Flawed Security

It has now been two and a half years since the horrific terrorist attack in Mumbai that took the lives of 166 people and shook the country to its core. The attack also coincided with the last of the bomb blasts triggered by the so-called Indian Mujahideen, a set of radicalised Indian Muslim young men who have since been killed, or are in jail facing terrorism charges. Since then, barring one or two relatively small attacks, things have been peaceful on the terror front.

 



No doubt our secretive guardians will claim that they have foiled numerous strikes by various terror modules, but their claim can be credited only if they put up would-be terrorists for trial like their counterparts in the UK. Otherwise, it would be safe to assume that the post-Mumbai disruption of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba is responsible for the current lull.
 
Confusion
In the wake of the attack, P. Chidambaram’s appointment as the Union Home Minister evoked a great deal of expectations and a lot of hype. But two and a half years later, things are back to what they were in the days of the unlamented Shivraj Patil. Leave aside the “most wanted” list fiasco, the Ministry’s handling of the Maoist insurgency has gone from bluster to whimper. Its handling of the Telangana issue has created a permanent sore on the country’s polity, one which threatens to undermine the well-being of the Congress party itself.
Indeed, a look at the record would suggest that the Ministry is simultaneously suffering from myopia and hyperopia—short-sightedness as well as long-sightedness— leading to a great deal of chaos and confusion in the internal security policy of the country.
Long-sightedness had the ministry think of institutions and organisations like the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) and the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) that could overcome the traditional problem of the lack of coordination between the various security agencies of the country. There was also talk of converting the ministry into a full-fledged “internal security” ministry. The short-sightedness, however, has led to poor conception of many of the grand ideas and initiatives taken by the Ministry.
To go by a recent interview of Mr Chidambaram to a national daily, it would seem that the only solution to India’s security problems is the Natgrid and the NCTC. The rationale for the Natgrid—  the integration of 21 existing Central and State databases with banks, insurance companies, stock exchanges, airlines, railways, telecom service providers, chemical vendors etc— is that the current information is not adequately shared and available at the right time to the right person. But what is the guarantee that things will change in the future?
You may be able to access passive information relating to banking transactions, airline ticket purchases, credit card usage. But the chances that disparate agencies will actually feed their human intelligence inputs into the system are bleak. Besides the lack of training, is the  culture of secret agencies which hoard information, sometimes for the best of motives, such as the desire not to expose a good informant.
 
Threats
The NCTC which seeks to merge the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), and the Intelligence Bureau (IB) into a super ministry of security is so obviously flawed, that Mr Chidambaram’s colleagues are having a hard time giving the proposal a decent burial. The key flaw, as is obvious, is the assumption that terrorism is the only threat to the country.
In fact, terrorism, though vicious and deadly, is a small portion of the national security spectrum. It has the capacity of creating great harm and generating huge headlines, but it cannot destroy a nation, the way the NATO intervention and civil war are doing in, say, Libya, or the US did in Iraq. The main threat to national security comes from other states, either individually or in coalitions. That must be the focus of our national security system, and the counter-terror efforts can only be their subset, notwithstanding their current salience.
The job of the NSCS and JIC, for example, is to provide analytical inputs to the government on not just current threats, but future developments as well. Indeed, the NSCS looks into issues like climate change, food security, terms of trade and so on as a part of its job and the JIC into the Chinese and Pakistani orders of battle, the developments in Burma, and so on. As for the NTRO, it is meant to be a high-tech intelligence gathering body that looks at threats in cyberspace, ballistic missiles threats and challenges of space-based weapons etc.
In any case, pre-empting terrorist attacks requires uncommon sophistication. It is not just a matter of stringing together a scenario based on vast amounts of data at the command of the government, but of actually being able to join the dots which have not quite clearly emerged and are in no data base.
This is best exemplified by a case which brought out the limits of the US National Counter Terrorism Centre. In mid-2009, the US National Security Agency picked up phone conversations in Yemen suggesting a terrorist plot against the US involving a Nigerian. A well known businessman in Nigeria walked into the US embassy expressing concerns about his son’s radicalisation and information regarding his fears was sent to the NCTC; separately, the CIA also made a file and with biographical information on the son, Umar Farooq Abdulmuttalab, sent it to headquarters.
 Yet Umar was not put on any no-fly list; he took a flight from Lagos to Amsterdam and then boarded a flight to Detroit and midway, he attempted to ignite a bomb hidden in his underwear. A US Congressional investigation found fourteen specific points of failure ranging from human error to technical problems, systemic obstacles, analytical misjudgments and competing priorities.
 
