NSA: PM’s adviser, not superspook

Shivshankar Menon comes to his new assignment as National Security Adviser (NSA) with many proven credentials, but the one advantage that may have slipped past the notice of many is that he is about 15 years younger than his predecessor. This makes him more contemporary with his international peers and they will speak to each other in the same idiom. In some ways this is a generational shift in a country where wisdom is considered directly proportional to age. America’s NSA is the personal appointee of the President and does not have to go through the usual route of getting congressional approval for his appointment. This is for good reason because no Chief Executive and no country can afford to have the two of them functioning on different wavelengths. Mr Menon has taken charge at a very crucial time for India as the next decade will determine whether we finally make it to the Big League or will be destined to remain a potential global power — the perennial best man. Many of the geopolitical problems that confront India are well known.

The United States, still by far the strongest military, economic, technological and cultural power, has begun to face the reality of limitations of military power and that the taller the rhetoric, the harder the fall. There is a realisation and sotto voce admission among America’s leaders that they can no longer act unilaterally. China, possibly acting under premature hubris, seeks space for itself while the US finds it is unable to have the kind of free run it had earlier. It is this assessment that may have led to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s formulation of the Group of Two (China and US) as global arbiters. US President Barack Obama had leant backwards while in Beijing when he accommodated China in South Asia. Taking a cue from this, influential US thinktanks have now suggested that for US policies to succeed in Afghanistan, it is essential to solve the India-Pakistan tangle of Kashmir and for that it is necessary to involve China in a tripartite arrangement.

A significant power shift is likely to take place in Asia in the next few years. Whether or not India can make the triangle of US-Russia-China from Lisbon to Vladivostok into a rectangle that includes India will depend on India as much as the other players. There is a great churning of the oceans that has begun in Asia with the rise of China, the emergence of India and reawakening in Japan. The next few years will see continued struggle and competition for markets and vital resources that will shape military policies of nations and choke points will remain unstable.
The Indian Ocean has been an attraction for most empires in the past and the Czarist thrust for warm waters, or the later Soviet thrust into Afghanistan reflected this. Today the Indian Ocean acquires another strategic importance as it provides vital sea lanes to China and the rest of East Asia. China, despite the vastness of the Pacific, feels landlocked without control over the Indian Ocean. Its deep pockets have helped it acquire vital energy sources and routes that take gas through the Central Asian land mass into China, but the vast majority of energy-producing countries — Russia and West Asia — still look to the West as their main buyers. India ranks a poor third in this race.

Our own neighbourhood is likely to remain unstable and Afghanistan will not get sorted out in the foreseeable future, much less by mid-2011. It is not known how many and for how long will the Western forces remain in Afghanistan. Talks with elements of the Taliban have begun at some level. Pakistan’s quest for "strategic depth" — which at best means control over the Pushtun on both sides of the Durand Line — will keep the region unsettled and increasingly Talibanised. Consequently, Pakistan will, in the next few years, become increasingly irrational in its attitude, and flail before it threatens to fail.

Handling our new-found relationship with the United States and our old friendship with Russia is going to be a challenge and an opportunity. We must accept that the US, whatever its level of desire of friendship with India, will overlook Pakistan’s India-specific delinquencies and will not even remotely jeopardise its own interests in and with China. In fact, on Pakistan, there seems to be a strong level of understanding between the two even though this may become the next battleground between both of them in the unfolding Great Game. The US has concluded that the only points of departure between the US and India are on trade, climate change and Iran. They do not think that India’s sensitivities on Pakistan’s continued support to terrorism in India and the US continuously soft-pedalling this is a serious point of departure. Behind all the conviviality and bonhomie with the US, there lurk suspicions about the various defence-related acronyms like CISMOA (Communications Interoperability Security Memorandum of Agreement), EUMA (End-Use Monitoring Agreement), Logistical Services Agreement (LSA) and Basic Exchange Cooperation Agreement (BECA), and their small print.

Pakistan is unlikely to give up its policy of using terrorism as a force multiplier as long as its leadership does not have to pay a price for this. The tactics of terrorism will become more complicated where attacks will be planned in one country, financed from another, terrorists recruited elsewhere in another country and targeted somewhere else; they will be more sophisticated and lethal in the next few years; cyber-terror by terrorists and cyberwarfare by states will be more common. There are many players in the field today — the fanatics, criminals, drug traffickers and human traffickers — which complicates even further the task of intelligence agencies.

Other global and regional issues will impact India’s security. Issues like climate change, terrorism, energy security, water shortages, food security, migration, and some purely our own — our abysmal law and order, leading to insurgencies in many cases, health, education and infrastructure issues — will ultimately create security problems. Rapid economic growth will create socio-economic pressures arising from exploding expectations and demographic pressures on urban areas.

