A decade has passed since the end of the Cold War, and insurgency remains a major factor on the world scene. This has been entirely predictable, given the inevitable drive of man to improve his lot. Whether driven by separatism, religious alienation, or ideological desire to restructure the state, insurgents remain as active today as there were in the earlier era of state support. Indeed, forced to rely more upon their own devices, insurgencies have posed increasingly complex problems for the numerous weak states of the world, which find themselves, more than ever, challenged by a growing array of development and population issues.
This reality has driven continuous and extensive US military involvement, and thus brought a renewed focus on the dynamics of internal wars. Upheavals in once-obscure spots such as Nepal now routinely demand American attention. It is through the study of such cases that military practitioners will be prepared for effective engagement – in strategies, operational art and tactics – in future wars.
Insurgency in Nepal has existed for perhaps five decades but burst into the open only with the declaration of a ‘people’s war’ on February 13, 1996, by the Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist (CPN-M), the most radical offshoot of the left-wing spectrum in Nepali politics.1 Desultory action ended when the ‘Maoists,’ as they are universally termed, unilaterally abrogated ongoing talks with the Government and launched a nationwide general offensive in November 2001. Since that time, a steadily increasing level of violence has left as many as 8,000 Nepalis dead in total, a majority of them in little more than a year.2
Known as a premier tourist destination, the site of the mighty Himalayan Mountains, the majestic Mt. Everest, Nepal would hardly seem a candidate for a raging Communist insurgency. Indeed, if anything, its population was recognized not as rebels but for its loyal service as Gurkhas, perhaps the single most legendary infantry in the world.
The combination, though – dominant peaks and service as infantry in foreign armies – actually goes to the heart of the matter. It is not an accident that, over the past nearly two centuries, a small, land-locked mountain kingdom has sent hundreds of thousands of its young men into combat for others. To the contrary, Nepalese have flocked abroad, not due to their martial bent or any other unique national characteristic, but rather for the oldest reason known to recruiters: need.
Parameters of the Old Regime
Far from being a Shangri-la, Nepal is 24 million people competing for livelihood in a country but the size of North Carolina (which has just 6.5 million). Roughly one-third of the national territory is the Himalayas and consequently has a mere 0.7 per cent of the population. The lower approximately one-third of the country, the tarai – scrub jungle now largely cleared – holds 32.1 per cent of the populace. It could not even be settled until the 1970s, when several virulent strains of malaria were conquered. This has resulted in a popular concentration, 67.2 per cent, in the central one-third Hill country. Lest the point be lost, some 16 million people are sandwiched into ‘one-third of North Carolina.’
The result, according to a World Bank study of 1973, was a population density (per square kilometre of arable land) rivalling that found in the more fertile, multi-cropped regimes of certain Asiatic deltas. Conditions of livelihood – among the worst in the developing world3 – were exacerbated, because an effective lack of any industrial base meant that 90 per cent of the population was rural, with 80 per cent of the total population working directly on the land. Though 90 per cent of farmers were classified as owner-operators, only severe division achieved this impressive figure: 50 per cent of all households endeavoured to engage in agriculture on plots of less than half a hectare; 7.8 per cent were completely landless.4
Thus the economy has a current Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of only US $5.5 billion, and an annual budget of just US $1.1 billion. In contrast, the 2003 public schools budget for Fairfax County, Virginia, outside Washington, DC, was passed at US $1.3 billion. The official leading source of foreign exchange, tourism, in a banner year interjected the purchasing power of just 250,000 visitors annually, a limited trickle-down tap. It should come as no surprise that the United Nations (UN) lists Nepal as among the poorest countries in the world; 80 per cent of the populace, surveys consistently find, must do outside work to survive.
Limited development, however, ensures that such work is scarce. The result is a skewed distribution of resources, in which some have and others do not. The only solution readily available has been out-migration and participation in the global economy. Historically, for certain hill tribal groups, this meant enlistment as soldiers in the British Indian Army. Such opportunities, though they declined substantially in British service since Indian independence in 1948, have continued in the Armed Forces of India, but still have no possibility of absorbing even a sizable fraction of hill tribe job-seekers, much less others.5 Indeed, Nepalese of all communities seeking relatively well-paid expatriate work, have largely opted for service work abroad, with the largest single employer being Japan, if India itself – which has an open border with Nepal – is not considered.6 Regardless, most job seekers are unable to obtain external employment, irrespective of destination, and so find themselves mired in poverty. Statistics show that at least 20 per cent of the population lives in extreme, abject circumstances.
Considering only economic matters, Nepal would be a candidate for serious dislocation. Exacerbating the situation further, though, are social parameters: issues of caste, ethnicity, and language. On the surface, Nepal is a picture of unity, the world’s only official Hindu kingdom. The constitutional monarch, a living god for much of the population even in the 21st Century, sits atop a society 86.5 per cent Hindu and nine per cent Buddhist – a society in which every aspect is dominated by the caste system.
