Indias new language of killing

PRAVEEN SWAMI, writing in The Hindu

TOPICS
defence
national security
government
national government
Narendra Modi has suggested he would authorise Indias intelligence services to st
age cross-border strikes against terrorists. The stakes are seismic and must be
debated with dispassion, before a choice is made in rage
Early one summer morning in 2008, an ageing Toyota car slowed down to turn at th
e corner next to the Indian Embassy complex in Kabul, transforming itself as it
did so into a wall of searing, white light. Fifty-eight people were killed and 1
41 injured, their bodies torn apart by shock waves, fires, and shards of metal a
nd glass. Inside hours, western intelligence services listened in to Inter-Servi
ces Intelligence (ISI) officers inside Pakistan congratulating the perpetrators.
Furious, then National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan called for action. Talk-t
alk is better than fight-fight, he said, but it hasnt worked. I think we need to pa
y back in the same coin.
Mr. Narayanan, intelligence officers serving at the time recall, authorised Indi
as Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to begin a quiet dialogue on doing just that
with its Afghan counterparts. It found a willing partner in Amrullah Saleh, the
then head of the Riyasat-e Amniyat-e Milli, or the National Directorate of Secur
ity (NDS). Following the 26/11 strike, the officials said, RAW even explored the
prospect of targeting Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, using NDS asse
ts inside jihadist groups hostile to the Pakistan Army.
A Modi way of war?
Indias intelligence czar, though, never got the political clearance he hoped for.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remained committed to the dialogue process with P
akistan, believing that bomb-for-bomb strikes would increase terrorist violence.
In early 2010, foreign service officer Shivshankar Menon replaced Mr. Narayanan
, and the doves came to control policy-making.
Keep your hands in your pockets, a senior RAW official recalls Mr. Menon as tellin
g Afghan desk officers in mid-2010 and that was that.
Except, that might not quite have been that. Last week, prime ministerial front
runner Narendra Modi made the first-ever public suggestion by any politician tha
t he might authorise offensive covert operations against terrorists one of the m
ost fateful decisions facing Indias next government. Mr. Modi lashed out at Union
Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shindes revelation of joint efforts by India and the
United States to apprehend terrorism-linked ganglord Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar in Ka
rachi. Do these things happen through the medium of newspapers? he asked. Did the U
nited States issue a press note before they killed Osama bin Laden?
Its hard to say whether Mr. Modis speech was driven by election-time testosterone,
or reflects considered counsel from his inner circle of advisers. This much is
clear, though: inside the intelligence community, there is a growing view that I
ndia must learn a new language of killing.
Ever since the 1999 Kargil war, Indias security calculus has been derived from th
e assumption that the U.S. would moderate sub-conventional warfare against India
. Dr. Singhs 10 years in office show that this belief was well-founded. The autho
ritative South Asia Terrorism Portal database shows that violence in Jammu and K
ashmir declined year-on-year from 2002 to 2013 and though theres substantial evid
ence to suggest that the ISI backed the 26/11 attacks, international pressure ha
s forced it to rein in jihadists since.
In the past two years, though, the wheel has turned. The Pakistan Armys war again
st jihadists is flailing and its control over one-time proxies among the jihadis
ts has diminished. Political parties there have sought to appease the increasing
ly powerful jihadists. For their part, Pakistans Taliban has sought to wean away
the ethnic-Punjabi constituency of state-backed organisations like the Lashkar-e
-Taiba. Last year, Tehreek-e-Taliban leader Wali-ur-Rahman warned that the practi
cal struggle for a sharia system that we are carrying out in Pakistan, the same
way we will continue it in Kashmir, and the same way we will implement the shari
a system in India too. Indian Mujahideen are training with the Taliban; violence
in Kashmir is up.
Indias secret wars
Little genius is needed to see what might emerge to the west of Indias borders: a
nuclear-armed state with crumbling central authority, controlled for all practi
cal purposes by rival Islamist militias. The water, Pakistans military ruler Genera
l Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq instructed his spymaster, General Akhtar Malik, in Decembe
r 1979, must boil at the right temperature. Now, the water seems dangerously close
to boiling over.