In a tangled and shrinking world, where various — and at times — contradictory interests coalesce, with different triangular or quadrilateral groupings overlapping, the new NSA will have to have the nimbleness of a Mizo Cheraw dancer, but one is sure he is surefooted enough for these intricacies. It will be useful to remember that the job is about advising the Prime Minister on national security in its widest connotation, which includes internal as well as external security matters. The NSA’s job requirement should not include running the security and intelligence apparatus. The NSA is the ultimate consumer of intelligence, not its producer. If the NSA inadvertently becomes the man responsible for the product, then he ends up being its salesman, however shoddy the product. Instead, he should be looking for the finished product and customising his requirements.

Source : Asian Age , 29th Jan 2010

Too Official to be complete picture

BOOK REVIEW : The Defence of the Realm –The Authorised History of MI5
by Christopher Andrew
1032 pages ,Allen Lane,Penguin

Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of the UK’s intelligence service MI5 whizzes past some of its big embarrassments

They used to say that if you do not want too many people to read your report then the best way is to make it so long, pack it with annotations and obfuscate at crucial points so that sooner than later the reader will lose interest. After 1100 pages based on information carefully gleaned from 400,000 Security Service (MI-5) files, Christopher Andrew’s monumental work - The Defence of the Realm - is the authorised history of the service. One wonders though how many will actually sit down to read this. Andrew’s book is a little longer that Stephen Dorril’s study of Fifty Years of Special Operations of MI-6 (SIS) published about ten years ago. Obviously the SIS got their book in first maybe because they have a shorter history.


Since it is an authorised version, which has been carefully scrutinised for clearance, it is natural that any information that would jeopardise national security interests has been excluded from the book, consistent with the policy of the Neither Confirm nor Deny principle. Andrew discusses the Hollis (DG MI-5 1956-65) saga in a few stray paragraphs strewn all over the book, Philip Knightley is more detailed about the suspicions relating to Hollis in his book on British intelligence - The Second Oldest Profession. This is the difference between an authorised version which is what Andrew’s book and Knightley’s book which could be defined as an authoritative version. Similarly, the 1996 defection of David Shayler and his disclosures of some operational details was a major embarrassment for the service but Andrew gives this a page and a half. Knightley has more on Shayler.


Shayler’s disaffection was at a time when cutbacks and constant changes in the mid-90s had affected morale. Some of the changes made at that time had improved efficiency but had affected camaraderie in the service, which is an intelligence service’s main asset.


There are the expected episodes of the suspicions that Prime Minister Wilson was suspect, apart from the treachery of the Magnificent Five - Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean and Cairncross. Andrew speaks of the excessive paranoia that pervaded an intelligence organisation when moles were discovered or suspected to exist with spies spying on each other. In such an atmosphere of intrigues and conspiracies, real and imagined fears abound and, at times, are undistinguishable. The CIA counter –intelligence chief, James Angleton was an enthusiastic contributor the paranoia that gripped the British service those days. As Peter Wright, one of the great supporters of the conspiracy theories within the service, later admitted that as the scent of treachery lingered in every corridor, fears fed easily on the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn’s bizarre theories. It becomes necessary to ensure that intelligence agencies are carefully regulated so that while they remain externally ruthless and efficient against the enemy they do not end up subverting the very state that they are supposed to serve.


The Cambridge spies happened because intelligence of the period was distracted by the German threat and ignored the inroads the KGB had made into the system and the idealism of the few. The Nineties were difficult years for the service with the disappearance of the Communist threat. As a result the service seemed to lose its coherence and relevance till the Islamic extremist threat surfaced. This happens in all intelligence agencies because when the threat is not evident no one wants to think about it and prepare for it. When the threat eventually surfaces apparently unannounced, the agencies get the blame for not anticipating this. Today, the main activity of the service is counter-terrorism and following Islamic extremism.
There is little reference to India except for the early years. Later, in its 1985-86 report the Service referred to the growing threat from Sikh (and other sub-continental) terrorism and later asserts that good intelligence along with arrests of Sikh and Kashmiri terrorists ensured that the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ‘frustrated plots to attack Rajiv Gandhi during his state visit.’


The book is not something for the average reader. It is serious stuff and like the trade itself, complicated and at times, fascinating. It is either for the historian or the professional and will find its place mostly on library shelves.

***

Source : Mail Today , 17th Jan 2010

Instability awaits Kabul

I DON'T do quagmires”, Donald Rumsfeld had once declared rather grandly. He didn’t believe in exit strategies either. Yet, eight years later with casualties rising to a little more than one death a day in Afghanistan and expenses crossing US $ 450 billion, in December 2009 President Obama, referred to July 2011 as the date by which the US would begin to pull out of Afghanistan . This state has been the result of a policy that presumed that military supremacy was an unqualified good born of American superiority. Great though the power of the American military machine might have been, it was not great enough to solve problems such as global terrorism of the al Qaeda variety. America needed help of friends, demonised its own supporters like President Karzai, it chose other friends wrongly and declined others’ advice. Consequently, it ended fighting the wrong war at the wrong place with wrong tactics.

