PAKISTAN’s reaction to the Indian army division-level exercise, now under way, has been mature and measured both at the media and official levels. The Urdu language press, normally highly reactive to any such movement along or around our eastern border, has been significantly muted.

At the 58th formation commanders’ conference (FCC), India’s Cold Start doctrine came up for some detailed discussion and professional assessment. The main elements of the Indian doctrine include the raising of a new south-western command in addition to the existing western and southern army commands, the creation of a rapid deployment force, and a special forces (commando) command.

At full strength, the new raisings would add considerably to the offensive punch of the Indian army and further upset the correlation of forces, already vastly in India’s favour.

The Cold Start doctrine was first enunciated by former Indian army chief General Nirmal Kumar Vij who retired on January 31 this year. Cold Start might actually be a euphemism for a hotshot start to deny the defender any breathing space and catch him napping at the post.

This is a rather over-ambitious postulate in the context of its effective application to a fighting force as professional, well-equipped and battle-hardened as the Pakistan Army. Operating on interior lines in an offensive-defensive role, the Pakistan Army can give a befitting riposte to an invading force at any time and place.

At a press briefing in June last, ISPR Director-General Major-Gen Shaukat Sultan stated that while the Indian doctrine could not be ‘outrightly’ ignored, it did not seem to be a ‘viable proposition’ vis-a-vis Pakistan.

It could perhaps work in the case of what Gen Sultan called ‘a banana republic’ by a sudden invasion and landing of foreign forces. However, this is not to ignore the threat but to analyze it thoroughly and meet it in a designed rather than a reactive manner.

An eye-for-an-eye sort of impulsive approach seen through our past armed encounters with India would be strategically obsolete and tactically counter-productive. Countering Cold Start by a Pakistani version of the same would be little more than an unimaginative repetition of the stalemated encounters all along the Sialkot-Lahore-Kasur front in 1965.

In a war nothing can be more counter-productive than engaging the invader on one’s home ground and according to his doctrine. A Pakistani Cold Start, therefore, might well be overruled straightaway — if for no other reason than for the dominant prospect that ours would be essentially a defensive war with an offensive edge.

Translated and developed in military terms, General Pervez Musharraf’s role as peacemaker, through the Delhi summit, may well be termed the Musharraf doctrine of flexible response. Keep your options open and invoke them to suit the law of the land and the demands of a highly volatile situation.

The simple doctrine, General Sam Manekshaw gave to his advancing troops in the eastern theatre of the 1971 war was: ‘Leave the highways and follow the byways’.

The Indians thus avoided loss of life and limb and of precious war materials that would have taken place in an active engagement with the well-entrenched Pakistani forces. They made it all the way to Dhaka without a single significant encounter with the defenders.

That was the triumph of a doctrine given by the high command and faithfully and scrupulously followed by the field forces. Our forces were denied their last chance to fight back to stall the Indian advance, if not to repulse it completely.

While it is for the general staff and the army high command alone to work out the details of the postulated Musharraf doctrine of flexible response, this can be broken into three constituents as follows: dissuasion, pre-emption and activation. Although parts of an integrated whole, each can also be invoked by itself according to the nature and gravity of a given situation.

Dissuasion, in practical terms, would mean convincing the enemy beforehand of the grave folly of crossing the line at all and risking a violent response from the other side.

Pre-emption would involve mobilization, acquisition of advance intelligence and a prescient appraisal of the enemy’s war plans, vital forming-up points and deployment areas. These would have to be combined with aggressive diplomacy to pre-empt his war-like preparations under international pressure.

Activation would mean biting the bullet and going for the invader with everything at one’s command. Cast in an essentially defensive role, with an offensive edge, however, Pakistan’s objective would be to repel the aggression through a swift and sweeping response — basically to end the war as quickly as possible with the minimum possible damage to itself as the defender and maximum punishment to the aggressor.

While there is no reason to dismiss the Indian manoeuvres as simply a ‘routine’ exercise, there is no cause for undue alarm either. And Pakistan’s discreetly measured response amply demonstrates it.

The exercise might well be the field test for General Singh, the first Sikh Indian army chief since independence. Gen Singh assumed command earlier this year.

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.

WE are indeed a nation of extremes. One day we rub everyone in the dust and treat them as scum of the earth; the other day we elevate them to the position of demi-gods.

That is exactly what we did the other day to our cricket team when it returned from India after performing creditably by “coming from behind” to level the Test series and clinch the ODI series.

It was a job well done and Inzamamul Haq and his men deserve accolades, for after a long time they gave this cricket crazy nation something to cheer about. We should have been gracefull and magnanimous in victory.

Credit for the success goes to Inzamam, Younis and Yousuf Youhana who all grew in stature as the tour progressed. Rana Navedul Hasan was an inspired performer while Shahid Afridi rightly dubbed as the “King of Sixers” at last came into his own and demoralized Indian bowlers with his awesome hitting and useful bowling spells.

