This is just a cover up excuse. When I first talked about it I spoke from experience and reading about a lot nations who have mapped and contained even more difficult terrains. Not only for security or establishing writ of their law and order but even instituting civic infra and connectivity.
I have a strong suspicion that there are many layers in establishment and few of them are corrupt and heavily invested in continuing the conflict.
No way this conflict should have lasted that long.
I think we are wasting our time looking at wrong places.
yeah...the issue is a lot of layers of our armed forces are corrupt or non-professional. They are also not tech savvy and believe in using foot soldiers as fodder to contain terrorism. Also, they are struggling to fill officer ranks - look at the number of vacancies in armed forces; because of India's private economy - now all these government jobs are not preferred much less. IAF is struggling to find pilots as many want to work in private industry. As India's economy grows, the armed forces will have even more trouble finding soldiers and pilots and sailors.
Our armed forces:
- dont come up with a decadal threat assessment study
- dont consider strategic threat assessments every year for quick action
- dont invest in advance to equip soldiers absed on these near term and long term threat assessments. Procurement is very inefficient and chaotic and full of corrupt intentions.
- dont provide a professional working environment for its members. dont provide good health facilities especially mental health.
Plus:
- way too much arrogance at the top level that they know-it-all and frame bad policies on battle field engagement.
- really, really bad cybersecurity and propaganda departments. very bad communications of engagement outcomes to citizens - inability to get citizens to support lethal strikes.
- always on the defensive and thinking too much about loss of international image (mainly due to MEA being extremely defensive) due to the stupidly cultivated "India is NOT an aggressive nation" image.
- pissing off our own citizens with heavy handed tactics without understanding that having citizens on your side is a must for fighting lethal wars and forgiving any errors the security forces may make. Look at the extent the Roman emperors went to keep citizens happy and on their side, despite have a powerful military. In our case, one officer dies and their entire family starts chanting things like "talk to Pakistan, give away kashmir" etc which the enemy exploits.
- finally, India is still a very loose federation of states with national integration, unity, and levels of patriotism pretty low compared to other countries. No leader in India has ever taken concrete measures to inculcate patriotism amongst all Indians due to the stupid "chaltha hai" attitude and the highly corrupt CONgressis. I really thought Modi would be a lot stricter but even he seems to have dozed off in his second term. Maybe the China virus and all the sufferings has brought him down.
Overall, a large section (more than 50%) of Indians are a poorly disciplined set of people who dont respect issues like rules based society, professional work habits, high work performance, patriotism, national honor, civic sense, education, health etc. They are just born, lead chaltha-hai lives, and die without doing a single thing for the society and country. They serve no purpose with their existence and are not remembered for anything. How can a nation like this be decisive with the enemies that inflict big wounds on her?
What all we lack, the Americans, Chinese, Russians, Brits, Japanese... etc have and we keep shouting "we want a seat at the UNSC". No wonder, no one gives a shit about our claims as they know we wont even enforce security within India not to talk about the region or the world. So how can India be part of a "security" council? LOL.