Faced with not-dissimilar problems, Afghanistans NDS has made its choice. Last ye
ar, U.S. forces captured senior Pakistani Taliban commander Latif Mehsud from th
e custody of Afghanistans intelligence services lending weight to claims that the
NDS has been backing the jihadist group, in retaliation for the ISIs support to
the networks of Islamist warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani, and the Afghan Taliban. In
private, NDS officials admit they have staged bomb-for-bomb actions against atta
cks they attribute to the ISI, including one in March on Kabuls prestigious Seren
a Hotel.
The question is simple: will India be able to deter Pakistani jihadists with sim
ilar tactics?
From the early 1980s, Khalistan terrorists began receiving weapons and arms from
the ISI Directorate. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ordered retaliation. RAW set u
p two covert groups, known only as Counter Intelligence Team-X and Counter Intel
ligence Team-J, the first targeting Pakistan in general and the second directed
in particular at Khalistani groups. Each Khalistan terror attack targeting Indias
cities was met with retaliatory attacks in Lahore or Karachi. The role of our co
vert action capability in putting an end to the ISIs interference in Punjab, the f
ormer RAW officer B. Raman wrote in 2002, by making such interference prohibitive
ly costly is little known.
India came to covert warfare late in its history. In 1947, imperial Britain stri
pped the assets of Indias covert arsenal as it left. The senior-most British Indi
an Police officer in the Intelligence Bureau, Qurban Ali Khan left for Pakistan
with what few sensitive files departing British officials had neglected to destr
oy. The Intelligence Bureau, Lieutenant General L.P. Singh has recorded, was red
uced to a tragicomic state of helplessness, possessing nothing but empty racks and
cupboards. The Military Intelligence Directorate in New Delhi didnt even have a ma
p of Jammu and Kashmir to make sense of the first radio intercepts signalling th
e beginning of the war of 1947-1948.
For Pakistan, covert warfare was a tool of survival: faced with a larger and inf
initely better-resourced neighbour, it knew it could not compete in conventional
military terms. Mr. Khans doctrine posited that sub-conventional offensive warfa
re could provide it defence. From 1947, Pakistan engaged India in what Prime Min
ister Jawaharlal Nehru would later call an informal war.
Indias covert capabilities grew in the wake of the 1962 war. Helped by the U.S.,
the newly-founded RAW developed the capacities for deep-penetration espionage me
ant to target China. It used its new tools to target Pakistan in 1971. Establish
ment 22, operating under the command of Major General Surjit Singh Uban, carried
out a secret war in what is now Bangladesh. Establishment 22 personnel aided Si
kkims accession to the Union of India; trained Tamil terrorists; and armed rebels
operating against the pro-China regime in Myanmar.
Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, though, ended RAWs offensive operations against Pakis
tan and his predecessor, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, wound up its eastern
operations. India continued to possess a superior conventional military, but as
it became known in the late 1980s that Pakistan possessed a nuclear weapon, it
became clear this sword would remain sheathed.
In 1999, soon after the Kargil war, intelligence officers attempted to persuade
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to authorise the development of offensive co
vert capabilities.
He didnt say a word, one official present at the meeting told The Hindu, not yes, no
t no. Less than three years later, when terrorists attacked Parliament House, Mr.
Vajpayee had no tools at his disposal to deter Pakistan bar an expensive, and u
ltimately useless, threat of war.
Mr. Vajpayees silence, like that of his predecessors, wasnt cowardice. The use of
covert action inside Pakistan will, almost certainly, invite retaliation ending,
thus, in more violence, at least in the short run. It can cause large-scale civ
ilian fatalities, with damaging international consequences. It can end in the ar
rest of Indian assets, damaging the countrys credibility. It can succeed in its a
ims, as Israel, the U.S. and the United Kingdom have sometimes proved or, as tho
se very countries have learned, just as easily fail.
There is no easy path to be taken, for each winds past the taking of human life.
It is imperative, therefore, that Indias new security czars discuss their choice
s dispassionately, before a decision has to be made in rage.