A comment on US plans to strike in Pakistan

The report that the US is contemplating unilateral strikes should an attack on its homeland be traced to Pakistan, should not occasion surprise. US Secretary of State more or less said this in the wake of the arrest of Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to set off an improvised explosive device (IED) in Times Square early this month.


According to The Washington Post that broke the story, the US options for such a strike could include air and missile strikes, as well as the use of US Special Operations forces for raids inside Pakistan.
Currently, the US strike capability for Pakistan focuses on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. They are used in a very restricted fashion with just about 40 or so strikes attributed to them this year concentrating mainly on the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan. These use single or a salvo of several missiles at one time and clearly what the US is contemplating is something larger.
The US is now confronting a dilemma that India has faced ever since the Khalistani terrorists began creating mayhem in Punjab and Delhi in the 1980s. Many of these used sanctuaries and assistance from Pakistani operatives. In the early 1990s, Pakistan gave sanctuary to thousands of Kashmiris, trained and armed them and sent them to fight India in Kashmir. But New Delhi forebore any action across the Line of Control. That has been the pattern of the Indian retaliation since then — it has chosen to defuse the Pakistani terror threat on Indian soil, without getting involved in any cross-border action. This message was most clearly visible when Pakistan used its forces to occupy Indian territory in Kargil as well.
But the event that really strained Indian patience was the Mumbai blasts of 1993 that the Pakistani ISI organised with the help of the Mumbai underworld dons like Dawood Ibrahim and Mushtaq (Tiger) Memon. This was arguably the worst act of terrorism till Nine-Eleven came along. 250 people died and 700 were injured in the 13 near-simultaneous bomb blasts across the city. The police quickly gathered enough evidence to show that a number of people of the Mumbai underworld had travelled to Pakistan via Dubai, and had received training in the use of IEDs and AK-47s. In 1994, Tiger Memon’s brother inexplicably returned and surrendered to Indian authorities with more proof of official Pakistani complicity in the terrible event.
Despite all this, the Clinton administration worked overtime to prevent any Indian retaliation for the terrorist act. Indeed, in 1992, the last year of the senior George Bush administration, the US had threatened to put Pakistan on a list of nations who were state sponsors of terrorism. But the Clinton team took that off the agenda in the very year that Pakistan’s complicity in a massive act of terrorism became apparent.
This is the pattern of US behaviour since. In 2001, when India massed its forces on the border in response to the terror strike on Parliament, the Americans cautioned restraint. Though, a case can be made out to say that President George W. Bush actually waited nearly 10 days for the Indians to act before pleading for restraint. The Indian side was not ready, and so, playing the world leader, Bush called New Delhi and Islamabad.
In the wake of the 2008 Mumbai
strike, too, the US went into a diplomatic overdrive, but it did not have to try
too hard as New Delhi did not seriously contemplate any military retaliation. The problem was that its army expressed its unwillingness to act immediately.
In retrospect, the planned Indian action could have led to full-scale war with unforeseen consequences. The US action that the Post is talking about is likely to be in a lesser scale. Washington does not have the manpower or the stomach for anything major. In any case it is very much there in Afghanistan across the FATA region and is not likely to take a step that could precipitate an upheaval in Pakistan where it is probably disliked even more than the Indians.
This appeared in Mail Today May 30, 2010

Lacklustre

The Mail Today report on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's national press conference of May 24, 2010

Even his most ardent admirers will concede
that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a colourless person. So should we be surprised that in a mammoth press conference to mark the first year of the second term of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), Dr Singh failed to shine? To switch metaphors, he blocked every ball thrown at him through the innings and ended up scoring no runs.
Sadly, the passion and the expectation that marked his advent in government, so visible in his press conference of September 2004, were absent here.
His negative achievement was that no question flustered him, and neither did he make any gaffe. On the other hand, he positively failed to sound convincing on his government’s achievements, or to reassure his countrymen that their troubles — whether with Pakistan or with inflation — would, or even could, be tackled by his government. He failed, too, to provide convincing excuses for the sins of omission and commission of his government and his ministers.
The one issue that is bothering all Indians — food inflation, which is currently hovering at 16.49 per cent—was dismissed casually by the economist PM who could have authoritatively explained to what his government planned to do to bring down prices. He merely declared that general inflation would be down to 5-6 per cent by December. This was just one piece in the 75-minute press conference where platitudes and evasion seemed to be the rule of the day.


