India scoring own goals against Pakistan

Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani must have gone home chuckling, for never in his wildest imagination would he have assumed that the Indians would score so many own goals in less than an hour especially after the drubbing his President Asif Ali Zardari received at Yekaterinburg, barely two months ago. The score at the end of play was Pakistan four, India zero. This sudden loss of form remains inexplicable and has bewildered and angered many. Some have attributed this to American coaching. The Pakistani commentator Ayesha Siddiqa rubbed salt into our wounds, when she said that "This is an Indian government which is under the influence of the United States."

The four goals came in rapid succession. These were:

"Both leaders agreed that the two countries will share real time, credible and actionable information on any future terrorist threats." Now it is a basic and essential truth of life that we share secrets with those we trust or with those where we have an identifiable common interest or target. Do India and Pakistan have this? There is a clear divergence between pious hopes and attainable goals.

"Prime Minister Gilani mentioned that Pakistan has some information on threats in Balochistan and other areas". The incongruity and irrelevance of these 16 words jars. Pakistan has been blaming the rest of the world, chiefly India and now its benefactor and protector, the US, for its current troubles. It conveniently ignores the fact that its present problems emanate from the Taliban and the Lashkar-e-Tayiba ,both of which creations of its own malevolence. Pakistan is today paying the price of fighting a two-front jihadi war. Besides, the implication of the words "and other areas" is particularly sinister. Already there are wild accusations of Indian involvement in the terrorist attack on the Lahore Police Academy and on the Sri Lankan cricketers. More terrorist attacks by the Taliban or whoever wants to do this will surely take place in Pakistan. We can be certain that the evil Indian hand will be seen in this. And what if there is an attack on an American facility by the Pakistani Taliban and the orchestrated allegations are that there is an Indian hand?

In Havana, we had raised Pakistan to our level by describing it as a victim of terrorism. In Sharm el-Sheikh, we downgraded ourselves to their level by allowing them to describe us as sponsors of terrorism.

"Both prime ministers recognised that dialogue is the only way forward. Action on terrorism should not be linked to the Composite Dialogue process and these should not be bracketed. Prime Minister (Manmohan) Singh said that India was ready to discuss all issues with Pakistan, including all outstanding issues." The eagerness to resume the Composite Dialogue is mystifying if we at the same time insist that Pakistan must give us satisfaction on the issue of terrorism. Clearly the two -- Composite Dialogue and terrorism will now operate in separate, unconnected silos. What is the leverage that we will have on Pakistan if we are not even going to insist that we be given reasonable comfort before we resume dialogue? Ironically, and after years of hard fought battles with Washington, we now hear voices that suggest that they too have begun to understand and acknowledge the root cause of the problem. There is an increasing acceptance that the war on terror cannot be disaggregated and fought selectively. Admiral Mike Mullen ,chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke about the need for Pakistan to control terrorism both on the eastern front and the western front. Just when this is beginning to happen, we have wilted.

"Prime Minister Singh reiterated India's interest in a stable, democratic, Islamic Republic of Pakistan". Now why on earth do we have to say this? In the past also we have had our leaders signing at the Minar-e-Pakistan while the Pakistanis mounted assaults on Kargil , we rush off to Karachi and want to certify Mohammad Ali Jinnah's secular credentials and now this. Has Pakistan ever expressed that it wishes to see a democratic secular Republic of India? At least they are honest about this one because no Pakistani leader can afford to say this and get away as this expression undermines the very basis of the two-nation theory that the leaders still cling to in search of an identity that is non-India. For 60 years Pakistan's leaders have been trying to undermine India through the jihadis. It has not worked but it has not been given up either.