In reality, beneath this picture of unity, is division. There are 60 recognized caste and ethnic groups; only slightly more than half the population, 56.4 per cent, is actually embraced by the caste system. More than one-third, 35.5 per cent is classified as ‘ethnics’ – tribal groups who are outside the caste system. The four largest of these have just over one million members each: Magar, Tharu, Newar, and Tamang (Magars supplied a plurality of Gurkha manpower in the British system7). A further 3.6 per cent of the people are classified as belonging to religious communities (e.g. Sikhs, Muslims); 4.5 per cent are ‘others.’
Significantly, half of the caste figure is comprised of the top two castes, Brahmins and Chhetris, the historic priestly and warrior castes, respectively, 16.1 per cent and 12.9 per cent of the total population. Ergo, 29 per cent of the populace is structurally positioned, by religious mandate, to dominate. This they have done and effectively control all positions of power and influence.8 Not surprisingly, this leads to charges of unfair advantage, where disproportionate influence and possession are replicated by religious sanction.
Linguistically, there is also severe division. According to the 1991 Census, Nepal’s people speak 32 languages, with only 50.3 per cent claiming Nepali, the national language, as their mother tongue. Though the second language, Maithili, 11.9 per cent, is a distant second, the Census notes that some ethnic and caste groups, which have their own tongues, are not even reflected in the total number of languages enumerated. Needless to say, it is the top castes, which are brought up and totally at ease with Nepali, while other groups often struggle, even as linguistic competence is a key factor in access to employment, whether in the Government or private sector.
Given such socio-economic divisions, it would be expected that politics would play a significant role in mediating contending demands. Even though the country is a functioning parliamentary democracy, here again, there is more than meets the eye. A democracy only since 1990, Nepal suffers from the, by now, all-too familiar problems of the genre ‘emerging democracy’: corruption, inefficiency and lack of focus.9 Compounded by a lack of state integration, the political system has been able to foster little save a lack of legitimacy.
Nepal emerged as a country in 1774-75. As it reached its present boundaries, then sought to expand into territory claimed by British India, it found itself bested in an 1815 war with the East India Company. As a consequence, most of the tarai was lost, and Nepal was forced to agree to what effectively was British suzerainty.10 A prime ministerial coup of sorts led to more than a hundred years of hereditary Rana rule (1846-1951) during which Nepal was closed to the outside world, save limited British representation. This ended in November 1950 when India, which desired a greater role in Nepal’s affairs for defence reasons, supported a royal restoration.11 The King assumed direct control in December 1960 and only in 1990-91 did democratic forces emerge triumphant.
This proved a mixed blessing. The era of Rana rule was not improved upon by the subsequent ten years of chaotic transition and the thirty years of monarch-guided democracy – the so-called panchayat system. Thus, even as Nepal had all the organization and bureaucracy of a modern nation-state, in reality it remained a backwater. The writ of its administrative apparatus – five regions (plus a capital region), 75 districts (each roughly the size of a North Carolina county), and 3,913 Village Development Committees (VDC) – barely extended beyond district capitals, and most areas of the country could be reached only on foot. Development was at a primitive level and little change was visible.
Heightened expectations that democracy would make a difference in the lives of the populace were dashed.12 Though there were improvements, particularly in the areas of health and education, these were minor bright spots in an overall dark picture of self-absorption by the major political parties. The Nepali Congress (NPC) ruled for all but roughly a single year of the democratic era, with the legal leftist coalition, the United Marxist-Leninists (UML), the major opposition. The monarch, who might have been expected to serve a mediating and leadership role similar to that played so effectively by King Bhumipol in Thailand, was killed in June 2001 in the so-called ‘Royal Massacre’ and was replaced by his brother, who therefore, to many, lacked legitimacy.13
Communist Opposition to the Old-Regime
Into this dynamic, the Left had early interjected itself as an active player, even heading the Government for slightly less than a year. Yet, as happened in Peru with the restoration of democracy in 1980 (after a dozen years of attempted military ‘revolution from above’), the expectations and passions unleashed, which surfaced particularly vigorously within the Left, saw the proliferation of ever-more radical options. The result, in the early 1990s, was the Nepalese Communist Party (Maoist), or CPN (M), a body that in its formative stages consciously modelled itself on the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) of Peru.
Committed to the ‘Gang of Four’ Maoism, as had emerged during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – which convulsed China with its attempt to ‘internalise’ the dialectic – it demanded a solution to Nepal’s problems by the establishment of a Maoist ‘people’s republic’. Politically, this necessarily meant an end to monarchy, to be achieved through a Constituent Assembly, which would rewrite the Constitution. The Party also demanded an end to ‘Indian imperialism’. Economically, there was to be an end to capitalist exploitation; socially, an end to caste, ethnic, religious, and linguistic exploitation. Since the system would not simply accept these demands, ‘people’s war’ was to be used to force the issue.
