New Year’s Resolution
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
Westfield, IN
In 360 BC, the Chinese Emperor Huang used the guerrilla tactics for the first time in the documented history of mankind against Tsi-Yao-A Miao, a local ethnic leader, by instigating a series of small attacks. These tactics weakened the Miao’s so much so that the Emperor established his rule across China.
Emperor Huang did not innovate anything though. The concept of asymmetrical warfare had existed way before him. Notwithstanding some controversies about the passages, Sun Tzu, the celebrated Chinese military General, may have illustrated the basic principles of guerrilla warfare in 600BCE though these words:
“Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest. In raiding and plundering be like fire… Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
Of course, he did not name his tactic as guerrilla warfare, a Spanish word that means “little war.’ As such, “guerrilla war is an irregular warfare in which small groups of semi-trained, highly motivated and loosely connected civilians or the military personnel skirmish with an organized, powerful and well-equipped regular army.”
So how did the word enter the English language? In contemporary diction, it was introduced by Leo Tolstoy who referred to the Spanish freedom fighters resisting against the French invasion of their country as guerrillas in War and Peace(1869). In the same time period, the Russians also developed a similar strategy of guerrilla attacks after the fall of Moscow in 1812: they were devastated by their defeat at the hands of the French (Napoleon) Army and launched a multi-faceted insurgency against foreign occupation.
As for the sub-continent, in the 17th century Shivaji Bhosle of Maharashtra, India, organized a long and successful struggle against the Mughal Empire on religious grounds which resulted in the establishment of the first Maratha Empire in the Northern parts of the sub-continent. Marathas, a Hindu ethnic group, believed in Hindu rule in India.
Coming to the modern era, the twentieth century saw numerous guerrilla struggles across the globe. Among them, the militant struggle of Mao Tse-Tung in the Chinese civil war and the Cuban revolution under Fidel Castro come to mind instantly.
Mao Tse-tung- the founder of the Peoples Republic of China- was defeated in 1927 during the “Autumn Harvest Uprising” when he was leading the “Revolutionary Army of Workers and Peasants.” After the loss, he reorganized his army, honed his skills, and altered his strategy altogether. Avoiding a full-scale confrontation with the more powerful and organized Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), he relied on guerrilla attacks to seize victory and to ascend to power. He describedthis strategy in his book as “a powerful special weapon with which we resist the Japanese and without which we cannot defeat them.”
In Latin America too, the triumph of the Marxist revolutionary army in 1959 under the leadership of Fidel Castro along with the Ernesto “Che” Guevara, resulted after they had launched a vicious campaign against the Military Dictator Fulgencio Batista. Che described the strategies of guerrilla war in “La Guerra de guerrillas” and proposed the controversial theory of “focalism” in his book. According to his theory, a small group (foco) of guerrillas can sustain a revolutionary movement that can ultimately be converted into a massive and large-scale uprising. So, after Cuba, he ventured to Congo assisting the revolutionaries in 1960-65. He lost there. He, then, moved to Bolivia and led the “National Liberation Army of Bolivia” but was captured and eventually executed by the Bolivian Military.
In our short history, Pakistan also has taken advantage of guerrilla warfare after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Ideally, once we have claimed victory in Afghanistan celebrating our expertise in these tactics, we should have stopped using this effective but fatal strategy. But our policy makers only knew how to get in and had no plans of getting out. So in the absence of an exit strategy, we overdid it. We thought every foreign policy problem could be solved by sending a small militia, an easy and simple solution of long-standing, complex problems-a mistake. Even today, we rely upon such insurgencies for the “optimal” solution in neighboring countries.
The problem is that we either fail to put in the equation or ignore the spillover effect in the form of the sectarian outfits like Lashkare Jhangvi(LeJ) and Sipah e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a menace that we have left to grow despite waging a war against Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in September 2014. Today, as Pakistan’s economy is set to take off, these Jihadi outfits, if left unharmed, can impede or reverse our growth single-handedly. Do we realize that the amount of investment we have put in can be blown up in a matter of weeks? Can we take that risk? Is it not time to reevaluate and revise our previous strategy. It has caused us to lose thousands of people including soldiers. From 2007-2013, it even rocked the foundation of Pakistan jeopardizing our existence. Can we not wake up before the cascade of massacres begins again? Should it not be our new year’s resolution?
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