Myanmar -- The neighbour we keep forgetting

For most Indians, Myanmar, with whom we share a placid 1,600 km border, is conceptually even more remote than our own north east, even though similar ethnic groups live on both sides of the border. Often we lapse into bouts of collective amnesia and seem to forget that Myanmar, important to us in its own right, is also an important buffer with a China that is getting stronger and more assertive, is our land route to south east Asia and a friendly coast line would help us better protect Andaman and Nicobar as well as our interests through the Bay of Bengal.

One fine Saturday morning in June 1988 the Military junta in its infinite wisdom demonetized the Kyat without placing any alternative currency in the market till ten days later. An already impoverished country of 40 million had that many paupers overnight. A month later, seething with rage, the people were out on the streets, but leaderless till someone thought of Aung San’s daughter Suu Kyi who was visiting her ailing mother Daw Khin Kyi, former Ambassador to India.

Miles to go: Aung San Suu Kyi’s party NLD won 40 out of the 44 seats it contested but the party has a long way to go in a 600 member legislature

An overnight icon, Suu Kyi may be excused for not heeding the advice of some well-wishers suggesting she not be so confrontational with the Tatmadaw; inexperience, euphoria and a feeling of invincibility led to her long incarceration, the movement was crushed and the regime promptly ostracised by the West. We anointed ourselves as the champions of democracy and followed a default foreign policy which was a constant diatribe on AIR led by U Nu’s daughter. Real politik never entered our calculations and we never realised that our interests in Myanmar were going to be always different from those of the West.

For nearly 25 years since the 1988 upheaval, the regime has held firm. Impoverished and comparatively backward, but under no real internal threat as the leaders began making attempts to get back into the real world.

The West may today exult in the results of the recent by-elections in Myanmar but we must remember we will have to deal with the army backed regime for the foreseeable future. Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD won 40 out of the 44 seats it contested but the party has a long way to go in a 600 member legislature. The NLD may have made a tactical error by not participating in the 2010 elections leaving the field to other parties.
In an ultimate show of magnanimity, the regime could now offer her a ministerial post. Suu Kyi would then have to decide — risk waiting for the next elections in 2016 or accepting the assignment now. An electoral battle may have been won but victory is still far away.

The regime is not likely to loosen its effective control of power. Right now they need Western capital and investments for which they need political acceptability. This by-election provides them this. They have begun their peace negotiations with the various ethnic insurgent groups and significantly, the last round with the Kachin Independence Army was held in Ruili in Yunnan province. The road from Ruili to Lashio in the Northern Shan States is like any other major highway anywhere else while the India-Myanmar infrastructure remains archaic in comparison.

Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh is currently visiting Myanmar which is only the second visit by an Indian PM in 20 years and hopefully political exchanges at that level will be more frequent. It will always be in our interest that we should seek to economically integrate our eastern states with Myanmar whose rice production can help feed our north east at a much cheaper rate. Trade between Mandalay and Kohima, Tezpur, Agartala, Gauhati and Aizawl and air connections between some of these cities and Mandalay and Yangon should be sought by us. India certainly has security and economic stakes in Myanmar and a strong Chinese presence diminishes our role further. We need to create Myanmarese stakes in India.
Any offer of trade concessions, assistance in the country’s economic development, scholarships at prestigious educational, scientific, technological and medical institutes and at the Staff college and the IMA would greatly help.

Our Look East policy makes sound sense if we learn to deal with Myanmar regardless of who is in power.

Source : Mid Day , Vikram Sood , Vice President , ORF Centre for International Relations.

The truth is out there

Was there an intelligence failure recently? The answer is, perhaps, yes. Is this the first time such an incident has happened? Certainly no. Could it happen again? Unfortunately, yes. So was there egg on their faces? The answer is no. This is because what happened was in the line of duty. Let us reverse the argument and say that the same information had been accurate and a major incident/catastrophe had been averted. There would have been no public reference to the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and the world would have moved on. In this case, there has been some embarrassment and, hopefully, there will be some course correction. So let us also move on. Is the R&AW or any other intelligence service infallible? The answer is no. Is the R&AW competent? The answer is yes. Does it need continuous reform and upgrading? Of course, yes.


An intelligence officer has to deal with whoever gives him the best information, the best lead, and the best way to protect his country's interests. The man or woman providing this may be a true patriot, an idealist, a businessman, a military general, a mercenary who sells his information to the highest bidder, a criminal, an arms smuggler, a counterfeiter or anyone who wants to take revenge on the system. These emotions and motives are not steady or constant. Thus an impeccable source today may be a renegade tomorrow. A trusted source today may become a double agent tomorrow or a loyal intelligence operative will turn rogue. This is the constant dread of any intelligence officer because there is no defining moment when this will happen, till it is too late. Further, there is no such thing as complete and infallible intelligence. If it were, there would have been no 9/11 or 13/12 or 26/11. The point is that the best intelligence will not prevent wars but can help win them. This is something we must understand before we go ballistic about intelligence failures.
Intelligence collection is not a single-source activity; there are multiple sources of intelligence. A single report may be, although not necessarily so, and especially in this Lashkar-e-Taiba case, based on a number of inputs from human intelligence, technical, electronic and communications intelligence. It may also have an input from cyber intelligence. There may be times when all have to be matched. There are other times when all will not match but the information is vital, potentially serious for the country if true but still not verified.
Yet there is just not enough time to verify the authenticity of the intelligence given. So what does the intelligence agency do? It passes this on, with whatever caveat attached, because if the intelligence is withheld for confirmation and turns out to be accurate with devastating consequences, then this would be a graver failure. Thus, faced with such a situation, not only is an intelligence agency advised to report it, it is mandatory that it should and should continue to do so in the future. One only hopes that the country's intelligence services do not now go on the backfoot and become defensive about its reporting that surely was one of the purposes of this sting.