People’s war, declared formally by the CPN (M) on February 13, 1996 – but explicitly discussed and planned in the early 1990s, if not before – was by that time, considered in global perspective, a well-tested and efficient mechanism for seizure of state power. It may be assessed to consist of five elements:
In implementing this approach, the CPN (M) examined the numerous ‘people’s war’ struggles which had been carried out in the post-World War II era. The two insurgencies that exercised the most influence early on were Sendero Luminoso in Peru17 and the so-called ‘Naxalites’ or Indian Maoists.18 Shining Path is fairly well known in the West. Its extraordinary level of violence had Lima on the verge of collapse by 1992, when the capture of the leadership, combined with an array of other counter-insurgency moves, all but destroyed the movement. The Naxalite phenomenon, though a virtual icon amongst international leftists, is less known amongst scholars. It began as a minor Maoist-inspired upheaval in 1967 in the small Indian district of Naxalbari, which sits up against Nepal’s southeastern border, and was snuffed out, but then revived in ‘copycat’ left-wing upheavals throughout India, some of which eventually required deployment of the military. Remnants remain active in at least eight Indian States.19
Significantly, what both of these key influences share are that they are distinguished by their lethality. Mao himself did not shy away from violence against ‘class enemies’, but held that only the most die-hard elements would have to be ‘struggled’ to the extreme; i.e. killed. Most opponents could be neutralized and brought into support of the revolutionary endeavor through the mechanisms of the united front. Neither Sendero nor the Naxalites followed this approach, instead taking ‘elimination of class enemies’ as a literal charge for action. The result was an impressive level of terror, with actual numbers being much greater in the Peruvian case. The practical result was that the CPN (M) initially looked for inspiration to two of the more radical insurgent movements to have appeared in recent years.
There is some irony in this, since the CPN (M)’s leadership, like that of both Sendero and the Naxalites (not to mention the Khmer Rouge, another Maoist group which adopted extreme violence), is drawn overwhelmingly from the very ‘class enemies’ attacked by the party’s doctrine. The two leading figures in the nine-member Politburo, Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai, for instance, are both Brahmins with educational backgrounds.20 (The party’s Military Wing head, Ram Bahadur Thapa aka Badal, is apparently ethnic Magar and hence an exception.)
That leaders of a revolutionary movement should come from the elite is consistent with global patterns, whether insurgent or terrorist, throughout the 20th and now 21st Centuries. So, too, is the prominence of leadership figures with an educational background.21 Followers, as might be expected, are drawn from an altogether different strata, the marginalized of society, those who become the so-called ‘grievance guerrillas.’ That the CPN (M) has had little difficulty tapping such individuals’ stems from the abundance of socio-economic-political contradictions discussed earlier and compounded by issues of gender. Women have been prominent in the recruiting profile.22
Prior to going underground and becoming illegal, prominent members of what is now the CPN (M), guided by their ‘progressive’ ideology, focused their political efforts amongst just such strata, even sending a number of representatives to Parliament in the early period of transition to democracy.23The areas of this electoral strength, the same mid-western regional hill districts that form the subject of so much development literature, remain the Maoist heartland.
Organizationally, there is nothing unexpected in the CPN (M)’s approach in those areas. Using the mass line in areas where they are present in strength, and the united front in areas of Government presence (especially urban centres), cadres have emphasized winning the allegiance of the people by tapping into local grievances and then connecting solutions with membership in the CPN (M). Logically, however, this has meant that, at times, there are contradictions between the subjective pronouncements of Maoist publications and objective realities on the ground.24 Where the population has hesitated, terror has been used to ensure compliance. This increasingly has been the case as the party has moved out of the areas where it previously had an electoral base. Statistical analysis of casualties shows a near majority to be upper caste victims, an expected result in a society where those castes are dominant.25
As a mass base is mobilized, it is incorporated into a clandestine infrastructure, the alternative society of the CPN (M). This structure, to date, has essentially replicated that of the Government, merely setting up a radical alternative. In at least six mid-western districts, Government presence is now limited only to the district capitals, and the Maoists effectively constitute the ruling structure. The Politburo issues directives with the assistance of an approximately 25-member Central Committee. The precise relationship between this infrastructure and the so-called ‘Military Wing’ is a matter of some conjecture, but the degree of independence ostensibly enjoyed by the latter from the party is undoubtedly overemphasized.26 The main armed component, for instance, six guerrilla battalions, may only launch military action in response to instructions relayed through their individual Chief Commissars (one per battalion), who are Central Committee members.27 Similarly, the united front apparatus, while also existing as a separate entity, appears to be under firm party control.28
Leaders and followers, then, are mobilized, in the final analysis, by the same ‘causes,’ but approach the issues quite differently. Leaders, drawn overwhelmingly, even at this point in time, from the elite strata, seek structural change to deal with the issues. Followers, while also seeking solution, want direct and local redress.29 Preliminary systemic responses involved sending ill-prepared Police forces, both from local stations and regional response units, into affected areas, where their behaviour, actual and perceived30, thrust self-defence into the equation as a major theme for Maoist recruitment.31
The heartland of the early Maoist position was the area straddling either side of the border between the districts of Rolpa and Rukum in the mid-western region. There, Kham Magars responded to the CPN (M) guidance and became guerrillas, generally supported by the population.32 Further expansion proved more difficult and the level of popular involvement was commensurately lower. Indeed, even as the Maoists were able to dominate the six districts in the mid-western regional heartland, an area as near to the epicentre of the uprising as western Rolpa, Gharti Magar territory, witnessed infrastructure so thin that mere handfuls of cadres maintained control only through their ability to call upon guerrilla manpower for enforcement of their writ.33
Though the Maoists themselves did not claim as ‘base areas’ the human terrain they thus were able to dominate, the districts in the mid-western region served that role, as outlined in key ‘people’s war’ documents authored by Mao Tse-tung. Within them, social transformation could serve as a basis for popular mobilization, with the result that the movement could project itself outward into new areas. Necessarily, a contradiction glossed over in Maoist theoretical literature emerged for the CPN (M) in terms of resources, because the base areas were among the very poorest regions in the country – due, not to the issues of exploitation posited in party literature, but to more mundane reasons of overpopulation, poor techniques of agriculture and animal husbandry, and limited soil and water regimes. The result was the relative absence of the sort of social engineering one would expect to find in a ‘liberated area’ – and very limited resources available to the liberation movement.
