perpetual military state of war and as long as the bulk of the Pakistani economic resources, foreign aid dependent, were going to support the military’s effort against India, the economy could eek out an existence.
The caveat, which changed the equation was that once Pakistani army became engaged in two wars, it could only finance both wars by completely draining the economic resources by denying those economic resources to the civilian economy. What this suggests, as a long-term prospect, is that the Pakistani army is nailing its own coffin by persisting in a policy option, which will prove suicidal to its instititonal interests and eventually, it will have to make a strategic-political decision as to where to concentrate its progressively dwindling economic resources.
The undeniable truth is that Pakistani army, given the paucity of resources availiable to it, in financial terms, can only fight a single front war. In order to reorient its military posture, from India to the Taliban insurgency, will require a political assessment of choices. This change of mind, will occur once it becomes clear, to the Pakistani army, that while India may be willing to accept the existence of a Pakistani army; the Taliban will not, because they see the Pakistani army as the single most important impediment in their quest for an Islamic emirate.
Pakistani army has not, yet, debated this question, because it still thinks that a post-American Afghan settlement will witness a traditional balancing of regional interests. The emerging reality is that as the United States prepares to leave Afghanistan, it will gradually lessen its political and military dependence on Pakistan, but Pakistan will find the burdens of a two-front war simply insufferable and then, the question facing Pakistani army and its doctrine of strategic depth in Afghanistan will not be so much a financial dilemma, but instead it will be a very real risk assessment of Pakistan’s internal political situation and threats to its political stability.
The bitter reality, in terms of the logistical ability of the Pakistani army, argues that the Pakistani army is simply not capable of fighting the Taliban and existing in a state of readiness to fight India and still, domestically maintain a political stability needed to meet its institutional interests within Pakistan.
The only question unanswered is how long can the Pakistani army continue in such a state of affairs, before it implodes due to its own self-perpetuated contradictions?
ciao
feroz
makes sense –
do you write columns in dawn/tribune?
The jokers sitting in the GHQ are perhaps inspired by the strategic depth of Russia which lead it to victory against Charles, Napoleon and Hitler. But Russians never allowed its centres of political strength to fall into enemy hands; St Petersburg to Napoleon, Leningrad and Moscow to Hitler. Napoleon never wanted to annex Russian territory and in pre-industrial era, the French army (which used to live off the land) lacked the ability to sustain operations deep inside Russia. In world war 2, the Red army shifted over 1500 military industrial units from Western Russia to the Urals and maintained their massive offensive ability despite huge loss of men and territory. In case of Pakistan, loss of Lahore would instantly end the war. In 1965 war, both armies miserably failed to cross tiny water barriers like BRB canal or Rohi Nala. Our grand strategic withdrawal would involve the most difficult of all military operations i.e. bridgeheads across massive rivers and withdrawal in contact. The Chairman DHA (who also commands the Corps) can only dream of conducting such complicated maneuvers. These pathetic armies cannot breach even a modest line of defense. But one must give credit to both armies for the way they successfully fool their own people. I think from the great German army, we have only learnt the lessons regarding propaganda and manipulation of public opinion.
The key to the German army’s success was the skill, professionalism and committment to the state of Prussia and later on, towards Germany. The Prussian army was created to serve the policies of the state as an instrument of state (sovereign) power. Later on, this same tradition was followed by the Junker class, from which most of the officer corps came, in the case of Germany.
The flaw in the German army and the cause of its ultimate defeats in both world wars were reasons, which existed outside of the battlefield but impacted the battle itself. In the First World War, the reason Germany sued for peace was that by 1918, its economy had collapsed and during the Second World War, it lost because it had no clarity of a political policy to guide it.
The Wehrmacht’s campaign in Russia is a brilliant case-study of exceptional military achievements and confused political decisions by Hitler. The reason that Germans were not quartered in Moscow by the winter of 1941 had less to do with the Russian army, but everything to do with Greece and Hitler’s own decisions. The German invasion of Russia was earmarked for early spring, but then Mussolini’s Italy invaded Albania and got bogged down and at the point, Hitler made the decision to postpone Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, and help out Mussolini and in invading Albania and to secure their southern flankin the Balkans, from the British based in Cyprus and Malta and in Egypt, Hitler invaded Greece and towards this end, German divisons tasked for the Russian invasion were re-deployed in Greece, where they statyed after the invasion for the reasons of occupation and fighting an anti-German insurgency.
The other blunder was Hitler’s decision to reorient one of the German army groups from advancing towards Moscow and order it to capture the oil fields in Baku and then change his mind again and re-order it advance towards Moscow.
This allowed the Red Army, which was reeling relentlessly, since its faux pas at Minsk and Kiev, the time to organize a line of defence at Moscow and had Hitler allowed the German advance, the Germans would have reached Moscow before the first snows fell.