The accompanying phalanx of PMO officials and select ministers sat somewhat bored and expressionless in a block of reserved seats at the government’s chosen venue — Vigyan Bhavan. The PM alone on the dais was meant to signal his supreme authority in the government. Instead, it made him appear to be the lone target in a government where the buck stops nowhere.
“I am accountable as PM,” he declared when asked as to who was accountable for Dantewada and other failures.
The most striking aspect of the old Prime Minister of the new government was the extent to which he, a man of undoubted probity, was willing to justify the questionable conduct of a colleague because he belongs to a powerful coalition ally.
For the record, the PM declared he would not pass judgment on the 2G spectrum allocation issue, yet his detailed response to the question as to why there was such a difference between the 3G auction (almost Rs 70,000 crore) and the 2G sale (around Rs 11,000 crore), seemed to buy telecom minister A. Raja’s argument lock, stock and barrel.
Equally disturbing was the Prime Minister’s insistence that the government had not misused the Central Bureau of Investigation for the simple reason that the CBI was an autonomous body under the purview of the Central Vigilance Commissioner. If the PM seriously believes that to be true, then there are serious questions to be asked about his grasp on government.
At one level a defensive tenor became inevitable when questions pitted Rahul and Sonia Gandhi against him. He was, of course, quick to deny any difference of opinion with the Congress chief who he said gave him the benefit of her “advice and guidance” regularly.
Questions about Rahul Gandhi as the prime minister-in-waiting inevitably raised the issue of Manmohan Singh’s tenure. In response to a question on whether he would make way for the young Gandhi, the PM let his guard down to declare that he would be willing to make place for anyone whom the Congress party decides on. He later corrected himself to declare that he had been given this task as Prime Minister and “till I finish the tasks, there is no question of retirement.”
To be sure, there was nothing new or original in what the PM said. The young Gandhi has made his disdain for high office clear to everyone, and few can doubt that the 77-year old Singh is in office till as long as Sonia Gandhi and the party will it.
In this sense the issue that has seized the headlines is a distraction from the substance of the press conference, which actually reveals the extent to which the UPA-II government headed by Manmohan Singh has allowed allies to run riot and permitted a growing incoherence on issues such as the creation of Telangana, combating Maoism, and inflation.
For example, the Prime Minister declared, “There is no agreement as of now on creation of new states. There was a proposal for a Telangana state… that matter has been referred to a committee.”
This bald statement fails to capture the mayhem that was unleashed when the Union home minister declared last December that the Centre would start the process of forming a separate Telangana state.
The Prime Minister does not seem to realise that merely expressing disapproval of ministers expressing “their views in public” is not enough to get them into line. The fact is that ministers such as Mamata Banerjee (railway) have visibly disagreed with the government’s policy on Maoists, and she has not been disciplined.
We all know that the first anniversary of the UPA-II government was the occasion for the national press conference. But there is no clarity on its purpose.
If it was to celebrate its achievements, well, they were put out in a four-page opening statement “deemed as read”, and remained largely unread and unarticulated.
If it was to provide excuses for the failings of the government, then the tenor of the PM’s responses was unconvincing.
This appeared as the cover story on Mail Today May 25, 2010

The UPA's ailment is poor leadership

The elections of 2009 mark a discontinuity in the six year reign of the United Progressive Alliance government. Looking back in the past year, that event seems to have had baleful, rather than beneficial, consequences for the alliance, notwithstanding the fact that the election outcome strengthened the position of its lead party, the Congress, and more-or-less devastated the Opposition.
Almost all surveys of the UPA-II’s performance show them coming up short against expectations. Their rivals have harsher words in judging their performance. The CPI(M) claims that minus the check they had put on UPA-I, the UPA-II has encouraged crony capitalism, surrendered to the Americans, and abandoned any pretence of serving the aam aadmi. The BJP endorses many of these charges and also accuses the government of a weak-kneed approach towards Pakistan and terrorism.
UPA-I’s deserves praise for its achievements—the Right to Information Act, the NREGS and the Indo-US nuclear deal, and, above all, its handling of the global financial meltdown. There has been no comparable achievement from UPA-II as yet. The Right to Education Act is a noble idea, but it remains to be seen whether it is even implementable.