S Akbar Zaidi, a Karachi based analyst, was right when he said that India had to acknowledge that Pakistan, the intelligence establishment and groups like the LeT were not going away. In this triangle, Pakistan cannot survive without the other two, the Lashkar survives because of the other two and the intelligence rules over both. In other words, so long as there is Pakistan there will be the LeT backed by the Inter Services Intelligence backed by the army. Zaidi also added that the Pakistani establishment would not pursue cases against the Lashkar operatives involved in the Mumbai attacks and feared that there could be another Kargil or a Mumbai.
In dealing with Pakistan we must accept that its policy on jihad can no longer change. It has pursued this policy for far too long and the belief apparently is that the only way to get out of this mess is to get deeper into it. In the process it is also a state that is increasingly obscurantist with an acknowledged reputation that the country is now ground zero for global jihad. A terribly frightened and miniscule moderate section stands by, unable to stand up to the jihadis' interpretation of Islam.

All this has been said in these columns before but two important writings in recent months would testify to this. One is Arif Jamal's book Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir . Jamal's book confirms that Mumbai 2008 was a continuation of Baramulla 1947. The other is an essay by John R Schmidt in the Survival journal entitled The Unravelling of Pakistan which is one of the most honest and sombre accounts of what is happening in Pakistan today and the dangers ahead that threaten the existence of Pakistan with the Taliban now sitting west of the Indus and threatening both Punjab and Balochistan. Since one author is a Pakistani journalist and analyst and the other a former member of the US Foreign Service their views cannot be attributed to Indian prejudice.

What we need to understand is that when Pakistan feels cornered its leaders will seek assistance and sympathy and export mangoes; their purpose served, they will revert to form and export jihadis. The way to handle Pakistan is not through kind gestures and misplaced magnanimity; these are taken as signs of weakness and generally used to bargain for more.

The Pakistani establishment has made full use of its feeling of indispensability to the NATO effort in Afghanistan through provision of intelligence and logistics. As the US has begun to realise coddling Pakistan is counter-productive it needs to disabuse Pakistan of this and explore the routes through Iran and Russia . For this naturally it must stop needling both these countries; if India is required to give comfort to Pakistan to allow it to assist the US effort why not the US give some comfort to both Iran and Russia to enable them to help the US in Afghanistan. Indian presence in Afghanistan is benevolent and it would be unfortunate if this is reduced as this is the one country that has rendered assistance to the Afghan people. Pakistan does not have to be given comfort on this issue. Carrots must reduce and sticks must increase.
Pakistan has to be reinvented before it morphs into something very frightening.

Source : Rediff.com , 28th July 2009

Sleeping with the Enemy

The Sharm el-Sheikh declaration is perhaps the shortest, the most perplexing and worrying piece of drafting that has been signed by two heads of government. It now exists as a document that would be the basis for continued acrimony between India and Pakistan and among Indians. Never have so few led the country so astray as in this document.

One of the sentences that has generated considerable debate is when it states that “Both leaders agreed that the two countries will share real time, credible and actionable information on any future terrorist threats.” It is information that will be shared not intelligence; information being something that could well appear in the newspapers but intelligence presumes that information which has been gathered from secret sources. The sentence does not talk of ISI and RAW co-operation. Presumably, therefore, the reference is to exchange of information about terrorist acts.

Although Pakistan has been sponsoring jihadi terrorism against India for decades it does not consider this to be terrorism. The instruments have been Lashkar-e- Tayyaba or Jamat-ut-Dawa is it is now called, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and a host of other jihadi organisations that keep mutating according to the needs of the ISI. Since this is a low cost foreign policy option against India and since the Pakistan Army also believes in jihad as a doctrine it is unlikely that it will co-operate with India or share any real time credible actionable information following any Indian request. On the contrary, one should now expect a great deal of ‘information’ about Indian agents active in Pakistan. General Mirza Aslam Beg’s bizarre allegations of multilateral co-operation between the CIA, the R&AW, the MI6, Mossad and the German BND, all working to destabilise Pakistan and Afghanistan, will now acquire respectability.