The reason, why the Russians suffered a disaster at Minsk and Kiev was due to a political disicion of Stalin’s and it was due to the fact prior to the German invasion, Stalin had purged the Red Army of its most capable field officers because those officers had trained with the Germans in the 1920s and Stalin thought were becoming too “west looking”. The end result was that when the German invasion came, the Red Army found itself without effective command leadership at the division and corps level and had to develop that skill while engaged in a shooting war.
This was in sharp contrast to the German army and its experience. At the Treaty of Versailles, where the size of the German army was limited to 100,000 men, the German army’s high command handed picked only the most brilliant and professional officers to be retained on active service in the limited army and rest were cashiered.
The point is that decisions made under political complusions have far reaching consequences for military strategy and had Guderian been not retained in the post-Versailles German army, Blitzkreig as a concept would never have been developed and had Rommel being pensioned off, he would not have commanded the school of infantry where he wrote his book, Infanty Attacks, that brought him to Hitler’s attention and later gave him the command of the VII Panzer Division in the invasion of France, where he employed the Blitzkreig ideas to lethal effect.
In the case of Pakistan, Pakistani army’s hopeless disarray comes more from the fact that that it has no political acumen above the regimental level and most of officer corps’s professionalism is actually limited to a battlion level command, because of the reason that the Pakistani army, in its strategic doctrine, has never clarified the difference between tactics and strategy.
The idea of “strategic depth” is a tactic and not a strategy, because a strategy must have a political rationale to it; a foresight. A political strategy’s influence over a military strategy is a must, because it then allows the military to frame its own plans, which will attain the political strategy and a successful military strategy is one, which allows for accomodation of the political reality after the war has ended.
The reason, why the United States and NATO is embroiled in a quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq and the reason, why Kargil was a political loss for Pakistan and the reason, why India is having a difficult time in Kashmir, has nothing to do with the individual bravery of its soliders on the battlefield. Any military plan of action, employed in a pursuit of a political objective, which does not factor for the post-war political environment is destined for a remarkable failure.
War is an instrument of diplomacy and when wars occurs, it is because diplomacy and politics were not able to reach a compromise over the issue and therefore, the political strategy, which underlies a war, is primarily concerned with how to revive the political and diplomatic process from an advantageous position. The end of a military strategy, then, is to create the conditions by ending the political-diplomatic impasse under which a political-diplomatic dialoque can be revived and which leads to a final peace settlement ending the state of war and reestablishing peace.
Any military strategy/plan that fails in creating political conditions for an eventual peace settlement, is a failure. This is the yardstick, by which military operations, in view of the political goals of a war, must be judged. This is the reason, why the military policies of the United States are a failure in Iraq and Afghanistan and why Kargil is considered as a failure and why the Indian military operations in Kashmir are a failure.
This then detours the discussion into an understanding of the military mind as a political strategist and a political mind as a military strategist and why the military must be placed firmly under a civilian control lest the military, from its own institutional interests, starts to chart the course of a war devoid the basic political requirement; to end the war once the conditions for peace exist, and instead favors an open-ended committment to the war without defining the metrics necessary, as to under which conditionalities the war can be concluded.
This criteria then depends on the political acceptability of a final peace settlement and the political willingness, and the military logistical capability to fight a war to such a desired end.
This is the question facing Pakistan and its people and its army and this is the question, which determine a peace in South Asia.
ciao
@ MilestoGo (December 19, 2010 at 3:48 pm)
I do not write for Express Tribune or Dawn as I do not meet their very high standards of accepting articles in those famed publications.
ciao
@FH
that’s surprising!
FH is a typo. I meant Feroz.
@Feroz Khan
I am not sure that German army obediently served the state policy as an instrument of the state. German army had complete control over the foreign policy and it strongly promoted political conservativism and ultra nationalism. Moltke literally pushed Germany into the world war 1 in order to execute the Schlieffen’s Plan. Do you think, politics had any role in the formulation of the Sclieffen’s Plan? I think the Kaiser was simply tactless at the diplomatic level and only some great statesman like Bismarck could have pacified its own army and the enemy.
I think the Schlieffen’s plan was too good for its time, in other words the german army lacked the mobility needed to execute that complicated maneuver. The withdrawal of 3 Corps for the Battle of Tannenberg and gaps that emerged between the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Army sealed the fate of the war. The bloody stalemate and attrition lasted for 3 years, and finally economic collapse lead to ceasefire. But i believe the war was lost on the battlefield!
