Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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khatvaanga
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by khatvaanga »

Deans wrote:I have only just seen this very informative thread. I have a large collection of books, mostly on Military history, history and Geopolitics.
I will keep posting recommendations starting with these. Both books on Amazon (hard copy and kindle).

1. The Saraswati Civilisation - Maj Gen, GD Bakshi.
This is his best researched work (though it can do with better editing). It completely changed my view of the Indus Valley civilization and the Aryan Invasion theory. In short - The Civilization along the banks of the Saraswati (the Indus was a tributary) preceded the Indus Valley and spread outwards. The civilization died when the flow of river water changed, but by then its influence had spread outwards.

2. The Battle for the Falklands, Max Hastings.
Britain's foremost military historian was an embedded reporter during the war. What made the book very interesting was that the first half was devoted to the political developments that led to war - how a decision by one side influenced the other to act, how wrong assumptions were made, what were the Argentine compulsions. The second half is a detailed account of each phase of the battle - one of the few that combined all three services and where the outcome hung in the balance. Written in an analytical non-jingo style, it devotes time to often overlooked parts of a war, such as mistakes made, the importance of logistics and Inter service coordination.

and I have your book sire 2022: India's 2 front war! loved it reading first time and jsut got it back from a friend to read it again especially now.
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Re: Book Review Folder - 2008/2009/2010/2011

Post by khatvaanga »

kancha wrote:[

On that note, do read 'Rogue State' by William Blum. Here's a review by a reader on Amazon :
Thanks for reco. wil read it.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Deans »

khatvaanga wrote:
Deans wrote:I have only just seen this very informative thread. I have a large collection of books, mostly on Military history, history and Geopolitics.
I will keep posting recommendations starting with these. Both books on Amazon (hard copy and kindle).

and I have your book sire 2022: India's 2 front war! loved it reading first time and jsut got it back from a friend to read it again especially now.


Thanks for your kind words Sir.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by khatvaanga »

Read a book "2034: A Novel of the next World War". Really well written about China taking on US in 2034 once they [China] are ready! Without any change in current paths of these countries, it would be really on dot as the novel suggests in 2034.

The biggest shocker for me is that India playing a MAJOR role in bringing about the war to an end! In the novel, we sink Chinese carrier and shoot out Amrikan planes loaded with nukes to prevent escalation and end-of-world. It does get the timelines right though... "20 years since Modi became PM and started modernizing their forces, India is a very different country than it was at the start of the century". felt good reading about it.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Deans »

Today's recommendations are about WW-2 in the Pacific.

Shattered Sword - Parshall and Tully.
Probably the best work on the Battle of Midway (the one that doomed Japan).
Not only an incredible amount of detail, but an analysis of why certain things were done the way they were. A lot of myths of the battle are carefully dismantled. The reader sees a clear connection between how Strategy leads to Doctrine, which influences Tactics. How small mistakes build up into disasters and what led to certain decisions being made.

Guadalcanal - Richard B Frank
The Guadalcanal campaign is comprehensively dealt with in this book. It interested me because the outcome of the war in the Pacific was in the balance at this stage and the campaign in Guadalcanal could have gone either way.
The Guadalcanal campaign also involved all services, with equally intense and uncertain battles on land sea and air. The book also highlight the importance of logistics and the difficulty of jungle warfare.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by jamwal »

Has anyone read or is willing to sell/share At The Forward Edge of Battle by Major General Syed Ali Hamid? A copy costs 3000+ and I don't really want to spend so much for a book written by a Pakistani armyman.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by chetak »

Who Killed Shastri, by Vivek Agnihotri - Review

Who Killed Shastri, by Vivek Agnihotri
(Amazon IN, Kindle, Flipkart)


Lal Bahadur Shastri, India’s second prime minister, died in Tashkent in the early hours of the 11th of January, 1966. This was shortly after he signed a peace accord between India and Pakistan, brokered by the Soviet Union. He was cremated in his hometown after his body was brought back to India. In case people are wondering, another prime minister from the Congress party, not from the Nehru dynasty, was denied a funeral in the national capital.

Regarding Shastri’s death, these are the only incontrovertible facts that people agree upon. Why is that? Because Indians, like everyone else, love a good conspiracy theory. Because conspiracy theories behind his death have been used to point fingers at the alleged role of foreign powers and the complicity of certain politicians and political families on the other. Because no one disputed the circumstances of his death till several years later, when it was politically expedient to do so.

Thus goes one line of argumentation.

Oh, by the way, no autopsy was conducted on Shastri’s body. This despite the fact that the Indian prime minister had died in a foreign country, not long after the nation had fought a war with its neighbour. Despite the fact that the late Prime Minister’s wife, Smt. Lalita Shastri, had asked for an autopsy, stating she believed that her husband had been murdered. No commission of inquiry was held to probe into the circumstances of his death to quash any such conspiracy theories. No documents are available with the Government of India about his death. No records exist with Parliament.

Shastri was a vegetarian. His last meal was prepared not by his personal cook, but by Jan Mohammed, who had been Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s cook and that ‘he was posted as T.N. Kaul’s cook in Moscow’.

Who was T.N. Kaul? He was India’s ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time? In Kuldip Nayyar’s words, in an interview he gave to the author, Kaul called him several times, asking him to put out a statement that would clear his name. This sowed the seeds of doubt in Nayyar’s mind that perhaps there was more it than met the eye. Or that Kaul refused to allow anyone to come near Shastri’s body, or his insistence that Nayyar give a statement that Shastri had died of a heart attack. Kaul was later appointed ambassador to the United States by Mrs. Indira Gandhi.

Before the prime minister’s visit to Tashkent, a DIG (Deputy Inspector General) had flown from India and approved the arrangements for Shastri’s stay in the tourist home, that had a provision for an operation theater ‘with oxygen and other fittings’. ‘But two days after his approval, ‘a particular gentleman’ from Moscow … a very big person … intervened’ and the location where Shastri was to stay changed. The Indira Gandhi-led government provided no response or information on who this person was.

Nor is the logbook that holds a record of the prime minister’s pulse, blood pressure, and other health indicators, and which is the government’s property, available. It is simply missing.

We must also ignore as unreliable and exaggerated the accounts of Robert Crowley, a CIA Clandestine Operations Division operative. Crowley spent his entire career with the Directorate of Plans, also known as the ‘Department of Dirty Tricks’. The recordings of the conversations Crowley had with Gregory Douglas, a journalist, are also of no value, particularly when Crowley tells Douglas that ‘We nailed Shastri as well’, or that Homi Bhabha was warned several times by the Americans to stop India’s nuclear bomb project. It should also be dismissed as pure coincidence that just two weeks after Shastri’s death, Homi Bhabha died when the Air India Flight 101, ‘Kanchenjunga’, on which he was traveling, crashed in the Alps, ostensibly due to a ‘pilot error’. Never mind that Crowley told Douglas that ‘his 707 had a bomb go off in the cargo hold… No real evidence and the world was much safer.’

Assassinations, or deaths under unnatural circumstances, are nothing new to either India or other countries. Just between 2009-2013, ‘as per the data furnished by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) in its response to an RTI query, … Eleven nuclear scientists in India have died under unnatural circumstances.’ It has elicited neither alarm nor an inquiry from successive governments.

A few years later, on the 30th of December 1971, Vikram Sarabhai, commonly referred to as the father of India’s space program and also the founding Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, was found dead in a hotel room at the Halcyon Castle in Kovalam. Like Shastri, his cremation was performed without an autopsy.

Vivek’s book follows a first-person point of view, with the author interlacing the narrative with the background of the movie; how the idea was seeded, what the research led to, how skepticism faded, and the imagining of the ending, the climax. After all, we still don’t know who killed Shastri. Whether his own ill-health, the trying circumstances of the times, poor judgment on the part of the medical staff present at the time, or a conspiracy, we are still struggling for answers and closure.

The movie released in April 2019. Since these were pre-Covid times, it saw a theatrical release but had to make do with a small release footprint of 250 screens, as opposed to more than a thousand screens that a typical, mainstream Bollywood release sees. In addition, it ran up against such movies as Karan Johar’s ‘Kalank’, ‘Avengers: Endgame’, and then the much hyped ‘Student of the Year 2’. It held its own, increased the number of screens it played at, and ended up as an unqualified commercial success, much to the dismay of those who had written off Vivek’s movie even before its release and one critic who had wished he could give the movie zero stars, without having seen the movie.

I would be remiss if I did not finish with one last factoid. Two pieces, in fact, about two persons.

