In Poonch, Pakistan’s hybrid war at play

Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)

The frequency of calls to my mobile phone has been increasing exponentially. Everyone seems to want to know why the Army is taking so long to clean out the few terrorists reportedly holed up north of the Rajouri-Dera ki Gali (DKG)- Surankote-Poonch road.

The Bhata Durian jungle adjoining this road and stretching to the higher reaches is extremely thick, and the mountains form the lower part of the Pir Panjal range on the Rajouri side; they stretch to the top of the range where the passes are 13000-14000 feet. The terrain is treacherously broken, strewn with caves and jagged rocky outcrops, much like the lower Shivalik range. This is great countryside for hideouts, terror training camps and the like; well out of sight and away from habitation.

The local Gujjars come up to some parts of the jungle en-route to the meadows and glades on routes which lead to Kashmir. The vegetation canopy in the jungle terrain is thick and provides a protective cover from aerial observation, unless energy-based surveillance is employed. There are hardly any mobile communication towers in the vicinity as one goes higher towards the mountains and long-distance communication will usually be by satellite phone, unless a deliberate effort is made to set up other transmit facilities. Yet, this write up is not a lesson in terrain conditions but an assessment of why the sponsor state of Pakistan has chosen to repopulate this area with terrorists. At the outset, even with my larger experience of serving in J&K, I seemed to be fooled and perceived that there was no connection between the Poonch terrorist concentration and events in the Kashmir Valley.

The events I refer to here are the minority killings and the targeting of non-Kashmiris. With the cascading nature of events, Pakistan’s strategy seems to be falling into place. Historically, Pakistan’s innovations in strategy have usually consisted of small tweaks in methods it used in the past. An obsession it never seems to get over with is the idea that one day the people of J&K will rise up to support its forces when they cross the LoC and enter J&K. That obsession has led it to often try infiltrating irregular armed elements to establish bases and caches of arms and explosives on our side of the LoC. It tried a direct invasion with tribals in 1947-48 under Operation Gulmarg and failed. In 1965, it tried to repeat something similar by infiltrating irregulars (Razakars) into various jungle tracts north and south of the Pir Panjal range, awaiting offensive operations by the regular Pakistan Army. This was Operation Gibraltar, which proved a fiasco with premature discovery and neutralization of the Razakars in the areas between Gulmarg and Baramulla and in the jungle tracts around Rajouri. In the period 1989-92, similar efforts were made by pumping in terrorists and making the LoC almost irrelevant with the notion that also became a slogan – “Kashmir banega Pakistan” (Kashmir will belong to Pakistan). During the Kargil episode, and for two years thereafter, I served with the Rashtriya Rifles (RR) HQ Victor Force and we were highly suspicious of activities around a landmark which fell outside our area of operations; a place called Hilkaka, a virtual campsite for nomadic shepherds up in the Pir Panjal. Our suspicions proved right in 2003, when it was discovered that Hilkaka and the adjoining areas had a concentration of about a hundred terrorists.

Under Operation Sarp Vinash, these terrorists were flushed out with a painstaking methodology which involved constructing high altitude helipads for the launch of Special Forces or heliborne infantry units and preparing staging sites en-route to Hilkaka. Almost 65 terrorists were killed as they attempted to escape across the passes of the Pir Panjal. For Pakistan’s deep state, survival is contingent upon turbulence in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

The scrapping of Article 370 and removal of J&K’s autonomy in 2019 by the Indian Government was a shock to the Pakistani deep state. Two years in the wake of the initiative, things seemed to be stabilizing for India, a situation not acceptable to the deep state. October seemed a perfect time to re-launch an all-encompassing move to seize the initiative and put India on the back foot in J&K.

The ideological winds of ‘Political Islam’ were flowing from Afghanistan after the Taliban success and it seemed suitable to use these for inspiration of the sleeper cells in Kashmir. The softest targets were minorities and migrants; targeting them was considered to find favour with the local communities, who have perceptions of demographic change occurring due to the new laws. The resulting turbulence would prevent governance and development initiatives and invite detentions and interrogations, which could be used to fan anti-India sentime