The declared US objective has been to take out Al Qaeda from Afghanistan so that they do not become a threat to the US and its allies. Yet the Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan; it is mostly in Pakistan with sanctuaries in Yemen and Afghanistan. It is the Taliban that is mostly in Afghanistan with sanctuaries in Pakistan, so the result is that the US has been fighting an obscurantist section of an ethnic component of Afghanistan whose objective has been to throw the foreigner out and seems to be succeeding. The Taliban now represent, by and large, the Pushtun sentiment in Afghanistan and they are spreading into Kunduz in the north as well. It is possible now that the US will re- evaluate its policy towards Pakistan following the killing of seven CIA operatives inside the CIA camp in Khost; an attack that originated with the Pakistan Taliban. This act highlighted not only the dangers of counter terror operations but also that the level of commitment in the opposition to the US was very high. The US now wants to achieve something in eighteen months what has not been possible in eight years.

The second review of the US policy by Obama has probably been the result of the failure of the US and British offensive in Helmand last summer accompanied by reports that the Taliban had begun to make inroads outside the south and east which they already control, while the security situation in Herat had deteriorated.

The coalition failure in Helmand has been interpreted by most Afghans as victory for the Taliban and also drew more recruits to the Taliban. It is impossible to distinguish them from ordinary villagers and it would be a mistake to conclude that they are resented by the Pushtun population. Coalition forces have remained far too inadequate and ill motivated to allow for an effective clear and hold policy.

The Al Qaeda’s objectives and tactics are different from the Taliban’s.

While the Taliban has become an insurgency seeking liberation of its lands from foreign occupation, Al- Qaeda seeks the end of the West’s influence in the Muslim world and the end of the West’s local supporters and allies. Al- Qaeda does not seek to control territory. But the organisation needs sanctuaries to survive.

Since al- Qaeda seeks Western targets, its operatives need access to training facilities, cities, international connections and the media.

For this reason, Pakistan is currently the main base, with limited sanctuaries elsewhere.

Withdrawal

It is difficult to predict if and when the US will change its decades old policy of pardoning Pakistan all its transgressions. What we need to take into account is that one of these days the US will carry out its much vaunted but ridiculously inadequate much delayed surge, declare mission accomplished and thin out. Its longterm policies are dictated by election year compulsions. Once the coalition forces begin to pull out a few things will inevitably happen as other interests try to fill the empty spaces.

Pakistan will naturally assume that its moment has come again and it could now acquire its much dreamt of strategic depth, throw the Indians out and be the overlord in Afghanistan. The Iranians are unlikely to remain idle spectators as a Sunni Wahabbi neighbour is going to be an unsettling factor for them.

The Chinese have already begun to move in with their commercial and resource interests into Afghanistan as they would see an opportunity to move closer to the Persian Gulf, given their steady relations with the Iranians.

They also need to keep the Islamist extremists away from sensitive areas like Xinjiang. The Central Asian Republics and Russia have their concerns about the dangers of Talibanised ideology spreading into their countries. Finally, the absence of a strong centralised authority will only create more confusion in a country that has been run on drug money and foreign doles.

India
Pakistan’s exultation may be temporary.
Unable to control its own territory it is unlikely to be able to run Afghanistan in the way it may want to. It does not have the resources to do so and the US will not sub lease Afghanistan to Pakistan this time.

The other very real danger is that the Pushtuns on both sides of the Durand Line, joined together in a common fight for decades, may well ask if they fought all these years only to end up being minorities in both countries. The departure of the Coalition Forces will only add to the instability of the region and India needs to prepare itself for this eventuality.

There have been subtle suggestions made in recent months that are designed to create illusions of grandeur in us. These suggest that as a power rising towards its destiny as a major power, we should be playing a more active role in our neighbourhood, especially in Afghanistan.

Some have suggested that we could send in a brigade as a token. This is dangerous talk. The cost of maintaining a brigade is enormous and could be as high as Rs one crore a day. Add to this the logistics, air support, artillery cover, not to mention the other vital aspect, intelligence cover. Surely this intelligence would not come from the Taliban. Others suggest that we should have no problem in equipping, stationing and supplying several divisions of troops in Afghanistan. In a series of articles in this newspaper in January 2009, Manoj Joshi had cited reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General to show how inadequately equipped our forces were. The situation could not have altered dramatically since then.

It is true that there is goodwill for India in Afghanistan for our contribution to its infrastructure. This will dissipate rapidly once we are seen as an occupation force. It will not be difficult to create this impression particularly as we have no means of influencing opinion in Afghanistan, there being no media presence of our own there. Instead, we should follow the Chinese model, of gaining influence in Afghanistan without firing a single shot or losing a soldier. We need not make our policies Pakistanspecific all the time.

Role

We should look for a role in the region beyond the current troubles but we need not prove this by sending in our troops hoping to succeed where others have failed. We may develop a two- front war strategy but we are hardly capable of fighting a three front war.
We should be prepared to train Afghans in India, in whatever discipline and numbers they want this. We should offer additional infrastructure building, taking care to match this with the Afghan capacity to absorb.

We need to ask Afghans what they want and not decide ourselves what we want to give. We need to co- ordinate with Iran, Russia and Central Asia in our endeavours. Post US, there has to be a regional agreement ensuring peace and neutrality in Afghanistan.

Source : Mail Today , 7th jan 2010