Twenty years ago, almost to the day, the last Soviet soldier left Kabul and the ‘Free World’ celebrated its triumph over Evil.Communism had begun its rollback and soon the ‘Free World’ would herald the arrival of a New World Order. Today, the triumphant superpower is caught in a quagmire in Afghanistan with no exit routes visible and the New World Order is in a shambles. All this is a consequence of the instrumentalities that were created to help fight the Cold War which have now become unmanageable. Today Afghanistan and Pakistan have become inextricably intertwined. The obscurantism, radicalism and the utter brutality personified by the Taliban transcends the Durand Line, obliterating it, possibly permanently. In its search for strategic depth against India, Pakistan is losing ground.
The declaration of Nizam-e-Adl (religious code of justice) in the Malakand Division that has seven districts including Dir, Chitral and Swat, and the Kohistan district of the Hazara Division mars the retreat of the Pakistani state. This was followed by a series of incidents like the warning to India by al-Qaeda, the Kabul attack by the Taliban and the assassination of politicians and the burning of schools, seem part of a long running horror serial awaiting its denouement. The Shias and other clerics have opposed this and the Hizbut Tehrir (which works for revival of Islamic Khalifah globally) has termed this as mere eyewash. The British and the Nato have expressed concern, but strangely Washington is being politically correct by describing this as an internal affair of Pakistan.
Washington is obviously disregarding what the Amir of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-Shariat- e-Mohammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws), Maulana Sufi Mohammed had to say soon after his jubilant entry into Swat, the district dominated by his son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah. Maulana Sufi has said that anyone opposing the imposition of Sharia were Wajibul Qatal (worthy of death). The Tehrik rejected democracy as un-Islamic: “We want immediate enforcement of the Islamic judicial system in totality: judicial, political, economic, jihad fi’isbillah (jihad in the name of God), education and health.” Incidentally the motto of the Pak army is also jihad fi’isbillah and the army as well as Islamabad were taken into confidence when this deal was struck with the TNSM by the provincial government. What is also relevant is that Maulana Sufi had sent 10,000 tribesmen to support the Taliban who died fighting the Northern Alliance. This is not surprising for the motto of the movement is Sharia ya Shahdat (Islamic Laws or martyrdom), rejects western style democracy and openly condones the use of force in jihad.
Given all this and given the fears in Washington that the next attack on the US could have its origins in Pakistan, its current circumspection is mysterious. This is also mystifying because there are several Pakistanis who are justifiably worried and helpless. And for them to be told by the champions of free speech and liberty that they are on their own must be troubling. It is possible the Americans have worked this deal out, taking a leaf out of Petreaus’ plans in Iraq. Formulae successful in one country do not necessarily apply in another. Iraq had no Taliban, no al-Qaeda and no sectarian mafias of the kind that Pakistan has with all their entrenched interests and backed by the establishment.
A senior police official in Karachi talked of the influx of new militants from the NWFP and he explained how many had made southern Punjab their base and that the jihadi network had an increasingly Pushtun face. The Punjab provincial authorities have been worried that the Taliban had entered the province through its borders with Balochistan and the Frontier Province. The Dera Ghazi Khan bomb blast earlier was attributed to the Taliban. In an attempt to prevent further influx, the provincial authorities had sent their elite force to the provincial boundaries to strengthen local security arrangements. It would be worrying to have the possibility of Pushtun jihadis infiltrating into the Punjab but the fact is that ever since the Lal Masjid episode, there has been ample evidence of the presence and effectiveness of the Taliban from the various suicide attacks on the army and the ISI culminating in the Marriott bombings. The other fear should be that this influx will now get mixed up or be a rival to the existing Punjabi jihadi networks in southern Punjab —those of the JeM and the LeT offshoots.
There are other worrying strands in Pakistan. The image of Pakistan lies not just in the sophisticated salons of Lahore. It is the villages that have begun to change drastically where huge loudspeakers at village mosques propagate hard Salafi Islam, oppose Barelvis, Sufis, Shias and other sects as none of these are considered to be Muslims. Even the Punjabis, long considered to be more liberal towards women, are now adopting the Taliban line. Classical music is disappearing, teaching music is violently opposed by the Islami Jamaat-e- Tulaba at the Punjab University, there are few kathak teachers — once the favourite dance at the Mughal courts — available today. But these are outward signs.
