It isn’t about saving Private Ryan

It was stirring television, particularly so early in the war which was never expected to be fought. But it wasn’t stirring warfighting. If an army with a superiority of 20 to 1, with total air dominance, the finest in smart weapons, bristling with technology and body armour which would make it impossible for the enemy to kill you unless he actually hit you on your nose or some place like that, has to wait a whole day to clear out one little machine-gun nest, it would be a long time before it can neutralise any significant challenge from the defenders. And this, mind you, were the British who have shown greater spunk in the firefights so far than the Americans.

Now, imagine, how would a relatively low-tech, low-paid and quite literally pedestrian Indian army have handled a situation like that? Most likely, at the very first sound of firing from the house some young captain would have been asked to take a platoon of men and assault it. They would have bought a bunch of casualties, but the obstruction would have been cleared within the hour. But the army that packs more firepower and technology than any in history so far took a whole day doing this, and inflicted on itself a massive propaganda blow as the world (and you’d bet the Iraqis) saw for hours how easy it was for a couple of riflemen to hold up an allied advance. On the other hand, they were able to clear it without taking any casualties.

One look at an allied soldier and you’d suspect the war is not so much about fighting and winning as about marching into Baghdad without paying any price for it. From body armour to oversized helmets, the vast array of armoured vehicles and crunching air power using only stand-off weapons, this army would be the envy of the average Indian (or Pakistani, for that matter) soldier.

Yet, given the same kind of overwhelming superiority over the defenders, a subcontinental army would have covered a lot more distance than this one has done. And one reason they would have been able to do it is that they are not shy of taking casualties. You can say they are callous, cynical, that human life does not matter so much in the third world — all of which may be partly true. But it is also true that you cannot go to war and expect to win without losing any lives.

From Grenada to Haiti to Kosovo to Kabul, the Americans have come to mistakenly believe that technology, smart weapons, air power have taken the most crucial element in warfighting out of the equation — physical contact with the adversary.

Their post-Vietnam campaigns have strengthened the misconception that once you have overwhelming superiority in technology and firepower and total control of the skies, warfare is reduced to nothing more than an old-fashioned, punitive colonial expedition: A tribe misbehaves, so you send a column to subdue it, kill its men, burn its homes, and they will behave better in the future.

It has worked so far, it even worked in Iraq in the last war. Chances are, it may even work to some extent in this war. But this war is not about teaching somebody a lesson or punishing a regime you don’t like. It’s about taking a country.

And if you want to take a country of 26 million people with two great rivers and 192 billion barrels of confirmed oil reserves merely with smart, stand-off weapons, without physical contact with the defender, without the blood and gore of a real battlefield, you’ve forgotten what the business of war is all about.

The fact is, the Americans were accurate in their assessment that Saddam’s army would not come out and engage them in classical do-or-die defensive battles which could be quickly settled by air power.

But they did not imagine little irritants like the Umm Qasr riflemen. Also, the rest of us did not imagine how tough the allied soldiers would find to deal with what is at best harassing fire here and there.

I bet there are so many officers and men in our own army who laugh when they see large bodies of these troops with more body armour on them than on an Iraqi tank, pinned down by some sweeping, inaccurate small arms fire. The subcontinental armies were trained by the British to bash on regardless in such situations.

The quarter-million strong allied force over a battlefront stretching hundred of kilometres has lost just 28 men in eight days of fighting and everybody thinks they are facing such stubborn resistance.

The much-maligned Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka lost 271 men in half that time with just five depleted brigades (around 2,000 combatants each) but they took Jaffna meanwhile.

The LTTE had no tanks or air power, but nor are Saddam’s defenders using any of that now. And in guerrilla warfare, the LTTE had no peers. They had snipers in temples, emerging from manholes or strapped to coconut palms letting off volleys of murderous fire.

Indian troops moved with no air cover. Three of the four columns were denied even the protection of a small detachment of helicopter gunships for fear of civilian casualties.

Only one brigade commander, Jogi Dhillon, insisted on a softening helicopter strike on the hamlet of Chavakacheri, where the Tigers had built formidable defences on the way to Jaffna. The Mi-25s killed nearly two dozen people, and human rights organisations (mainly Indian) screamed blue murder but his brigade made it to Jaffna with a fraction of the casualties the other three suffered.

One more significant piece of statistics: 10 per cent of all Indian casualties in taking Jaffna peninsula, with a population greater than Basra, Nassiriya and Umm Qasr put together, were officers, including the deputy commandant of one of the brigades.

The allied forces, in contrast, have yet to lose a single officer in the fighting — the only ones to die so far were caught up in friendly fire (the Tornado pilots’ captain in the Kuwait camp bombed by a fellow American).

If the Americans really want to know what is going on, they should be speaking to some of the veterans of the Indian army. It took the Golden Temple complex in 72 hours in Operation Bluestar but took nearly a thousand casualties, with 141 killed.

A fighting force one-tenth the size of the allied armies now, suffered 522 dead and 3,000 wounded taking no more than a score of peaks from the Pakistanis in Kargil. But they took the peaks, even if it meant marching uphill, fully exposed, under withering fire. The world’s strongest armies, on the evidence of this Iraq campaign, would have waited until the B-52s had reduced the mountains to sea-level.

In contrast, the Americans want to take a whole country with a sizeable army and are panicking with 28 battlefield deaths in eight full days. The networks are talking of fierce fighting all over the place: around Basra and Nassiriya, Najaf and Karbala, on the approaches to Baghdad. But if the fighting is all that fierce, where are the casualties?

That is the real story of this war the networks are not telling you. Or maybe they don’t know enough, having got used to covering the one-sided expeditionary campaigns like Kabul and Kosovo. Each time some Iraqis as much as fire from a distance, they call it fierce resistance.

Then their armies are not conditioned to do what old-fashioned armies do in such cases: send out a patrol led by a young officer to check out the source of trouble and neutralise it.

Soon enough the allied generals will face this moment of truth. Their air power will run out of targets and the B-52s will not be able to clear out every little machine-gun nest in an Umm Qasr or Nasiriya.

At some point, somebody will have to call young officers, give them their platoons, get them to take off their body armour and take out the threat the old-fashioned way. This will mean casualties on a scale several times greater than seen so far. That’s why the frowns on the faces of Bush and Blair.

Write to sg@expressindia.com