Fighting on the Himalayan Ridges

Thousands of Indian soldiers are now perched on the freezing ridges of Ladakh. With China continuing with its expansionist "salami-slicing" of borderlands, lakes and islands, with no signs of letting up even in the midst of a pandemic, these soldiers are likely to stay put for the rest of the winter.

How do fighting units sustain themselves through some of the toughest physical terrains? How do they deal with the long stretches of silence and boredom? What keeps them going? I was looking for a book that would dwell on questions like these, and that is how I ended up with Sabastien Junger's "War".

It is a short, sharp book which reminds you that you should not judge a book by its cover. The book cover you see here is not the one favoured by the publishers which has a close-up shot of a single eye on an effeminate, clean-shaven face. I thought this one was more apt for the story of one platoon in one valley of southern Afghanistan.

This is the story of KOP - Korengal Outpost in Kunar Province. Its a place where the deep valleys and high mountains provide an ideal cover for Pakistan-trained Taliban to infiltrate into Afghanistan, and in 2007 Junger stays out there with a platoon that is trying to prevent this infiltration. 

This is a battlefield where codes of honour clash. When a US patrol gets ambushed one of the survivors, a soldier named Luttrel, staggers badly wounded into a mountain village with the Taliban at his heels. He survives because "The people of Sabray were obliged to protect Luttrell under an honor code called 'lokhay warkawal' (?), which holds that anyone who comes to your doorstep begging for help must be cared no matter that the cost to the community." 

The Taliban, on the other hand, know that battles can be won when the villagers are made to suffer at the hands of the "enemy", the "infidel". Their strategy is to lure NATO forces to accidentally killing so many civilians that they lose the fight for the human terrain. The physical terrain would inevitably follow.

There is irony in the imbalance of military hardware. The Americans can call in their Apache helicopter gunships with 30mm chain guns, their drones, 155mm howitzers and AC-130 gunships, but thermal signatures can be blurred by Taliban fighters wrapped in blankets on a warm rock, and a flock of crows can give away the position of US soldiers. 

This brings you to a glimpse of the cost of war - "A javelin shoulder-fired rocket costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes war seem winnable."

Then there is the X-Factor that motivates smaller fighting units - "Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they are looking for. Not killing, necessarily, but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defence of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you've been exposed to it, there is almost nothing else that you'd rather do."

"In a crude sense the job of the young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile-long valley in Kumar province needs to be brought under military control. Nearly 50 US soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I'm not saying that's a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged."

The situation in Ladakh now is of course vastly different - especially the human terrain. Unlike US troops in Afghanistan seeking legitimacy and acknowledgement from a wider world, this is a place where a conquered people - the Tibetans - are looking for ways to settle scores with the Communist Party of China. This will be a different kind of fight on the ridges.