NEVER AGAIN

The United Progressive Alliance government’s recent approach to terrorism has been both muscular and active. A great deal of credit must go to the man who was appointed as the single-point counter-terrorism leader in the wake of Mumbai — Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram.
Things are still happening in a command fashion — orders going from top to down. But that is because for a long time nothing was happening. Everything was being dissolved into committees and task-forces. Hopefully, after the emergency surgery, the government will have the foresight to grow durable institutionalized arrangements.
A new National Investigation Agency has been created to deal with terrorist crime and a draconian legislative framework to deal with terrorism approved. Actions frozen for the past four years were unfrozen. In response to a question in Parliament on Wednesday, Mr. Chidambaram noted that the country’s “level of preparedness is higher than it was three months ago.” He added that “by March 31, there will be better coordination between Multi-Agency Centre and its subsidiaries, and also between MAC and special branches of state police and various data centres.”
He also spoke of better equipment for the armed forces and the paramilitary, and observed that the country had strengthened its coastal security in Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Dangers

These are brave words, but necessary, given the trauma the country faced when Mumbai was attacked. For sixty hours, a gang of gunmen fought off India’s elite National Security Guard and we had to witness the agony of thousands who lost their near and dear ones in the carnage and of the hundreds who had been injured.
The NSG cannot be blamed-— neither through doctrine, training or equipment were they in a position to deal with the situation effectively. The overwhelming sense that came out of the traumatic days was of helplessness and humiliation, compounded by the fact that no one seemed to be in-charge, either in Mumbai or in New Delhi.
There is a real and present danger of a recurrence of a Mumbai-type event. A great deal depends on whether the recent steps taken to heighten our security work, and the extent to which the promised Pakistani actions against the terrorist masterminds and handlers on their soil disrupt their activities.




The transcripts of conversations between the terrorists and their handlers released by the authorities reveal the almost puppet-like control that was exercised by the handlers in Pakistan. Because this had to be done over unsecured communications networks, this could not have been a preferred situation but one mandated by the circumstances.
And what were they? The Lashkar leadership had a bold and ruthless plan, and they had a set of well-trained and motivated killers. The problem was that most of them —carefully nurtured within Pakistan for security reasons — were semi-literate and not very capable of functioning autonomously. For them to understand the layout of a modern hotel, or function in a modern city, would be difficult. Whatever independent thinking they may have had was wiped out by systematic brainwashing to make them into effective and remorseless killing machines.
If Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, Zarrar Shah & Co are truly out of commission, then it should make it difficult for the Lashkar to mount a similar operation in a hurry. If not, we can anticipate another strike. But we do not know where it will be, or what it would involve.
Having failed in their mission to provoke war between India and Pakistan in November, the masterminds will strive to carry out a more horrific attack, one that would make it difficult for the government to display the kind of restraint it did in the wake of Mumbai.
Given the Indian way of doing things, the biggest danger we confront is complacency. Having put a number of key measures to secure the county’s land and maritime boundaries, to get more effective intelligence coordination and unblocked money held up for vital defence and security needs, the government may well feel satisfied. But we are far from being home and dry.
New institutions and arrangements require time and training to become effective. The new maritime arrangements, the MAC and all the other good things the government has done have to not just be there as new signboards but must be made battle-worthy and battle-ready through training and retraining and tested on the ground.
Then, in pushing new measures Mr. Chidambaram has knocked a great number of heads. The normal tendency is that once the political ankush (goad) is withdrawn, the bureaucratic worms again crawl out of the woodwork and things soon return to normal. After Kargil and the Parliament House attack — the two defining national security disasters of the National Democratic Alliance period — the government carried out an unprecedented and long-overdue exercise to overhaul the country’s defence management system. But the incoming UPA put everything into the deep freeze.

