Insurgency in Iraq

For the govt in New Delhi, the crisis is its first foreign policy test

India, like the rest of the world, has watched with shock and dismay as Iraq has, essentially, fallen apart. India's stakes in Iraq are high - many Indian civilians are employed there. The ministry of external affairs has confirmed that 40 Indians working in oil refineries have been abducted by insurgents; nurses working in the town of Tikrit are also under threat. The government's response so far has been, by and large, inadequate. It is not as if there is no institutional expertise - as many as 18,000 Indian nationals were evacuated from Libya in less than a week in 2011.

It is not as if there were not similar amounts of time in this case, although it is true that the groups once known as Al Qaeda in Iraq - now reformed as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS - have taken over an enormous amount of territory in a few weeks. After they defeated 40 times their number of Iraqi soldiers in the country's second-largest city, Mosul, they stormed south and have taken over several cities in the Sunni heartland, including Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. It remains difficult to imagine that ISIS will be able to defeat the regular Iraqi army in a sustained manner. There are less than 10,000 fighting men in ISIS, whereas the Iraqi army numbers in the hundreds of thousands - and has, of course, air support and armour as well. However, just like the country overall, the army is divided between Sunnis and Shias, and that has affected its operational capacity. Indeed, the fightback against ISIS is being led by better trained and more cohesive special forces from Iran who are acting as the spearhead for the Iraqi army.

However, for several reasons, this insurgency is not going away. Here are the two biggest factors. First, ISIS has access to oil revenue. In fact, it seems to have planned its assaults around access to oil wells. This gives it a safe source of revenue - while ISIS fights the Syrian regime, for example, it also makes money selling Damascus oil and electricity. Hence, it is better armed, more organised and can offer more stable incomes to its fighters than the run-of-the-mill insurgent organisation. The second is that it has a secure base. The reason that the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have proved resolutely difficult to defeat is that the Pakistani Taliban take refuge in Afghanistan and the Afghan Taliban can take refuge in Pakistan. The safe space where you can escape being harried by government troops is what allows an insurgency to sustain itself - which is why counter-Naxal operations in India, for example, require co-ordination between states. It is necessary, thus, for India to prepare for a long insurgency.

Unfortunately, the Indian government has been late in responding to the developments in Iraq. There are both macroeconomic and human consequences. On the one hand, oil at $120 a barrel or above will significantly alter the fiscal deficit mathematics. On the other hand, the safety of Indian workers is a matter of national concern. There is an uncomfortable feeling that the government has been again taken by surprise by developments, and is uncertain about how to respond. This is not reassuring. The government needs to be open about where Indian citizens are at risk and what is being done to secure their return. And it needs to share what its contingency plans are for a period of elevated oil prices.