What has been happening is best described by Pervez Hoodbhoy in his article ‘The Saudi-isation of Pakistan’. He says “Pakistan’s self inflicted suffering comes from an education system that, like Saudi Arabia’s, provides an ideological foundation for violence and future jihadists. It demands that Islam be understood as a complete code of life, and creates in the mind of a school-going child a sense of siege and embattlement by stressing that Islam is under threat everywhere.” Hoodbhoy describes the education curriculum that is prescribed as “a blueprint for a religious fascist state.” This curriculum has been in existence from the time of Zia ul Haq and successive governments including that of the self-proclaimed moderate Musharraf, have merely tinkered with it and today the young minds are fertile grounds for fanaticism.
There are some other Pakistanis who worry at the trend Pakistan is taking. I A Rahman, the director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan doubted that Sharia could be kept confined to Malakand and once it spread to the Frontier, Punjab could be next. It will be some time before Sufi and son-in-law sort out the whats and how s of improving the Sharia but a few outcomes are fairly certain. It is unlikely that the Pakistani authorities will ever be able to re-establish their hold in Malakand. It is likely that there will be similar demands from other parts of Pakistan for establishing the Sharia. The civil society in Pakistan, weak as it is and dependent on the army and the feudal systems, will eventually disappear. And the US policy of regionalising the war on terror in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region will lead to more trouble.
We have been warned
Source : Indian Express ( Chennai Edition) 25th Feb 2009
Pakistan is in deep trouble. As has been said before, the trouble this time is worse than in 1971. This time there is no fall back position because in 1971 there was a West Pakistan to come home to. The retreat from the Swat Valley by the Pakistani state is a sign of the troubled times and was perhaps pre-ordained. In intelligence parlance it is called ‘blowback’ – the unintended consequences of unacknowledged actions in other peoples countries.’
This time the admission comes from on high when the President of Pakistan says he fears a Taliban take over in Pakistan and that Pakistan was fighting for its survival. He should worry because the Taliban control Swat which is 160 kilometres away from Islamabad. To put this in the Indian perspective, it is like them sitting in Agra or a little beyond that. Simultaneously, there have been reports in Pakistan of the Taliban having infiltrated into the Punjab and Karachi. Killings and kidnappings continue, in FATA, in NWFP and in Balochistan where a nascent nationalist struggle is again visible. Worried that the Taliban were infiltrating into the Punjab province, Pakistani authorities have sent their Elite Force to the borders with NWFP and Balochistan to prevent these infiltrations. The economy is collapsing there and is no succour forthcoming either from the Americans or from the Friends of Pakistan unless Pakistan shows good faith.
Pakistan has shown progress only in one category. The Washington-based Fund for Peace now lists Pakistan at 9 in the list of failing/failed states, up from 10 two years ago. Thus we have a delinquent state that is also a failing state as our neighbour and that too a neighbour where hatred for India has been a habit. The sooner we accept this unfortunate reality the better it will be or easier, one hopes, to formulate serious long term responses and immediate pre-emption. Today, Pakistan is a metaphor for “ground zero of terrorism” or “epicentre of terrorism.”
Pakistanis themselves have been in denial for long and so have we been; assuming that Pakistan was a moderate liberal state and that what was happening in that country would eventually pass. This is not going to be so. For this one has to read what Pervez Hoodbhoy, the well known physics professor at the Quaid e Azam University in Islamabad, says in his essay ‘The Saudi-isation of Pakistan’. He begins his essay with the ominous prediction – “The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that the madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s cities. Left unchallenged this education will produce a generation incapable of coexisting with any one except strictly with their own kind. The mindset it creates, may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.” Hoodbhoy’s anguish is obvious when he says “Grain by grain the desert sands of Saudi Arabia are replacing the rich soil that had nurtured a magnificent Muslim culture for a thousand years….. Now a stern unyielding version of Islam (Wahhabism) is replacing the kinder, gentler Islam of the Sufis and saints who had walked on this land for hundreds of years.” This is an essay every Indian, and any one else who cares must read; not to exult in what is happening in Pakistan but to worry.
It is true that Pakistan was formed in the name of Islam and all its various leaders have used Islam for political ends. Quite early in Pakistan’s life criticising Pakistan meant criticism of Islam. This weakened the civil society. Undoubtedly Zia was the one who converted this into a strong instrument of state policy but right from the beginning Pakistan’s leaders tried to deny history and even geography when they sought their moorings elsewhere. Fear of India, the urge to be different and the search for an identity that was non-India led to the rise of the Army with the result that today the Army is the institution that owns Pakistan. And it looks increasingly that Pakistan’s latest attempt at democracy is about to flounder.