In the absence of an external input, as provided, for instance, by drugs in the cases of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) in Colombia and Sendero Luminoso in Peru, CPN (M) was forced to rely upon the more traditional but limited insurgent methodology of criminal activity, especially bank-robbery, abduction-for-ransom and extortion,34 for generation of funds. These, though they could at times produce windfalls, were not able to meet the demands of rapid expansion.35 Neither could external links make up shortfalls, since the allied movements of CCOMPOSA were actually in an inferior position logistically to their Nepalese comrades. These stark realities left the movement with a character, in many areas, as much jacquerie as disciplined insurgency.
Dynamics of ‘People’s War’
Progress thus was steady but more a product of Government lack of capacity than insurgent power. Methodology was predictable and mirrored that of other insurgent movements following the people’s war approach. While ‘winning the hearts and minds’ was important in the base areas, terror was indispensable for expansion into contested populations. This was supplemented by guerrilla action and ultimately, with the launching of the November 2001 general offensive, the mobile warfare phase.
The basic pattern of mobile warfare may be conceptualized thus: Terror facilitates or establishes the ‘space’ necessary for the insurgent political campaign. It eliminates societal rallying points, the synapses such as local gentry and minor Government officials. Terror further generates demands for protection. Answering this demand, police forces respond. Once they predictably spread out, they are attacked in guerrilla actions with small patrols and stations overwhelmed. Unable to defend themselves, the police invariably consolidate forces, thus exposing still larger swaths of the population to insurgent domination. Behind the scenes, certain guerrilla units (i.e. a proportion of guerrilla combatant strength) are ‘regularized,’ to use Mao’s term, turned into mobile warfare units – ‘main force’ guerrilla units. They are ‘conventional’, but only in the sense of established tables of organization and equipment (TOE), and specialization. When the Government inevitably deploys its military to reclaim ‘lost’ areas, these units (normally the Army) find themselves, first, harassed by guerrilla action, which demands small unit saturation patrolling, then, defeated in detail by the mobile warfare units (which fight using ‘guerrilla tactics’).36
Doctrinally, political cadre should enter an area and gradually mobilize clandestine infrastructure, which produces violent action. Some movements, such as the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and Sendero Luminoso itself, prior to its 1980 declaration of people’s war, have essentially followed this approach. More common, though, as illustrated by the Naxalites in India and FARC in Colombia, is to lead with violence, ‘capturing’ a target population and then reorganizing it according to ideological dictate. This is the approach CPN (M) has relied upon since 1996.
In a typical action, in Muchook, a small village which is a four-hour walk from the district capital of Gorkha (the capital is also Gorkha), a Congress Party representative and Maoist opponent, a ‘big landlord’ (owning two hectares), was awakened at 2230 hrs by a knock on his door. Confronted by seven Maoists, armed principally with agricultural implements, he was dragged from his home and told he was to be made "to suffer the way you made the people suffer." His legs and feet were then systematically broken with hammers. Carried to a hospital in Kathmandu, he survived, but his absence deprived the village of a natural rallying point. For there existed no government presence in Muchook, with no police station, for example. Police, who did venture into the area, found nothing; but they could not stay, and so the Maoists effectively took control of the village and its surrounding area, one of Nepal’s 3,913 basic building blocks, or VDCs.