Leaders
Some would say that the reason for the UPA’s poor performance is hubris. After achieving so much and trouncing their political opponents in the last general elections, their overweening pride led them to lose their way. This was manifest in the episode relating to the Women’s Reservation Bill when the Congress party behaved as though they actually had a majority in Parliament and were not dependent on some of the more unsavoury parties there for support. With a divided and devastated opposition, a sense of complacency gripped the party which has never really been known to possess much stamina.


But there is a deeper problem as well—leadership. UPA-I came up with a somewhat odd model for a parliamentary democracy when the real leader of the largest legislature party in Parliament did not become the prime minister. The diarchy between Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh functioned reasonably well in UPA-I. Even so the Indo-US nuclear deal was a near-run thing.
In UPA-II the model seems to have come under strain. Within sight of his retirement, Dr Singh has decided to narrowly focus on his own agenda and substantially delegate the rest to his Council of Ministers. He has cleverly shifted Pranab Mukherjee to the Finance Ministry, and effectively boxed him into a portfolio which requires mechanical application, rather than brains or brawn. Just in case, the PM also has his trusted lieutenants R. Rangarajan, the chief of his Council of Economic Advisers and Montek Singh Ahluwalia riding shotgun with Mr Mukherjee.
This style has affected the functioning of various ministries. The only thing Defence Minister, A.K. Antony has going for him is his honesty. The same could be said of the Minister for External Affairs S.M. Krishna. Home is being looked after by the energetic P. Chidambaram who is, perhaps, only now realising that while his portfolio may open a path to greater professional glory, it is also littered with more land-mines than have been laid by the Maoists in the forests of Dantewada.
But, the government is not just four portfolios. And that is where the rub lies. The PM’s hands off approach to the ministries run by allies like the NCP, the Trinamool and DMK, have brought great shame to the government. Even today we do not actually have a full accounting of the manner in which Mr Sharad Pawar has mismanaged and mis-used his Agriculture and food and civil supplies portfolios. There is already some preliminary evidence to show the wrongdoings of the ministers who head the Civil Aviation and Telecom portfolios. We have the strange spectacle of a universally acknowledged honest prime minister heading a ministry where corruption is reportedly rampant.

Agenda
As for his chosen agenda, foreign affairs, unfortunately, the Prime Minister has had to learn his lessons quick -time. He is, of course, a seasoned hand in government. But his forte is economics. Neither has he been entirely comfortable with the political dynamics of the country. That seems to be the reason why his first initiative with Pakistan in Sharm-el-Sheikh came unstuck. He has been slow to react to the changed nuance of the post-Bush US policy in Asia and as a result, India has been left holding the can in Iran and Afghanistan.
But why blame Dr Singh? The problem lies in the apex leadership structure whose dominant pole is Ms Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress party. Her hands off political management has also been a problem. Why did the Congress, for example, bring the Women’s and Nuclear Liability Bills virtually simultaneously to Parliament ? Had they been taken in sequence, the Congress could have worked on the BJP and the Left to pass the Women’s Bill and then at a later occasion, taken up the Nuclear Liability Bill. Instead, in combination with the cut motion division, both measures failed.

Welfare
Ms Sonia Gandhi is clearly concerned, but her response, in the form of a new National Advisory Council, seems to be jaded. Her influence in the achievements of UPA-I are signal. Without her active backing none of the measures we have listed above would have passed. But more of the same is not the way to go.
As long as NREGS was confined to 200 of the most backward districts, it worked well and there were few allegations of corruption. Now that it has been extended across the country, the accusations are all over the place. The reason is that in some part of the county, there is no real interest in seeking recourse to the NREGS, but since the Union government is throwing the money in, there are always individuals who are only to happy to divert it into their pockets. In the same manner the food securitiy legislation could well become a means of transferring public resources to some creative individuals.
The Congress needs to pause and think before it mindlessly presses on with the belief that social welfare programmes are the key to electoral success. It is one thing to aid the indigent, quite another to create a culture of entitlement where people find it more convenient to be declared “backward” and “poor” and live off a government subsidies and doles. We need NREGS as a measure to aid the distressed, but it cannot be a substitute for policies which will create real jobs for the people.
The unintended consequence of the 2008-2009 crisis seems to have been to reveal that social democracy as an ideology is going the way of communism. As Europe is learning, the massive deficits, used to pay unemployment allowances, subsidised housing, mass transit and education, are not sustainable. California, with the world’s eighth largest economy, is currently curtailing spending on health, welfare, transport and the environment.
This is where the Congress party is facing a real crisis—one of providing a leadership in a world that has changed, and is changing. Yesterday’s solutions no longer hold good for the problems of today, whether they are for eliminating poverty and disease, improving relations with Pakistan and China, transforming our ghastly infrastructure or revitalising our water-stressed agriculture.
This article appeared in Mail Today May 21, 2010

