CARRYING THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra

17 March 2015

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The Responsibility to Protect doctrine has received conditional approval even before the military and legal infrastructure to implement the strategy has been put in place. Also, R2P is a racist concept that denies the Third World the right to fight and settle its own scores

The Indian military is really in no state, infrastructurally or intellectually, to fight a modern war, but it refuses to acknowledge this in public, or for that matter, even internalise it. This, however, has not prevented the the Ministry of External Affairs from giving conditional approval to the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, even as our Defence and External Affairs Ministries plod along without dedicated legal wings. Now all of these might seem disparate strands with no connecting threads but the dangers for India — especially for our supposed strategic autonomy and our elected political leadership — are immense. 

Several times, in these columns, the inability of the Army, Navy and Air Force to understand, internalise, enforce and disseminate modern warfare has been discussed. Similarly, the economy cannot absorb the industrial costs of such modern warfare. Why? Because the emerging warfare scenario — precision strike and minimal civilian casualties — is a reflection of 21st century industrialisation, which is very different from the 20th century industrialisation. The 20th century was dependent on heavy machinery which could be replicated through industrial drawing and some reverse engineering. In the 21st century, however, the focus is on processes — extremely complex inter-disciplinary processes, that are virtually impossible to duplicate without enormous intellectual rigour and huge sums of research funds, as can be seen in the Western university system.

In such an ecosystem, each piece of ammunition is so expensive that it makes no sense to expend it on the wrong target — or those targets that are irrelevant or tangential to victory — such as civilians, hospitals and schools. In order to make each bomb hit exactly where it is intended to hit, a huge amount of money is spent on electronic intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance complexes to generate accurate targeting data. In such cases, the fighter that actually drops a bomb on its target is simply the tip of the iceberg.

In India, however, we believe that merely acquiring a fighter platform with the capability to launch pin-point attacks, without developing the necessary intellectual and industrial infrastructure, gives us the ability to duplicate Western paradigms of war. This is utterly misguided, because a Third World economy cannot sustain a First World military infrastructure and, consequently, achieve the kind of minimum civilian casualties that Western warfare can.

As a result, any war that India fights — assuming it ever gets into fighting a difficult full-scale war against similarly matched forces (contrary to the 1971 Bangladesh war where we faced down an Army one-fourth our size with a non-existent Air Force) — will be a protracted and bloody affair. In such a situation, stalemates and getting bogged down are inevitable and will invariable result in huge civilian casualties.

The ongoing tragedies in Syria and Iraq are classic examples of this. The Syrian Army was battle hardened against the Israeli military in the 1970s, and, though badly mauled, earned Israel’s respect for its fighting qualities. Yet with the outbreak of an asymmetric rebellion within, this Army collapsed and failed to achieve most of its objectives. The fighting descended into wholesale massacres and the Government shifted to a strategy that maximised civilian casualties and included the use of nerve agents.

Similarly, during the Iran-Iraq war, both Armies, though supposedly equipped with state-of-the-art supplies from the US and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics respectively, were bogged down in a bloody stalemate that saw the use of poison gas and wanton massacres of civilians. While Iran was heavily sanctioned and resorted to asymmetric tactics, Iraq simply got increasingly brutal with its tactics.

This is what happens in desperate full-scale wars in Third World countries (and Iraq, Iran and Syria were all far ahead in terms of human development than India was or is). This is also the kind of war that India has never fought, except in Bangladesh and that too with overwhelming numerical odds on its side. Transpose this situation to today, against Pakistan (if deterrence fails and international pressure does not occur) — a hostile population, an impending stalemate and India’s inability to finish the war on its terms will mean that the smart munitions stockpile would be expended in a few days. The remainder of the war, even if India does not wish it so, will be a nightmarishly bloody affair with significant civilian casualties.

This begs the question: If deterrence works and international pressure does occur, what is the point of spending such huge sums on the military when “strategic autonomy” clearly does not exist in any form? On the other hand, if deterrence fails and international pressure fails to eventuate, India faces a much bigger problem wherein R2P becomes a legal issue and the emerging body of human rights law becomes a noose around our necks. In cases where R2P applies and intervention eventuates — such as Libya and Kosovo — what happens to its leaders can be gauged from what happened to Muammar Gaddafi and Slobodan Milosevic.

Where R2P becomes difficult to enforce, it is the whole body of human rights laws, associated with the principles of R2P, that make the prosecution of a decisive war impossible, with the country being heavily sanctioned and ostracised. In the worst case scenario, the leadership is either hauled off to the International Court of Justice in lieu of lifting those sanctions as happened in the case of Milosevic.

In effect then, R2P far from being a noble concept is, in fact, an extraordinarily racist concept that denies the Third World the right to fight and settle its own scores. It is a tool to forcibly suppress the geo-strategic imperatives of Third World countries and subject them to the arbitration (and hence geo-strategic imperatives) of the West — jargon for “superior White people”. In effect, R2P is an extension of the concept of the White man’s burden. It is the sophisticated wording that gives it any respectability, though its intellectual place should be in the Ku Klux Klan bylaws and anyone advocating it, is fundamentally a Nazi.

What is the lesson for us here? Our military cannot do what it claims it can; and our diplomats, in conditionally acquiescing to a set of thoroughly racist principles, have flushed down the drain whatever little slice of fictitious ‘strategic autonomy’ we had left. The net result is that if we exercise our ‘strategic autonomy’, we’ll probably have our most of our democratically elected leaders in chains in some foreign prison or dangling off the gallows.