Besides where is the trust that is so essential before such sharing begins. Even PM Gilani admitted this after his return from Sharm el-Sheikh. There have been contacts between the heads of ISI and RAW in the past but these never led to anything substantial. This was before the ISI went berserk with its jihadi agenda on Kashmir and the rest of India in the 1990s. This has only sharpened with time and one can hardly visualise the ISI leading the Indian intelligence agencies to terrorists hiding in Pakistan or planning terrorist acts against India. In their book they are mujahideen, ghazis and fidayeen but not terrorists and instead Baloch nationalists are the terrorists.

An establishment that has handled Hafiz Saeed with kid gloves, has never handed over any of the terrorists like Masood Azhar or mafiosos like Dawood Ibrahim, is hardly likely to co-operate. Besides one is not even sure whether or not the Indian intelligence agencies would be willing to share all the details with their Pakistani counterparts for fear of exposing their sources of intelligence thereby jeopardising an operation or a source. The present DG ISI Lt Gen Shuja Pasha is known to described the Taliban as Pakistan’s assets while Pakistan’s military spokesman Gen Athar Abbas was quite categorical in his CNN interview when he said that in the Taliban context Pakistan expected some concessions from Washington over his country’s concerns with India. Given this frame of mind, co-operation on terrorism aimed against India is likely to remain either frozen and lead mostly to one-up man ship with misleading and frustrating results. Although an India Pakistan intelligence co-operation between the two intelligence services may be desirable more as a means to keep channels of communication open, nothing extra-ordinary should be expected from this. The level of trust is just not there. This has to be built and this is not available at the flick of a switch.

Besides trust, intelligence co-operation, like any other co-operation but on a far higher plane of understanding, needs an identity of interests and targets. India and Pakistan have not identified the common threat or targets despite the Havana Declaration. There is no congruence of interests beyond noble pronouncements and naïve assumptions when leaders meet. Seeking Pakistan’s assistance in tackling terrorism in India is like asking a murderer to help investigate in the murder he has committed. He might, under duress, but there is no evidence of that being attempted by India.

Intelligence co-operation covers various bilateral interests like tackling terrorism, insurgencies, geo-political studies and assessments, training and supply of equipment. This is the standard practice and quite often intelligence agencies serve as the secret and reliable means of communication between two countries with adversarial relations; they act as the ice breakers or deal makers.

The Iran Contra deal of 1980 could not have been worked out without the active and discrete cooperation of the CIA, the Mossad, the French and the Iranian intelligence and other reliable but not always desirable intermediaries. In fact, legend has it that George Bush senior himself flew into Paris on 18 October 1980 along with CIA Director –designate William Casey to work this deal out just three weeks before the US presidential elections. This was a co-operation that served various needs – political, military and operational where the contracting parties got what they wanted. Reagan got acclaim for the release of the American hostages, the Iranians got the weapons they needed to counter Iraq, Israel sold their weapons and the Nicaraguan Contras got the money. A win-win situation for all.

There is another kind of need based strategic-tactical co-operation that is open ended. The ECHELON scheme is a multilateral sigint co-operation between the five Anglo Saxon countries - US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Originally put together to spy on the Soviets, it later landed itself in some controversy when the Europeans complained that this was being used for industrial espionage in Europe. In the intelligence game, liaison and co-operation does not preclude spying on friends or trying to suborn them.

The surveillance operation had been stepped up after the September 11 attacks and according to James Bamford, the author of the book ‘Body of Secrets’ and an intelligence expert, the US and British intelligence agencies intercept millions of telephone calls, emails and faxes every hour. Working together, the National Security Agency, the US eavesdropping organisation, and its British counterpart, GCHQ, remain the largest espionage organisations the world has ever known which can eavesdrop any conversation virtually anywhere in the world. This capability has been further refined and upgraded with the outsourcing of a substantial portion of techint collection in the US. All this requires a high level of mutual trust and identity of interests.
India and Pakistan are a long way away from this kind of identity of interests.

Source : Mail Today , 25th July 2009