When power dissipates

Russia has been in a war for ten months now. A military superpower should never be in a war for that long against a rag tag civil-militia quasi-military force. Going by the recently concluded Football World Cup when a weaker team extends a much stronger team to a stalemate or extends the game into extra-time they are already the moral winners. Same analogy explains a military application. Ukraine has extended the game into extra-time and Russia seems an increasingly embroiled power.

By way of strategy, a clear objective is essential before military is applied. It invariably derives from political purpose and must always feed into a political aim. Operationally objectives are defined to achieve a military aim. Military aim varies from outright victory to domination of space to feed into political purpose. But a qualitative and quantitative efficiency of application of the military instrument is based around minimal cost of force application with maximum returns in the shortest time. Decisive force then becomes essential if indeed military instrument is chosen as the means to a political purpose.

By these definitions then Russia continues to lose. Putin is either not interested or has not applied adequate means to bring the war to an early end. It surely is not in the interest of Russia to convert Ukraine into her Afghanistan by way of an analogy. Except that she has slowly drifted into a war of that kind. To the USA it was important to occupy and retain Afghanistan as a space and it kept warding off the Taliban challenge at a cost. She had occupied Afghanistan in a military ‘Blitzkrieg’ in classic application but holding the space for political purpose entailed a cost she was ready to pay. That seemingly is not the case with Russia.

Numerous factors deny Russia that possibility to dominate the second largest country by area in Europe. Her only choice then was decisive force in a swift application achieving a clearer military aim which obviously was not how Russia has gone about this business. Paining Europe with a winter freeze at the cost of economic loss is hardly what militaries may be used to facilitate. Or the objectives of war have constantly been drifting in this war of shifting political purpose. If this can be imposed upon a military super-power by a smaller power, the super-power will come out badly mauled in an uncontrolled, unending conflict.

The lesson in it is to calibrate the use of military force and then measure it against the matrix of time and intensity to achieve a clear objective in an earlier time-frame. I posit this in the context of using military force to eliminate the menace of terrorism in an irregular war as faced by Pakistan. Currently we face a dilemma between a policy that vacillates between appeasement, negotiated settlement and use of force. The lack of clarity in policy and the chosen strategy entails a heavy cost in blood and treasure on an already emaciating socio-economic structure. It mimics using military in an unending war without achieving political purpose. And an application that fails to achieve a decisive victory in an amorphous war is akin to frittering a military force pursuing non-defined objectives.

Pakistan has been following a hybrid policy on terror outfits. How we got here once again after having successfully routed them out of our soil is a classic case of policy hibernation that failed to keep up with an evolving threat. Instead, we resorted to friendly appeasement and selective punishment under pervasive amnesia failing to register how each of such attempts earlier had backfired. It isn’t as much running-with-the-hare, hunting-with-the-hound argument than a poorly contrived and delusional sleepwalk into a policy failure sold as an unattainable chimera of remedying pervasive disharmony in a region. Talks and appeasement led to malicious actors finding their way back into Pakistan. It was patently self-destructive foiling gains that a border fence promised to deliver. Who all were involved and enabled such facilitation must be made answerable. As a result, the TTP once again is a factor that sits in our midst with its fangs out and intent declared in no uncertain terms. Bannu – the town in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa where the hostage drama was played out – brings home the oft repeated lesson in military history: when a military needs to revisit an objective it wasn’t done right the first time.

Pakistan cannot afford such amateurism. What is starkly clear is that the TTP is a hostile group against the state and the people of Pakistan. It aims to reverse constitutional positions that the parliament and the state have ordained. It kills and maims people with terror and must be dealt with as an enemy of the nation. To fall for unrealistic ends by ceding a policy of easement and facilitation is playing right into the group’s hands and whittling away at the power capital that this nation has so resiliently nourished and sustained against all odds. It is unfortunate that when the country is in throes of political and economic meltdown, equally critical to a nation’s health, poorly conceived policies make vulnerable the only remaining asset of the nation – its military forces and their inherent strength – in consequence of inadequate and amateurish policy conception.

In moments of destitution inherent strengths need to be preserved which necessarily must include a nation’s military strength. Weak policies must not be let to stray us from what is critical to our needs. Someone chose to appease the terrorists, thinking they were a changed lot now and could be accosted to peaceful ways. This chimera was dulled rather soon after they had found a backdoor entry into areas from which they had been evicted at very heavy price to the nation; this in the name of negotiations and familial and tribal calling. The strife and destruction they are causing now on a wider front is called war. It needs to be fought as a war. Anything less including talks or negotiations is delusional and whittling away resident national power. National interest and security of the people comes far higher in the pecking order than any presumed ethnic or regional affiliation. It holds true for our policy on Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Our national security and sovereignty cannot be compromised in any consideration. Those that challenge the State and its people deserve no reprieve.

By some extension the same can also apply to the political fratricide that politicians and political institutions are engaged in. It weakens a nation’s political capital. Political power too is as critical to lead a nation out of its challenges and socioeconomic ailments. The fracas and circus that is going on in Punjab is the case in point. While the drama in Bannu was being played out, KP’s leadership was in attendance at Zaman Park in Lahore providing moral support to party’s beleaguered hierarchy. Someone should have ordered them back to their posts in the province. If this isn’t a reflection of our priorities and bankruptcy, what is?

Published in The Express Tribune, December 23^rd, 2022.

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