Eleven years after Shastri’s death, in 1977, with a non-Congress party in power for the first time since Independence, Dr. R.N. Chugh, Shastri’s personal physician who accompanied the Prime Minister to Tahshkent and was present in the villa where he died, was summoned by a parliamentary body. On his way to parliament, in the heart of the national capital, the car in which he was traveling was hit by a truck. Only one person, a child, survived. Dr. R.N. Chugh died in that ‘accident’.

The second witness called to depose was Ram Nath, Shastri’s personal servant and present in the villa when Shastri died. He first visited 1, Motilal Nehru Marg, where Shastri’s widow lived. As he exited the bungalow, he was run over by a government bus. His legs were amputated, he went into a coma, lost his memory, and died a few months later.

All perfectly normal coincidences, all explainable as random occurrences. Nothing to investigate, nothing to question, nothing to fret over.
As for the book, it is a breezy, well-informed read, and keeps you turning the pages. It may also make you question the mainstream narrative that has been built over Shastri’s death. Do read this one. It gives you a ringside view into the making of a movie, the contours of a conspiracy that has remained hidden, and the making of a nation that cares little for either facts or its future.

This review was first published on Indic Today on November 15th, 2020.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Cyrano »

Spy vs Spy: ISI knew Kulbushan Jadhav was ‘small fry’, waited before snaring him, says new book
In the book 'Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI', the authors quote an unnamed colonel in the external intelligence wing of ISI as saying, “The ISI waited patiently, hoping to grow Jadhav into something special and then when he was big enough, as a target, ISI would pull him in."
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+ Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) knew Kulbushan Jadhav was “small fry” but waited to “manufacture a big, fat Indian catch”.
+ Indian intelligence agencies infiltrated Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani’s circles and waited for foreign militants to join him.
+ On the 26/11 attack, foreign agencies sent 18 detailed briefs, including likely targets in Mumbai, the number of attackers, their route, and method — but all this intelligence was “largely ignored”.

These are some of the claims in Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI, journalist couple Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s latest book, published by Juggernaut, on the alleged secret dealings of Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies.
While the authors have pieced together the anecdotes in the book from talking to several high-profile serving and retired spies, their main sources are two lesser-known, mid-level ex-officers, one in the ISI and the other R&AW. The ISI officer, identified by his nom de guerre ‘Major Iftikhar’, is supposed to have taken part in several ISI operations, including in Kashmir, before going rogue. The former R&AW officer, identified as ‘Monisha’, too got disillusioned by the agency she served and is now settled in the US, the authors write.
Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI is journalist couple Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s latest book, published by Juggernaut
On Jadhav — who was arrested in Balochistan in 2016 on charges of being an Indian spy and who has been languishing in a Pakistan jail since then — the authors write that ISI used the network of Uzair Baloch, a Karachi-based “landlord, trader, thug, local hero, robber, and philanthropist” with “deep connections into Iranian Baluchistan”, to spy in the Iranian port city of Chabahar.
Sometime in 2014, in a compound in Chabahar, the ISI “identified men they believed to be RAW officers and they puzzled over one repeat visitor they did not know… He was not an Iranian. But he appeared to be running a marine freight business from there,” the book quotes an ISI officer.
The authors quote an unnamed colonel in the external intelligence wing of ISI as saying, “The ISI waited patiently, hoping to grow Jadhav into something special and then when he was big enough, as a target, ISI would pull him in”.

The book says Jadhav was outraged by the Parliament attack of 2001 and offered to assist Indian agencies.
Four years after 26/11, Jadhav reported something that was too good to be true. “He told the people he was speaking to that he had managed to work his way into the Baloch family of Lyari. His contact was a nephew of Uzair Baloch,” says the book.
Jadhav had thus “been ensnared by the ISI which had been dangling the Baloch family, hoping he would bite… The game was on… a Karachi crime family serving ISI to buy their freedom; the ISI that wanted to manufacture a big, fat Indian catch”.
On Kashmiri militant and Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, whose killing in 2016 set off protests across the Valley, Levy and Scott-Clark say he could have been killed earlier, but Indian agencies had infiltrated his internal circle, and kept him under constant surveillance, using him to trap foreign militants.
“More people of every kind wanted in. Veterans risked the LoC crossing into India, without knowing that the NTRO and RAW were constantly monitoring them, Burhan Wani acting like flypaper for the Indian intelligence community,” they write.
Wani was shot dead on July 8, 2016, in a village named Bamdora, where he was hiding with some accomplices. “Outside the Valley, in New Delhi, something had shifted,” the journalists say.
On the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the authors say what “unfolded on 26/11 was so close to the intelligence excavated by Western agencies”, who had an undeclared, high value source in David Headley, the Pakistani-American Lashkar terrorist who is serving a prison sentence in the US.
Indian agencies had been told by the US to safeguard the targets — intelligence that went “largely ignored”.
The book quotes Monisha as saying, “I was unable to get traction in Lodhi Road [R&AW]… What mattered was whether India bothered to develop the intelligence from GCHQ and the NSA before the raid. Or did we fail, through laziness, or – worse still – by intent?”
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

Inside Central Asia: a political and cultural history of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran by Dilip Hiro
The former Soviet republics of Central Asia comprise a sprawling, politically pivotal, densely populated, and richly cultured area of the world. Yet they remain poorly represented in libraries and mainstream media. Since their political inception during the rule of Joseph Stalin, they have experienced tremendous socio-political change. But despite this, the growth of oil wealth, the arrival of Western tourists and businessmen, and the competition for influence by the U.S., China, and Russia, the spirit of Central Asia has remained untouched at its core. In this comprehensive up-to-date survey, renowned political writer and historian Dilip Hiro offers a lucid analytical narrative that places the present-day politics, economics, and peoples of Central Asia and neighbouring Turkey and Iran into an international context. Given the strategic location of this region, its predominantly Muslim population, and its hydrocarbon and other valuable resources, it is not surprising that this vast expanse of Eurasia is emerging as one of the most potentially influential - and coveted - areas of the globe.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »


The Indianized States of Southeast Asia by George Cœdès


Traces the story of India's expansion that is woven into the culture of Southeast Asia.
REVIEW

This remains the seminal work of its kind in the field and continues to be assigned by University professors around the world for use in Southeast Asian studies. Translated from Coedes native French, the book gives a clear and concise history of the Indianization process that occurred throughout South-East Asia in the first thousand years A.D. . Coedes is able to transcend the mist of time and make these civilizations come to life. He was among the first Western historians to realize that the Indianization process was not one of a dominant Indian culture supplanting an inferior Southeast Asian culture, but of two great cultures amalgamating into a vibrant new form. Coedes takes us through the magnificent ruins of the Angkorian empire, in the jungles of Cambodia, and makes the ruins speak to the modern reader. He shows how every part of these cities was immersed in religious symbolism and splendor. This book is valuable for both the general and student reader. For anyone interested in the history, art, or religion of Southeast Asia this book is a must-read.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by ramana »

The End of Empires: African Americans and India Gerald C Horne
Martin Luther King Jr.’s adaptation of Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance is the most visible example of the rich history of ties between African Americans and India. In "The End of Empires", Gerald Horne provides an unprecedented history of the relationship between African Americans and Indians in the period leading up to Indian independence in 1947. Recognizing their common history of exploitation, Horne writes, African Americans and Indians interacted frequently and eventually created alliances, which were advocated by W.E.B. Du Bois, among other leaders. Horne tells the fascinating story of these exchanges, including the South Asian influence on the Nation of Islam and the close friendship between Paul Robeson and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Based on extensive archival research in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom, The End of Empires breaks new ground in the effort to put African American history into a global context.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Sachin »

For all the Bandit-ji fans in this forum.
Nehru's 97 Major Blunders HB Hardcover.
Amazon Kindle version is also available. This chronicles the achievements of Bandit-ji in all spheres; such as 'freedom struggle', Kashmir problems etc. etc.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by kancha »

Finished reading 'Aavarana' by SL Bhyrappa some days back.
Totally mind-blowing. A must read.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Rudradev »

kancha wrote:Finished reading 'Aavarana' by SL Bhyrappa some days back.
Totally mind-blowing. A must read.
Available in English?
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Rupesh »

Rudradev wrote:
kancha wrote:Finished reading 'Aavarana' by SL Bhyrappa some days back.
Totally mind-blowing. A must read.
Available in English?
Yes. I had brought an English edition from Amazon.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by chetak »

Rudradev wrote:
kancha wrote:Finished reading 'Aavarana' by SL Bhyrappa some days back.
Totally mind-blowing. A must read.
Available in English?