Another vital factor that played a key role in the success was that the discipline was maintained and for this the efforts of manager Salim Altaf and his deputy Asad Mustafa should be commended.

However, one should not overlook the fact that for the past five years everyone who is somebody in the PCB has been erroneously claiming that the Pakistan team is in the rebuilding process and a young team. The truth is just the opposite. Except for a couple of players all are vastly experienced.

In fact Pakistan, probably besides India, is the most experienced one-day outfit amongst the 11 ODI playing nations.

One should also not forget that for the first time in many years there was no fitness problem and the credit for that must go to our much underrated local home-grown commodity Eric Johnson than the expensively assembled foreign “experts” handpicked by the even more expensive foreign coach Bob Woolmer.

The coach continued with his habit of speaking out of turn. He spoke what could be termed illogical and rubbish. He compared, according to one newspaper report, Virender Shewag with Sir Don Bradman. A point picked up by the great Vivian Richards who remarked that the coach appeared to be in a state of intoxication when he made those comments.

After beating lowly-ranked Indians in the ODIs, Woolmer perhaps got carried away and went on to make tall claims that Pakistan could beat any team in the world. Of course in ODI any team can beat any team on any given day;, such is the nature of the game.

In our over-enthusiasm we certainly went overboard in showering praises, prizes and petals on our players as if they had scaled the Mount Everest or completed the “unique double” of winning the ODI World Cup and the Test Championship.

It was also conveniently forgotten that so far as the official ICC ODI rankings are concerned, the Indians are in eighth; only above lowest of the lows;, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Bangladesh. Besides, Pakistan has always had an edge over the Indians in ODIs. The present win ratio in our favour is two to one.

Another factor that should not be forgotten is that Imran Khan’s 1987 team had completed a double over the Indians in their own backyard.

The margin of victory in that year should have been 6-0, instead of 5-1; but for the ignorance of rules by Abdul Qadir who prevented Pakistan from making a complete sweep. We also very conveniently forget that Pakistan always has an edge over India and the present win ratio in our favour is 2:1.

We have also forgotten that Pakistan has performed so poorly in this form of the game over the past year that we hit rock bottom and by the law of averages it could only improve.

We lost the final of the Asia Cup to Sri Lanka after beating Hong Kong, India and Bangladesh in the run-up; beaten in the finals by Australia in Holland; we were elbowed out by an ordinary West Indies in the Champions Trophy.

We lost to Sri Lanka in the triangular home series and also to India at home. We were also at the losing end in the VB series finals. The line seems to be embarrassingly endless. The reality is that we are rightly tagged as the most “consistently inconsistent” team.

The performance of this management team was in stark contrast to that of Haroon Rashid was the manager. There were many cases of indiscipline during his tenure that gave Pakistan cricket nothing but bad name.

As far as the working of the PCB is concerned a lot needs to be done. The time is right for the high-profile organization to get rid of retired officials and inject fresh blood and do a professional job under the new constitution which is expected to be enforced in coming months, if it is enforced at all.

Abbas Zaidi, a former retired colleague of the PCB chairman, who knows not which side of the bat strikes the ball, was inducted only for the India visit as a consultant but has been rewarded for his loyalty and has become a permanent employee receiving astronomical remunerations.

No doubt the younger generation is exasperated when it finds that retired friends and relatives are hired while millions of youths are out of job.

The same goes for the octogenarian marketing consultant, Mr. Riaz Mahmood. He too was hired for the Indian tour of Pakistan; he is still continuing in the job although there is a general manager as well as a director who are enjoying all the perks of the job; sitting idle at home.

Apart from the two directors, there are more than half a dozen highly paid under-worked general managers doing exactly the same work that they were doing four years ago in junior positions.

LUMS have come and gone but the PCB persists with its old ways. in the same vein – it knows how to spend money lavishly, not how to use it judiciously. There is no process of accountability, no audit and no one is answerable to anyone.

The writer is an ex-Pakistan chief selector.

EVEN as the brouhaha over the tiger continues, the Union ministry of environment and forests (MOEF) has turned regressive. A ministry circular has asked all state forest departments to stop giving permission for any kind of research that entails ‘handling’ of animals (touching, holding or even wire tripping them for a camera shot). The ban is a blanket one: across forests, protected and otherwise, and across species.

The wildlife research community is jolted. Madhav Gadgil, member of the National Wildlife Board — NWB, the country’s apex body on wildlife management, headed by the Prime Minister (PM) — sent a letter asking the issue be discussed at the NWB meeting convened in Delhi. Gadgil wanted the PM to intervene. The latter merely promised to encourage wildlife research, setting the Central Bureau of Investigation off after Sariska’s missing tigers.

