Air Marshal Matheswaran Talks Security in the Face of Terrorism
Air Marshall Matherswaran
As India enters the seventh year memorial of the dastardly 26/11 terror attacks that had held Mumbai under siege for four days and resulted in the appalling killings of numerous innocents, there is hardly a Bombayite who doesn’t look back and wonder could the Government have handled that situation with greater effectivity. Providing the Rotarians with a real and first-hand perspective of these attacks, Air Marshal Matheswaran addressed the Club, providing a sense of clarity with regard to such operations, as well as an insight into how our nation needs to collectively tackle the security issue in the face of rampant global terrorism.
Having dedicated 39 celebrated years in the Indian Air Force (as a Fighter Pilot) and rising to the prestigious rank of Air Marshall, Matheswaran’s academic journey has been equally impressive. A Post Graduate in Military Science and Financial Management; he holds a Ph.D in Defence and Strategic Studies. He is a Senior Fellow in National and International Security at John F Kennedy School of Harvard University, as also a Doctoral Faculty of the Naval War College.
After completing his military service with the IAF in 2014, Air Marshal Matheswaran embarked on his second career in Academic Research and International Affairs as a Strategist, National Security Analyst and Aerospace Specialist. He travels widely to give lectures on national and international security and warfare. For distinguished service with the Air Force, he has been awarded the Ati Vishisht Seva Medal and Vayu Sena Medal by the President of India.
“I’m glad to address the Rotarians about National Security and the 26/11 Terror attacks. I was in Paris last week and the day we landed, we met with a time-consuming traffic jam and reached the hotel an hour and a half later. This was due to the fight going on to neutralize the terrorists around the airport. It brought back the memory of our own 26/11 attacks to which I was a first-hand witness to how operations were conducted. The event went on for 4 days with extremely well trained terrorists who were controlled, armed and well-coordinated by the back-end handlers – the Pakistani military, the ISI and the political system. It was a full-fledged military operation, not a routinely, simple terrorist operation. This is the first time India came across such a huge magnitude of requirements.
We eventually neutralized them. But what did we learn from that episode? Two main lessons emerged from that episode. The first one gets you wondering how does the nation look at security as a concept? Is it just a job of the security forces or does everyone need to be aware of changes happening globally? If we go through the last 20 years of history, we have had quite a few bombing incidents happening as a precursor to 26/11. In the rest of the world too, as in Paris, there were other incidents that were precursors to this attack. So how do we ensure these events do not repeat themselves? One way of addressing this is imbibing the ‘Clausewitzian Trinity’ about war, written 200 years ago. Clausewitz defines that a nation’s security needs to be addressed by the trinity – the People; the Government and the Armed Forces/Military.
None of these three can work in isolation. There has to be awareness amongst the people and there has to be greater involvement in issues that affect national security, in terms of spread of messages and education. The Government needs to interact with the people and the military – the final instrument at the disposal of the Government is the Security Forces. The order of the day is to understand how the nature of war has changed. We have always seen war as a state-to-state conflict. But today, globally there are nearly 200 independent nation states, and international systems characterized by anarchy. So when there are multi-lateral institutions their problems cannot be sorted by the mechanism of officially declared war. Post 1945, apart from superpowers, nobody really declares war. So what happens to communities, states and organisations that are dissatisfied or that create grievances against another state? How do they prosecute that conflict?
The method, as is exists today, is a full-fledged undeclared war in the form of a low-intensity conflict, or an ‘unconventional war’. And therefore terrorism is the method because the state does not own responsibility. So how do we resolve this problem? The fundamental issue we need to understand is that no terrorism or terrorist can actually function, and create an event like 26/11 or The Paris Attacks, without external support, which is the most important element for the survival of a terrorist organization. We need to have a firm national security strategy which addresses internal security, police functions, external security with respect to armed forces, and foreign policy in dealing with the problem creators, which means you have direct foreign policy related actions against Pakistan who perpetuated the entire 26/11 attacks. But how do you bring about the international order and international players to support your policies?
This expertise falls in the hands of political leadership and strategists. If 26/11 has to be avoided, we need to sort out the background support or snap the umbilical cord that provides support to LeT and related organisations whose singular aim is to create mayhem in India. Now, coming to the second part – the nature of war. One of the main failures of 26/11 was the time taken by the operations to get our act in order; and how we divide these operations. We still look at terrorism as an issue that needs to be treated by the Home Ministry as a Civil Law and Order problem. But that’s not the way you fight war! And while they have done exceptional work, the Police isn’t trained for warfare. Therefore it takes some time for them to react to an event which should have been reacted to in immediate time. If internal and external security is meshing together like this, then this war-fighting needs to be approached differently, where a certain amount of military function gets enmeshed into the internal security mechanisms. More important is the awareness of how to react to a situation. The media needn’t go overboard and has to function responsibly. Because media plays a major role in the public perception and hence needs to be moderated to an extent, so you allow good and correct perceptions to emerge.
Conclusively, prevention lies in the people’s will to demand appropriate policy changes and policy mechanisms from the political leadership. We need security forces to look at war-fighting in a different format because the nature of war has changed. The government needs to focus on clipping the financial mechanisms which are responsible for the survival of terrorist organisations. Governments must isolate and destroy those governments that support terrorism as a national policy. We surely can’t afford another 26/11!”