Redundancy
As outlined by media reports in India, the concepts of both the Natgrid and NCTC are ill conceived and deeply flawed. Security in a federal polity like ours, with far flung provinces which are constitutionally empowered to handle law and order, cannot be a simplistic centralised affair. It has to be a sophisticated structure which takes into account constitutional law, as well as the historical experience and ground reality in each state.
The resulting system must be interactive and multi-layered, instead of the top-down monstrosity that is being conceived. There is another danger—that of hacking and leakage. Wikileaks which have given so much agony to the US and entertainment to us, are the product of a leak of the Siprnet, a database of secret US diplomatic cables.
 What is the guarantee that sensitive information in Natgrid will not leak all over the place, or be hacked by the formidable Chinese hackers? There is nothing in the statements of the minister or the ministry regarding the need to protect the privacy and rights of the ordinary people. There has been no action against those who leaked the legally intercepted conversations of corporate lobbyist Niira Radia. The government has little compunction in curtailing our liberty, as it has done in the case of the internet recently, using terrorism as a pretext.
Any solution of our internal security scenario must be based on a people-centric approach, rather than bureaucrat-centric proposals. The end product of the work of the Ministry of Home Affairs is to make the lives of individual Indians safer and more secure and our liberties more meaningful.
The idea of a Natgrid and NCTC are fine by themselves, provided they are situated in a wider and more realistic national security architecture, and they are concieved in a more modest framework. They cannot be some super organisations, but must operate as additional work-horse institutions like the R&AW, IB, NTRO, Defence Intelligence Agency etc.
The one thing the recent economic crisis should have taught us is why we must not  rely on institutions that are “too big to fail.” Failure should be built into any organisation where humans are involved. So, smaller organisations, and ones whose functions are deliberately designed to overlap, are a far better idea. If one fails, the other can make up for it. In security, as in banking, there is nothing better than  a healthy degree of redundancy.
Mail Today May 26, 2011

Why Osama bin Laden had to die

Given his role in the killing of thousands of innocent people, it is remarkable that the death of Osama bin Laden, at the hands of American Special Forces at his Abbottabad hideaway, is generating so much heat. Some of the angst is natural, coming as it does from his relatives and supporters. In other instances, terrorism experts and commentators have debated whether the killing would impact on the Al Qaeda’s operations, and some have argued that it would a) make little difference and b) lead to a resurgence of terrorism.
Not surprisingly, some in Europe and the US have questioned the legality and the ethics of his killing. He was killed on the orders of the American president by breaching the sovereignty of a friendly state, and this was done without any pretence of due process. On the other hand, there is the morality of killing an unarmed man, even though he was a dreaded terrorist. The EU, many of whose member countries are fighting the Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan,  indulged in some verbal contortions. European Commission president Manuel Barroso initially welcomed his death as a “major achievement” but later a spokesperson clarified that the EU did not think that his death was an “execution” calling into question Europe's opposition to the death penalty. But in a subsequent statement, the EU commission was less ambiguous, noting that bin Laden had been punished for the crime of killing thousands of innocents.
 
Debate
Of course, as of now we do not know enough of the circumstances of his killing. There have been multiple narratives. Initially we heard about a human shield, then about a woman who was injured trying to protect him. And all this must have happened in the pitch dark, with only the Seals with their night vision equipment knowing what was really happening. Neither do we know the exact text of the order that the US president gave to the Seals. Nevertheless, the consensus, barring bin Laden’s die-hard supporters, seems to be that the death was a welcome event and rid the world of a bad man, legality and ethics be damned.
The dilemma of the US in dealing with terrorists is palpable. They have, over the years captured hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives, including people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah,  Saif al Islam al Masry and Ramzi Binalshib. But even years after capturing and waterboarding some of them, they have not been able to proceed with their trials. The debate within the US as to whether they should be tried by military tribunals or the normal courts of law has been a wrenching one and is not quite concluded. 