Many Pakistani leaders have been spreading the theory that India is about to reverse the partition and gobble up Pakistan. They flatter themselves. It is also a self-serving argument that encourages the retention of a huge self-aggrandising Army and feeds a feudal system. No right minded Indian would ever dream of taking over that desolate piece of territory whose sole harvest now is jihadi terrorists and hatred towards others.
Pakistani leaders never wanted to or failed to understand that their country would remain the safest when they confined themselves to adventures within their own boundaries. Pakistan becomes unstable the moment it pretends to be the inheritor of the Empire and seeks suzerainty over Afghanistan or seeks to cut India down to size. The pursuit of policies other than in one’s own national interest usually damages that national interest.
The US will most likely continue to repeat earlier mistakes – not having learnt anything and forgotten everything. Only the other day Richard Holbrooke was telling us (even though he was on a learning mission) that India and Pakistan face the same threat. Not quite, Mr. Holbrooke. We are victims of Pakistani-inspired, funded and equipped terrorism. Pakistan, on the other hand is a victim of its own policies, which for long spells were ignored and indirectly abetted by the US by the very fact that they were ignored. Anxious to achieve results in Afghanistan as soon as possible, it is likely that the Americans will be satisfied if Pakistan shows results in the war on terror, west of the Indus. This will be a mistake. Unless the Pakistanis tackle terrorism east of the Indus, dismantle the large infrastructure of terrorism and hunt down the terrorists the problem will never go away. Instead of this, what we have are peace deals even on the other side of the Indus facing the Afghan border. The US needs to change policy too from the earlier one of routinely plying the country with funds for misuse and arms for regional adventurism. Maybe Pakistan needs to be starved of both for some time till it is adequately disciplined and detoxified.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is looking more and more like a failed joint venture of the Anglo-Americans who spent most of the second half of the last century investing more and more in keeping this country afloat. The Pakistani melt down looks increasingly like the Lehman Brothers collapse and this country too must go into international receivership with stern conditionalities of sustained good behaviour which, above all, must make India safe from future depredations – sub-conventional, conventional and nuclear – by that country and Kashmir is not on the table.
Source : Mail Today , 19th Feburary 2009
'Nothing should be as favourably regarded as intelligence; nothing should be as generously rewarded as intelligence; nothing should be as confidential as the work of intelligence.' Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It is possible that had the State paid any attention to Sun Tzu's principles, our systems might have been better equipped to handle events that led to and occurred on 26/11. In India we have violated all these principles, more or less consistently but especially in these last few years, since after the time of Rajiv Gandhi. In the aftermath of the Mumbai massacres, and even before that, throughout 2008 questions about intelligence failures have been raised after each major terrorist act. However, Mumbai was more than just intelligence failure. Like Kargil it was also a systemic failure but the starting point is inadequate intelligence, the failure to connect the dots within the system and then the rest just happened as the world saw on TV.
It is unfortunate that for a country like ours that has had to deal with insurgencies and unending terrorism for sixty years, the political leadership and a civil bureaucracy has viewed the business of intelligence collection with disdain. Efforts to control have usually meant putting roadblocks and reducing intelligence functions to bureaucratic practices.
Any state that seriously wants to preserve or enhance its national interests needs statecraft that is a mixture of diplomacy, intelligence, military technology and economic power. No single instrument is powerful enough in the pursuit of national interests and all instruments have to be sharp and powerful but intelligence is an important function at all times, peace or war or between the two stages. Unless leaders equip themselves with a strong intelligence arm, they will continue to be surprised and continue to make wrong choices.
In understanding the role of external intelligence we must first accept a few basic truths. Even the best intelligence will not be guarantee against all terrorist attacks or other nasty surprises but this will make the price higher, will be a deterrent and of immense help in investigations instead of what happens at present where the investigating agencies are blindsided. Secondly, intelligence is not just by the IB or R&AW or DIA; in case of terrorism it is the local state units in the district and the sub-division that have to perform. Third, since external intelligence operates on foreign soil, it is an extra-legal or even illegal activity. That is why governments need the cover of plausible deniability since relations between sovereign powers could get adversely affected even ruptured because of clandestine activities. That is also why preserving an intelligence operative's identity becomes vital but is often not understood. It is not a quirk of personality or a desire for mystery that makes an intelligence operative uncomfortable when he is exposed as so often happens in India. In fact the best intelligence operatives are those who have a passion for anonymity although in the Indian system this is impossible. Further, intelligence is often an amalgam of information and data from various sources – technical of various kinds and human sources, all of which is converted into knowledge by skilled analysts. But all this is not enough because intelligence is as good as the process that converts this information into knowledge and as good as the ability of the ultimate user to assimilate this intelligence.