adding to Rupesh ji's post above

"Aavarana" has been translated by Sandeep Balakrishna

This is Sandeep Balakrishna's outstanding and highly recommended website
(https://www.dharmadispatch.in)

Guys, please do visit and also donate to his website if you can. This guy is actively dharmic and very knowledgable



https://www.amazon.in/Aavarana-Veil-S-L ... 8129124882


About the Author
Dr. S.L. Bhyrappa is widely regarded as the greatest living novelist in Kannada. In a literary career spanning over fifty years he has authored twenty-two novels, which have been translated into most of the major Indian languages, including Urdu. His works have run into numerous reprints and have been the subject of numerous scholarly studies, as well as heated public debates. Of his books, Daatuwon the Sahitya Academy award while Mandrawon him the prestigious Saraswati Samman. He lives in Mysore.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by kancha »

Rudradev wrote:
kancha wrote:Finished reading 'Aavarana' by SL Bhyrappa some days back.
Totally mind-blowing. A must read.
Available in English?
Yes. Available on Amazon

Added later: I see others have already filled in with the details!
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Manmohan »

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Written by a serving Indian Army officer. Posting some excerpts here with the author's permission

AUTHOR’S NOTE


Not very long ago, I found myself serving in one of the many beautiful small towns that this great Nation of ours is blessed with, and with some spare time on hand. I finally had the opportunity to pen down certain thoughts that had been playing in my mind for the past few months, ever since the Pulwama Attack and later, the Balakot raid and the events that followed, right upto the abrogation of Article 370 and the events that followed in its wake.

To every single person who was following these events, it was quite apparent that something had changed. It was a change that was difficult to quantify, but it was amply clear that the established rules of the game had been thrown out of the window and a fresh set of rules brought in.

I didn’t intend to write this book as a purely academic one. Instead, I have chosen to write it in a free flowing narration with my personal take on things and opinions that I hold quite strongly.

I really do hope this book will help me make my point on this issue in a language that will be easy to comprehend.

Happy Reading!
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Manmohan »

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PREFACE


The day was 9th June 2015. A group of 64 or so of men, who were amongst India’s finest Special Forces troopers made their way into a small, nondescript village on the India-Myanmar border. Interestingly, they had come into the village not from the Indian side, but from Myanmar. Each and every one of them was dead tired, dehydrated and probably stinking too, given their dirty uniforms and the fact they hadn’t had a bath in the last three days despite it being the peak of Indian summer!

Yet, each and every one of them was in happy spirits. There was a shine of quiet contentment in their eyes. A contentment that comes from a job well done; of a mission successfully executed; of fallen comrades avenged.

It was a mere five days since 18 men of a battalion of The Dogra Regiment of the Indian Army had been ambushed in Chandel District of Manipur as they were in the process of deinduction after a successful tenure lasting almost three years. The sheer brutality of the ambush, and the large number of casualties to own troops had shocked not only the Nation, but the entire world as well. What fueled the rage was the assumption that going by past trends, there would be a lot of statements from official Govt channels and maybe a token operation, but nothing more than that.

Yet, here we were, with own men having gone right inside the lair of the enemy and sending an unmistakable message to those concerned.

Yes, they would done many successful operations in the past too.

Yet, this operation was vastly different from the earlier ones.

These content, but tired men didn’t know it yet, but they were the harbingers of a new, aggressive policy of Coercive Military Diplomacy that their Nation had apparently embarked upon.

They were the first visible signs of a sleeping giant that had finally awakened; of a Nation that was no longer content to punch way below its weight when it came to fighting the numerous proxy wars facing it at practically all its borders.
It was an operation that had been ordered at the very highest levels of the Govt of India, and personally overseen by the top echelons of political as well as military hierarchies. No compromises were made as far as the planning and preparation went. Whatever the team commander asked for, he was provided, including delaying the operation by two days.

It was indeed a bit different from previous such operations - A welcome change at that.

That things were far more different than merely this, became apparent soon enough after the successful execution of the operation and exfiltration of own troops into own territory (They were thereafter airlifted from the Indo-Myanmar border back to their base near Imphal).

This time the Govt of India did something it had never done before - It went public with an announcement through its Information Minister, Colonel Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore (Retired), that the Indian Army had successfully carried out a cross border operation against the insurgents that had ambushed the men of the Dogra battalion.

More than the military operation itself, however impactful it might have been, it was this official acknowledgement by the Govt of India that caused a lot of heads to turn in a lot of capitals all around the world. That it had been on Myanmar soil and not in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir too wasn’t lost on those who cared to see it for what it was.

And there was that proverbial ‘Chor ki Daadhi Mein Tinka’ (Translation: A guilty conscience needs no accuser) type reaction amongst a set of people within another Indian neighbour who had a lot of dirt hidden in plain view.

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This tweet above by a prominent Pakistani journalist, since deleted, explained the grudging unease felt more than 2,000 kilometres away from the scene of the deadly raid. They had just been given a glimpse of what this benign giant and its military to their east was capable of, in case it chose to.

And that day in June 2015, when the Indian Information Minister announced the raid in Myanmar, though coated in diplomatic niceties, it was more than apparent that it was going to be a different India from now on. An India that was briefly outraged when nine soldiers of a Gorkha battalion were similarly ambushed and killed in Churachandpur District in Manipur almost exactly a decade ago before moving on to other, more pressing issues of the day, had this time visited unprecedented retribution over the perpetrators.

Not just content with that much, this was the first glimpse of an India that had actually formally and officially owned such an operation across her borders.

As things in the coming days were to prove, this sense of unease amongst Pakistani elite was adequately justified, and with good reason. Pakistan has been, since its very birth, waging a proxy war against India in Kashmir - A war which refused to stay confined to Kashmir and instead, spilled over in form of all too frequent terror attacks in the Indian hinterland as well.

What gave her confidence to keep waging this relentless war was a benevolent India that despite its formidable military machine, chose to keep taking punches on her chin instead of taking the fight to the enemy. India continued its pursuit of growth and development.

This book intends to chronicle the changes in this strategy which have come about in the recent past.

My intention has been to write this book as much as an academic report as an emotional one. Emotional, because I too have been alternating between being an active and a passive participant in this war for nearly two decades now, losing many dear friends in the process and on more than one occasion, avoiding grave injury myself too. Thus, my own take on this is naturally coloured by my experiences and I don’t intend to expend much effort in tempering it down.

It has been a war that has bloodied the hands of countless Indian soldiers, including my own, but without showing any signs of abating. It has been a frustrating war because thus far the puppeteers were sitting safe in their own cozy little worlds, happy to dispatch their brainwashed puppets into India to do their dirty job.

Until they managed to wake up the sleeping giant, that is.

What follows in the coming pages is a soldier’s take on what just happened. I hope I have been able to do a good enough job of it to make it relatable for you.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Manmohan »

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WHAT IS COERCIVE MILITARY DIPLOMACY?


‘War is Continuation of Diplomacy by Other Means’

- Carl von Clausewitz


The quote above may seem a simple one, but it holds a really deep meaning indeed. It is a simple enough quote for the times that Clausewitz lived in – where the King was also the direct leader of the military. However, subsequent evolution of the ruling structures in the world led to the King being replaced by elected representatives of the people who would then govern them through elected legislatures, which also meant devolution of direct command of the military.

It is here where the use of military as an extension of diplomacy took the backseat in a large number of instances, with the military being relegated to an instrument of last resort instead.

This is exactly what this book is premised upon – about the Union of India once again making good use of her military might as part of the gross national power, when it comes to strengthening her diplomatic engagements in the long running Tango with the most belligerent of her neighbours – Pakistan.

So before moving ahead, let me attempt to define what exactly is meant by the term ‘Coercive Military Diplomacy’.

While the term itself is sort of self-explanatory, I tried to get a more academic kind of an answer to what it meant.

Like any good researcher, I did the first thing that came to my mind when I set about defining this term on which my book is premised – I went to the all knowing Google! But to my amazement, I didn’t find any particular reference to this phrase that I could quote here.

Thus, I’ll offer a definition based on my own perception of what it means – Coercive Military Diplomacy is the actual or threatened use of military force to induce modification in the behaviour of an adversary to one’s liking.

Now coming to why I chose to write on this topic has been somewhat explained by me in the beginning of this book. Adding further thoughts to it, it has been a very interesting study in contrasts when one observes the terror campaign perpetrated by Pakistan against India, especially the one in Kashmir since 1989, with attendant terror attacks in other parts of India as well.

Over the past three decades or so, India, despite a formidable military machine, has primarily been in a reactionary mode to cross border terrorism from Pakistan.