Dealing with terrorists has always been a bit of a confounding affair for those who promote the concept of the rule of law and due process. The Indian experience with terrorism has, in that sense, been a learning process. In the 1980s, the government sought to try a number of terrorists it had arrested in Punjab through special courts which were permitted to function from the jails where these people were held. But the process opened up the judges, prosecutors, police and witnesses to threats by terrorists. After a vicious campaign that targeted the wives and children of police personnel, the Punjab police decided that they would simply kill the terrorists they captured. Indeed, so systematic was the policy that some of the terrorists who had been captured prior to the institution of the policy mysteriously “escaped” from their jails and were never to be heard of again.
 
Masood Azhar
But the real lesson came from the episode that culminated in the hijack of the IC814 to Kandahar in December 1999. The story began with the capture in February 1994 of Masood Azhar, the Harkat ul Mujahideen ideologue who had been sent to India to effect the unification of the HuM with the Harkat Jehad-e-Islami into a new outfit called the Harkat ul Ansar. Azhar had close ties with the patrons of the outfit, people like Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, the rector of the Binori masjid in Karachi, a fountainhead of Islamist radicalism.
So, extraordinary efforts were made to secure his release. The first attempt was to trade off Azhar, Sajjad Afghani and Nasrullah Langaryal with a captured major of the General Reserve Engineering Force and a BSF constable. When the government refused the terms, the two were executed.  Then came the June 1994 kidnapping of Kim Houesgo, the son of a British journalist who had been trekking in Pahalgam. The boy was let go because of local pressure, in part generated by Qazi Nisar, a religious leader of Anantnag.  Nisar paid the price for his “interference” because he was killed subsequently.
Then, in October 1994, in an incident long forgotten by Delhiites, five foreign backpackers were kidnapped from various guest houses in Paharganj, and held captive in the Ghaziabad area by Ahmad Sayeed Omar Sheikh, a British Pakistani and a graduate of the London School of Economics. By chance the kidnapping went awry and the hostages were rescued through a brave operation by the local police. Sheikh was injured in the shootout and captured. The demand of the kidnappers was the release of Azhar, Langaryal, Afghani and several Kashmiri militants.
The next year, six foreigners were kidnapped by a cover outfit of the Harkat ul Ansar called the Al Faran, again from the Pahalgam area. This episode did not turn out well; while one, an American, escaped and another, a Norwegian was beheaded, the others have not been heard of since. The government again refused to accede to the release of Masood Azhar and his associates.
 
Pragmatism
Four years later, came the culmination with the hijacking of the IC814 which was traveling from Kathmandu to Delhi in December 1999. It was taken to Kandahar and the government of India was compelled to release Azhar, Sheikh and a Kashmiri militant Mushtaq Zargar. Both Azhar and Sheikh went on to commit other infamous acts thereafter. Sheikh was involved in the killing of Daniel Pearl and may have been part of the Nine Eleven plot. Azhar set up a new and more virulent outfit called Jaish-e-Muhammad which was probably involved in the attack on the Parliament House in December 2001.
Not a few at the time of Kandahar, and even now feel that had the two terrorists been killed rather than arrested, it would have saved a lot of lives and anguish.
The killing of Osama bin Laden, therefore, has to be seen in a pragmatic, rather than in an ethical or legal light. Had bin Laden actually been captured, you can be sure that there would have been an endless and escalatory series of events aimed at freeing him. In any event, it must be said that Islamic jurisprudence would have little to say about the manner of his death, considering that under Shariat law the basic principle is an eye for eye and a tooth for tooth. Viewed through that matrix, the full accounting for bin Laden’s crimes is yet to take place.
Mail Today May 19, 2011

Help Pakistan, despite its own follies

It has been more than a week since the killing of Osama bin Laden, but the furore it has created simply refuses to die down. Mostly, of course, the tumult is now a great deal about Pakistan’s bluster, matched evenly by Indian bravado.
It doesn’t take much to see where Islamabad is coming from. A country which has made mendacity an intrinsic part of its national policy is compelled to rant when caught out. But just what accounts for the bluster and boast that we are seeing from New Delhi? Can it be the fact that the United States has walked the talk in its promise of getting its man dead or alive, while India can only gnash its teeth and moan about the opportunities it has lost in the past?
Some Indian pain comes from the false comparisons that are being made between Indian and American capabilities and circumstances. Take just the satellites—the US would have had the use of half-a-dozen of a kind India will probably take another thirty years to acquire— the 18 tonne KH-12 satellite which can provide real time imagery of interest from space, the Lacrosse radar satellite which can provide the imagery through bad weather, the Intruder which snoops on communications traffic and so on. Besides the billion dollars or so it takes to build a satellite, you need a launch vehicle of the Delta IV or Soyuz class
which can hoist 10-20 tonne satellites to low earth or geosynchronous orbit.

