Introduction

The importance of counterinsurgency (COIN) has exponentially increased in the past few years, especially for the United States and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The difficulties the United States has faced from fierce insurgencies in those two countries resurrected COIN writers and theories long marginalized in U.S. and Western military doctrine and civilian policies and re-oriented the study and practice of COIN for the challenges of an uncertain and dangerous future. Other countries, too, confront on-going or potential insurgency movements, which also inform predictions that COIN will be one of the great and growing challenges of twenty-first century international relations. These predictions concerning the contemporary and future importance of

COIN contribute to the incentives experts and practitioners have to scour past and present COIN campaigns for lessons and best practices to appropriate. The burgeoning COIN literature of the past few years has repeatedly mined the great COIN case studies of the British success in Malaya, the French failure in Algeria, and the tormented U.S. experience in Vietnam. Even the World War I-era sagacity of “Lawrence of Arabia” has been trotted out time and again as classic advice on how to pursue the task of understanding and overcoming insurgencies. Curiously missing from this frenetic interest in COIN theory, practice, and

doctrine has been the experience of a country that has fought many COIN campaigns from the very beginning of its existence to the present day-the Republic of India. This book focuses on India’s experiences with COIN in order to illuminate the lessons India’s COIN campaigns can contribute to the search for how best to prepare, equip, and utilize military and civilian personnel in waging this most difficult kind of conflict. The number, nature, and diversity of India’s COIN campaigns make the

Indian experience fighting insurgencies a rich collection of case studies on COIN that simply have not been sufficiently analyzed outside India. India has fought COIN campaigns from the mountains of its northeast provinces to the Vale of Kashmir to the jungles of Sri Lanka; it has confronted insurgencies inspired by tribal desires for independence, fueled by religious zealotry, driven

weaken allies is that India has faced these insurgencies as a democracy dedicated to civilian control of the military and the importance of the rule of law as a principle of governance. Analyses of India’s COIN campaigns by Indian experts, especially the works

of Rajesh Rajagopalan (2000, 2004, 2008) and Vivek Chadha (2005), have not been frequently (if at all) scrutinized by U.S. and European experts struggling to overcome the West’s decades-long neglect of COIN theory and practice. As John H. (Jack) Gill and David Lamm argue later in this volume (Chapter 10), “No evidence exists that insights gained from Sri Lanka, or any of India’s many internal COIN operations, have influenced any doctrinal thought in the U.S. military” (p. 174). Many reasons can be identified that help explain this neglect of India’s experiences in the Western discourse on COIN. To begin, all but one of India’s COIN campaigns have been fought inside India, whereas the U.S. and European heritage in the COIN context concerns fighting insurgencies far from home. The cool and prickly relationship India and the United States had during the Cold War may also be a factor in U.S. disinterest in India’s civilian and military history of countering insurgencies. Finally, much of the thinking and writing on COIN within India has

appeared in military publications (e.g. Journal of the United Services Institution of India, Indian Defence Review, Journal of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis) which are not often primary source material for Western analysts of security and military policy. Other relevant works are personal memoirs or journalistic accounts of specific campaigns written by key participants or investigative journalists, which also have been neglected except by specialists of Indian politics or South Asian security. The academic writings on COIN in India are also not extensive, which itself is curious given the sheer number of COIN operations India has undertaken, the dangers to the Republic the insurgencies have posed, and the controversies the insurgencies and the COIN campaigns have ignited in the Indian polity. Given this reality, we see this book as an opportunity to bring closer toge-

ther the intense U.S. and Western interest in COIN and India’s rich history of waging COIN campaigns. As described below, the book’s organization attempts to produce cross-fertilization by combining analyses from Indian practitioners and experts with reflections on the Indian experience by U.S. authors. This approach serves two policy-relevant purposes. First, the book makes

more accessible to Western audiences leading case studies of Indian COIN operations written by individuals who fought in COIN campaigns as officers in the Indian Army or as leaders of police forces. Through these case studies, the reader can learn how India approached its COIN conflicts and witness India’s triumphs and tragic mistakes across decades of Indian history. These lessons from India’s experience can feed into the iterative refinement of COIN theory, doctrine, and practice taking place in the United States and other

in the Second, the book’s substantive analysis speaks as well to India itself. The

“lessons learned” from these case studies matter as much, and probably more, for India as for any other country. The Indian and U.S. authors reveal serious problems that India still has not confronted effectively in how it prepares for and executes COIN campaigns. One of the haunting themes emerging from the renaissance of interest in COIN in the United States is that the U.S. military and civilian government agencies have proven very inept at learning the lessons of past COIN operations. The same theme appears time and again in the Indian case studies in this book. This reality is sobering for those in the United States attempting to integrate COIN learning into policy in more sustainable ways because it reveals a fellow democracy struggling rather unsuccessfully to pass on COIN wisdom and best practices to future leaders. In addition, the failure to learn from past mistakes is a wake-up call to Indian policy makers and military officers that perhaps the time has come to make more concerted efforts to avoid repeating the mistakes of yesteryear.