Our problem also lies in intelligence coordination and downstream handling of intelligence generated elsewhere or by central agencies. Another aspect is that the R&AW does not report to the state authorities but through filters at the Centre where the report is processed and passed on for action. One does not know about the route of this report and the source but that this was a sting operation is accepted. Any mature nation would quietly work this back and see where it went wrong.

No intelligence organisation in the world is blameless or has not had its share of errors of judgement. Indeed, there is no organisation in the world of any kind  that has not made worse mistakes but in our country the principle of negativity is so strong, especially at present,  that we are prepared to believe the worst about ourselves. No one has even bothered to wonder how the three names were publicised so quickly in Pakistan. We all exulted that it was our scoop about our incompetence.

Had we understood the game, consulted those who were in the game and then believed them, before rushing to print then it is possible the intelligence game would have become more difficult. Instead we made it so simple for the opposition because of our preconceived negative perceptions. We still do not know if this was a smokescreen while the real infiltrators are elsewhere. For a country that has spent an awful lot of energy and time demonising R&AW as an omnipotent force to suddenly turn around to show it as incompetent, must arouse some curiosity. 

It would be useful, as it would give a better perspective, if some of us read 'The Ten Biggest American Intelligence Failures' by Uri Friedman (Foreign Policy, January 3, 2012). Friedman starts with Pearl Harbour and ends with Iraq and includes the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Indian nuclear test. These are real failures that made a difference to policy and marked the difference between success and failure of policy. What happened in our case was a blip, a day's work, par for the course and the agency must move on.

Malevolent wrongdoing deserves censure, mistakes in the line of duty deserve consideration and rectification.

Source : Hindustan Times , 22nd May 2012, Vikram Sood , Vice President , ORF Centre for International Relations.

Arms and the men - and women

In India there is hardly full closure or for that matter any full disclosure to many of the scams that periodically surface, we go through the mandatory catharsis for a few weeks then go back into hibernation till some later politically motivated or convenient time. The two cases being talked about these days are the Tatra trucks and the resurrected Bofors case. Both relate to arms deals or military matters and there is a great deal of injured innocence or mock horror in India about this.

It would be useful to put this in some global perspective since we all talk of globalisation. The arms trade had gone global much before globalisation became fashionable.

Andrew Feinstein puts it succinctly in his book “The Shadow World— Inside the Global Arms Trade”. He says: “The arms trade operates on collusion between world leaders, intelligence operatives, corporations at the cutting edge of technological development, financiers and bankers, transporters, shady middlemen, money launderers and common criminals.”

Fence-sitTing: Despite nominal embargoes, private buccaneers like the well known arms dealer, Viktor Bout, and nations like the US, Russia, several NATO countries, Israel and China sell weaponry to both sides of the fence

Hardly any one has been left out of this. Not many would want to be left out of this secretive but immensely lucrative market. A year ago global military expenditure was approximately US $ 1.6 trillion or about Rs 11,800 per person on the planet and more than India’s BPL, annually. This represents a more than 50 per cent increase over expenditures in 2000. The US today spends US $ 700 billion on defence and the over all global trade in conventional arms big and small is about US $ 60 billion a year. The main producers are in the West — the (despite nominal embargoes) as do private buccaneers like the well known arms dealer, Viktor Bout.

Feinstein calculates that 40 per cent of the global corruption is because of the furtive and secretive manner in which arms deals are negotiated. Arms are sold in the name of democracy but nothing undermines democracies more than these deals. Inevitably, since there is a combination of the huge sums of money involved, the secrecy of national security, the limited number of decision makers, bribery and corruption is on a much wider scale than any one outside the trade can visualise.

Add to this, conflicts of interest, inept decision making leading to inappropriate choices that then lead to unending cover ups. This is particularly so in democracies such as ours and not in autocratic systems.
Consider this as an example of how the West has often come to happy arrangements with retrograde autocratic regimes. When the colourful Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan landed in Crawford, Texas in August 2002 to meet his friend President Bush and to urge him to wage war on Iraq, he had travelled in a £ 75 million Airbus gifted to him earlier by BAE Systems as gratitude for their £ 40 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal itself was complicated involving the Bank of England, Saudi oil, Aramco, BP and Shell.

This is apart from the £ one billion paid into accounts controlled by the Prince. Much of it went to the fancied and exclusive Riggs Bank in Washington DC and it was discovered later that some of the money from these accounts were inadvertently transferred to two of the hijackers who blew up the WTC towers in 2001. But this was a minor hiccup in a mutually valuable relationship.

Arms productions by gigantic conglomerates need steady buyers along with repeat or new buyers. This is both to sell existing products and experiment new equipment for which wars are necessary. There is no magic code that will unscramble this gridlock.

India must therefore learn to quickly indigenise defence production to cut out both dependence on external sources and corruption that is endemic to the system and to provide employment to Indians along with a sense of pride. This will not happen overnight and there will be obstructions by vested interests.
So long as there are threats and regional ambitions, defence companies and their agents selling their wares will abound for the foreseeable future. The answer does not lie in stopping external purchases. The answer is in buying the best for the present while reconciling to the ultimate reality that no nation becomes great on borrowed plumes.

Source : Midday , 10th May 2012, Vikram Sood , Vice President , ORF