Circumstances
The stealth helicopter that the Americans used is of a class that no other country in the world possesses. The Pakistan Air Force chief may now claim that his radars were not active, but his initial statement was that the radars failed to pick up the American helicopters. Being in the Islamabad air defence zone, there is no way that the radars would have been inactive.
More important, are the circumstances, and possible consequences of an operation launched by the US, and one launched by India. Let’s be clear, if the US operation had come apart, it would have led to great embarrassment for the Americans. Success, as you can see, has led to a great deal of tension between Washington and Islamabad, but they still remain on talking terms. At the end of the day, both need each other, albeit for different purposes. And this mutual dependency does generate a degree of moderation in their discourse.
An Indian operation, on the other hand— success or a failure— would have almost certainly triggered off a wider war. This is because Pakistan perceives itself as India’s rival, while despite poor relations it is used to being a surrogate of sorts of the US. There should be no surprise that while Islamabad feels  humiliated by the bin Laden killing, it also feels that the asymmetry between it and the US is much too great to convert its anger into a practical policy of retaliation. The US is, after all, half-a-globe away.
In the case of India, however, not only would Islamabad feel compelled to retaliate, it also has the wherewithal to do so. India may prevail in a long war with Pakistan, but no war between two nuclear armed countries is going to be a long one. And for a short one, the ratio between the land forces the two sides can deploy is roughly even. In any case, war, with a possible nuclear outcome, is not something that anyone should contemplate with equanimity, even though some of our hawks think we are being over-cautious. And therein lies India’s frustration, and the recourse of its hawks to false bravado.
And so we come to the issue of the policy that India needs to adopt towards Pakistan. In the past ten days, since Osama was sent to his maker, there has been a torrent of criticism of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that Pakistani duplicity undermines the very basis of his peace policy. This would be true if you accept the simplistic, and indeed caricature, version of Pakistani reality trundled out by our chicken hawks. In this version, everyone and everything in Pakistan is duplicitous and therefore there is little use in negotiating with them.
There is nothing wrong in holding that belief, but the question that the hawks must answer is: If Manmohan Singh’s flexible engagement is not the right policy, what would they suggest?

Policy
We hear a great deal about why Mr Singh is wrong to engage with Pakistan, but his critics do not provide a coherent and sustainable policy option. Neti, neti, may be good philosophy, but it’s no substitute for policy.
Talks with Pakistan may yield little. But at least they have the value of maintaining an engagement with some parts of the fractured Pakistani deep state. It also has the benefit of keeping international opinion on our right side. At a time when Pakistan is trying to get the US to nudge India out of Afghanistan, engagement with Islamabad, howsoever cosmetic, serves to  signal that our relations with Pakistan are not as bad as Islamabad claims they are.
Given the balance of forces, war is not a viable option between India and Pakistan. No one will doubt that the Indian military will fight with great bravery if asked to do so. But can a war deliver the outcome of our choice — an end to Pakistan’s support for terrorism? The lesson of all wars is that it is one thing to initiate it, quite another to be able to control its course and consequences.
Pakistan is a far more complex problem than what many of our hawks assume. It does not have the clinical pathology of a schizophrenic. That would be simple indeed. Its dangerously fractured polity has now been seriously compromised by the power of Islamism.
 The political power of the Pakistani deep state is divided between the civilian politicians and the Army. But today both these institutions have been neutered. The civilians have been battered by the street power of the jihadists and the Tehreek-e-Taliban’s suicide bombers. More dangerously, perhaps, the Army and its Inter Services Intelligence Directorate may now have Islamist networks  operating within, unbeknownst to their leadership. This can explain both, as to how Osama bin Laden came to be living in the Abbottabad compound, and how elements in the ISI provided the wherewithal for the Mumbai
operation.
Brink
The civilians acknowledge  this openly, but the army is paying the price for trying to put a lid on it. That explains why, despite suffering huge losses in its battle with jihadists, the Pak army is hesitating to clinch the war in North Waziristan. The army, which has always seen itself as the guardian of Pakistan, is clinging even more desperately to its national flag.
The rhetoric about breaches of Pakistan’s sovereignty and humiliation acquires a nationalistic narrative instead of being allowed to gain the jihadist twist. Given Pakistan’s history, a lot of that nationalism translates easily into anti-Indian jingoism. A bit of schadenfreude may be fine but anti-Pakistani jingoism would  hardly be the appropriate response here.
The Pakistani deep establishment which was flying high for so many decades, is visibly stalling and so our effort must be to ensure its soft landing, rather than permit a devastating crash.
Mail Today May 12, 2011