This process was repeated time and again. Complementary moves were carried out to neutralize the state and its agencies completely. District and VDC offices, for example, were systematically razed, their records and equipment destroyed. In Gorkha, the single month-and-a-half period prior to May 2002 saw 34 of the district’s 66 VDC offices completely eliminated. The 60-odd police stations, with their approximately 500 men spread out over the size of a US county (3,610 sq-km), with more than a quarter of a million people to cover and no real means to do so save on foot (the only paved road in the district connected Gorkha town to Kathmandu), were helpless.37 Nationwide, then, by the beginning of 2003, more than 1,400 VDCs no longer existed and virtually all no longer functioned, their personnel, elected locally, having almost universally fled.38 The influence of terror was illustrated by the reality that fewer than 30 VDC Chairmen had actually been assassinated (again, of a theoretical total of 3,913).39
All other elements of the state likewise found themselves attacked. Roads were cut; bridges, dams and hydropower facilities, aqueducts, telephone towers and electric lines, and airport control towers were systematically destroyed. By the same early-2003 date noted above, more than 440 post offices, most of them with the most rudimentary facilities, had been gutted.40
Such action was the essence of the approach of Sendero Luminoso (which Nepalese Maoist documents claimed to be copying consciously) and the Khmer Rouge.41 To all appearances, the goal was to sever links with the existing system, isolate the population into a self-contained entity, and return society to the proverbial revolutionary ‘Year One,’ when the remaking of the new world would begin. The guide for this transformation was to be the thoughts and dictums of the leader, ‘Prachanda Path,’ a deliberate echoing of Sendero Luminoso’s ‘Gonzalo Path’ (‘President Gonzalo’ was party leader Abimael Guzman Reynoso).
Though the essence of the campaign was rural-based, as would be expected from the ‘people’s war’ approach (as it had evolved, particularly through the Vietnam War experience), urban action was not eschewed. Just as Sendero eventually extended its campaign into urban space, so did the CPN (M). Such areas, in any case, were limited in Nepal, so the main targets were the three most important cities and their surrounding productive lands: Kathmandu, the capital; Pokhara, to the west, on the doorstep of the mid-western region; and Nepalgunj in the tarai. There, united front activity of the CPN (M)’s United Revolutionary People’s Council (URPC) was most important, supplemented by a terror campaign of bombings and assassinations initiated in August 2002.42 The most prominent victim was Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mohan Shrestha, commanding officer of the police field force (Armed Police Force or APF), killed in January 2003.
Even as terror forced society in upon itself, the principal target of guerrilla action was the 46,500-strong police force, the first line of armed defence – for Nepal possessed no local forces of any kind.43 An essentially unarmed ‘watcher’ force, two-thirds of whom carried nothing heavier than a patrol stick, the police were quite unprepared for the demands of counter-insurgency. Emergency response units, who in any case were armed with the 1941 version of the .303 Lee Enfield (a bolt action rifle), were likewise found lacking. Patrols sent to the scenes of incidents were ambushed; numerous small police stations were overrun, attacked in the dead of night in assaults initiated with homemade explosives, then overwhelmed by human wave assaults. Efforts to set up a more appropriately armed and equipped police field force, the Armed Police Force (APF, 15,000 men), made slow progress under the pressure of operational demands. By January 2003, while the Civil Police had suffered 985 fatalities, 108 APF personnel had been killed.45
Predictably, the only possible police response was to abandon outlying stations and consolidate the defensible mass. In the hills, where terrain, lack of communication and difficulty of movement favoured the guerrillas, this process was inexorable across the entire breadth of the country. Rolpa, in the insurgent heartland, was typical.46 In 1996, there were 33 stations in the district, with the largest but 75 men, most less than 20.47 When the post at Ghartigaun in western Rolpa was attacked in 1999, for example, it had a complement of 19. Fifteen were killed, the others wounded; the station was totally destroyed and never re-garrisoned. In 1998, two such stations were abandoned; in 1999, a further 16 (including Ghartigaun); in 2000, six more; in 2001, another four; and in 2002, three – leaving a total of just two for the entire population of nearly 211,000.
Such was the lack of national integration that, once the police presence was eliminated, the insurgents became the state. All that remained to serve as a reminder of far-off Kathmandu were the minor functionaries, who could not flee lest they lose their meagre salaries: the likes of teachers, postmen and VDC personnel. Heads of VDC’s, as mentioned previously, almost universally fled;48but school staff and postmen generally stayed. Had the approach of Sendero, the Naxalites or the Khmer Rouge remained the dominant ethos of the Maoists, not only would one expect such personnel to be eliminated but a new order instituted. Allowing for local exceptions, this was not the case. Indeed, in most areas, once the initial spasm of destruction had been completed, it ended – with comparatively lower levels of destruction in those areas where the Maoists held sway and made use of facilities, such as VDC offices. Land was not systematically seized or redistributed, and even schools were not directed to change the normal, centrally determined curriculum (though private schools were generally closed). Maoist combatants carried out civic action projects of sorts (such as improving trails and constructing bridges) even as Government development personnel – charged with doing the same tasks -- were refused entry. Only in those core areas of longstanding insurgent presence did anything ‘new’ surface, though various people’s Governments and projects, in reality, were but efforts to make earlier forms more equitable and responsive.