Forget AfPak, the problem is PakPak

You can almost hear the screw turn, thread by thread. A day after stating “there would be very severe consequences” if a successful attack was traced back to Pakistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said what everyone knows. She has said that “some Pakistani officials were more informed about the al Qaeda and the Taliban than they let on.”
A year after the US launched its AfPak strategy, it is becoming clear that the real issue is PakPak. It took an attack on CONUS (Continental United States), even though a botched one, to convince the Obama Administration of the dangers of relying too much on Pakistani good intentions to fight the war against the Islamist radicals.
As a general rule, it is relatively much easier to enter into a war, than to be able to figure out its course, or end. Something of the sort is now happening in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region as the second American coming there increases in intensity. For the past couple of months we have heard a great deal about the fickleness of the US and the West who announced their date of withdrawal even before they launched their campaign. We heard, too, of the brilliance of the Pakistani generals who were managing to extract considerable rent from the Americans, even while undermining them and planning their own takeover of Afghanistan after the announced withdrawal.

US
While it is a good idea to generally have an exit strategy in place before you go into a hornet’s nest, it is a better one to have a clearer idea of your goals. The US has an exit date in mind, but its goals appear amorphous. Are they to stabilise or democratise Afghanistan, Pakistan? Or, is it to wipe out the al Qaeda, including its two iconic leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri? Meanwhile Pakistani military action in South Waziristan, American drone strikes in North Waziristan, the ongoing battle in Afghanistan are rapidly changing the facts on the ground.


Many of these issues come to mind when we are confronted by one of those little occurrences that help the larger shift of a paradigm. The event was the failed bombing of Times Square. By itself, it did not amount to much and it is unlikely that the combination of gas canisters, cans of petrol, fireworks and fertiliser (of the wrong kind) would touch off anything equivalent of the Nine-Eleven event. But what it has done is to concentrate minds in Washington.
The logic for the Administration’s position was underscored by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last Friday. Stating that Pakistan was doing the best it can, he added, “You also have to realise that, with their military operations in the West, they've started to be pretty thinly stretched themselves, as well as taking a substantial number of casualties.”
The problem for Gates and his generals is that there is another factor that has gained salience in the equation—the drone strikes in North Waziristan where the militants are now concentrated. The US has so far carried out 34 strikes in Pakistan, all in North Waziristan. This can be compared to the 53 strikes in 2009 and 36 strikes in 2008. Allegations that they cause a great deal of collateral casualties cannot be verified on the ground, but one thing is clear, they are far more accurate than the air strikes by the Pakistan Air Force. What they have managed to do is to severely constrain the militants operating in the region, particularly their ability to train new recruits. The reaction of the TTP has been to try and respond to them by attacks in the US using people like Shahzad, or Najibullah Zazi, an American-Afghan who was arrested last September for a failed attempt to bomb the New York subway system. The third major recruit of the system which is run out of North Waziristan is David Coleman Headley who was used for reconnaissance for the Mumbai attack.
The “turning” of Americans of Pakistani origins is clearly worrying the US. In addition to these, there are five Pakistani-Americans in jail in Pakistan. They were en route to Waziristan when they were caught. There are currently some 600,000 or so Pakistani Americans in the US. They may be well-off and comfortable as compared to the country they come from, but they cannot remain unaffected by the radical anti-Americanism of the Pakistani people and the message of radical Islam brought to them by itinerant preachers and satellite TV.