A note on Special Forces

General  V.K. Singh’s  claim that India can launch special forces operations-- of the kind the United States did to kill Osama bin Laden-- probably reflects the esprit de corps of the para-commandos, of whom the Army Chief counts himself as one, rather than a true assessment of our capabilities. 

In fact there are only two countries which have displayed an ability to launch high-risk, virtually  suicidal operations, in modern times—Israel and the US.

India does have Special Forces, but they have been largely used as a kind of super-infantry where they are employed on missions which the regular infantry would baulk at. We don’t lack brave men, but we don’t possess the combination of political will, politico-military-intelligence integration and specialized technology that makes these operations possible. Special Forces work is a full-time job requiring specialized language and cultural skills which cannot be acquired if you are also deployed in routine military duties.

We also do not have the desperation of Israel which launches such operations because it believes that its national survival is at stake. Neither do we have the ferocious determination and technological prowess of the world’s sole super-power, which has used military as an instrument of foreign policy through much of its history. A great deal of technology, of course, goes with the ability to launch them. The US with its enormous constellation of surveillance, Elint and Comint satellites has a great advantage. It is also far ahead of most countries in stealth technology and the debris of the destroyed helicopter in the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad indicates that it was a stealth machine which successfully spoofed the Pakistani air defence radars. Claims that the Pakistani radars were inactive can’t be taken seriously since Abbottabad is in the air defence zone of Islamabad/Rawalpindi area.

By their very nature, true Special Forces  operations are fraught with not just physical danger, but grave political consequences arising from failure. A goof-up in Abbottabad would have led not only to the possible capture and deaths of the US Navy Seals, but a possible sinking of the Obama presidency.

The disaster that hit Operation Eagle Claw through which President Jimmy Carter sought to end the crisis arising from American diplomats being held hostage by Iranians in April 1980 not only sank his re-election chances, but also poisoned Iran-US relations thereafter. One problem of Eagle Claw was the lack of cohesiveness of the various elements—the Army, Navy, Air Force and the Marines.

In India, the three Services cooperate only in name. The Air Force doesn’t do night flying on helicopters, but the Navy does, but neither will cooperate with the Army on a sustained basis. And all three of them have the poorest of relations with the Research & Analysis Wing which, in any case, lacks the covert operations culture which is vital for such operations. 

One thing that Indian commanders who say they can do an Abbottabad do not realise, is the enormous technological assets that the US has brought into play. The MH-60 Blackhawk that the US crashed in Osama’s compound, was modified by the Joint Special Forces Command’s technology division to be stealthy. Considerable surveillance by satellites which we can only dream about possessing, were deployed along with human intelligence resources.

The key issue in Special Operations is political leadership. The US JSOC may have supervision of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Special Forces, but their missions are cleared by the President himself, because they have ramifications far wider than the world of the military or intelligence services.

Besides political leadership, Indian Special Forces require to have a far better working relationship with our intelligence services. Here we are talking of integrating two cultures—that of the armed forces and that of the civilian intelligence personnel, who would not only be people in R&AW, but NTRO, IB and those dealing with geospatial imagery. In this matrix, whether they have the right kind of body armour, assault gun, grenade or pistol, is really secondary. Actually India has the Special Frontier Force under the R&AW, which was originally created for operations in Tibet, but it has now become obsolete and it is not clear what the mission of the force currently is.