The critical component at the local level, of course, was the cadres. These, too, were of remarkably uneven quality and presence. It would be expected that the level of ideological knowledge would be low among movement ‘followers,’ but this generally has proved the case for the cadres, as well. Participation in the movement resulted from a variety of local and personal factors,49 and cadres generally did their best to reproduce the procedures and ‘symbology’ of the movement; but outside the core areas, they held sway only through terror, through their ability to call upon guerrilla formations to act as enforcers.50
This reality revealed a peculiarity noticed by virtually all observers: the dependence of the Maoist campaign upon tribal manpower, especially Magars. The fact that guerrilla formations were dominated numerically by Magars stemmed from the ethnic composition of the core areas in which the Maoists had long worked, such as the Rukum-Rolpa border corridor. That entire tribal communities would become involved in the insurgency was predictable once Government miscues allowed the CPN (M) to tap the self-defence dynamic. A staple of Maoist agitprop in such areas remains skits featuring blue-clad ‘policemen’ burning villages and brutalizing the villagers, only to be routed by them under the leadership of the party. That tribal links were being exploited was further illustrated by Magar dominance of guerrilla formations as far away from the core mid-western areas as Dolakha District, the ‘Rolpa of the East,’51 where Magars were less than 2 per cent of the population (as per census).52
If this dynamic fingered the CPN (M), in a sense, as a tribal revolt, a different process was at work in more mixed areas. In these, cadres were the movement, and they, as indicated, were a product of local realities and thus of mixed ethnic and class composition. Though they did participate directly in terror actions, especially in villages targeted for movement expansion, within their own areas of responsibility, they were more likely to call upon outsiders, the guerrillas.53
These guerrillas, who were initially organised in small units, eventually (certainly by early 2003) were overwhelmingly assigned to six main force units, battalion facsimiles of 400-600 men each. Single battalions were found in the Eastern and Central Zones (as per the Maoist framework) and four battalions in the Western Zone.54 Their weaponry was similar to that possessed by the Nepalese Government, a mix of the old and the new. The latter were primarily captured pieces and those purchased in the black market using looted funds.55 For training, ex-servicemen were both coerced and hired.
Even where terror is not the most salient issue in the minds of villagers, contact between them and the guerrillas would be a recurring factor in life, since the combatants are dependent upon the villagers for the necessities of life. All movement, for instance, must occur through the preparation of caches of necessities, ranging from food and water to firewood, and such activity occurs through orders issued to villagers by the cadres at the behest of the guerrilla chain-of-command. Similarly, the combatants enforce mandatory attendance by villagers at political rallies with the cadres issuing orders and enforcing them forcefully, if necessary. The end product is a high level of popular fear but an inability to do anything save reach accommodation – unless flight is adopted as a course of action. At the time of the cease-fire, a growing number of villagers appeared to be opting for this latter option.56
Systemic Response to the Maoist Challenge
Only with the November 2001 general offensive by the Maoists did Nepal take the necessary step of reinforcing the overwhelmed police force by committing the 54,000 troops of the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA)57 and passing anti-terrorism legislation. Spread throughout areas of the country which could be reached by road, quartered in battalions, but more often company cantonments, the RNA was a largely ceremonial force better known for its contribution to United Nations peacekeeping missions than for martial prowess. Indeed, even companies did not deploy as such. The result was a number of serious reverses as the RNA went through the painful transformation required for dealing with guerrilla warfare. In several instances, company-equivalents were overrun. By January 2003, the RNA had suffered 244 dead and 345 wounded.58
Faced with the Maoist campaign, the Nepalese state reeled. Though the number of dead was not as severe as that of many other insurgencies – the highest total figures for the entire period, February 13, 1996, to the present, are put at some 8,00059 – they were concentrated in the year-plus which followed November 2001. A majority of all war dead, therefore, came in the space of just over a year, a powerful shock to Nepal.60
Response was hampered by the political shortcomings already detailed. Not only did Governments change with startling rapidity, on average one per year, but also governance was only possible due to the formation of various intra and even inter-party coalitions. Self-interest was the order of the day, illustrated by rampant corruption, and administrative drift meant than even substantial foreign development assistance was not incorporated in a systematic manner. The appearance of an insurgency, therefore, was seen as but one more minor factor among many, and parcelled out to the security forces for action – which in the pre-November 2001 period meant to the police.
Under some enlightened commanders, local police operations could have passed for those that had proved successful for the British in Malaya. Others, though, were more repressive than developmental in thrust. One advantage for the state was that numerous individuals, both civilians and security force, had served abroad with the United Nations in peacekeeping situations.61 Thus, they were well versed in the ‘hearts and minds’ approach to internal pacification, as opposed to pure repression. It was in a sense predictable, then, that approximately a year before the Maoist general offensive, the RNA, though still in its barracks as far as stability and security operations were concerned, was nevertheless deployed in limited fashion in support of a Government Integrated Security and Development Programme (ISDP).
The RNA, it was intended at this stage, would serve as the security shield for bringing Government presence to underdeveloped areas, which would then see an interjection of activity designed to improve conditions and promote livelihood. As matters worked out, the RNA was the only element of the Government which actually fulfilled its role. Though half a dozen districts were designated, with Gorkha as the pilot project, and RNA battalions deployed in area domination patrols, the civilian input was limited to selection of the projects by local Government bodies. The result was that the RNA itself used its limited assets to build roads, dig wells and provide rudimentary medical attention to villagers. Yet none of this was done on a scale that made the slightest difference to the actual situation on the ground.62
With the November 2001 offensive, the ISDP was suspended, and the RNA deployed to engage in area domination. The highest formation for command and control was the brigade, but this gradually gave way to divisions and a planned corps, both of these more area commands than deployable military entities. Solid individual training could not be channelled into results-oriented operations due to shortfalls of arms and equipment, as well as severe shortcomings in leadership and technical skills.
