Author’s Note: This article was penned on February 15 this year in response to Dr Shashi Tharoor’s op-ed in The Indian Express. It was sent to an Indian publication, which was initially interested but then backed off. The author then tried another Indian publication, which was interested in placing it in both the print and the web editions. But that was not to be after their editorial meeting, in which the majority view was that it would unnecessarily put them in the crosshairs of the current Indian government. Below, The Friday Times is printing it without any update.

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pastor, theologian, dissenter; 1933)

Written during the Nazi era, Bonhoeffer’s advice was stark: if a society or state has got the direction fundamentally wrong, it can’t run in the opposite direction to get it right. It needs to get off that train. 

Easier said. How does one get the Daedalion wings to escape the maze, the bind?

India’s politician, diplomat and public intellectual Dr Shashi Tharoor penned a column last month for The Indian Express titled “For India-Pak peace is not weakness, dialogue is not defeat”. It’s an improvement on what he wrote last year in April, “Hit Hard, Hit Smart”, though it still gets the cause and effect wrong. I shall come to that. But let me begin with what he wrote last year, a column that was dictated more by the flow of immediate passions than an understanding of war, its conduct or why the Sturm und Drang of war lays to rest the flawed assumption that the adversary is a cut-out.

I am not going to flyspeck Dr Tharoor’s recommended strategy in that column because that would take us into the complexities of war, a phenomenon much written about but whose intricacies continue to elude even the managers of violence. That said, to establish the point, I would take two examples from Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns, a general who spoke of coup d’œil but still made disastrous decisions because the battleground tactics are not the same as the politico-strategic objective, Clausewitz’s Zweck, for which the battles (Ziel) are fought. 

Bonaparte began his Russia campaign while suffering from the Spanish ulcer. He crossed the Neman River in June 1812 even as an Anglo-French army led by the Duke of Wellington was arraying to give battle to the French at Salamanca. The........

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