Reviews of two recent books on Pakistan

IN SOME ways these books are complementary and their basic goal is to try and understand what Pakistan is all about, and the dynamics of the social, political and ideological developments taking place there. While Riedel, a former CIA officer, sees his task as one to propose a course of action in dealing with Pakistan, Lieven, a former journalist and now academic, seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the country, its institutions and people. He has examined the structures of the Islamic republic — its justice system, religious tensions, its vaunted military and syncopated politics, and the rise of the Taliban.
But, he insists, Pakistan is neither a failing, nor a failed state. Ironically one of his most emphatic judgments (and he makes many) is that the Pakistan Army would be able to hold its own against all the challenges because of its discipline and unity and the only thing that could change this is a US invasion which the officer-class failed to oppose. This would put the Pakistani soldiers in a dilemma of obeying their commanders or responding emotionally as Muslims opposed to US activities in the region.
This is the perspective with which we must see the Pakistani reaction to the Osama killing. The establishment may not be complicit in his presence in the country, but it cannot afford to be seen as having done nothing while the US entered the country and carried out the operation. Nationalism, of the Pakistan Army variety, is therefore a means through which the GHQ seeks to keep the radicalisation of the forces at bay.
While Lieven has provided a sympathetic portrait of Pakistan, his prescriptions are somewhat one-sided. He calls for India and the US to accommodate Islamabad’s concerns over Afghanistan, and for Sino-US cooperation to assist Pakistan whose real challenge is not so much Washington and New Delhi, but the ecological challenge — primarily the water stress — that the country faces.
Lieven’s arguments on the need to cherish and respect Pakistan are all right, but his solutions  seem to demand more from others than from Islamabad.
The only way in which Pakistan’s security and its well-being can be assured in the longer run is the integration of the country into larger regional framework. But as long as Pakistan insists on seeing itself as the fortress of Islam and  its relations with the US, Afghanistan and India in zero-sum terms, it cannot get on to a workable track.

It is only through better ties with New Delhi that Pakistan can also handle what he himself calls its central problem — water stress. Actually both India and Pakistan have recognised through summit meetings in January 2004 that the best means of muting their conflict is through a regional framework where Islamabad can deal with New Delhi without feeling that it is being dominated by India. The regional framework also provides the best possible way of resolving the Kashmir issue and that of Afghanistan’s border dispute with Pakistan. The emergence of a genuine South Asian Free Trade Area cannot but have benign political consequences. This is also a means by which external forces like the US, which are, as Lieven recognises, an anathema to Pakistanis, can be kept out. But Islamabad resists any effort to open up.
Riedel’s sweeping narrative and analyses sometimes misses the mark, or states the obvious. For example he places the IC814 hijack along with other terrorist actions by the Mullah Omar-Al Qaeda combine. But that’s not true. It was an autonomous action, the fourth or fifth in a series of hostage taking whose aim was to obtain the freedom of Masood Azhar. Equally, his claim that Ilyas Kashmiri was involved in the Delhi kidnaps in September 1994 also seems to be at variance with facts.
The organiser of this was Ahmed Sayeed Omar Sheikh, the British-Pakistani who is serving a life sentence in Pakistan for killing Daniel Pearl. Lastly, Riedel’s prescription on Kashmir — LoC as a permeable international border — is precisely what India and Pakistan have been discussing since 2005.
Riedel is right in saying that the only way to “change Pakistani behaviour is to engage Pakistan.” But the problem is the nature of the engagement. After all, the US has been engaged with Pakistan for a long time, but few will disagree with the fact that its returns have been mixed.

He is right in his short-term red lines that Pakistan must follow — avoid giving sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and promoting the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. But he, like Lieven, ignores the less glamourous, albeit slower, process of trying to fashion a larger South Asian area, by building economic and people-to-people relationships which will alter mindsets, without necessarily touching borders.
The issue is quite simple — will India and Pakistan need to resolve their well-known problems before they can become friends, or will a process of growing engagement create the conditions in which the two can become friends, allay suspicions and resolve their outstanding problems.
I for one would place my bets on the latter course.
Mail Today May 8, 2011

A victory in the long war against terrorism

Machiavelli is the author of the saying “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Islamabad was certainly practising what the author of The Prince advocated: The hideout where Osama bin Laden was killed was a stone’s throw from Pakistan Military Academy, the headquarters of a Pakistani army division and the regimental centres of the Frontier Force and the Baloch Regiments. In the parlance of covert operations, such places are called “safe houses” and what could be safer than a house in the middle of a cantonment?
The relationship between Islamabad and Washington has been somewhat strange. The Pakistanis have ostensibly delivered all the Al Qaeda figures they could lay their hands on  for what is now a total of $20 billion in aid. At the same time, the Pakistani establishment has provided support and sanctuary to the Taliban, the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group and the Haqqani network which is fighting the US in Afghanistan. The Americans have been fully aware of this double game, but been able to do little about it. Will Osama’s killing change things?
 