Intelligence is generally considered evil because it is secret, therefore it must be controlled by transients who are either biased or ignorant about the methods and needs. There is therefore an absurd expectation among some wise people that intelligence agencies and their methods should be made transparent. At the other end of the spectrum is the declining professionalism among the agencies where they have been resorting to leaks to protect themselves. Presumably in an atmosphere of uncertainty and a highly politicised bureaucracy, this is another way to save one's gaddi – when sycophancy ceases to work.
There are other things that are wrong today within the agencies. The first aspect is to consider whether the present system of recruitment and manning the intelligence organisations is the best that is possible given the present nature and level of threats. National threats have changed there are other transnational threats that no single agency or a single country can handle. Besides there is no knowing how the new threats will evolve. The rapidly changing technological applications bring their own threats. Catastrophic terrorism, cyber terrorism, remote control missile attacks and virtual wars are the other new threats. International trade and commercial transactions have become faster and more intricate; banking transactions move at the speed of lightning. IT-driven globalisation also covers the criminal world. Interaction between narcotics smugglers, arms merchants, human traffickers and terrorists is that much easier, faster and safer. They all have access to sophisticated denial and deception techniques. Add to this, radical religious terrorists which are affecting India most dramatically and are supported by Pakistan in every way. The normal civil servant however bright just does not have these skills or the aptitude .
Within organisations there has been an increasingly greater reliance on techint in preference to humint capabilities. No amount of techint is a substitute for an intelligence operative or an astute and experienced analyst. The best techint is of little use if this is not preceded or accompanied by effective and sound humint capacities. Techint will give facts but not intentions and particularly in the case of counter terrorism, humint is an absolute must.
Intelligence collection and operations are increasingly highly specialised skills. This is not something that can be handled by men and women who seek to join an intelligence agency as a temporary haven or as an opportunity to treat the organisation as a secondary foreign office with no commitment to the profession. These are jobs meant for lifetime committed professionals who acquire their skills in tradecraft, languages, areas and issues over a long period of time. Besides relatively small organisations like the R&AW cannot have a revolving door where officers come and go every few years. The R&AW is the only major external intelligence organisation in the world that has a fixed quota for seconded officers to man its clandestine and analysis desks. In an era of specialisation this means that that these very skills are lacking; so is the commitment. This means a loss of talent every few years apart from other drawbacks that an officer has walked away with many operational secrets and can be vulnerable once he leaves.
The R&AW was not conceived as a Central Police Organisation. It was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the organisation's founding fathers, Rameshwar Nath Kao and Sankaran Nair, who repeatedly stressed that the R&AW should not become just another police organisation, and should have talent from wherever they could find, including other services of the Government of India. Recruitment to what would be a new service began in 1971 and many other lateral entrants later got absorbed in a service that became their new life. It was during the watch of Garry Saxena that the service rules were formalised and later other lateral entries were possible. The underlying principle of this was intelligence collection and operations were not assumed to be the preserve of any particular service but unfortunately the IPS still assumes it should have primacy in the R&AW and the result has been a constant and a debilitating battle between the in-house service and the IPS.
The result has been that apart from calamities like Morarji Desai that befell R&AW in the ninth year of its existence, the organisation has been subjected to periodic attempts at reforms which have been a little better than merely reorganising quotas among various services or creating more promotional avenues. These reviews and committees have attempted to exercise external control and succeeded in creating only road blocks. This has only meant increasing bureaucratisation of a profession which by nature has to be unconventional, and needs imaginative and flexible handling far away from stodgy bureaucrats who feel at home only in carefully structured and rigid systems. For this mindset, the process and not the result, is an end in itself.
Drawing the right talent has been an increasing challenge in the government. It is more so in the R&AW. The UPSC route may have been the more transparent, but now seems increasingly unimaginative and irrelevant to the needs. This is not to overlook that the IPS has contibuted some truly outstanding intelligence officers but these officers would have been outstanding anywhere. It is just that the requirements have changed today. Besides that an exam passed five, ten or twenty years ago does not qualify a man or a woman as an intelligence officer. The former Naval Chief Admiral Arun Prakash highlighted the kind of problem that exists in his recent article "The clear and present danger from 6th CPC". He pointed out the difficulties R&AW had in accommodating Naval officers on secondment because of the equivalences laid down by "the Kafkaesque Department of Personnel."