Radicalism
For historical reasons, Pakistan lies at the heart of darkness. As if the djinns who aided its creation were not enough, they got Abu Ala Maududi and the Jamaat-e-Islami. But the real shift from Jinnah’s secularist vision came with the American-sponsored jehad that gave birth to the Taliban and General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamisation drive. Running like a thread through all this was a profound sense of self-hatred manifested by the detestation of India, the country from which Pakistan had been created. Even if north-west Pakistan had not been the geographical epicentre of the anti-Soviet jehad, there was enough in its history to infect it with the Islamic radicalism that came from Saudi Arabia
and Egypt.
The dilemma for the Americans is that even while this tide of radicalism shows signs of receding in countries like Indonesia, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia, it is still to reach its peak in Pakistan. The Americans are pouring the big bucks into the country—indeed, on the day Faisal was indicted in New York, the US Embassy in Islamabad released $468 million of coalition support funds that reimburse Pakistan for its counter-insurgency efforts.
No matter what the electoral compulsions of the Obama Administration are, the US has no option but to go forward at this juncture. It is now clear to the US that Pakistan is the more important front. That is where the war against radical Islam must be fought and won. The prognosis there does not look too good. But this could change. Crucial to this would be the decision of the generals in Rawalpindi.

Army
Earlier this year, the Pakistan Army declared it had ended its operations in South Waziristan and did not contemplate going to its northern half. But this was more wishful thinking than an authoritative statement. After years of hoping to ride out the storm by making deals with the militants, the Army was forced to go into Swat, then South Waziristan and Bajaur agency. There is every chance that it will go into North Waziristan as well.
The situation on the battle ground will drive the policy, not some subtle plans of the ISI. On the ground, there is today a new amalgam of militants—the TTP, the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, HuJI and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen radicals, the Afghans in the form of the Haqqani network, the Chechens and, above all the Al Qaeda.
There are some in the Pakistan Army who recognise that it is no longer possible to conduct a policy of attacking some militants and leaving the others alone. As patriots, many officers are deeply conflicted because they can see the threat that the militants there pose to Pakistan itself. The cockiness that characterised the initial response to the challenge is giving way to a sense of realism which tells them that the restoration of the Taliban in Kabul could actually be a bigger threat to Islamabad, rather than India, the US or Central Asia. The difference between success and failure lies in whether they can halt the momentum of the past and persuade their colleagues to reverse course.
This piece appeared in Mail Today May 13, 2010

Revenge is a dish best served cold

Today is Judgment Day. The court will decide on the punishment of Amir Ajmal Kasab, the convicted killer who along with his associates snuffed out the lives of 166 innocent people and maimed 308. There have been insistent calls for a death sentence from victims’ kin and an outraged public; the public prosecutor, Ujjwal Nikam, termed Kasab a monster and declared that his execution would deter more acts of terrorism.
An argument could be made to say that a Kasab alive would serve us better than one dead. But there is the matter of the crime, committed with brazenness and brutality and the issue of the price that must be paid for killing so many innocents. If the law demands his head, so be it. Considering the fair and dignified manner in which the trial has been conducted, we can only expect a reasoned and fit decision from Judge M.L. Tahilyani.
Nikam’s description of him as a “killing machine” is apt, since conscience and compassion was wiped out from his brain. Actually, Kasab was a mere cog in the machine. The real machine— the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba— continues to flourish in Pakistan, brainwashing more young men, and arming and equipping them to wreak more mayhem. We know some of the names, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, but the others are nom de guerres— Yousaf aka Muzammil Butt, Abu Hamza, Abu Qahfa, Usman, Rashid Abdullah, Sajid Mir, Major Iqbal, and the shadowy “Major General” and Col Sadatullah of the Signals Communications Organisation of the Pakistan Army.

Goals
India needs to set two goals for itself in the wake of the Mumbai massacre—avenging the deaths of the innocents and preventing the recurrence of another attack. Both objectives are interlinked, but there should be no doubt that the second one is paramount. Success in rooting out the terror network will be the best revenge for the Mumbai attack and for that we need to adopt an integrated strategy which will use all the instruments at our command—military, intelligence, diplomatic and financial. The strategy will have to have a short and a longer term perspective.
Some of the elements of the short-term process have already been set in motion— better intelligence coordination, the ability to react more quickly to another Mumbai-type attack and so on.




But everyone knows that even now we are a long way off from achieving the goal of ensuring that India’s borders are not so easily breached. Given the open borders at Nepal and Bangladesh, we need a lot of diplomatic and intelligence work to ensure that terrorists from Pakistan do not find it easy to use the Kathmandu or Dhaka option. There is a great deal of work as yet to be done in securing our 7,500 km long coastline. It will take at least five years and a lot of hard work to ensure that small fishing boats cannot slip in to land terrorist commando teams on the Indian shore. This requires enhanced policing with a triple layer—Navy, Coast Guard and State police—cordon along our maritime boundary.
The Multi-Agency Centre has gotten going but it still requires a lot of effort to ensure that a varied group of people— Intelligence Bureau, Research & Analysis Wing, economic intelligence organisations, military intelligence, state intelligence services—can work as a single team. On paper this looks simple, but habits of a life-time which include a fierce turf mentality are not so easily overcome.
The MAC is expected to evolve into a National Counter-Terrorism Centre. Again, it is important not to be fooled by paper achievement. The US had one going for the past three years, yet, the centre failed to pick up the most obvious clues left by Umar Abdulmuttalab, the underwear bomber. The ultimate proof of the pudding will be in its eating.

