Aufstands- und Partisanenbekämpfung (COIN)

[Quintus Fabius]

COIN Lektionen aus Indien:

https://mwi.usma.edu/managing-violence-l...rom-india/

Lessons for the US Way of Warfare

As the dust settles on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the question of strategic patience in counterinsurgency—and whether “away teams” are ever truly able to exercise such patience in expeditionary campaigns—has resurfaced. Indeed, India’s position as the “home team” in this particular case is a clear point of contrast with the US experience. With both the watches and the time, India has been able to play the long game and act flexibly in managing violence in the northeast. As a politically peripheral region, India has far greater flexibility in rewriting rules, accepting trade-offs, pushing the envelope, and devising work-arounds with insurgents in the northeast than it does in priority areas, such as Kashmir. In this sense, its approach is insulated from the lurches between surge and total withdrawal that characterized US policy in Afghanistan.

Yet the Naga case nonetheless offers important lessons for US irregular warfare practitioners. As the ceasefire progressed, the rules of violence management quickly moved away from New Delhi’s preferred model of clearly defined ceasefire ground rules applicable across the region. But Indian practitioners adapted and devised new ways of competing with Naga insurgents within a broader framework of managed violence, recognizing insurgent influence and exercising restraint in certain areas while pushing back in others. The ability to adapt to and manage fluctuations in violence and faits accomplis on the ground is therefore a key prerequisite for sustained violence management. Adopting a flexible approach, and knowing exactly when and where to deploy the levers of force, restraint, and localized bargaining, requires that both political decision makers and military commanders have a deep understanding of the local context and an ability to read relations with armed actors at both the local and leadership level. It is this depth of understanding that has allowed New Delhi to play the long game, tiring insurgencies over time, demonstrating the effectiveness of overt and publicized restraint—calibrated with pinpoint military pressure—in successfully managing insurgencies in this way.