Developing a Human Terrain System for Jammu and Kashmir

The Government of India has been waging a long battle in state of Jammu and Kashmir since independence. The government has experimented with a variety of economic, political and strategic solutions at the state, regional and trans-national level for resolving the issue. Unfortunately, none of these have worked and the magnitude of the problem has increased. The most disturbing development of this prolonged struggle has been the alienation of the people of J&K. Reports of human rights violations in J&K by the Indian military personnel are widely cited. The army on the other hand accepts and defends a limited degree to coercion given the nature of challenges they encounter in the region. The situation in the state is challenging; the army in the process of defending the people has emerged as a source of apprehension and the common people in distancing themselves from the army have been suspected as supporting terrorists.

No other dimension of the J&K issue requires more urgent attention than bridging this gap between the people and military. The success or failure of the various peace plans, economic proposals, and strategic doctrines will be determined by the equations shared between the local population and the army personnel. The Government of India can take inspiration from the Human Terrain System of the U.S. and apply the programme with necessary modification in J&K.

The Human Terrain System (HTS), a programme run by the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office, is currently being used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Programme seeks to gather ethnological and cultural intelligence from the ‘war zones’ and thereby assist the U.S. military in employing a more informed and humane approach for post-intervention stabilization in Iraq and Afghanistan. The HTS is an updated version of the CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development) programme, used in Vietnam by President Johnson. Within the HTS several categorizations exist- Human Terrain teams, reach-back research cells, subject-matter expert networks and language specialists.

The operations of the Indian military in J&K cannot be compared to the U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in principle the strategy of HTS can be borrowed from the U.S. experiment. The socio-cultural ethos of J&K (and of every state in India) is distinct and the military training necessarily does not address this reality. The military has been trained to fight enemies and not to protect its own population. Since the operational dynamics of the military has changed, given the realities in J&K, the HTS could contribute significantly in addressing the lacuna.

HTS is an attempt to make available the expertise of the social scientists and regional experts to the military personnel for the purpose of factoring the local sensitivities into the military strategy. The military campaign in J&K is not just about defending a territorial unit but also about integrating the population of the state into the national mainstream. The achievement of national security objectives in J&K largely rests on a clear understanding of the societies where the army is engaged. As the programme over-view of the U.S. HTS explains, the local civilian population in the area of conflict – the human terrain – must be considered as a distinct and critical element of the environment. The HTS in J&K could engage with this human terrain and serve two vital purposes.

The HTS will have to be contextualized for use in J&K. The government will have to put together a Human Terrain Team (HTT) comprising of journalists, academicians, anthropologists, lawyers, economic experts, religious leaders, medical personnel, psychologists and civil engineers from within the state and across the nation. The HTT could would be able to comprehend and respond to the micro needs of the people and emerge as feedback loop not only for the military also the government. The issues of sanitation, education, economic development, viable employment are the micro concerns affecting the daily lives of the people of J&K. The HTT would be better equipped to address the human security concerns of the local population. Since the HTT would operate as an adjunct of the military forces, the negative perceptions towards the army could be neutralized.

The HTT would also operate as an advisory body for the purpose of strategic and political planning. Benefiting from the expertise and experience of the HTT the political and military leadership will be able to devise strategies for providing security with development to the local population. The HTT would create space for the social and human concerns in the macro politico-strategic perspective of the government of India.

The creation of HTT may appear ambitious and a time consuming proposition given the dominance of traditional strategic planning. But it time to realize that J&K is not a traditional theater of war and hence innovative strategies need to be devised for countering the challenge.

[Publised at http://www.ipcs.org/whatsNewArticle11.jsp?action=showView&kValue=2591&status=article&mod=b]