This comment underscores the problem of manning that afflicts both the intelligence agencies and the armed forces because as with the Navy, so with the Army and Air Force. There are other problems in a world where the threat perceptions are changing rapidly and where the terrorist is invariably a step or two ahead of the counter terrorist. There is a need to break out of the hierarchical system introduced in intelligence agencies where promotions within the organisations must lag behind the superior service, the IAS. Since personnel of intelligence agencies seek promotion within their own agencies there is need to change the nomenclature of their ranks, break free from the system of equivalence with the hierarchy and strike out on one's own. The same principle could apply to the Armed Forces who do not have to be bound down by archaic principles of equivalence. They can still be answerable to the civil authority of the government.
The regular UPSC recruit, however bright, will not suffice. The brightest no longer join the civil service. And an intelligence agency needs language skills, in depth knowledge about the target country and its cultural mores, computer whizz kids, technology experts, military men, financial experts and bankers who can help trace the financial trails of the terrorist, the ability to link the terrorist with the arms and drug smuggler. It needs economists, scientists, area experts, political analysts, university dons, journalists and those with the skills like those of Connie Sachs in John le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy." Ideally, therefore, an external intelligence agency should be able to pay its personnel well but be able to hire and fire for non-performance. It cannot afford to carry disgruntled men and women in its ranks. Promotions throughout will have to be performance based not linked to seniority. There has to be a fast track for those who excel. Since everybody cannot climb the ladder and there has to be some sidelining of even the bright ones, it is best for the government to consider the system of flexible pay bands so that officers can at least hope to end up with a better pay packet at the end of the day.
This means having to break out of the iron cage of the bureaucracy that little else besides impeding. This means recruiting in the open market from colleges and universities as all the well known agencies of the world like the CIA, the SIS and Mossad do. Catch them young and then mould them is the motto. In the present system, the man joins an organisation when he may be in his mid-twenties or if he is seconded, even much later. Most have got accustomed to the frills of bureaucracy, are married and with children. They are just too rigid to learn anything new and too old to take any risks or gamble, so essential for an intelligence operative.
It is of course unrealistic to expect any banker or finance wizard to give up his fancy job and work for a still lowly paid government assignment. The CIA faced with budget cuts in the Clinton era got over this problem by outsourcing which has now become an Intelligence-Industrial Complex rather like the Military-Industrial Complex that has typified US capitalism. It is estimated that today that outsourcing is a 50 billion dollar business annually and consumes about 70 % of the budget of the US intelligence community's budget and this includes those working on covert operations. The CIA, the National Security Agency and the Pentagon now have partnership arrangements with giants like Lockheed Martin, IBM, CACI and Booz Allen Hamilton. This may not be the model for India to follow but there is no way that there can be any effective functioning of intelligence agencies in the future without some involvement and reliance on the private sector. This involvement is going to be inevitable and necessary chiefly because it could be in the interest of the private sector to be participatory in the security of the country and it has the means and the resources to do so. The private sector could provide the technological inputs in battling terror.
In a fast changing world with a rapidly changing threat perception, intelligence agencies have not been nor allowed to be flexible to meet the evolving threat. There is hardly any surge capability where the agency can, on its own, shift manpower and resources to meet the new threat. The present system is far too cumbersome and slow to allow any rapid redeployment and by the time the new system is put into place the quarry has moved on, either morphed into something different or has just become too big so that the changes originally proposed become inadequate. The head of an intelligence organisation must have the flexibility and authority to move men and material around.
None of these freedoms would be available without checks and balances and accountability or oversight. We are perhaps not yet ready, as a people, to have the US system but the British system is better for us where accountability is to the Cabinet. A great deal would depend on the Prime Minister who needs to choose his chiefs of intelligence with great care. Past experience, career performance and integrity should be the main guiding factors and not seniority.
All this is meaningless unless there is a systemic overhaul. Both Mumbai and Kargil were as much systemic failures yet the target always is the intelligence systems. Mumbai occurred because the lessons of Kargil were not adequately learnt. Intelligence reforms without police reforms are pointless because the local policeman develops the strategic intelligence given by the central agencies. Police reforms without civil service reform are equally meaningless. And civil service reform without political reform is similarly meaningless.
Given the needs of the hour, the threats that we face and will continue to face in the future, the country can no longer afford to have nothing but the best.
Source : Indian Defence Review , January-March 2009
