Operation Sarp Vinash

Most afternoons, there is plenty of work at the Foreigners' Graveyard in Surankote, digging graves for thebodies of terrorists killed in the mountains. The small green field behind the Surankote police station usedto be the size of a suburban bungalow lawn. It now sprawls over an area of an outsize football field, andthreatens to overrun adjoining farms.

The designated burial ground for unidentified terrorists, the graveyard houses the remains of the dozens of jihadis,many from Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the Kashmir valley, graves in what are known as 'martyrs' graveyards'often have elaborately carved headstones. Here, no one seems to care enough to take the trouble.

Talk to local police and military officials about how they find terrorists in this area, the centre of themost bitter fighting in Jammu and Kashmir, and it soon becomes clear it has little to do with special tacticsor high-grade intelligence. "All you do is march into those forests", says a trainee at theSurankote Police Station, pointing to the dark shadow, "and, soon enough, you'll be in the middle of awar."

Over the last month, it has become clear that nowhere near enough Indian troops were marching into themountains of Poonch, and up into the Pir Panjal. Operation Sarp Vinash [Snake Destroyer], athree-division strength operation involving three Army brigades, has thrown up evidence that terrorists on thePoonch heights have been building up safe bases in key areas of the district for several years.

Troops discovered a network of almost a hundred well-defended bunkers around the Hill Kaka bowl inSurankote, built up from the high-altitude Dhoke shelters used by Gujjar herdsmen in the summers. Sofar, the Army claims to have killed upwards of 62 terrorists in the operation, although not all the bodies ofthose killed have so far been recovered.

Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami (HuJI) terrorist Muhammad Amin Sajid's diary provides interesting insight into howterrorists in Surankote actually functioned. Sajid, who lived in the Madrassa Jamia Ashrafia in Pakistan'sOkara district, maintained a record of contributions from various groups for common expenses, like guides,porters, supplies and medicines. The Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami, al-Badr and Jaish-e-Mohammad(JeM) all made contributions to Sajid's central fund.

Other diaries record the deaths of comrades in Afghanistan, with one entry recording the death of aterrorist code-named Butshikan, or idol-destroyer, in Osama bin Laden's Tora Bora complex. Interestingly,Indian troops encountered one elaborate cave defence at an altitude of 3,989 metres, which was eventuallydestroyed with the use of helicopter-fired air-to-ground fragmentation missiles.

Other diaries, interspersed with Islamist slogans attributed to the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, showthe presence of a crude counter-intelligence apparatus. It records the execution of 10 'spies' whose throatswere slit after they allegedly 'betrayed' jihadis to Indian forces between May 1999 and July 2002. Thelist includes two women and three children.

Such killings of Muslim villagers, mainly from the Gujjar community, are common in Rajouri and Poonch, andhave continued through the Sarp Vinash period. Five villagers were shot dead at Keri Khwas, nearRajouri, on March 25, and another six were slaughtered at Kot Dhara, near Darhal. Many of the killings can betraced to wholly non-military origins, pegged around land and resource conflict between Gujjars, RajputMuslims, and ethnic-Kashmiri migrants.

An elaborate communications structure built around portable satellite phones allowed terrorists to communicateon their handlers with Sialkot, Muzaffarabad, Kotli, Islamabad, Abbotabad, as well as sympathisers acrossIndia - calls were made to Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. One photograph recovered from akilled terrorist showed him posing in front of the Parliament House in New Delhi.

Since the satellite phone systems used by the terrorists are of a type which uses a gateway in Pune totransmit signals, it is possible Indian intelligence knew of the signals traffic for some length of time, andwas content to allow it to be generated. Elaborate codebooks for radio-frequency communications were alsofound.

There are lessons to be learned from the fighting on the Pir Panjal. First up, it is necessary to rememberthat, the Army's own public relations enthusiasm notwithstanding, this is not the first time large-scaleoperations have been carried out in the region. In July 2001, twenty-one Jaish-e-Mohammad cadre wereeliminated in a bunker-busting operation above Surankote.

Many, as investigation later disclosed, were teenagers, tragically press-ganged into the service of jihad.Again, in mid-2002, joint operations by the Jammu and Kashmir Police and Rashtriya Rifles claimed eighteenterrorists in Doda's Wadwan area, in some of the most remote and difficult terrain in all of Jammu andKashmir. Regular encounters have taken place even in Hill Kaka, where the Army has found such success.