Questions
Speaking to the nation, and indeed the world, US President Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that the operation was an entirely American affair and any information about it was conveyed to the Pakistani authorities only after the deed was done. A report of a meeting in Islamabad convened by President Asif Zardari and attended,  among others, by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and Pakistan Army Chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, and the heads of various intelligence agencies notes, “The meeting was told that the Pakistan forces did not take part in the operation and the operation was done under the US policy and Pakistan was informed after the completion of operation.”




For a man who had vanished into the thin air after that battle in Tora Bora in the winter of 2001, there are a lot of answers that the world will be looking for. Some will be forthcoming through his autopsy which the Americans will have no doubt conducted. For example, was he in need of regular dialysis? Second, there will be questions about his whereabouts in these years and his relations, if any,  with Pakistani authorities. The answer to this, too, will be forthcoming since the US has custody of his wives and children who will no doubt be debriefed. In addition there is an unspecified number of persons captured at the site who will provide some answers.
There are some questions that Pakistan, too, needs to answer in a credible fashion. Principally, who owned the building where Osama was staying? We should not forget that all the top Al Qaeda leaders who have been arrested till now were found in Pakistani safehouses—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshib in Karachi, Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad. We are being told that the national identity card of the house-owner was bogus and that no such person exists. How convenient!
Just as the rise of bin Laden had consequences for the world, so could his sudden death. His killing took place at a time when the Arab world has been hit by a string of what are clearly secular revolts—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria. It is quite clear, as of now, that the Islamists have taken a back seat and that the popular anger against authoritarian rule has been led by the rising middle-class, rather than a bunch of fanatics who want to take the region, if not the world into the medieval ages. So, bin Laden’s end could be the signal that the high tide of jihadism which was unleashed by the American-Saudi jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, is now ebbing.
In Pakistan, there are two possible outcomes. One, that his death will mark the beginning of the end of the Al Qaeda led anti-American war in Afghanistan and the elimination of the groups which were propped up by the outfit—the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Haqqani network and the loose coalition of Punjabi militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Harkat-ul-mujahideen and so on and
so forth.
 
Consequences
On the other hand, the event could actually intensify the anti-American movement in Pakistan and serve to re-energise the jihadists and their constituency. This is, after all, a country where the murderer of Salman Taseer was feted by the middle-class lawyers of Lahore. Radicals of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba know that the US will use the occasion to push the Pakistan army into an offensive in North Waziristan. And if the US has additional information on the possible complicity of some Pakistani officials in shielding bin Laden, they would gain a major leverage against the generals in Rawalpindi who are procrastinating. 
The consequences of Osama’s death will be indirect in India, though they could be important. Despite periodic alarums, the Al Qaeda did not operate in India and had no “India” chapter. The link comes through Pakistani militant groups that had allied themselves to the Al Qaeda and who shared their Wahabbist religious outlook such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba.  But even the Lashkar which focuses its operations on India, has by-and-large avoided recruiting Indian Muslims. Their operations, such as the Mumbai attack were handled exclusively by Pakistani and Pakistani-origin Muslims, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by the Mumbai police.
But, if the US learns that there was much greater complicity of Pakistani officials in giving sanctuary to Osama, things could be different. For the past several years, the US has made its distrust of Pakistan quite clear; even while it has provided Islamabad with billions of dollars of aid, it has stopped sharing vital information, such as planned drone strikes with their Pakistani counterparts. The recent relationship between the two countries has been rocky. Last week, the Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Dawn newspaper “It is fairly well known that the ISI has a long standing relationship with the Haqqani network [which] is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners… but that’s the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship [between the US and Pakistan].” 
 
Win
But winning one battle does not constitute victory in a war. The death of bin Laden can be a beginning of a process, but one which we cannot take for granted. The Al Qaeda idea has spread far and wide and while it is unlikely that another leader of Osama bin Laden’s calibre will emerge, there will be many smaller bin Ladens around.
The United States needs to carefully use the occasion of bin Laden’s death to shift the momentum against the jihadists in a definitive manner.
They have shown great courage and determination in planning and executing the covert operation that netted Osama, but now they need equal political common sense and hard diplomacy to consolidate their gains.
Mail Today May 3, 2011