A critical weakness was intelligence, the linchpin of any counter-insurgency effort. Nepal’s various sources for information gathering and processing – the police, Armed Police Force, RNA, and National Investigation Department (NID) – were quite unprepared for the demands of internal war and generally deficient in both information gathering and intelligence production/dissemination.63Exacerbating the situation, these bodies functioned as separate entities with little coordination or data sharing. Only at the very highest levels of the bureaucracy was raw input brought together for analysis, but this, too, was provided for in an ad hoc and undermanned fashion.64
Still, dramatic strides were made in setting up the command and control architecture necessary for counter-insurgency. With the Prime Minister in position as commander-in-chief, the National Security Council (NSC) was charged with executing the campaign. Because the NSC itself consisted of top Government leaders, it was the Council’s Executive Secretariat that undertook planning and coordination tasks. At various levels, but especially in the districts, coordinating committees – comprised of the local police, RNA, civil, and intelligence representatives – met to determine policy and implementation. A unified command, with the RNA having authority over all elements of the armed response, eventually came into existence, giving fillip to the ad hoc but functioning coordination cells that had been formed at the RNA headquarters. APF platoons were deployed as if they were ‘light’ RNA units, and the police were given primacy in the defence of most urban areas.65
The greatest difficulties occurred in overcoming the substantial baggage of past political inadequacies. The police, for instance, were not trusted by the RNA, being seen as corrupt, inefficient, and as bullyboys for the ruling party, which normally had been the Nepali Congress. The new APF, in turn, had received a good portion of its initial manpower draft from various Nepali Congress youth groups and so was likewise not trusted by either the Civil Police – who did have a good many within the officer corps who were well trained and had substantial experience – or the RNA. For its part, the RNA was viewed as loyal first and foremost to the Palace and as a possible threat to the fledging democracy. A highly centralized decision-making machinery meant that even the best of motives could often fail to overcome bureaucratic inertia.
Foreign support, hence, became crucial in addressing these flaws. Britain, as might be expected from its long and deep involvement in Nepal, played an important role in training. India, concerned lest it see another security problem develop on a crucial border (Nepal is a buffer between New Delhi and Beijing), responded initially with training and material support, eventually moving vigorously to suppress substantial Maoist subversion within its own borders. Ironically, China, having moved in its foreign policy beyond supporting ‘Maoist insurgents,’ also provided equipment. Finally, the United States, which long had been a major development actor through its US Agency for International Development (USAID), moved vigorously in all areas, from supplying arms and equipment to training. An emergency appropriation brought the combined military aid (Foreign Military Financing) for Fiscal Years 2002 and 2003 (FY02/FY03) to US $17 million. Assessment teams from all these three countries were supplemented by personnel for actual training, including US Special Forces.
Where no amount of foreign input could compensate, though, was in overcoming the shortcomings of a traditional system, which organizationally manifested themselves in extreme deference to authority and a consequent lack of initiative. Combined with the intelligence shortcomings cited above, this resulted in a failure to come to grips with the struggle operationally and tactically – even as the general strategic grasp of overall parameters could be judged as being reasonably accurate. While it was understood with considerable clarity how socio-economic-political shortcomings had produced the insurgency, it was not grasped how to respond.66 Consequently, a comparatively weak insurgent movement, which drew its combatant strength from a minimally armed tribal revolt and could expand beyond core regions only through terror orchestrated by voluntarist action, was allowed to go unchecked for want of application of any systematic counter.
Further, even as this uncoordinated, haphazard, armed response moved forward, political realities worsened the situation. Virtually the entire post-November 2001 period saw the Government in a state of crisis, with the Nepali Congress splitting into two rival factions, and the UML reportedly refusing to accept the reins of Government. Finally, in October 2002, the King, using extraordinary powers granted to him by the Constitution – but highly controversial nevertheless – disbanded the Parliament and appointed a Government made up predominantly of members from minority political parties.67 As the King’s own legitimacy was not secure, this made the Government’s even less so, and the ousted parties wasted no time in endeavouring to test, through mass action, the staying power of the new regime. So tainted were the political parties by their own corruption and ineptitude, though, that they were unable to rally a viable challenge.