Police
Lamentably, the biggest failure remains at the bottom of the security pyramid. The policing system in this country remains unchanged. It is corrupt, illiterate and brutal. Policemen who are on the take and are involved in criminal acts can hardly be the instruments to fight the subtle and sinister forces of terrorism. People talk of police reform and structural changes, but there is the simple issue of humanising the policeman who instead of seeing service to citizens as a duty, sees them as a potential target for exploitation.
Strengthening fortress India is, no doubt, a major challenge. But only diplomacy of the benign and the coercive variety can be the genuine game-changer. And the game that needs to be changed is called Pakistan. As we have learnt, most recently from the Times Square bomber, Pakistan is both the fountainhead and sanctuary for international terrorism. Faisal Shehzad emerged from a Waziristan training camp to go to the US and launch his strike, and after that he sought to flee back to Pakistan, a country where he would have presumably found sanctuary, which may not have been officially sanctioned as in the case of terrorists who attack India, but at least from those who sent him out in the first place.

Pakistan
New Delhi is involved in a complex exercise in engaging Pakistan even while seeking to contain Islamabad’s proclivity to use terrorism as an instrument of state policy, or at least to tolerate the activities of those terrorists who are inimical to India. Pakistan of today is not the same as that of 2007 when we were able to come close to a solution for the Jammu & Kashmir dispute and get a sharp reduction of the movement of terrorists across the Line of Control. The Pakistan of 2010 is more conflicted and confusing.
At one level no one seems to be in-charge, at the other the process of the restoration of a civilian government seems to be under way. Then, on one hand, the Pakistan Army is permitting terrorists to cross the LoC in larger numbers, on the other, it is itself involved in a mortal conflict with the god-fathers of those terrorists in Waziristan. One part of the cocky GHQ expects that with the Americans under control things will soon be back to the halcyon days of the late 1990s when they ran the regime in Kabul. But there are quite a few who know that the Taliban of today are not the same as the ones who angered the world by wantonly destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas and that a Taliban government could prove to be more than a handful for Islamabad, especially if the latter is not able to ensure that its writ runs in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan.
India needs to factor in these issues whether talking to or building up pressure against Pakistan. India’s real revenge will be in helping the transformation of Pakistan into a normal society, one that no longer takes pride in jihadi gunmen, leave alone provide them training and shelter.
This article appeared in Mail Today May 6, 2010

In spying on politicians we are no different from the ISI

On Monday, the National Technical Research Organisation celebrated its seventh birthday. I was not at the party, but I can guess that the atmosphere was not particularly celebratory. Suddenly an agency that should neither be seen nor heard, has become the centre of a scandal alleging that it had tapped the phones of four prominent politicians, including one from the ruling party.
There is something curious in the NTRO figuring in such a controversy. As is well known, the outfit is meant to gather strategic technical intelligence, so why was it involved in a tawdry wire-tap of politicians which is more up the Intelligence Bureau’s alley? Or, in the way of spooks, are we being led down the wrong alley ?
Though no one is saying it outright, fingers are pointing to M.K. Narayanan, the former National Security Adviser who was the supervisory authority over the NTRO and the IB in the period that the alleged malfeasance took place. Narayanan, a former IB officer has made great contributions to national security, but his real forte has been “political security”, or gathering political intelligence for the party in power, in his case, the Congress.

