I Do Not Think Any Lessons Have Been Learnt, One Has Only to Look at the Newspapers Then As Well As Now, Every Kill is an Occasion for Exultation January 2022

Brig. R.R. Palsokar, author of Ours Not to Reason Why: With The IPKF in Sri Lanka

Even when you first wrote this book in 2012, you had the benefit of hindsight. How has your understanding of the IPKF, its military limitations and political compulsions evolved between the first edition and this one?

When I first wrote the book, the aim was to record the performance of the Brigade I commanded and in particular the bravery and dedication of the men and officers. This I felt must be recorded for posterity else no one would ever have known what had really happened and there were enough stories floating around as to how incompetent the IPKF had been. I was very clear that we had done our job, irrespective of how our seniors painted it to hide their own shortcomings. The military limitations and political compulsions though at the back of my mind, was not my concern at that time.

Subsequently, after the book was published and a number of officers gave their views particularly as to what could have been done which resulted in the article which was published in FORCE in February 2018. What I have said there has never been contested. Now that I look back it is not surprising that we were doomed to fail from the very start because the aim, if there was one, was hardly thought through. That the intervention did not turn into a disaster is testimony to the dedication to duty and ability of the officers and men who fought there.

In the same vein, how has your understanding about counter-insurgency operations evolved?

We were not right to think that by dominating territory we had the situation under control. We had to fight for the hearts and minds of the local populace. We succeeded in dominating territory but miserably failed in the second, our emphasis was on kills rather than winning the locals over. It was a non-winning strategy. The manner of American withdrawal from Afghanistan has proved that my basic understanding of the situation in Sri Lanka was correct. In Afghanistan, the US and its allies failed in both for a variety of reasons, some relevant to us others not so, but that is another subject. One lesson from Sri Lanka must stand out—rushing in cannot help.

After we returned, I wrote a series of articles in the (then) Combat Journal on counter insurgency. This helped me in clarifying my own ideas on the subje