It was at this moment that the Maoists chose to offer, in January 2003, a cease-fire and renewed negotiations. The reason had already been provided by Bhattarai in December 2002: "The situation is now peaking towards a climax after the fratricidal and regicidal ‘king,’ Gyanendra, and his notorious son, Paras, have staged a retrogressive coup d’etat against the supine parliamentary democracy on October 4 and restored autocratic monarchy in the country."68 Such vitriol notwithstanding, the country eagerly embraced the proffered respite.69
Earlier negotiations, as detailed above, had been unilaterally terminated by the CPN (M) in November 2001, in order to go over to the offensive. However, links had never been broken. The UML, in particular, because its stated ideology continues to incorporate the notion of ‘revolution,’ had kept channels of communication open, as had any number of other actors. Human rights groups, for instance, repeatedly endeavoured to act as mediators. Eventually, the Palace and its appointed Government, in order to renew discussions, used these channels. Just how these would eventually fare remained anyone’s guess, because neither side showed any sign of altering its basic positions. These positions, to be clear, were irreconcilable on such basics as the nature of the state and the position of the Monarchy. Even during negotiations, both sides continued to train, re-equip, and acquire armaments.
In this situation, the Maoist position remains paramount. From the previous cease-fire, captured documents and pictures, including video footage, together with interrogations of prisoners, show cadres telling the mass base that negotiations are no more than a tactical gambit, that the cause of the revolution will never be betrayed or given up until a ‘people’s republic’ is established. The real question is whether the present phase of talks are seen by the party as just a pause for regrouping or a more serious effort to gain, by non-violent means, that which it has thus far been unable to gain through violence – a standard political warfare technique, to be sure, but one that is not producing the level of societal dislocation attending the Maoists’ effort to become, to borrow a phrase, ‘the New Sendero.’
Significantly, the latter course seems likely, with the CPN (M) – in its own calculations – moving from a position of strength into fractured Nepali politics. At this point, however, analysis points to two possible interpretations of Maoist design.
Neither of these two interpretations would preclude inclusion by the Maoists of more immediate concerns, though Bhattarai, as the head of the Maoist negotiations team, has begun to emphasize that the CPN (M)’s ‘75 Points’ is a document of strategic goals rather than tactical demands. He claims for the Party a willingness of the movement to accept intermediate steps (e.g. a ‘bourgeois republic’ with a constitutional monarchy), a determination to move beyond an early attraction for the approach of Sendero Luminoso or the Naxalites in order to arrive at a unique, situationally appropriate ‘Nepalese Maoism.’75 Specifics of application for the building of a new Nepal are to be found in an expansion of Bhattarai’s doctoral dissertation released in May 2003.76
Even if this formulation were accepted at face value, there would be grounds for pessimism. Maoist rhetorical excesses, especially attacks on the RNA, and a bargaining emphasis on broad, often utopian, declarations at the expense of specifics, has led to a situation where the two sides are in danger of talking past each other. Undoubtedly, the RNA sees little but a cynical effort to weaken it. In the field, Maoist cadres and combatants have been briefed that the major goal of the current round of talks is the consolidation of the ‘national army.’77 Simultaneously, the Maoist representatives in Kathmandu have focused on ending international assistance to the Government (which, as indicated above, has been crucial in enhancing the capabilities of the security forces), all the while demanding that the RNA ‘return to barracks.’ Under no such restrictions themselves, Maoist forces have continued to move and train, funded by undiminished criminal activity.
Further, unsure of their position vis-à-vis Nepal’s international supporters in the era of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), the Maoists have stridently attacked them, in particular the United States. This has furthered the impression of Machiavellian manoeuvring, though it would seem more correct to find the inspiration for such CPN (M) verbiage in the party’s parochial origins and operational environment. Put simply, the Maoists have a painfully limited understanding of the global forces and processes presently in play.78 This leads to a degree of paranoia and mistaken bargaining positions.
It should be further noted here that representatives of the CPN (M) present in Kathmandu are among the most worldly and well-educated in the Party. This leads to questions as to both the scope of their authority and the degree to which their positions accurately reflect those of the entire leadership. Though CPN (M) decision-making is apparently a collective enterprise, Prachanda dominates through majority support in the Politburo. His views – especially concerning the extent to which a compromise may be exercised in the negotiations – are not known – despite the claim by Bhattarai that he and his peers are but a reflection of the Party will.
The difficulty of the situation has been compounded by the movement, in May 2003, of the estranged political parties into a phase of active resistance against the state – which led to the resignation of the first ‘caretaker’ Government in June and its replacement by a follow-on administration. Though the parties had constantly voiced support for a favourable outcome in the Government/CPN (M) negotiations, they have committed their own efforts completely to a confrontation with the palace and its appointed Government. In this action, the Maoists have joined, using their fronts to dramatically increase their influence within what hitherto has been the Government’s rear area.
In such an environment, the only real surprise came when the Maoists on August 27, 2003, abruptly terminated the cease-fire and resorted again to a variety of armed actions, to include targeted assassinations against important Government personnel in Kathmandu. The surprise came from the obvious: Government disorientation and lack of focus seemed to be providing the CPN (M) with ample leeway to make progress through ‘political’ means – progress that would surely be more difficult in a state of armed conflict. Indeed, faced with renewed Maoist assassination efforts, the Government promptly restored legal prohibitions and asked international organizations for assistance in apprehending leadership figures. Thus, ‘people’s war’ is again in full swing.