Peaceful Sneaking

This is nothing against Sebastian Gorka's discussions of asymmetrical warfare, which seems to be his area of expertise. But each time he talks with John Batchelor about Asia, Pundita can found pulling out tufts of her hair and banging her head on the nearest hard surface.

So it was last night, when the sahib held forth on the PLA (China's army) and their doctrine of unrestricted warfare, which was codified in a book that came out about a decade ago. Gorka is clearly under the impression that this kind of warfare is a recent invention of China's defense establishment.

For the sahib's benefit, the whole of India's post-Independence defense experience can be summed in one sentence: "The Indians caught them sneaking."

"Them" being the Pakistanis and the Chinese.

A favorite Chinese ploy was -- and still is -- for the PLA to get 'nomads' to drive their herds across a part of the Indian border. When the Indian military catches them at it and tells them to move back onto China's side of the border, the nomads draw themselves up to their full height and snap that they are standing on their sacred ancestral grazing lands inside China.

Then comes the call to China's military. A few Chinese officers show up, fiddle with the measuring tape then say, 'The nomads are right. They're in Chinese territory.'

The Indians tell them no, the nomads have set up camp two feet inside the Indian border. After much squabbling and more playing with measuring tape, the Indians open a map to show exactly where the border is.

The Chinese look at the map and say, 'That's a map the white man drew when he ruled you. Why do you put faith in anything the white man drew?'

I am not making any of this up.

After days or even months of argument, during which the nomads drive their herds a few more feet inside the Indian border, the Indian army finally gets the Chinese to pull the nomads back. But when they move back, they are still an inch inside the Indian border. Then the Chinese redraw their map to show the one inch to be inside Chinese territory and save the map for the next round of border disputes, which is actually never-ending because the Chinese are always testing the limits of their land's boundaries.

The nomads are just one ploy; there is the old road-building ploy ('You want us to rip up this entire road just because you think it's six inches inside your border? Now who's being petty?')

And there's the Long Lost Chinese Tribe ploy. I keep telling the Pakistanis and Iranians not to accept too much help from the Chinese because if they keep it up, one day they will discover they are Chinese. I've even warned South Africans about this. They tell me, 'Pundita, they would never try it; look at us, we're black.'

To which the Chinese will chorus, 'Black with Chinese characteristics!' Mark my words.

The Han Chinese have been practicing unrestricted warfare since anyone can remember. How does the sahib think the map of China got so big? But they do it inch by inch and foot by foot. So when they speak of 'Peaceful Rising' what they mean is 'Peaceful Sneaking.'

All this looks new to Sebastian Gorka simply because he is a Natoist. The Nato governments never paid attention to Chinese (or Pakistani) aggression toward India until they became alarmed that China was carrying out unrestricted warfare against the USA.

The alarm came a little late in the day -- after the U.S. goverment did everything it could to play China against Russia, then got deeply in hock to China.