Broaching the issue with the PM had just one effect. Forest departments across the country tried to hush up the circular’s existence; even researchers who now found their work blocked weren’t able to get their hands on it. MoEF officials neither confirm nor deny its existence. But there is no denying this coincidence: the circular was sent just when researchers across the country reported missing tigers in more than four tiger reserves of India, raising serious doubts about MoEF’s intentions.

MoEF holds absolute fiat over who carries out research on forest lands and who doesn’t (see box: And the act says…). “In the absence of any guidelines the draconian provisions are used with such capricious intent that researchers are completely at their mercy,” says Ulhas Karanth, senior wildlife biologist and director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Bangalore, one of the premier wildlife research groups in India. He should know: in one of the longest lasting field studies on tigers in Nagarhole national park, Karnataka, Karanth suffered the brunt of the department’s ire when permits for camera traps of tigers became hard to come by for nearly three years. The reason: “The new state forest minister wanted to reopen logging and we went public against it,” says Karanth.

In April 2004, 18 researchers and field workers including Karanth were hauled to court over nine different cases by the state forest department for ‘trespassing without permission’. To do what? To conduct research, which included hydrological studies in the Kudremukh National Park, Karnataka. The studies were done two-three years before the case was filed. More importantly, the same researchers used some of the studies in the courts to successfully prevent the government from opening up Kudremukh to mining.

“We can still get away, for we are now senior researchers. But what of the young biologists or M Sc students who have to deal with this constantly and have no avenues or recourse?” asks Karanth. Take Abi Tanim, a wildlife researcher from us-based University of Missourie, US, who had to wait for more than six months to get a permit and carry out research on Indian wolfs in Andhra Pradesh. He got the permit, but then arrived the circular, and now he’s waiting again.

Tanim’s isn’t a one-off case: recounts a young researcher working for a senior biologist on tigers, “The park director once came up and asked us not to paint our transects (lines drawn on the forest floor to do sample studies) in red colour because the tourists would not like to see bright-coloured marks in the forest. He wanted them painted brown — who would find the transects in the dense forest then? The entire purpose was to have a clearly visible path!” Such hilarious details trickle in from nearly all researchers who have worked in the field.

While for some sciences the laboratory is the house of all ideas, for a wildlife biologist the forest or free ranging animals in the wild becomes the laboratory. Outside the glamour of a few camera-touting, National Geographic acclaimed, high-profile so-called conservationists are actually hundreds of field workers, assistants, researchers, biologists and ecologists who spend years together in the field collecting data that then is analysed back at the office. The data, more often than we are made to believe, comes not from watching tigers or lions but from meticulous work, which can range from collecting faecal material of deer to looking for sub-surface amphibians in the middle of night in thick monsoon. The end result of living several years, flitting between an office and a dense forest, is, at the end of the day, a few academic papers, sometimes a thesis and occasionally a bright career. But all this gets nixed when the forest department turns research into a turf battle.

The problem, many point out, is that the forest department traditionally has never been trained to carry out research or appreciate it. “It’s quite like asking the guard at the gate of the Indian Institute of Technology to stand at the gate and tell what kind of research should be carried out inside,” says one biologist quite succinctly.

Kartik Shankar, fellow at the Ashoka Trust of Research and Education in Environment, Bangalore, says, “One big hurdle is the entire animal rights’ lobby groups, which still hold strong sway over the ministry and constantly pushes it not to give permits for work with animals.” He also counters a staple forest department grouse that research doesn’t ever help the parks with their conservation goals. “I think the right to research is an equivalent of intellectual property rights. Even if we agree that the research has been rather unhelpful for conservation, I think it’s our right to intellectual property that gets denied when we aren’t allowed permits on flimsy grounds.”

The permits controversy isn’t a new one. In the mid-1990s, a standing committee of the erstwhile Indian Wildlife Board had ratified a set of guidelines for issuance of permits by the state forest departments. The guidelines somehow got buried in the labyrinth of the Wildlife Institute of India (another government arm) and never saw the light of the day. Rauf Ali, a senior ecologist and director of Feral, an environmental NGO based in Pondicherry, points out, “Look at the Wildlife (Protection) Act. It has several chapters on every aspect of wildlife regulation and ecology but none on research. Does it not show where the ministry’s priorities lie? Why can’t we have specific laid-down guidelines for who can do research, how it ought to be sanctioned? Make the process clear and open to public scrutiny.”

But the real hurdle is the ministry itself. Will it really want to let go of the only hold it has over researchers that roam India’s protected forests, and report exactly what they have found? As the tiger episode has shown, these researchers can act as whistleblowers against corrupt practices and officials, and the ministry has learned to use the research permit as a solid stick to beat the ‘errant’ researcher by. If the Prime Minister really wishes to promote research, as he promised at the NWB meeting, could he enable a scientific temperament in the ministry? © CSE/Down to Earth Feature Service