Guerrilla warfare —Shaukat Qadir

Guerrilla warfare —Shaukat Qadir

To an old soldier who did his humble best for as long as he soldiered, as proudly as he could, it is heart warming to see the army of today learning so swiftly. It takes a very special breed of officers of all ranks and their men to learn to operate independently

My introduction to guerrilla warfare came early in my career, when I volunteered for a two-month stint in erstwhile East Pakistan, in early 1971. I got there in April and my stay kept getting extended until I was fortunate enough to return in late October, before I could become a guest of India!

The lessons I learnt there were the very basics: never to be unarmed; reload at the earliest; don’t trust anything that moves; don’t open fire till you can see what you are aiming at; check the area for snakes before answering the call of nature in the wee hours — you don’t need a snakebite at a spot where no one will suck out the poison, etc. etc.

I returned a veteran of sorts but dazed and with a fear of landmines.

After the 1971 war, we moved straight into the Balochistan ‘insurgency’. I was by then a tried soldier, far more confident, probably a little cocky, but had learnt one lesson: nobody can ever learn enough about the conduct of war, a truism for all fields of knowledge, which I was to learn in time.

On a ‘search’ mission, we started out at last light and by dawn, in just under eight hours, I, along with my twelve-man patrol, had covered about twenty-two miles of the roughest terrain you can imagine. I felt very proud when I called a halt for breakfast beside a stream on the top of a pinnacle.

Along came an old man in chappals. On interrogation I learnt that he had started about three hours ago from a village over fifteen miles away, was headed for Mashkai, where we had started from, expected to get there for lunch and return home for breakfast the next day. He had run out of his chewing tobacco and was going to get some!

I returned and wrote a demi-official letter to my GOC relating this incident and, while also quoting Sun Tzu, explained that if we continue to operate carrying sixty pounds each, however physically fit we might be, we would never be able to catch up with the locals. We had to adjust, and learn to fight by their rules, or fail. My initiative in writing to the GOC and my conclusions were highly appreciated —but nothing changed. I was to witness the same ineffectiveness in the army operations in the streets of Karachi.

No army in the world is trained to operate against guerrilla warriors. In fact, guerrilla warfare is the antithesis of military operations. The military trains to operate against recognisable opponents who are trained like all armies and, therefore are predictable. Those in the military who are wise enough not to be ‘fighting the last war’ and resort to the unexpected are also predictably unpredictable. They all operate along recognisable lines of communication, because they are bound to their logistic support system.

The guerrilla warrior, on the other hand, fights by no such rules. He is undistinguishable from any other local, he wears no uniform and, most discomfiting of all, he is totally unpredictable. He digs no trench, when facing long odds he fades into the background, and he often appears on your rear, when he is supposed to be in front. He is not bound by orders, or at least those that are comprehensible to the conventional military mind. He has no logistic chain and, therefore, is bound to no known lines of communication; he is trained to live off the land and, if he runs out of ammunition, he kills a soldier and takes his weapon and ammunition.

This is why no army has been successful against guerrilla operations, unless it has changed its military lessons to adjust to the rules set by the guerrillas. This is also one reason why the recent unexpectedly swift success of the Pakistan Army is so remarkable and encouraging.

Normally, there are two responses by militaries faced with guerrilla operations in terrain that favours guerrilla warfare. First, to follow the infamous maxim from an anonymous origin that originates from British forces operating in Malaya: “if the purpose of terrorism is to terrorise, the purpose of anti-terrorism forces is to terrorise more”; and second, to follow the sterling example of US forces, whether when they were fighting in Korea, Vietnam, or as they presently are in Afghanistan, i.e. to incrementally increase the use of firepower indiscriminately, keep making excuses for their lack of success and finally, when defeat stares them in the face so closely that it becomes undeniable, evacuate — repeat the British victory at Dunkerque!

To be just to them, the British SAS was the first military force to learn this lesson and began to beat the Irish Republican Army at its own game and on its own turf. Their contribution in delaying Argentinean forces till the arrival of their on-ground forces in the Falklands War would have made Che Guevara proud.

To an old soldier who did his humble best for as long as he soldiered, as proudly as he could, it is heart warming to see the army of today learning so swiftly. It takes a very special breed of officers of all ranks and their men to learn to operate independently, to exercise initiative and grab opportunities that arise, and for which no prior orders/instructions have been given, to learn to operate under logistically independent conditions (even for limited periods of time), free from established lines of communication.

I write this to honour those soldiers, of all ranks, who have participated in our recent operations against terrorist guerrillas; whose contributions have been extolled and recognised and those many thousands whose contributions will never be recognised, but without whose contributions we could never have succeeded.

The writer is a former vice president and founder of the Islamabad Policy Research Insititute (IPRI)