The Gambler
"There is another passage, also from ten years ago, addressed to Kahan. On how to disarm Pakistan's nuclear weapons. I have found that during Singh's tenure as commandant of the National Defence University, his writings were consistently reckless and dangerous."
Lin read on:
"…Confining the war to a single theatre is deeply disadvantageous for India. During my service in the 19th Armoured Regiment,1 I came to understand the importance of deployment width. Even at the regimental level, one should never launch an attack along a narrow frontage; the enemy will hold the strong ground and bleed our troops out a few at a time. That is the nightmare of any army. Because of the Army Staff's conservatism, Pakistan has been permitted to deploy its nuclear weapons 250 kilometres west of Sri Ganganagar,2 which, as I understand it, is the maximum range of their primitive delivery systems. And yet we have been powerless to respond to this provocation. If we gave ourselves free rein and crossed the border in this sector, we could eliminate the threat entirely…"
"Clearly, Singh will not choose the old method of fighting. He admires Clausewitz and Napoleon. He will never allow the rugged mountain passes of Kashmir to become Pakistan's most effective ally."
"You're predicting his future actions from a few ten-year-old letters?"
"Not only from the letters. I have been studying his character for several years, from when he was still a minor functionary at the Ministry. There is a Chinese saying: rivers and mountains are easily changed, but a man's nature is not. I predict that he will have a bold ground-offensive plan, within the next two months."
"How is that possible? An operation that size would leave traces."
"It would, and there is one trace that will be most visible: he will remove Aspad from his post and replace him with someone he can fully control."
The hall erupted into noisy discussion.
"Anyone care to bet me on this?" Lin said with a smile, seemingly confident.
A scattering of quiet, restrained laughter followed. No one took the bet, but everyone in the room made note of the lieutenant colonel's claim. Most of them had come here expecting nothing more than a briefing on regional geography and Indian force dispositions. They had not expected the lieutenant colonel to stray so far off topic as to make a startling prediction about Indian grand strategy.
All of this was within Lin's plan. The flat-out prediction was not a spur-of-the-moment flourish.
Lin had been working this sector for several years. He had long since developed a comprehensive plan, one he had not even shared with his mentor Xu Jingzhe. He was a self-confident but reserved man, and he knew his own limits. He understood how difficult it was to get real decision-makers to accept an outsider's views. Today's seminar had given him a speaking slot, but that slot was a courtesy. No one was actually going to ask him for strategy, and he knew it better than anyone. Lin had not followed his mentor's instruction to include "appropriate" personal judgement in the final section of his briefing. Instead, he had planted a series of memorable hooks. He knew this war would continue, and events would soon vindicate his predictions. Not long from now. Perhaps weeks. Perhaps days.
"Lieutenant Colonel. Assuming everything unfolds as you predict, how many formations do you estimate India will pull out of southern Tibet?" The colonel in the front row was not finished.
"Good question. But before I answer, I need to tell you what kind of man Singh really is. I have some information. In 1996, as a representative of the Indian Army's armoured corps, he visited the Ukrainian tank works. At a casino in Odessa3 he lost forty-three thousand US dollars in a single day."
"Kickback from the factory, surely?"
Laughter broke out.
"No, no. The Singh family is wealthy. His personal integrity is actually quite good. No record of taking kickbacks, which is rare in Indian military circles. My point is that he is, by nature, a gambler."
"A gambler?"
"Yes. Although he later gave up the tables under the guidance of his spiritual mentor Kahan, at his core he remains a gambler. That does not change easily." Lin said. He was taking the long way around, but he was finally answering the colonel's question.
"I also know about his record as a company commander in Bangladesh. The Indian armoured corps' record for longest-range breakthrough is his. But in the course of that battle, he lost eighty per cent of his combat strength."
The colonel did not interrupt further. Lin saw him nod, slowly and seriously.
"So if his ground forces become bogged down in Pakistan, given what I know of the man, he will not settle for pulling one or two divisions out of Eastern Command. I believe he will throw his entire stake on the table."
The hall went quiet again. After Lin's build-up about the gambler's character, the final conclusion no longer sounded like idle speculation. Of course, everyone understood that none of this would happen if Aspad remained Chief of Staff. Everything depended on whether the lieutenant colonel's prediction came true.
"Very well. Enough digression. Let me return to how the terrain of southern Tibet shapes the Indian deployments. As you can see, the Yarlung Tsangpo divides the region into two halves. This is as true for India as it is for us…"
Lin closed the section on Singh's psychology and returned to terrain. This was the part he had actually been assigned to deliver. But for him, the thing he had really wanted to say had already been smuggled in. The rest was boilerplate, read straight from the script. Every attendee had an identical copy of the text. Let them read it themselves.
Ten thousand kilometres away, at Peshawar, everyone was waiting for word from Hassan. He had been off the radar for a long time, and communications had been entirely cut. The Saab AWACS had now reached its assigned station and could see all four Indian Su-30s had declined to loiter near the border despite their enormous fuel loads. They were heading east, probably back to New Delhi or Bareilly.
A fast-moving contact appeared on the scope, flying in the opposite direction.
"Falcon lead, is that you?"
"…" The F-16C's radio was live, but there was no answer; only the pilot's ragged breathing. He seemed to be gulping air to stay conscious.
"Squadron Leader Hassan, is that you?"
"It's me… Thanks be to God." Hassan said, his voice shaking. Behind Major General Islam a few people clapped, scattered and uncertain, perhaps trying to celebrate that the catastrophe had not been total. But the general himself sat motionless, like a stone figure.
"What about Rashid?" Hassan asked.
"He did not eject. The wreckage went down on the western side of the glacier."
The command post fell silent. Since India's declaration of total war, the air force's first planned counter-stroke had ended like this: two of its most precious advanced fighters lost. Such losses meant little to an Indian Air Force of more than a thousand aircraft. To an exhausted Pakistan, they were a nightmare, and the worst single battle the PAF had fought in forty years.
1. 19th Armoured Regiment (第19装甲团): An actual Indian Army armoured regiment. Singh's alleged service there places him in the armoured corps tradition, which is consistent with his later invocation of manoeuvre warfare theory. The author is careful to give Singh a real, if undistinguished, military background to explain how he came to hold operational views at all. ↩
2. Sri Ganganagar (根加纳戈尔): A city in northwestern Rajasthan, close to the Indian-Pakistani border. A point 250 kilometres west of Sri Ganganagar falls in the Bahawalpur–Multan area of Punjab, Pakistan, which is plausible terrain for medium-range ballistic missile deployment. Singh's implication is that the Indian Army has failed to threaten this deployment through a wider offensive frontage, and that only a thrust across the Rajasthan border can solve the problem. ↩
3. Odessa casino, 1996: The author invents a plausible biographical detail. In the mid-1990s Ukraine was a major seller of Soviet-era military equipment to India, including T-80 tanks, which makes a visit by an Indian armoured corps representative entirely credible. Odessa's casinos were notorious during this period. The forty-three-thousand-dollar loss is specific enough to sound like intelligence and vague enough to be unverifiable, which is the point. ↩