Turf
Even so, it is worth asking why the NTRO and not the IB? The equipment in question and the taps were technologically trivial. Shohgi communications in NOIDA advertises its SCL-5020 device capable of passive tapping of 16 two-way calls at a time. Such devices are now fairly routine with state police and central law enforcement bodies.
Is the NTRO being fingered to cut it down to size ? It is no secret that neither the IB, nor the R&AW really cottoned on to the idea of a dedicated high-tech agency from which they could task electronic intelligence. Indeed, in his years as NSA, Narayanan treated the agency as a step-child and it was only in the wake of the Mumbai attacks that its long-pending grants for high-tech equipment were cleared. What he did do was to place some top IB officers in the agency. One wonders whether these officers played a role in the impugned episode, if indeed the NTRO was actually involved.
The NTRO has been set up to deal with the larger challenge of technical intelligence which can range from what comes out of the internet to satellite imagery and missile tracking. While there is some overlap with what organisations like the IB, Aviation Research Center and the Defence Intelligence Agency do, the mandate was to set up an agency where expensive assets such as super-computers and high-end space-based sensors could be concentrated. The average background of an NTRO staffer is technical and scientific and they are unfamiliar with the tactical world of intelligence which involves tapping individual phones. If someone has led them up the garden path, it is the duty of the government to find out what happened. It would be a travesty if the incident is used as a pretext to hobble the NTRO.


The MHA has been planting all kinds of stories about how conversations could have been inadvertently recorded. This is not the way interception equipment works. In an area as large as two kilometers square at the heart of New Delhi, there are thousands of calls and SMSs floating around. A portable unit has a limited capacity to intercept conversations and its activities have to be focused on some pre-set telephone numbers.
The manner in which official agencies fight their turf battles can be ruthless and scary. There are three men in jail without trial for the last three years in the so-called National Security Council Secretariat spying scandal. Some of the murky evidence suggests that they are there because they sought to create a computer network for sharing information on terrorism. Afraid of losing its exclusive control on terrorism issues, the IB has railroaded the men.

Legacy
Telephone tapping in a democracy is always hazardous business, yet as we know it, it happens. Anyone, including the politicians whose phones were allegedly tapped believed that such things don't happen, is lying. At least three of the “victims” have held executive positions in the central and state governments and know that the police can and do tap phones. This is especially true of Mr Advani the former Home Minister who, according to one former Intelligence chief, sought tit-bits of political information gleaned through taps every day.
Going by the legal position, only the Union Home Secretary and his counterparts in the states are authorised to order taps. The reality is somewhat different. Taps take place all the time. Police officials simply lean on the telephone exchange personnel, and pay them off, to conduct what are technically illegal taps, intelligence officers simply do it without a by-your-leave, using equipment that leaves no traces in our digital age. So ubiquitous is the equipment, that a couple of private parties have also acquired it to dig dirt on their rivals.
There are three kinds of intercept activities. The first is for fighting crime, espionage or terrorism. The second is linked to developing a picture of adversary military dispositions. The third, which is unique to India, is to keep the government of the day informed of the activities of the opposition and the key members of the government itself. You will recognise of course, the colonial legacy in this. In British times, the key function of the IB was to track the national movement. Telephone and telegraph taps and interception of letters formed an important part of their modus operandi.

Oversight
Unfortunately, 60 years or so after the British left, the IB hasn’t quite gotten off this groove. For this, the current crop of political leaders is to blame. They are the people who should have shut down the political wing of the IB, but they have not because every government sees it as a crown jewel or talisman that enables it to ward off the Opposition or dissidents. Sadly, on the matter of political use of the “agencies”, there is only a difference of degrees between India and Pakistan; military leadership makes the ISI cruder than the IB or R&AW.
Intelligence officers will vehemently deny any political intelligence gathering and insist that they work within legal red-lines and that phone intercepts are vital towards gathering evidence of terrorist crimes and warning of potential terrorist attacks. But other countries, too, face similar threats, yet they do not allow their intelligence services to impinge on the privacy of the ordinary individuals, leave alone politicians.
Tapping the phones of US nationals is prohibited in America. Permission only comes through a single judge Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If he turns down the application, it goes before a review court. There are currently 11 such judges who are appointed by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Despite this, the Bush administration went ahead and tapped phones of US nationals after Nine-Eleven.
More than legal processes, countries like the US ensure that there is bipartisan political supervision of the dangerous powers that intelligence agencies have. India is the only democracy in the world that has no such supervision.
Technical intelligence gathered through taps and other means is a valuable and vital means of protecting our democracy. But its unchecked use can and will undermine our liberties.
Effective political control and direction of the intelligence services is vital for a healthy relationship between the dark world of intelligence and the society at large. It’s high time such controls were instituted in India as well.
This article appeared in Mail Today April 22, 2010