Failure

It was declaratively allergic to stringent counter-terrorist legislation and was not particularly eager to have an NIA, and it had a somnolent Shivraj Patil as its Home Minister. Worse, with M.K. Narayanan, an old spook appointed the national security czar, all steps towards restructuring and reform died out.
The MAC should have been functioning by 2004. Narayanan did nothing about it, nor did he permit the National Technical Research Organisation to constitute itself in a manner it should have to carry out its high-tech surveillance mandate. The R&AW reached a nadir of sorts, and the government simply looked the other way.
Mr. Chidambaram’s timetable of March-end is determined either through the habit of a finance minister, or it is politically driven by the fact that the government will more or less end its term by then. But the country cannot afford to go by that timeline. An effective and agile counter-terrorist machine cannot be built in a matter of months; given our past sloth it could take years. And we need to take several other longer-term steps to be able to put up impregnable defences.

Agenda

First, reconstruct our relations with Pakistan by resolving outstanding disputes and building international pressure on Islamabad to make the paradigm shift away from using terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
Second, draw out the poison out of our inter-communal situation, especially in Gujarat and Maharashtra. This needs active intervention by the state and central government in building bridges with the Muslim community.
Third, overhaul the armed forces so that the enormous treasure we spend on their upkeep is justified by having a balanced and powerful military, one that can provide more options than were available to the government this time.
Fourth, create new centre-state compacts to promote greater synergy in the functioning of not just their intelligence agencies, and home and police departments, but in the joint working of the central and state governments as such.
Fifth, encourage inter-governmental, community and citizen participation in intelligence-gathering and analysis. Sometime bits and pieces of information are floating around at various levels, but it takes a clever intelligence service to pull all the strings together. In 1965, when the Army moved towards Lahore, they had no maps of Pakistan’s Icchhogil canal; the maps were available — with our Punjab state’s irrigation department.
Sixth, put in place a culture of leadership. Wars are fought by generals in a command fashion, and not by committee. Crisis management groups sound impressive, but they are usually ineffective.
Seventh, unlearn the “indigenous” mantra that has led to the police-bureaucracy-technocracy complex believing that they can do everything at home; they can’t. And their failure has led to countless problems ranging from the lack of a good Indian fighter and battle-tank to an inadequately equipped and trained counter-terrorist force.
Eighth, abandon belief that an announcement is tantamount to an achievement. We have announced the creation of the NIA, MAC, etc. What we now need is to make sure they work, and work well.

Everything must be subordinated to one goal: There must never be another Mumbai again.

This article appeared in Mail Today February 28, 2009

Revenge is a dish best served cold

Some Indians believe that November 26 is India’s Nine-Eleven. And, following from that, argue that India should respond just as the United States did — by making war on the country responsible for sheltering the terrorists. This sounds logical, and even reasonable, for something so horrendous as the Mumbai massacre deserves condign punishment, and hasn’t Barack Obama said that a sovereign nation like India has the right to protect itself?
The flaw in the argument is what realpolitik is all about. The US as a preponderant military power, with a blessed geography, can go half way around the world and make war on two countries, not just one, without facing any direct retribution. The wars have cost the US a great deal of money, but the loss of the lives of some 5,000 soldiers is hardly proportional to the death and destruction that has visited Iraq and Afghanistan.
India is not in that position. An air strike at a camp in Azad Kashmir is likely to be met by a retaliatory strike in Jammu & Kashmir. You bomb Muridke, and the Pakistanis are likely to hit an equivalent target in India. A ground attack on one part of the border could be met with by a counter thrust on another. In other words, there is no way in which we can give Pakistan a bloody nose without getting somewhat bloodied ourselves.
So, any war would become a slug-fest and the UN would soon step in. The international sympathy and support for India would melt away and the Mumbai massacre would mutate into an “Indo-Pakistani” problem. At this point, someone could append a clause to a UN resolution saying that not only must there be a ceasefire, but steps taken to settle the J&K dispute.

Capacity

Put simply, the US has the capacity to exercise military power and block any retaliation, military or diplomatic, whereas India does not. There is little value in using the military option, unless you can be sure that it is the bad guys who get the chastisement, not the chastiser. As of now only the most foolhardy military commander will offer such an assurance vis-à-vis Pakistan.
This is uncomfortable logic, but there it is. Its primary lessons come from the 2001-2002 near-war with Pakistan. India mobilized some 700,000 troops to teach Pakistan a lesson in the wake of the attack on the Parliament House. Islamabad mobilized its own army and used the opportunity to crack down on sectarian groups, even while permitting the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba to relocate in Azad Kashmir.
Later in 2002, on May 14, there was yet another attack, this time provocatively targeting the families of military personnel at the Kaluchak cantonment near Jammu. As many as 31 people, mostly families of jawans, were killed in the massacre carried out by three terrorists who had come from Pakistan.

The Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (aka Victoria Terminus) where most of the people were killed by two terrorists including Ajmal Kasab.

Despite an army ready to go to war, India did nothing. The reason was clear — there was no guarantee of a clear military outcome in our favour.
The reason why we cannot behave militarily as the Americans can is not only because we confront a nuclear-armed country, but also because India does not have the military capacity to carry out a military attack on Pakistan which will be free of the risk of retaliation.

Coalition

As President Pervez Musharraf put it in an interview to the Christian Science Monitor in September 2002 after the threat of war had passed “… my military judgment was that they [Indians] would not attack us… It was based on the deterrence of our conventional forces. The force levels that we maintain, in the army, navy, air force is of a level which deters aggression. Militarily…there is a certain ratio required for an offensive force to succeed. The ratios that we maintain are far above that — far above what a defensive force requires to defend itself....”
Even taking into account the Musharrafian bluster, there is more than a grain of truth in this assertion. The only way in which India could have overcome the tyranny of numbers is to have had much greater mobility and fire-power. But that is not the case. India’s armed forces follow archaic organizational principles and doctrines that do not allow them to combine their army, air force and navy to fight a single, integrated battle where all three services combine to deliver a single punch.
As it is, the army does not have adequate mobile artillery or real-time information systems to conduct long-range precision strikes. Our Air Force disdains supporting the army, and is, in any case, not geared for deep-penetration ground attacks of the kind the US and Israel specialize in.
It is an uncomfortable fact that Pakistan has fine-tuned a strategy of hitting us using proxies, even while holding out the threat of nuclear retaliation were we to use our military to hit back. The challenge for India is to craft another kind of strategy — one that understands that political authority in Pakistan is fragmented, and that while there are many elements that wish to live in peace with India, there are some that are determined to prevent this from happening. So, there is a need for a nuanced policy that encourages the former and isolates the latter. One way to do this is to take advantage of the international climate and build a global coalition to isolate the jehadi forces in Pakistan, even while encouraging those forces in Pakistan who are for peaceful co-existence.
The prospects for building such a coalition are very good. No country in the world, probably not even China, is comfortable with what is happening in Pakistan. This is the reason why they did not stand in the way of the UN Security Council putting the Jamaat-ud-dawa and Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed on a list of people and institutions associated with the Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
India and the world needs to investigate and analyse the Mumbai attacks thoroughly and act in a manner that will effectively prevent another attack, as well as ensure the dismantling of the jehadi infrastructure in Pakistan. This inevitably leads to the need to do something about the corporate culture of the Pakistan Army.

Beneficiary

The question to ask is: Who is the principal beneficiary of the Mumbai attack? It is not Asif Zardari or Geelani, or, notwithstanding the conspiracy theorists, the US, Israel or Hindu chauvinists. It is that part of the Pakistan Army which remains open to the jehadi temptation.
For the past year and more, these forces have been down in the dumps. They have been compelled to fight a deeply unpopular war against the Pakistani Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Going by the 2001 book, a massive terrorist attack on Mumbai ought to have provoked India into launching a limited military strike in Pakistan.
In such circumstances, the Pakistan Army could have ended their anti-Taliban campaign and marched off to counter the Indian challenge. They would once again have become heroes in the eyes of the public, and the US would have found it difficult to question the decision. A subsidiary consequence of this would have been an end to Asif Zaradari’s peace rhetoric relating to India.
Because generals usually learn to fight the last war better, the Pakistani plot has failed. India has not reacted militarily. The Pakistan Army must continue its war in the west, and at the same time face increasing international opprobrium and pressure with regard to their proxy warriors. The game has just begun, but with patience and fortitude, we can yet prevail. Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.
This article was first published in Mail Today December 18, 2008