You are right about the delay in Barbarossa. You are mixing Case Barbarossa 1941 and Case Blue 1942. The capture of Baku oil fields was the target of Case Blue which ended at the disaster of Stalingrad. In 1941, it was the diversion of Guderian’s 2nd Panzer army toward Kiev that delayed the advance towards Moscow. But i think Hitler is unjustly blamed for this diversion. 6 soviet armies totalling 600,000 men, located in the deep flank of the Army group centre had to be eliminated. If you study the battle of Moscow, you can see that Franz Halder extended the northern flank of the Army group Center right upto Kalinin, some 50 kilometers north of Moscow. Then why risk 600,000 men in the deep southern flank? In hindsight, we can say that elimination of the political centre of Soviet union would have prevented Stalin from bringing million upon million of reserves into the battlefield. But when the battle of Kiev was won, it was rightly considered the greatest battle of history.
You are right about the decapitation of Red army at the hands of Stalin. Infact, the germans had conducted tank maneuvers with Red army in Russia during the inter-war period.
Blitzkreig is a tactical doctrine. The rapid advance of Rommel’s 7th panzer division and Guderian’s 19th panzer Corp in France was made possible by the greatest strategist of the war, Erich von Manstein. The german feint towards Belgium drew bulk of the French army into Northern France and the area infront of Panzergruppe Kliest was lightly held. The breakout at Sedan was made possible due to superior strategy. Although, the spectacular armoured envelopment was a masterpiece in mobile warfare, but its the Manstein’s plan which diverted French troops away from the focal point. Compare it to the battle of Kursk which witnessed the greatest concentration of Panzers. Due to poor strategy, the frontal attack into Soviet defence lines and the head on clash with the Soviet 5th Guards tank army was enough to halt the German Blitzkreig.
And well said about civil military relations and subordination of military to political and national policy. But i believe that once a political decision has been made, the army should be given a free hand regarding deployment of resources and troops. Clausewitz said that the maximum effort must be applied at the right place and the at the right time. In case of Afghanistan, the right time of deploying 1oo,ooo troops was 2001. Troop surge in 2010 only exposes the naivete of US general staff. Now, the war has been lost.
Vithal Rajan should quit his day job and try his hand at fantastical Bollywood scripts. Barry Obama trying to get India and Pakistan to rethink their relations. Indeed. You need a severe suspension of disbelief to read through that one. May need Ekta Kapoor’s serials’ level of incredulity.
The example of France and Germany is a depressing one. Centuries of warfare were ended only after a massive war that first saw the germans occupy france, and then saw Germany ravaged by the combined efforts of two vast superpowers. The subsequent friendship came about under America’s wing, facing off against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Are India and Pakistan to be at war for centuries and then finally to be made friends only after being bloodied and broken in a world war fought on the subcontinent?
To be honest, the example of France and Germany may not be entirely wrong. While it may not take a world war, or even a subcontinental war, it does not seem likely that the indo-pak dynamic will simply evolve. It will take something drastic.
For India now is the time to wait and watch…and eventually help…
Feroz Khan:
The Indian army is not conducting any military operations in J&K. Surprised?
The fact is that in twenty years of militancy there has not been even one encounter between militants and army for control of territory. Militants have almost never (almost, because I can’t recall any incident; perhaps there were none) engaged the army at even platoon strength head on. There have been a incidents where a group of ten or eleven got caught in a building and tried to fight their way out. There was one in which a bus load of militants coming in from the CFL near Sonmarg got shot up and killed by an army ambush near Kangan in 1990. There has been only one significant attack on an army convoy. Significant because militants actually tried to ambush an army convoy and did shoot up two or three trucks before melting away. Otherwise it was mostly, till about 2000, isolated grenade throwing on passing army or police vehicles by teenaged boys paid a few rupees. In the last decade even that is rare.
In other words Indian army operations in Kashmir are hardly military in the sense that you may understand it. There is a military presence and that of the paramilitaries, but warfare there is none. Some years ago there was a week long operation in the hills near Poonch to clear a couple of square kilometres of forested mountainside of entrenched militants in a place called Hill Kaka. But nothing bigger was ever carried out.
The Indian army’s success in Kashmir is complete, not because of any brilliant strategies or tactics but only because the place is tightly manned. Militants hide out in the mountains in summer and come down for shelter in winter to the villages peripheral to the forests, but lately even in winter they have been hard to spot. According to one official estimate there are no more than 500 of them active, if that. So why does India maintain such a large presence for these few hundreds. It is simply a prophylactic to prevent more from sneaking in.
It is overkill of course, probably unnecessary and often bungled by the army as happened in Chrar e Sharif in 1995 when the mercenary Mast Gul burned down the shrine and escaped a military dragnet in the town. Size does not matter if the brain are pea sized.
There has to be a political solution to Kashmir; even the army chief has said so, but that process is at a standstill and no one can say when it can be resumed.