Confusion
The newest reconnaissance-satellite photographs soon reached the intelligence-analysis centre in western China. Lin Huaisheng was now responsible for part of the analysis work; after he handed up his assessment and judgement of the collated intelligence, there came, as ever, not a word in reply. Perhaps the senior officers scarcely read this blizzard of reports at all. The thought was enough to chill him.
Nearly half a month had passed, and Lin's teacher, Major General Xu Jingzhe, still had not appeared; but Lin took a telephone call from him. On the line the major general said only a few words. First, that Lin must by all means guard against conceit and rashness, which left him blinking; he had been cautious all his life, so when had he ever suffered from conceit or rashness? Second, the major general told him to make ready, to be prepared to travel south at any time for field research, though he did not say where. Southern Tibet? Aksai Chin? Or back to Pakistan?1 Before Lin could ask more, the line went dead. The call matched neither the best outcome he had hoped for nor the worst he had predicted; it seemed a short string of nothing much, but at least the gist of it was, broadly, positive.
In early May, all the world guessed that a ground clash between India and Pakistan would come within the month. More than that, many even circled the scale and the location. Laid over a single map, the various observers' judgements showed enormous overlap. First, most held that Pakistan would, through this clash, lose ten to a hundred square kilometres of ground: that is, the territory commanded by a few heights or a stretch of hilltops. Second, they held this ground to lie either south or north of the Line of Control in Kashmir. Here the analysts' opinions diverged a little. One camp held the point of attack would fall north of Kasur: put in the enemy's place, India had gained a strip of new ground there in the last clash, but had also created a salient, and were India to move here it could flatten the salient on the control line, which was militarily very reasonable. But some objected that under the massed troops confronting one another at Lahore, such an attack would come at a very heavy price.
The other view held that India would plainly move against the Siachen Glacier in the north, to seize the whole glacier at a stroke; this was the commanding height of the entire Kashmir control line, the greatest prize in the long run, and to date most of the air fighting had been in that area. But opponents held that it lay too close to China, and that India would not blunder about there without weighing the political factors.2
However it was, the last two views were at length reconciled: most inclined finally to judge that India would attack on two or three axes at once, and, on assessment, drive a concentrated breakthrough in whichever sector proved more militarily feasible, then, as in the past several clashes, halt just short of going too far.
Lin Huaisheng read these commentaries every day. He allowed that, if Prasad stayed on as Chief of Army Staff, the so-called offensive would very likely be one of these versions. From all over the world, too, every kind of harebrained prediction kept pouring in; even finance commentators with little grasp of military matters dared to pronounce on television that the tension this clash had brought to South Asia and the Indian Ocean rim would certainly ease in June, whereupon precious-metals prices were bound to fall back, while crude oil would not be much affected.
Would it truly be so? Lin asked himself that at least twenty times a day. He feared his professional analytical skill might, in the end, fall short of a futures analyst's. Yet sometimes so-called analysis is a gamble, very near to betting high or low; the more so as General Prasad was to this day still touring the fronts, lively as ever, talking with officers of every rank and posing for photographs, hardly a man about to lose his post.
What baffled Lin further was that the past few days' fresh intelligence, chiefly satellite imagery, showed a high degree of confusion. The Indian forces had carried out complex movements on every front, including the massing of marines at Dwarka naval base.3 Was this empty intimidation, or a diversion? The movement of India's three armoured divisions had been established: all northward; at least the divisional headquarters located so far all lay in northern Punjab. And across the whole central desert region the Indian army had also raised its guard, adding some second-line motorised troops and paramilitary personnel; but it was, relatively, still quiet, with no sign of an attack.
Lin did not know that days earlier an Indian lieutenant general had precisely foretold that these movements, true and false together, would leave the staff officers reading the intelligence at a loss; and now this welter of confused appearances was making Lin's head swell more and more.
"The situation really is complicated, isn't it. What could the true intent be?" Ding appeared at his side, asking his view.
"Right. Behind these dazzling movements there has to be one purpose."
"You still think India will make its ground attack from a direction no one expects?"
"Not a direction no one expects. I think this place is about to surface. In a few days I will be able to point it out to you on the map."
"Oh?"
"These last two days India's new bombing operations against the Jhelum dam have gone on without pause. As far as I know, they have committed the elite Su-30s from distant Bareilly to cover them, and those aircraft have pulled out of their sorties over the Siachen Glacier to do it, which is most abnormal. Besides that, at least three squadrons of MiG-27s have joined the bombing. These attacks plainly carry a large strategic intent. On the surface it is only the air force's tactical strike; but the one truly waiting for the dam to fall is the Indian army."
"But to this day the dam still stands firm as a rock."
"It is riddled through and through, and Pakistan too has been slowly giving up its defence. We shall see the outcome soon enough."
"You think this is the sign of an Indian ground attack from somewhere in the south?"
"Well, isn't it," Lin said with a sigh.
"Surely Pakistan's staff could not fail to read it? I should think they understand the real situation better," Ding said, very carefully gainsaying Lin. To his mind, well as Lin knew these regions, his extreme views had in fact made a solitary man of him.
"They can of course see part of India's intent; they have only read it entirely wrong."
"Let's hear it."
Lin sat up straight and began to explain his view. "From the present situation, Pakistan has plainly already grasped that the Indian air force's purpose in wrecking the dam is to wreck Pakistan's south-to-north road network. That much is clear, because in this stretch the Pakistani roads run through low-lying ground and would be cut, east to west, into many segments by the floods; so they too have acted."
"Yes; only, as it looks now, they are hurrying to move their forces from the south up to the north. The exact opposite of your analysis."
"You are right; plainly what they now fear is precisely that, once the roads are cut by flood, they will lose the power of north-south movement; so they are bringing the Karachi-axis forces over ahead of time," Lin said.
"But their reasoning does not seem wrong either, does it? Every past war has gone this way. Which is why the disputed ground is all in the north."
1. Xu's summons south: Major General Xu Jingzhe, Lin's mentor, tells him to prepare for field research "to the south" without naming the destination; Lin's three guesses (Southern Tibet, Aksai Chin, or a return to Pakistan) map the theatres of the Chinese contingency, Plan 4157B. The call ties Lin's analytical thread back to the fieldwork that opened the novel, and quietly signals that his assessments are being read higher up than the silence suggests. ↩
2. The Kasur salient and the Siachen option: The two locations the world's analysts favour. North of Kasur, India could flatten a salient on the Line of Control, sound in theory but costly under the massed forces around Lahore; the Siachen Glacier is the commanding height of the whole line and the scene of most of the air fighting, but lies close enough to China to carry political risk. Both sit in the north, which is exactly the point: the convergence of expert opinion on the north is what Sipanga's plan is built to exploit. ↩
3. Dwarka naval base (德瓦卡): A naval station on the Gujarat coast, at the mouth of the Gulf of Kutch and directly across the Arabian Sea from the Sindh and Karachi shore. Massing marines there fits the amphibious component of Sipanga's plan, the pre-emptive strike on Karachi and the landing on the Sindh coast; whether it is genuine or a feint is the very ambiguity Lin is straining to read. ↩