It is an open secret that Pakistan Army has been actively training and infiltrating terrorists into the Indian territory of Jammu & Kashmir through the Line of Control. Yet till recently, the Indian Army had been in a merely reactionary mode, with the result that the initiative continued to remain with Pakistan – they could calibrate the tempo of their terror campaign as per their own circumstances and preferences while the Indian Army remained deployed on their own side of the border, waiting to see what came their way next.

In the midst of this Tango, an important event happened in 1998 that gave further wings to the Pakistan Army’s ambitions – Nuclear weapons tests by both, India and Pakistan.

First inkling of their newly found confidence came about less than a year after the tests, in the form of the Kargil War. While the democratically elected Prime Minister of Pakistan was engaged in an initiative aimed at bringing much needed peace in the neighbourhood, his Chief of Army Staff, General Pervez Musharraf was busy intruding his troops across the Line of Control into Indian territory.

Enough has been written about the Kargil War that followed, so I am not going to spend much time on that except for highlighting the fact that the Indian Army and Air Force were explicitly forbidden from crossing the Line of Control as they went about their business of throwing out the Pakistani troops back to their own side. ,

Yes, India chose to exercise restraint and kept the war localized, even if at immense material and human cost. Of course, the very fact that the Government of India chose to escalate to use of air power, in itself constituted a major step towards coercive military diplomacy, even if in a reactionary situation. Pakistan was to grudgingly acknowledge later that in their scheme of things, India wasn’t supposed to react this violently to their unilateral attempt at altering the situation on the Line of Control, thereby leading to yet another military slap on Pakistan Army’s face!

Yet, there was a relatively unknown side effect to the Kargil War, apart from the coup in Pakistan, of course!

It so happened that the Pakistan Navy Chief had to resign right after the Kargil War, thanks to the aggressive posturing by the Indian Navy during the war, to which the Pakistan Navy had no reply.

However, despite the military humiliation in Kargil, the self-restraint exercised by India also apparently gave confidence to the Pakistani security establishment that India was not likely to escalate in case the provocations were kept below a certain threshold.
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Carrying on from the excerpts posted above
The aftermath of the hijacking of IC-814 flight in December 1999 wherein personnel of Pakistan Embassy in Kathmandu were revealed to have provided material assistance to the hijackers further bolstered this perception.

Thus began a campaign of terror attacks in the Indian hinterland, mostly with bomb blasts in crowded places. Some of the biggest ones amongst them, in order of chronology, were the car bomb attack at the Jammu and Kashmir State Legislative Assembly Complex on 01 Oct 2001, the suicide attack on the Indian Parliament on 16 Dec 2001, the Kaluchak massacre on 14 May 2002, Mumbai train blasts on 11 Jul 2006 and finally, the infamous 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks.

Of these, the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks very nearly breached the limit of India’s perceived threshold which had otherwise absorbed all prior provocations without much overt reaction. India came close to mounting a military response to these attacks which were different from the others listed above in that they continued for more than 48 hours, with visuals being telecast far and wide all across the world media.

Yet, India chose not to do so, for reasons best known to those in the corridors of power.

But something had definitely given way, for Pakistan never attempted a major terror attack in the Indian hinterland after that. Hereafter, the focus shifted on attacking Indian security forces’ convoys and garrisons within the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir, apart from the already ongoing operations on the Line of Control.

In addition to this, came the instances of beheadings and mutilations of the mortal remains of dead Indian soldiers on the Line of Control; with the most infamous / publicized amongst those being the beheadings of Lance Naik Hemraj and Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh of a Rajputana Rifles battalion of the Indian Army by Pakistan Army on 08 Jan 2013.

At the cost of repetition, it is once again re-emphasized that these provocations remained confined to either the Line of Control or within the hinterland of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan had correctly anticipated that these would remain within the supposed ‘tolerance threshold’ of India.

This is not to say that the Indian Army didn’t retaliate appropriately, or in some cases, even disproportionately. This part is covered subsequently in the book.

In the midst of all this, what was, to some, unclear, was the reason why India wasn’t being more aggressive in responding to such brazen provocations by Pakistan.

I intend not to delve on this question in the course of this book because firstly, it is moot at this point in time, and secondly, all I can do is speculate since I have no knowledge of what factors were at play when the decision makers chose this approach.

At the same time, there can be no doubt that even while choosing to merely react to Pakistani provocations, India still retained a huge military advantage over her belligerent neighbour. In fact, it is a testament to this fact that Pakistan too, chose to keep her provocations deliberately below the perceived Indian tolerance threshold in what is commonly described as the ‘War Avoidance’ strategy.

It was the perfect plan for the Pakistani security establishment.

Indeed, it was .. till the time it slowly but surely unravelled right in their face as India decided enough was enough!
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THE ‘NOT SO SUBTLE’ PUSHING OF THE ENVELOPE

The ‘Sleeping Giant’ slowly started to come out of its slumber sometime in 2014.
Thus far, Pakistan had pretty much gotten away with murder, and much worse, as has
been recounted in the previous section of this book. Despite the obvious advantages
across practically every spectrum of military capability, India had thus far been content to play the role of the ‘benign big brother’, giving pass after pass to the delinquent junior.

Even provocations as grave as the Parliament Attack or the 26/11 Mumbai
Attacks had failed to provoke the then Govts of India enough to retaliate in a way that would get the conventional military might of the Union of India to bear on Pakistan.

Instead, atleast in these two cases, the ‘retaliation’ came about in the forms of the
inconclusive Operation Parakram[5] and sending to Islamabad, dossiers containing
evidence of perpetrators based inside Pakistan respectively.

Unsurprisingly, Pakistan remained convinced that in terms of cost benefit
analysis, the continued terror export was an exercise which was far beneficial for it.

With such grave provocations refusing to shake the gentle giant next door from
its slumber, the ever increasing shallow cross-LoC raids coupled with mutilation /
beheadings of mortal remains of dead Indian soldiers too carried on with reckless
abandonment.

It was a win-win situation for Pakistan, in that the pains inflicted on India were
there for the entire world to see, thanks to the raucous Indian media landscape while on the other hand, Indian retribution (which, by the way, inevitably followed), was summarily dismissed as fake by the Pakistan Army which practically rules the country with an iron hand.

As a result, Pakistani citizenry only came to know about the ‘valour’ of their
‘invincible’ army and none of the pain inflicted by India in return.

This template suited the Pakistan Army just fine. The pain that they were
subjected to was never made known to their own citizenry, not just by themselves but also by India, which somehow was content to visit retribution on them, but without making it public.

Now why was this policy adopted by the Govt of India can be debated till time’s
end, but that is not what concerns me as I author this book. What matters instead, is the fact that this was the policy of the Govt of India, whatever might be the reason. That it suited Pakistani narrative may have been purely incidental.

The Pakistan Army couldn’t have asked for anything better, especially since they
are masters at not just hiding their own casualties, but at times, even unconcerned
about them, as was more than adequately demonstrated during the Kargil War when
they not only refused to acknowledge the presence of their own regular troops, but even refused to take back their mortal remains, many of which continue to remain buried on the Indian side of the LoC even today.[6]

All in all, things were quite comfortably set in a predictable routine - Pakistan
would provoke, and even kill Indian soldiers. In return, Indian Army would retaliate, but not acknowledge the same (more on this further in this book). As a result, what the world at large, and Pakistani population in particular would see was ‘spectacularly successful’ operations mounted by the Pakistan Army against a much larger adversary.

The entire situation, absurd as it may look, worked to the perceived advantages
of both neighbours. As far as Pakistan was concerned, her army was able to maintain
its status as being the only functional instrument of State that was virtually ruled by the military establishment in any case. In the case of India too, local level retaliatory actions ensured adequate retribution while the Nation at large concentrated on growing economically.

Pakistan had learnt to calibrate its actions and counter-actions in a way so as to
remain below her perceived threshold of Indian tolerance. They had learnt their lessons well, thanks to the Parliament Attack, the Kaluchak Massacre and the 26/11 Attacks in Mumbai. The ladder of escalation was firmly under Pakistan’s control.

However, it all changed in Oct 2014.

The Pakistan Rangers had, in yet another round of cross border firing across the
International Boundary in Arnia Sector near Jammu, opened unprovoked fire targeting India’s Border Security Force (BSF) positions as well as civilian areas on the night of 05/06 Oct 2014. The night long firing resulted in the deaths of seven civilians on the Indian side.[7]

Now where earlier India would normally respond by firing back on the positions of
Pakistan Rangers in the localized area of provocation, this time the chosen
methodology of the Indian retaliation was different.

It was the first sign that the benevolent giant had had enough of its pesky
neighbour.
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THE PAKISTANI (MIS)INFORMATION WARFARE


History bears witness to the fact that physical warfare has been accompanied with disinformation and deception. From ‘Ashwatthama is Dead’ in Mahabharat, to Goebbels and ‘Baghdad Bob’ in more modern times, lies have been used fairly liberally to either ensnare a wily enemy or to keep own people in dark in case the war is going against oneself.

This is quite true in the India-Pakistan ‘Tango’ as well, especially due to the wide disparity in conventional military capability due to which the results of practically each and every military engagement between India and Pakistan since the very birth of Pakistan in 1947 have gone against it.

To that end, lying to their own populace is justifiable. It is something that a weaker military that literally rules over its country may be excused for resorting to, in order to save its face and ensure its primacy in the political scene that ultimately enables it to appropriate a lion’s share of the meagre government revenues that Pakistan collects.

Before I move ahead, I’ll just lay out some of the ‘popular’ myths that Pakistanis believe to be gospel truth, thanks to their Army that has fed them such lies:

1. 1947-48 War: Pakistan government / army was not involved in any capacity whatsoever, neither in the initial ‘tribal’ invasion, nor in subsequent military operations.

2. 1965 War:

a) Pakistan won the war.
b) India ‘betrayed’ Pakistan by opening up a front on the International Boundary just as Pakistan was about to liberate Kashmir.
c) Squadron Leader MM Alam became an ace pilot in a single sortie when he shot down five IAF Hunter aircraft within a span of 28 seconds!

3. 1971 War:

a) Pakistan lost East Pakistan due to the treachery of the Bengalis.
b) There was no genocide / rapes carried out by Pakistan Army in the days leading up to the war.

4. 1999 Kargil War:

a) There were no regular Pakistan Army troops on the hills across the LoC. Instead it were just ‘highly motivated freedom fighters’.
b) Despite the above ‘fact’, Pakistan would still have won the Kargil War had Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif not panicked and gone to the USA to seek an immediate ceasefire.

The above lies are far too blatant, yet prolific in general Pakistani narrative, for me to deem them worthy of citing any sources for them. So I will just leave it at that.

Of course, there are other, smaller lies as well. For example, that Pakistan Army is deployed on the Siachen Glacier instead of the lower reaches of the Saltoro Ridge from where it actually can’t even see the Siachen Glacier!

However, for the purpose of this chapter, I shall concentrate on the web of lies that they spun in the aftermath of the Balakot Strike and subsequent shooting down of an F-16 a day after that, and the desperate ‘info warfare’ campaign that followed in the days and months after that.

Their very first acknowledgement of the Balakot strike commenced with a lie that IAF fighters had been chased away, being forced to drop their ordnance in the open that led to destruction of nothing more than a few trees when in true ‘Goebbelist’ style, Major General Asif Ghafoor tweeted from the official handle of DG ISPR, photos of Indian bombs that had supposedly ‘fallen in the open’.

So this was going to be the party line of Pakistan hereinafter. So much so, that less than 72 hours after the strike, the Pakistani Federal Minister and Adviser to Prime Minister of Pakistan for Climate Change, Mr Malik Amin Aslam accused India of ‘eco-terrorism’ for bombing a reserve forest and threatened to complain against India in the UN for waging environmental terrorism by causing the uprooting of ‘dozens of pine trees’!

Sadly, no such complaint was made!
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Another lie that went hand in hand with the above lie was that there was no such terror camp at the site. Instead, Pakistan claimed it was just another madrasa, like the hundreds of thousands of others dotting that country. Satellite images too showed the structures standing as they were before 26th Feb, notwithstanding the clear-cut holes in the roofs from where the ordnance dropped by the Indian Air Force had entered them, with pinpoint accuracy.

However, there were two important facts that put paid to both these counterpoints by Pakistan. Firstly, Pakistan immediately sealed off the area that the IAF had come visiting and secondly, it did not allow any access to any kind of media / diplomatic personnel for the next 42 days. Thereafter too, all it offered was a conducted tour wherein the Pakistan Army decided where the visitors could go and what they could see.

This inordinate delay gave rise to a lot of well justified speculation in all quarters about the true intentions of the Pakistan Army. If there was no terror camp and a mere madrasa and that too, without any damage whatsoever, as they claimed, then why this delay of 42 days in taking media / diplomats to the location, and that too on a strictly chaperoned visit?

Might the 42 days’ delay have been on account of the time taken to repair the damage and recreate a non-existent madrasa? After all, why would a madrasa that imparts education to children, be located hours away from the nearest settlement?

Of course, the web of contradictory statements and lies that defined Pakistani response in light of the failed riposte of Feb 27, coupled with the loss of a twin seater F-16 aircraft was in a league of its own. From reporting three pilots shot down to two captured to one dead in a military hospital, the DG ISPR finally corrected himself to say that Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was the only pilot in Pakistani custody.

I shall not talk any more about it here since the blatant attempts to hide their own loss of F-16 and death of atleast one of its two pilots in the initial hours of that engagement says enough. Instead, what I intend talking about here is the ‘efficacy’ of the ‘Info Warfare Campaign’ unleashed by Pakistan in the face of hard power wielded by the Indian armed forces.

That Pakistan would react to the Indian actions was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately for them, the result of such reaction too was unsurprising, given similar results in practically every military engagement between the two neighbours.

Understandably, the Pakistan establishment went into a propaganda overdrive in the immediate aftermath, in order to ensure that once the dust settled, there would be so much ‘noise’ in the information sphere that the truth will get drowned. To that end, a glut of articles in foreign publications followed, as also by individual foreign journalists on a variety of other platforms.

Quite predictably, Pakistani establishment succeeded in convincing its citizenry about its own version of the events of 26th and 27th Feb 2019. The war of narratives had been convincingly won by the Pakistan Army led establishment, atleast within the Pakistani borders.

However, there was one big catch in this plan.

Hard power is a pre-requisite to make the ‘enemy’ act to your will. But this was not the case with Pakistan. Having delivered what she deemed suitable punishment for the Pulwama Attack and shooting down an F-16 a day later, India chose to ignore the fake narratives being peddled by Pakistan, especially since Pakistan was spooked into releasing Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman post haste under the threat of further punishment, this time in a form that couldn’t be hidden away from her own populace!

Pakistan’s case was further weakened when despite the shrill rhetoric coming from practically every part of the government and military establishment, there was absolutely no response, or even an acknowledgement from the Indian side as they went about the business of organizing and conducting the general elections to the lower house of the Indian Parliament.

However, that the Government of India chose to ignore the ‘Information Warfare’ from across didn’t mean that the media and citizenry of India too followed suit. In the weeks and months that followed, the online landscape was filled with factual and point-to-point rebuttals to Pakistani lies.

Where the initial days of propaganda warfare were undoubtedly ‘won’ by Pakistan, what followed was a relentless ‘counter attack’ by Indian analysts and media that ultimately ended up putting Pakistan on the back foot. In fact, such was the depth of such analyses, that one person even dissected all grainy videos of the aerial engagement frame by frame as he went about debunking the Pakistani myths based on such evidence from within Pakistan. ,

A lie may run fast, but it can never run far!
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Carrying on from the previous post
This is exactly what happened with the Pakistani ‘Information Warfare’ campaign in the aftermath of the Balakot strike and the subsequent aerial battle a day later. For every myth propagated by the Pakistani establishment, there is now a plethora of factual rebuttals right on its tail.

However, to be fair, the Pakistani establishment succeeded atleast partially, in that their own population never got to know of their failure and was in a state of ecstasy at having defeated Indian in the aerial engagement of 27th Feb 2019. This so-called ‘victory’ included the shooting down of a Sukhoi-30 MKI aircraft of the Indian Air Force along with Wing Commander Abhinandan’s MiG-21. Icing on the cake for them was the inadvertent shooting down of an IAF Mi-17 chopper near Srinagar, in Budgam, in an unfortunate friendly fire incident.

Of course, as per the lies fed to them, even the Balakot airstrike had been an abysmal failure wherein the IAF had been successfully chased away by the PAF!

But the utter uselessness of such a campaign without any real power to back it up was soon apparent.

All this fake bravado and the stories of a non-existent victory over India came back to haunt Pakistan less than six months later.

The Government of India of Feb 2019 won the next general elections and came back to power with an even greater majority. One of the agendas in the poll manifesto of the ruling political party was the abolition of Articles 370 and 35A of the Constitution of India that gave limited autonomy to the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir and special rights and privileges to its permanent residents respectively.

This promise was made good by the now ruling party of India on 05 August 2019 when the government successfully abrogated both these articles of the Constitution of India.

The Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir ceased to exist in its earlier form that day onwards. Instead, it was broken down into two Union Territories - Jammu & Kashmir, and Ladakh, and formally absorbed into the Union of India as any other Union territory, i.e. without any special status / privileges.

Quite predictably, a wave of hysteria swept across Pakistan.

Along with that wave came an unyielding expectation from the average Pakistani citizen that the time had come for their armed forces to finally liberate Kashmir. The results of the battles / wars that these same armed forces had fought for the same cause a number of times before didn’t matter. What mattered instead was the still fresh memories of the humiliation heaped upon the Indian Armed Forces in the month of Feb 2019!

Hashtags such as #KashmirParFinalFight, #SaveKashmirSOS and #PakArmyRetaliateAgainstIndia started trending in Pakistan social media landscape amongst other trends.

The Pakistani propaganda machinery was caught in its own web of lies!

They knew that they had absolutely no hard power to fulfill any such demand by their increasingly agitated populace. The Pakistani ISPR led propaganda machinery kicked into gear in order to mellow down / divert public anger by initiating some milder forms of trends weren’t overtly militaristic.

Some days later, on 15th Aug 2019, none other than the DG ISPR, Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor implicitly acknowledged that the leading trend in Pakistan twitter landscape - #15AugustBlackDay - had been initiated on the anniversary of Indian independence by his establishment when he tweeted a note of thanks to his fellow Pakistanis for trending the same.

However, it was still not clear where was this ‘information war’ initiated by Pakistan headed, especially when the Prime Minister of India, despite his many public appearances / speeches hadn’t even once mentioned the word Pakistan!

To be charitable to the Pakistani establishment, it did seem to keep the outrage within their borders channelized to some extent in the form of some sort of instant gratification and perhaps, a notion of victory as well, by ensuring that their preferred social media hashtags trended within their country and in some cases, outside as well.

But this enterprise grew even more absurd when Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan appealed for the citizens of his country in the last week of August to henceforth stop doing whatever they were at noon every Friday and come out on the streets for thirty minutes to show solidarity with the Kashmir cause.

This was not meant to be a one day affair, mind you, but a weekly affair instead!

In essence, the Prime Minister had appealed to his countrymen to stop all economic and other activities for half an hour every week!

In my opinion, it might have been a ploy to appeal to the world powers in his upcoming speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019. Yet, this too failed since the very demand that the Pakistani Prime Minister made of his fellow citizens was something that was just not sustainable

Unsurprisingly, it fizzled out soon enough!

As I write this chapter almost exactly one year after the abrogation of Article 370, I can say with full satisfaction that soft power, even if an assumed one as in Pakistan’s case, stands nowhere if not backed by hard power – economic as well as military. The erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir no longer exists and the two successor Union Territories of the Government of India are gearing up to celebrate the first anniversary of the announcement that led to their establishment, while the Pakistani establishment is once again gearing up to run hashtag campaigns on Twitter and other social media platforms.
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Thank you Manmohanji for your excerpts, very interesting reading.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Reputation and Civil War: Why Separatist Conflicts Are So Violent by Barbara F. Walter
Of all the different types of civil war, disputes over self-determination are the most likely to escalate into war and resist compromise settlement. "Reputation and Civil War" argues that this low rate of negotiation is the result of reputation building, in which governments refuse to negotiate with early challengers in order to discourage others from making more costly demands in the future. Jakarta's wars against East Timor and Aceh, for example, were not designed to maintain sovereignty but to signal to Indonesia's other minorities that secession would be costly. Employing data from three different sources - laboratory experiments on undergraduates, statistical analysis of data on self-determination movements, and qualitative analyses of recent history in Indonesia and the Philippines - Barbara F. Walter provides some of the first systematic evidence that reputation strongly influences behavior, particularly between governments and ethnic minorities fighting over territory.
Sort of explains the Paki problem.
It's from seeking an identity apart from India.
Yet can't be apart.
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I was browsing through Khan Market's two major bookstores last week, looking for the books mentioned here. Most are not available, sadly.

What was interesting though, was the fact that the shelves were full of the works of Irfan Habib, Romila Thapar, Ravish Kumar, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyaya, Dalrymple and all the usual suspects. No wonder they call it the 'Khan market crowd'. It was hard to find anything pro-India or pro-BJP or pro-Modi, bar a few writers. On RSS, there were several books, the most prominent being by this same Mukhopadhyaya guy, all very much anti-RSS. The only favorable one I found was by Ratan Sharda, so I bought it.
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Try Amazon India
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Carrying on from the previous post, adding one more sequence of excerpts from the Swift Retort chapter with the author's permission.

Visual. And locked.

- Wing Commander Abhinandan
Varthaman, Vir Chakra, 27 Feb 2019 [91]


The morning of 27th February 2019 dawned as usual, with accusations and counter-accusations about the strike at the Balakot terror camp still flying thick and fast, as they had been since the last 24 hours. Social media too was a virtual battle zone of its own, with a battle of narratives and hashtags being waged by people from both sides of the Indo-Pak border (more on this later in this book).

However, all this changed as the morning wore on.

At about 10 am, there started appearing a few ‘unconfirmed’ reports about an Indian Air Force jet having crashed in Jammu and Kashmir. At the same time, some were mentioning that it was a helicopter that had crashed instead.

Soon the social media on Pakistani side started reporting about an Indian jet having been shot down and the pilot, named ‘Abhinandar’ (sic), captured by the Pakistan Army.

It took a while before the fog started to lift and things started becoming clearer. At 11:08am IST, the handle of a prominent news channel reported that the IAF had confronted and pushed back Pakistani jets that had attempted to ingress into Indian airspace in Lam and Krishna Ghati Sectors along the LoC. At about the same time, an Indian journalist tweeted that an Indian Air Force Mi-17 helicopter had crashed in Budgam, near Srinagar.

Soon thereafter, two things happened – The aerial action that took place was confirmed by both sides; yet there ended up being more confusion as accounts of India and Pakistan soon diverged diametrically when it came to announcing the outcome of the said engagement.

Here is what had actually transpired that morning.

The Pakistan Air Force had launched a surprise strike at two Brigade Headquarters and an ammunition dump of the Indian Army in vicinity of the Line of Control.

The total package that they had put together for this strike amounted to 28 aircraft, supported by an Airborne Early Warning (AEW) and an Electronic Warfare platform that converged over the target area from different vectors with the aim of achieving a favourable air situation for the duration of the engagement.

What helped them in this endeavour was the fact that both, the IAF as well as the PAF had been doing extensive flying near the border areas since the Pulwama Attack. In fact, the IAF too had used this enhanced aerial activity to mask its true intentions when it went in to attack Balakot, by feigning an imminent attack on Jaish ’e Mohammad’s Headquarters in Bahawalpur.

The likely aim of the PAF on the morning of 27th Feb 2019 can be surmised as under (especially with the benefit of hindsight today):-

1. Avenge the humiliation of having been caught sleeping when the IAF struck Balakot.
2. Send a strong message to India that the PAF is a potent force, by bombing targets across the LoC.
3. While at it, attempt and shoot down a Sukhoi 30 MKI aircraft of the IAF in order to gain moral ascendancy in the skies. (Sukhois, prized and most potent of all Indian aircraft, were being regularly flown near the borders by the IAF in the aftermath of the Pulwama Attack).
4. Keep the engagement localized, rapidly disengage and prevent escalation.

Let me take some time to analyze what I wrote above, before moving on to how the engagement actually played out. As I wrote in the previous chapter, the Balakot strike was just too ‘spectacular’ an event for Pakistan to simply wish away, as they had been able to do in the case of the surgical strikes in Uri some years ago. It seems that their polity finally took a call to retaliate in the way it did because the cost of not doing so would have been much higher, domestically, and would have eroded the image of the Pakistan Army amongst the populace - something which was utterly unacceptable.

Now the choice of targets, alongwith their geographical location makes for an interesting analysis as well. It is safe to assume that they hoped to keep the escalation localized to Jammu & Kashmir, instead of risking a spillover across the International Boundary, as had been their (unsuccessful) plan in the days leading up to the 1965 India-Pakistan War. This time, an additional factor that they either failed to note, or willfully ignored, was the fact that the IAF had already breached the International Boundary by attacking Balakot.

In addition, by choosing to ignore the fact that India had, in fact, deliberately chosen a non-military target that directly threatened her security, Pakistan instead focused on the fact that Indian had violated its sovereignty in doing so, and chose to attack Indian military installations in retaliation. The fact that Pakistan had itself not only failed to act against the terror factories within its boundaries that routinely targeted India, but on the other hand, actually nurtured and sheltered them, was given a deliberate miss.

In short, Pakistani military had chosen to retaliate to an attack on behalf of the terrorists it had nurtured!
Will add more excerpts from this chapter in the next few days
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ramana wrote:Try Amazon India
I usually do that, but did not have time to order and wait for shipping. Generally I order before I leave the US and have them ship it to a relative. Too late this time.
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Primus wrote:
ramana wrote:Try Amazon India
I usually do that, but did not have time to order and wait for shipping. Generally I order before I leave the US and have them ship it to a relative. Too late this time.
Primus Ji, this one is available as paperback on amazon.com as well!
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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https://thecritic.co.uk/between-war-and-empire/
Between war and empire
Jeremy Black weighs in on two recent historiographical offerings

BOOKS
By

Jeremy Black
15 November, 2020
Harper offers an excellent work that draws on his great understanding of South-East Asian history and provides an arresting account of a strand in imperial history.

Whereas his co-written Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars were each somewhat weak as military history, this new book superbly captures its topic, ranging widely to consider anti-imperial history and also to link it into the wider geopolitical and ideological themes of the period, including nationalism, great-power competition and the impact of Communism.

Contextualisation in my view trumps unilinear approaches

The tales of particular careers and episodes, for example the Singapore rising of 1915, are well-handled. So also, with imperial concerns about assassination. There is also a good handling of racism, although I would have preferred much more on imaginative literature. Thus, Fu Manchu receives far too little attention, and, more generally, it would have been useful to know much more about publications and across a range of mediums. That, indeed, would be a worthwhile follow-upproject.

This is also necessary because the central problem of all such studies, one that Harper understands and ably probes, is how to move from an assemblage of particular networks of rebellion to grasp wider questions of the stability of empire. Here it would have been useful to look at other sources.


Underground Asia. Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire by Tim Harper.
London, 2020. £35.00.
For example, as also in his earlier work, there is much more to be said about the military dimension. Here again, it is necessary to cite with caution. Thus, in 1922, at the time of the Chanak Crisis, which is of relevance to this book even though in South-West Asia, Lord Rawlinson, Commander-in-Chief India, warned about the danger of conflict spreading across the Islamic world: “To undertake offensive action against the Turk is merely to consolidate a Pan-Islamic movement,” a threat that also concerned the General Staff in London.

So, empire at risk; but, in practice, read across the breadth of military correspondence, the overall emphasis is less on insurrection than on external threats. And so also for France, which in the 1920s faced rebellions, including in Syria and Vietnam, but was primarily concerned about Italian volatility under Mussolini and also the danger of Italian-Spanish co-operation. Harper might well disagree, and there is room for a debate, but it is disappointing not to see such a discussion given real prominence in this excellent work. Contextualisation in my view trumps unilinear approaches, let alone “thick history” however widely the latter is defined.

I agree entirely that the “Cold War” should have a longer duration, and, indeed, argued this in my book on the subject. It in practice began with the Russian Civil War, but Harper skilfully interleaves it with a number of passages to radicalism, including communism, “Islamism” and Sikh militancy, although more attention could also have been devoted to the respective “internationals” of religious thought and practice. More generally, the international dimensions of a subject too often treated in terms of national narratives emerges very well in Harper’s study, but some of the judgments could do with qualification. Thus, “the colonialism of the 1930s was shot through with nostalgia,” is only true to a point as such an assessment underplays development strategies.

The routine abuse of prisoners by other inmates is itself a serious problem in modern India

Or of the remote Dutch detention camp at malarial Boven Digoel in New Guinea: “in colonial Asia in the 1930s such places multiplied, a premonition of the new camps that were opening in Europe”; actually no, not at all like the Soviet gulags or the Nazi regimen. Take, for example, the Cellular Jail built by Britain between 1896 and 1906 at Port Blair on South Andaman Island for political detainees deported from mainland India. In 1921, following revelations of brutality by prison guards, it was decided to end the transportation of prisoners to Port Blair and to repatriate the political prisoners to mainland Indian jails. However, in turn, overcrowding in mainland jails resulted in a revival of the transportation of non-political prisoners, while political violence in India led to the dispatch of political detainees to the jail. This was contentious, notably because of hunger strikes in 1933 and 1937 against conditions there. As a result of this controversy, political prisoners were returned to mainland India.

In the Cellular Jail, as now presented to visitors, the harsh nature of the prison regime, and thus allegedly of imperial rule by Britain, is demonstrated by both commission and omission. There is a presentation of single cells and the consequent night-time solitary confinement as abuses designed to break the spirit of prisoners, and not an explanation that these were then advanced practice and likely to lessen the serious risks of the spread of infection.

The routine, and sometimes deadly, abuse of prisoners in shared cells by other inmates is itself a serious problem in modern India (and elsewhere), although the well-connected do not tend to go to prison or, indeed, face the risk of conviction. Far from being a matter simply of colonial control, moreover, the Cellular Jail was constructed on lines similar to Pentonville prison in London, which had been opened in 1842, and was considered state-of-the-art, as it indeed was.

Present-day information for visitors to the Cellular Jail praise the hunger strikers as courting “martyrdom,” refers to “brutal and sadistic torture,” and describe the work that detainees did as “soul shattering” and “intended to function as a form of torture.” This approach scarcely captures the extent to which such work was fairly typical for prison regimes, and in both domestic and imperial contexts. There is a life-size model of a prisoner being flogged, as well as the remains of the gallows. Displays provide highly emotive comments:

Living hell … today a sacred place … the everlasting flame for achieving freedom … holy fire in memory of freedom fighters who died here … so that future generations could know about the revolutionary freedom movement and appreciate the tremendous cost at which our independence was achieved.

These iniquities were driven home for those who could not travel to Port Blair in a 1996 film by Priyadarshan, a film entitled Kaalapani in Malayalam and Siraichalai in Tamil. Expounding through history the value of independence, the jail now serves as an account both of a valiant struggle for freedom and of the harshness of imperial rule, the latter apparently demonstrating the need for this freedom.

The imperial perspective, understandably, is absent. That some of the cases for which prisoners were imprisoned at Port Blair, for example the Lahore Conspiracy case of 1915, occurred when Britain was involved in World War One, in which many Indian volunteers fought for the empire, is not brought out. Nor is the point that the murderers of judges generally are not treated as heroes.

A fascinating book, and a useful angle on empire, but incomplete

Moreover, other Indian perspectives are not considered at the jail. In practice, indeed, Indians disagree about the unity and heroic status of the prisoners. For example, the shock created for the prisoners by losing caste in being sent to prison meant more to some Indians than others and is not mentioned in the jail. Caste rifts between patriots are not part of the narrative. There was also a tension, again not mentioned, between the prisoners’ stance in the 1930s and that of the non-violent opposition to British rule associated with Gandhi. A fascinating book, and a useful angle on empire, but incomplete, albeit necessarily so.

Todman’s book is a sequel to the justifiably favourably reviewed Into Battle 1937-1941, this is an important work, that, like its companion, benefits from the decision to include an overlap with the years beyond the war, in this case with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. That proves an appropriate way not only to approach the context of what was a global struggle, but also to assess its consequences.

A thorough well-done for Todman, with a minor complaint. The book is handsomely produced, not least with a clear typeface, illuminating photographs (for example of ATS telephone operators), and a few maps, but it is large and heavy. At times, as with other of their books, I cannot help wishing that Allen Lane could be kind to their readers and produce not only quality but also comfort.


Britain’s War: A New World 1942-1947 by Daniel Todman.
Penguin, 2020. £35.00.
The judgments are sage and also humane. Thus, a good passage on garrison life in Cairo (sex is a recurrent theme in the book) includes “From 1942, Britons would complain a lot about the behaviour of American GIs in the UK. They should have tried spending a week as an Egyptian in Cairo,” or for the 1943 Aegean debacle: “By the standard of the Second World War, it was a sideshow, but a costly and revealing one. Even in an area under the aegis of General Wilson, a British supreme commander, unilateral British expeditionary action was no longer possible.”

More pertinently this was force-projection without air superiority, as well as an episode that did not capture Churchill in a good light and one that threw light on the idea of a Balkan strategy. The examples cited are pertinent, for example fatalism in the face of V2 strikes, as well as the 1,250 toilet pans necessary for repairs after a single strike on Barnet. There is no tale off. Thus, the role of the British Pacific Fleet receives sufficient attention, as well as the 1945 election. There is a good coverage of the Home Front, both under fire and just coping, and also of the troops, whether Field Hygiene Sections “trying to make sure soldiers crapped in the right place” or the psychological strains of conflict, the 670 million cigarettes in Normandy NAAFI stocks by mid-July 1944, or the sickness and low morale of the unsuccessful Arakan offensive in 1943.

Todman has done very well, but, unsurprisingly, the subject is far from closed

I liked this book which contributes to the important re-evaluation of the British war-effort. Scholars such as Buckley, Caddick-Adams and Holland have thrown much light on the fighting war against Germany, Marston and Moreman on the war in Burma, and so on. And so on for other combatants, notably the Soviets, on which see Hill most recently. Possibly, indeed, as a result, it is time for another re-evaluation, this time one that puts the British achievement into a wider comparative context. That would require a different book to that by Todman, excellent as the latter is. He is particularly to be praised for giving due weight to the British war with Japan, but doing so simply increases the value of comparative reflections, as also with the improvements in American and Australian fighting capabilities.

Moreover, there is another issue of significance, one to which there can be no fixed answer. How far should there be an explicit engagement with general topics of the history of war, including with the relevant conceptual, methodological and historiographical literature? No complaints about Todman here. He has done very well, but, unsurprisingly, the subject is far from closed.

Jeremy Black’s books include A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps, Tank Warfare. Avoiding Armageddon. From the Great War to the Fall of France, 1918-40 and Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World.

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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Primus »

Thanks Manmohan Ji, will order it here. I did manage to get quite a few books in the end, will take some time to finish them all.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Please post of the list for our info.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Source: https://danwang.co/2021-letter/

a few interesting books

In a similar vein, I found The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy by Andrew Krepenivich and Barry Watts to be a professionally-stimulating book. Andrew Marshall ran the Office of Net Assessment in the Department of Defense from its founding in 1973 until 2015. Four decades is an extraordinary tenure for a defense official, and for most of that time he was tasked with making the Pentagon smarter on Soviet capabilities as well as its reaction functions. Acolytes of Marshall’s (which includes the authors) refer to time under him as “St. Andrew’s Prep.” Still quite a bit of Marshall’s work remains classified, and I didn’t leave this biography feeling that he changed the course of the Cold War. What I appreciated is that the book made me think about how to be a better analyst.

Marshall found that US interagency efforts to study the Soviet Union were more about settling bureaucratic scores than to produce good reports. He wanted to do better. Marshall took the view that every research project must resemble an open-ended dissertation rather than something that can be susceptible to cookie-cutter formulas. His assessments were purely diagnostic, and thus not cheapened by policy recommendations. That doesn’t mean that they were equivocal. A good analyst possesses the boldness to offer conclusions. One cannot be confined simply to descriptive analysis and then insist that there are too many unknowns to make predictions. The point of every exercise must be to produce a judgment. These are good lessons for any analyst.

Jürgen Osterhammel’s style in Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia is to dump heaps of wonderful facts on the reader. For example, the merits of different pack animals for travel (“Georg Wilhelm Steller wrote a heartfelt homage to the sled dog”), culminating with demonstration for the superiority of the camel. The relative quiet of Asian cities in the 18th century, where there were few paved roads, and where felt-lined slippers made palaces into hushed spaces. How the Jesuits fought off the other orders for prime access to the Qing court, and how their opponents prosecuted a counter-attack by pointing out that their faith inclined the order to take miracle stories at face value. And when the Jesuits, as a meritocratic elite, found kindred spirits in the exam-created Qing mandarins once they were ensconced in court. Overall I feel that my knowledge is severely lacking on the Jesuits.

Osterhammel’s skill isn’t confined to offering a delightful series of facts. I loved his discussion of the 17th century European effort to learn about China. Scrupulously accurate records circulated with accounts of pure fantasy, leaving the outside reader with little idea of whom to believe. James Mill (father of John Stuart) solved his issue by dismissing personal testimony in toto. Instead he wrote his history of British India without ever setting foot there; for good measure, he denounced people who attempted to contradict him as being guilty of letting personal anecdote obstruct his deduction of general conclusions. Thank goodness, I must say, that in the 21st century we have transcended the epistemic foibles of the 17th.

Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second War by Douglas M. O’Reagan gave me more material on thinking about technology. After Germany surrendered, American scientists with a courtesy rank of Colonel combed through German industrial labs. They were there to seize its technological secrets. They discovered two things: that Germany wasn’t much ahead of the US—not even the mighty IG Farben in the chemical industry. And second, that the vast amounts of data and industrial recipes they microfiched and sent back to the US were mostly useless. Knowledge couldn’t be written down to be transported; it had to move in the form of people like Wernher von Braun. It was wonderful to read this historical case of the theme that technology is people, which has been one of the core ideas discussed in my essays (as well as by many other people before me). I wrote more about this book in my piece on US prosecutions of scientists.

Finally, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin isn’t mostly an operational treatment of the eastern front, of the kind by Glantz and House; nor is it mostly concerned with the domestic war economy, of the kind by Tooze. It is balanced on every topic, with an emphasis on diplomatic history. McMeekin shows how adept Stalin was at getting his way in nearly all his foreign policy goals, from taking over as many small countries as Germany did and then being viewed as a victim after Barbarossa; and acquiring huge amounts of lend-lease from the US. We all know that Soviet soldiers did most of the work to tear apart the Wehrmacht. But it’s also important to appreciate the scale of American help: “By the end of the second quarter of 1943, the US pork industry was sending 13% of its total production to the USSR.” It’s a bit of a minor miracle that after decades of scholarship there are still superb books about this global war. I wonder if that will continue, such that we will always be able to look forward to worthwhile treatments of the greatest struggle of the last century.

***
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Sachin »

Is there a copy of the book "Sky is the Limit - Signals in Operation Pawan" available for sale? Was looking for a copy. I am okay if it is a .PDF file, printed book or even suited for Kindle devices.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in Western Thought
Frederick Quinn

Current global tensions and the spread of terrorism have resurrected in the West a largely negative perception of Islamic society, an ill will fueled by centuries of conflict and prejudice. Shedding light on the history behind these hostile feelings, Frederick Quinn's timely volume traces the Western image of Islam from its earliest days to recent times.
Quinn establishes four basic themes around which the image of Islam gravitates throughout history: the Prophet as Antichrist, heretic, and Satan; the Prophet as Fallen Christian, corrupted monk, or Arab Lucifer; the prophet as sexual deviant, polygamist, and charlatan, and the Prophet as Wise Easterner, Holy Person, and dispenser of wisdom. A feature of the book is a strong portrayal of Islam in literature, art, music, and popular culture, drawing on such sources as Cervantes's Don Quixote; the Orientalism of numerous visual artists; the classical music of Monteverdi and Mozart; and more recent cultural manifestations, such as music hall artists like Peter Dawson and Edith Piaf; and stage or silver screen representations like The Garden of Allah, The Sheik, Aladdin, and The Battle of Algiers. Quinn argues that an outpouring of positive information on basically every aspect of Islamic life has yet to vanquish the hostile and malformed ideas from the past. Conflict, mistrust, and misunderstanding characterize the Muslim-Christian encounter, and growing examples of cooperation are often overshadowed by anger and suspicion.
In this important book, Quinn highlights long-standing historical prejudices but also introduces the reader to some of the landmark voices in history that have worked toward a greater understanding of Islam.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Perils of Empire: The Roman Republic and the American Republic
Monte L. Pearson

Perils of Empire: The Roman Republic and the American Republic examines the similarities between the Roman Republic, which gained an empire and lost its freedoms, and the expansionist foreign policy of the American Republic since Teddy Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. The book points out startling similarities between Rome's history and that of the American Republic and traces the series of events leading to the Republic's collapse into civil war and eventual dictatorship. This well-researched study of both long-term trends and current events highlights the difficulties of balancing the demands of ruling an empire against democratic political institutions and political freedoms. Before the Roman Empire, a time of one-man rule and limited freedoms, there was the Roman Republic 500 years of free elections, civil liberties, and conquering armies. At first, the successful armies brought wealth and glory; then the Republican institutions began to groan under the strain of running an empire. There were feuds, then riots, then civil wars, and the Republic was gone. During this turbulent period, some of the most famous people in ancient history vied for power and glory Caesar, Cleopatra, Cicero, and Octavian, Caesar's nephew, who became Augustus, Rome's first Emperor. With an American army occupying Iraq and fierce debates over which civil liberties must be restricted in order to prosecute a never-ending war on terrorism, now is a good time to look into the historical mirror and examine the perils for democratic institutions when republics acquire empires.
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