yensoy wrote:Are we done with the various crackpot theories and proposals now?
Ok the fact is that Tibet and Xinjiang are the last things in most Han Chinese peoples minds. It is beyond the beyond, much like how we "mainland" non-fauji Indians didn't think of or didn't think much of the north-east till the whole economy in our cities started pivoting around the hard-working migrant labour from those far off states. Tibet and Xinjiang's remoteness is probably 10 times as that, and literally the Han people view the other races in a very dim manner, not even giving them their rightful place in history or dignity as workers.
However, if we were to capture any currently Chinese held territory in Tibet, you can be assured that the Chinese will launch an all-out attack to recover said territories. Unless we have a really fool-proof way to hold on to it, and unless we can ensure that they cannot or will not retaliate elsewhere, and unless we have some moral justification (our intervention to halt a local pogrom of Tibetans would be a good story in the global opinion), we cannot and should not attempt such an action because it may backfire.
The reason they will react is very simple, loss of face. I recall but unable to find any online link that any Chinese leader who loses territory faces the death penalty. Regardless of the legal status, dear leader's internal enemies will be ready with an empty grave if he falters. Don't forget that UK fought to keep a bunch of frozen islands thousands of miles away from London and of very little economic value to them.
Likewise the Chinese also know that we will defend our territory to the hilt at this juncture and are ready to throw the book at them if they ingress and hold on to what is clearly ours (clearly as in constructed and populated, not an area where we have been patrolling and they are leaving cigarette butts). Ours is an army that climbed mountains on the sheer face to surprise the entrenched enemy in Kargil, ours is the army that spends 365 days of the year on a glacier, and unless they want to sit in guard of their salami slices through the harsh Himalayan winter, we will be back next year with the piece of artillery that drives them bat crazy, our bulldozer.
I don’t give a ****** about this. I want to be able to walk around with my head held high and not be beholden to decision paralysis. Hit them hard and rally support for a ceasefire. Give them their own medicine and all these shenanigans will stop.
Why the ****** should we care if some CCP stooge gets the death penalty for loss of face. That’s not our problem. I clearly articulated the strategic chips on the table. Tibet is a remote region that has no value to the Hans. They are pushing their luck because the pain is an attack on Tibet which has no strategic value to the Hans. Tibet is a buffer state or a geographical shield that China uses to attack India. Annex a buffer state that you don’t develop and care about and then bully the neighboring state. The mainland Chinese is 100% isolated from any blowback since Tibet gets the pain. We need to up the ante by changing the theater. That theater needs to be SCS. Miss adventure in Himalayas = new artificial island in SCS or annex Tibet and take the fight to mainland China. These are the only two strategies that will work. The current strategy is crap and we keep getting ****** by salami slicing. I have self respect and this is how I foresee defending my self respect. If you want to psychoanalyze how to get self respect be my guest. But generally it’s simple and straightforward. Someone punches you or threatens to punch you or puts your life in danger, you kick them in the balls (maximize the pain) and offer them an ice pack (conciliatory gesture).
Imagine this scenario. India annexed Tibet in 1962. Indian troops on Tibet border with Mainland China doings salami slicing. Would you care about blowback? No. Tibet would get the blowback and New Delhi would be isolated from any potential pain inflected as a counter response. So just by defining the playground, you automatically gained an upper hand. So the first rule is to define the theater of war. The Himalayan theater is hugely advantageous to the Chinese. They prick us with minimum troop presence to keep us confined there. They maintain this with 3 divisions, while we have a 3:1 ratio. If we want to justify the disproportionate troop level, we have to take Tibet. If not reduce the troop level and redeploy a similar prescience in SCS. If neither is done, there is no pain being inflected in Chinese actions. Now if we were salami slicing Mainland China, and they started building bases in Sri Lanka as a counter strategy, we would back off since their ability to inflict pain on our mainland matches our ability to inflict pain through Tibet.
The best defense is offense. What is the pain that China is incurring by taking this risk. If there is no pain, there is no negative feedback to stop. It’s that simple. We have to inflict pain and they will stop this strategy. The current status quo is a Chinese lever to rebalance our troop levels based on unilateral decisions taken by the CCP to distract us. This compromises national security. We need to get the threat closer to mainland China. There are two options, liberate Tibet to make it a buffer state so this is no longer a problem and take the fight to the Chinese or apply pressure on their eastern Seaboard for any pressure in the Himalayas. The Chinese are using this strategy against us first through Tibet and now through Pakistan and Nepal. Purely defensive strategies always leads to defeat. India needs to figure out how to inflict pain (economic, physical land, loss of human life) everytime we are pushed around like this, otherwise it’s a defeat in my book. Celebrating tweets that call for deescalation is a defeatist mentality. China will try again and maintain the superpower narrative while pushing a narrative to India’s neighbors that they fall under China’s sphere of influence because India doesn’t do anything when it gets humiliated and celebrates a cease fire. If I were China, I would do this all day until I turn all of India’s neighbors into buffer states and go in for the kill one day.
So the first battle Indians need to win is the ability to define the battle and the theater in which it is fought. If we don’t have freedom or flexibility to act on this, we have already given too much power to the enemy. We need to focus on counter balancing this by adding a buffer state that can act as the theater; insulating threats to that theater or by imposing a new theater closer to the enemy’s core civilization. New Delhi is very close to the current theater while Beijing is far away and insulated. That’s the first battle where we need to change the status quo preferably on land vs the Sea.