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India and the desert
scorpions
By B Raman
By
their invasion and occupation of Iraq, the United States
and the United Kingdom find themselves caught in a den
of scorpions. Sections of the Shi'ites as well as the
Sunnis, independently of each other in certain areas and
in tandem in others, have mounted hit and run raids on
the occupying troops, causing a steadily increasing
number of casualties.
A stream of jihadi
volunteers from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran,
Egypt, Lebanon and other countries have started moving
into Iraq to join what is promised as the mother of all
jihads against the US.
Before the occupation,
there was no evidence of any links between the Saddam
Hussein regime and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the
International Islamic Front (IIF), despite apparently
fabricated US evidence to the contrary. After the
occupation, there are increasing reports of attempts to
bring the dregs of al-Qaeda and the IIF from Afghanistan
and Pakistan and of Saddam's army and Ba'ath Party
stalwards together for what is described as a new jihad,
the like of which the world has not seen before.
Initial meetings in this regard have already
been held in al-Qaeda and IIF hideouts in Pakistan.
There are claims, as yet unsubstantiated, of Saddam
being alive and of he and bin Laden soon issuing a joint
fatwa against the US and the UK. More American troops
are reported to have been killed in the two months since
the occuption of Baghdad in April than during a similar
period after the Americans entered Afghanistan in
October, 2001. Saddam, if still alive, remains as
elusive in Iraq as bin Laden in the Afghanistan-Pakistan
tribal belt. The massive use of US military power,
including helicopter gunships and tanks, has not so far
been able to overcome the resistance, which shows as yet
no signs of relenting.
The US has embarked on a
multi-pronged approach to meet the growingly worrisome
situation. This includes psychological pressure on the
Iranian regime to prevent it from fishing in troubled
waters, a de-weaponization drive in Iraq, the results of
which have been disappointing so far, and a
no-holds-barred ground action in central and northern
Iraq, from where most of the initial resistance has
come. The ground action has been appropriately named
Operation Desert Scorpion.
An Associated Press
report of June 15 from Fallujah in Iraq giving some
details of the operation says as follows, "US soldiers
backed by helicopters and tanks raided homes, rounded up
suspects and confiscated weapons in the restive town of
Fallujah on Sunday, as part of a nationwide campaign to
root out anti-American insurgents who have been stepping
up attacks. Operation Desert Scorpion, launched on
Sunday, involves a series of sweeps throughout Iraq
using most of the US Army units present in the country,
said a US Army spokesman. It is a combat operation to
defeat the remaining pockets of resistance that are
delaying the transition to a peaceful and stable Iraq."
Iraqi families have complained of heavy-handed tactics
by the 1,300 troops who carried out the raids in
Fallujah, a town that has shown the strongest resistance
to US troops. Some said troops broke into homes and
arrested people with no involvement in attacks on
American forces.
The US finds itself caught in a
dilemma. After the occupation of Iraq, it claimed to
have achieved its military objective and brought home to
the US a large number of its Marines, Special Forces and
others. To send them back to Iraq now could be a loss of
face and amount to admitting that it had misjudged the
situation there. It, therefore, wants the induction of a
large number of troops from other countries enjoying its
confidence, particularly from Asia, to assist it in its
Operation Desert Scorpion, euphemistically called the
stabilization program.
Arab countries that
helped the US during the war by providing bases may not
like to get involved in anti-insurgency drives on the
ground lest their own troops get infected by the
resistance. Indonesia, Malaysia and the Central Asian
Republics may not also like to get involved. Hence, the
US eagerness for the participation of India, as an Asian
power, and Pakistan as a major Islamic power. Their
participation would, in US calculations, give the
operation the flavor of an international exercise for
the pacification and re-building of Iraq and not just a
US counter-insurgency drive.
Media reports say
that the US aim is to make the Indian troops, if they
arrive, in charge of law and order and internal security
in the Kurdish areas of the north, which have not been
affected by any resistance by the Ba'ath remnants there
and divert the presently deployed American troops from
there to the resistance-affected areas of central Iraq.
It is also reported that the Pakistani troops would be
asked to assist the US troops in their search and
destroy operations in the resistance-affected areas.
The opposition parties in New Delhi have
strongly advised the government against accepting the US
request. The reported advice of the Congress (I) is that
any Indian role should be confined to humanitarian
relief, training of Iraqi police officers etc. There is
strong opposition not only from the opposition parties,
but also from large sections of public opinion to Indian
troops being sent there to operate under US and not
United Nations auspices. Objections have also been
raised on moral grounds due to the widely perceived
illegitimacy of the US-UK invasion and occupation of
Iraq, even though the UN has subsequently provided a fig
leaf of legitimacy to the fait accompli.
While
the government has been claiming that no decision has
yet been taken, there is a feeling that it is keen to
respond positively to the US request and is examining
how to do so without alienating public opinion in India
and the Arab world.
Any positive response by
India would be extremely unwise. Indian troops could
irretrievably get sucked into a bloody
counter-insurgency operation as the surrogates of the
US, losing whatever goodwill India had earned in Iraq
and the rest of the Arab world in the past. It would be
as unwise and costly an exercise as was the Indian
army's involvement in Sri Lanka in the 1980s. India
could become the target of the new breed of jihadi
terrorists born out of the Iraq war, thereby making the
counter-terrorism task of the Indian security forces in
India even more difficult than it is today.
Moreover, the anti-Iran dimension of the US
operation in Iraq and India's association with it could
affect adversely India's developing relations with
Teheran. In the Islamic world, only Iraq, Iran, Turkey
and the Central Asian Republics had shown understanding
of India's concerns over the Pakistani sponsorship of
terrorism against India. With the disappearance of the
Saddam regime, we can no longer count on Iraq. By our
unwise association with the US operations in Iraq under
whatever cover, we may end up by losing the good will of
Iran too.
B Raman is Additional
Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of
India, and presently director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security
Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was
also head of the counter-terrorism division of the
Research & Analysis Wing, India's external
intelligence agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
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