The problem has been that offensives in the high mountains have rarely been well thought through or sustained.Helicopter-borne operations were attempted in Wadwan during the winter of 2000, but the lack of an infantrypresence meant that all troops eventually found was one empty Kalashnikov magazine. In 1999, the entire 8Mountain Division was pumped into Kupwara's Rajwar forests. Again, lacking intelligence support and planning,the grandiose operation, code-named Operation Kaziranga, succeeded in finding just one dead body in its firsttwo weeks.

In the summer of 2000, company-strength pickets were put up in Wadwan, and on the Margan pass into Kishtwar.The mainly defensive positions killed no terrorists, and were burned down when troops withdrew at the onset ofwinter - sending a clear message to local residents about who was boss.

It is silly to blame small Army units in the mountains for failing to operate aggressively, as the media oftendoes. Consider, for example, the case of Kishtwar. The district of Doda sprawls across 11,678 squarekilometres, only a few hundred square kilometres less than the entire Kashmir valley. Over 60 per cent of thisarea is made up of the single tehsil of Kishtwar, which, in turn, divides equally into four majorvalley systems.

The northern valley systems of Wadwan and Marwah were protected by just one battalion, and a single companytraditionally sent to Wadwan in the summer was pulled out in 2001, enabling a massive escalation in terroristviolence. The offensive operations carried out that year have had no subsequent follow-up - and now, theNagrota-based 16 Corps is considering a series of Sarp Vinash-style operations in this part of itsdomain.

Much of the credit for the success in Poonch goes to the new commander of the Romeo Force, Major-GeneralHardev Lidder. Lidder, sources disclose, was appalled to find that the Romeo Force, charged withcounter-terrorist operations in Rajouri and Poonch, just wasn't spending enough time on the heights.

Helicopter pads to supply troops in the mountains, as well as minor roads, were constructed in the winterto improve mobility. Then, without fanfare, troops of the 9 Para-Commando Regiment were tasked to take on amajor bunker on Peak 3689-metres in Hill Kaka, after helicopter surveillance flights picked up large numbersof footprints through the snow leading to a single complex. Thirteen terrorists were shot dead in theoperation, the largest single success recorded in the course of the ongoing operations.

As terrorists groups scattered into the Pir Panjal, more troops were called in to saturate the ground, anddisrupt their movement routes. The 6 Rashtriya Rifles was joined by the 163 Brigade and the 100 Brigade,pulled off duties on a new second counter-infiltration ring along the Line of Control.

The major offensive axis, as the operation evolved, were Thanamandi on the Rajouri-Poonch border, where awelter of killings of civilians had recently taken place, Hari Buddha, Marhot, Hill Kaka, and the Bufliazforests near Surankote. Troops from the 15 Corps were also pulled in to block routes from Saujian and Loran innorthern Poonch, across the Pir Panjal into Tangmarg and Shopian in the Kashmir Valley. It is unclear just howsuccessful these efforts, unlike the initial strike, have been, but large scale terrorists groups have clearlybeen dislocated and their logistics routes disrupted.

Lidder's most important contribution, perhaps, was to breach the unstated ban the Army has placed on the useof air power in counter-terrorist operations. Apart from the use of air-to-ground missiles, Cheetahhelicopters fitted with heavy machine guns were used on several occasions. The use of such weapons was madepossible by restrictions on Gujjar herdsmen, which barred them from using traditional high-altitude summerpastures, thus excluding the possibility of civilian casualties.

It seems probable that terrorists will now seek to bring down helicopters, and it will be interesting tosee how Indian forces respond to such an escalatory move. Operation Sarp Vinash also used technologiesjust starting to disperse through the ranks of Indian infantry formations, like portable ground radar andnight-vision devices, to considerable effect.

And the problems? For one, large-scale operations like Sarp Vinash can't, very obviously, make up thebread-and-butter of counter-terrorist work. There is no sign, yet, that its lessons about the importance ofrapid mobility and technology have adequately dispersed through the Army.

In fact, there is a very real danger that operations that secure media coverage may now be privileged overless flamboyant but equally necessary work. There is also little sign that much-talked-about civilian-militarysynergies are even being considered. Jammu and Kashmir, for example, has the highest livestock-to-human ratioin India, but is also an importer of milk and meat. A sensible programme of livestock improvement andprocurement might do more to keep Gujjars off the high pastures than the arbitrary handouts now being given.

Sadly, no one is even talking about such reform.

Sarp Vinash has shown that innovation, intelligence and enterprise do work. The problem is that thishas been repeatedly demonstrated over the past decade: only to be forgotten the morning after.

Praveen Swami is Special Correspondent, Frontline. This article appears here courtesy, the SouthAsia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal