Magnetic north is shifting 30 miles a year, it signals the reversal of poles. This will create problems for migrating birds, aviation and other navigations. Mr Modi is probably the only person in the region who knows this fact, therefore shifting his own poles so frequently. Statesmanship and statecraft is actually the art of practicing all the quotients in the most balanced way, the IQ, EQ, PQ, SQ and AQ. Leaders are intelligent, emotionally stable, physically fit, socially sanguine and spiritually platonic.
Modi’s sabrerattling against Pakistan is the rattle of a broken tambourine trying to be relevant to the international tunes. In this age of IQ, PQ, and EQ there is a need to define the warfare.Yuval Noah Harari says that there are three challenges which world is facing, one, spread and existence of nuclear weapons, second, the ecological degradation and thirdly the technological disruptions. There is a fourth threat and a challenge to the global peace and the human existence; it is Mr Modi with all his colourful quotients.
There is a strange complexity attached to the new concept of warfare which is less kinetic and more compound in nature. Strategic calculations or even the strategic elite are no more determinists in the age of social media where permeability of facts, ideas, fiction and truth are beyond the control of anyone. Non attributable wars are being waged everywhere, sometimes visible and most of the time only palpable at the Fahrenheit scale.
The full spectrum warfare is simultaneously applied to all the elements of national power of an adversary, thereby degrading all the spikes of a national wheel. Yet the new concept revolves around the element of deniability. The confusion is so dense thatgiving the names like hybrid war, compound war, asymmetric warfare, fifth generation war etc are all misnomers, because the boundaries are all intermingled and hard to separate even with a laser knife. One word, which in still a remote tone can define this new concept of warfare, is the partisan warfare, where you are ideologically hell bent to destroy a nation and its people.
The balanced approach being adopted by the Pakistani strategic thinkers and leaders has so far frustrated the Indian efforts. The partisan warfare as being the new concept of full spectrum warfare can only be countered through the political, social and economic wellbeing of people
People of Indian held Kashmir are facing the same partisan warfare. People of Pakistan are also a target but still the calculus does not allow an all out effort. Pakistan for the last decade was subjected to a combination of hybrid warfare in tribal belt and and a grey zone war fare in the urban belt. Hybrid is the tactical dimension of grey zones, which is an effort to create domestic disruptions and also weakening the alliances which Pakistan has with brotherly countries.
Fortunately at hybrid level Pakistan won the battle, at the grey zones it frustrated all the efforts to be induced in any regional war. The traditional alliances of the country are also intact. Pakistan in fact did the hybrid balancing without breaking any norms, rules or sinews. India through its jingoism is trying to copy the concept of Israel’s regional hybridism with Indian Kashmir as a laboratory and Azad Kashmir as the furnace. Mr Modi with all the quotients available to him is not trained to control the temperatures as he always remained at the delivery end of a tea stall.
Kashmiri tea is altogether a different ball game. India at this moment does not have three things required to play in grey zones, one, the ambiguity of international law, second, ambiguity of action and third the ambiguity of attribution. Pakistan’s umbilical proximity to India does not allow above three things to happen. The passing of citizen amendment act has diminished the advantage, whatever India was trying to accrue in information domain. NATO has just recently drawn up a specific threat catalogue and the bi-strategic command capstone concept to mitigate both conventional and hybrid threats. Pakistan can also draw up such actionable documents; the same should have an open content which pre expose Pakistan’s adversaries as they unfold their part of scroll.
India’s playing with the escalatory matrix is deliberate in nature, a means to squelch Pakistan’s response. The balanced approach being adopted by the Pakistani strategic thinkers and leaders has so far frustrated the Indian efforts. The partisan warfare as being the new concept of full spectrum warfare can only be countered through the political, social and economic well being of people. A good leader and a great statesman is therefore naturally designed to have best of the IQ,, EQand PQ etc.Wants to have stability then Save the people from disrupting facts, ideas, thoughts and information/disinformation on one hand and provision of means of sustenance on the other.
Grey rhinos are coming but if the eyes are on true north then the shift in magnetic north (30 miles per year) is just 30 steps to side way correction both in diplomacy and internal accuracy.
The writer is a free lance who contributes regularly on security related issues