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Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Pakistan’s Intransigence over Prosecution of Perpetrators of the Mumbai Terror Strikes is Hampering Rapprochement

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Three years ago, on November 26, 2008, ten Lashkar-e-Tayebba terrorists, trained, equipped, sponsored and directed by Pakistan’s ISI, landed by boat at Mumbai and carried out audacious strikes on four iconic targets before nine of them were eliminated by Indian security forces. Ajmal Kasab, the lone survivor, was tried by a Special Court and has been sentenced to death. Despite the voluminous evidence provided to Pakistan about the perpetrators and the planners of the diabolical strikes by India, and corroborated by independent investigations conducted by the United States and Israel, the Pakistan government has failed to act against any of them.

Writing in the Hindu last week, Praveen Swami stated, “Sajid Mir, Lashkar commander who crafted the assault plan, has been reported by both the United States and India’s intelligence services as operating out of his family home near the Garrison Club in Lahore; Pakistan’s Federal Investigations Agency hasn’t yet got around to paying him a visit. Muzammil Bhat, who trained the assault team, is claimed by Pakistan to be a fugitive, though two journalists who went looking for the terror commander in Muzaffarabad located him without great effort. Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, sole senior Lashkar operative held for his alleged role in the attacks, has continued to communicate with his organisation from prison. Pakistan hasn’t, tellingly, even sought to question David Headley, Pakistani-American jihadist who has provided the investigators with a detailed insider account of the attacks — including the role of the Inter-Services Intelligence in directing them.”

Pakistan’s intransigence in bringing the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror strikes to justice does not augur well for the recently resumed Composite Dialogue Process. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has stated that he will travel to Pakistan only after the terrorists who attacked Mumbai are convicted by Pakistani courts. Even Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of State has expressed her reservations about the Pakistan government’s “continuing failure, in our view, to fulfil all of the requirements necessary for prosecution related to the Mumbai attacks.” Unless Pakistan makes serious efforts to prosecute the terrorists and their handlers, the gains in the relationship made recently due to the announcement of MFN status by Pakistan and the proposed liberalisation of the Visa regime will lose value.

Within India too the follow up action to prevent another Mumbai-type terror strike has left much to be desired. The government had launched five major initiatives to shore up counter-terrorism capabilities. The first of these was to decentralise the deployment of the National Security Guards (NSG) – the agency that had eliminated the terrorists holed up in two hotels and the Jewish centre at Mumbai – to the major metropolitan centres besides Delhi so as to reduce the time taken to react against a terrorist strike. This has been done though the NSG commandos continue to face accommodation problems. The government has set up the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for post-incident investigation of major terrorist strikes. Unlike the U.S. FBI, the NIA lacks a counter-terrorism punch and cannot, therefore, assist in the prevention of terrorist strikes. It is to be hoped that the NIA will not be politicised like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CB).

While some efforts have been made to enhance coastal security, these efforts have fallen much short of the desired capabilities and India’s long coastline remains vulnerable to attacks from the sea. This was demonstrated with telling effect when an abandoned ship drifted all the way across the Arabian Sea to beach on the Mumbai coast without being detected by either the Indian Navy or the Coast Guard or the Marine Police.

Intelligence gathering, analysis, assessment and dissemination still need to be improved by an order of magnitude. The functioning of the existing Multi-agency Centre (MAC) has been streamlined but Home Minister P Chidambaram’s initiatives to establish a National Counter-terrorism Centre (NCTC) to coordinate all counter-terrorism efforts and a National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) database to maintain widely shared records of all terrorism-related intelligence and activities, are still to see the light of day because of Centre-State issues and inter-ministerial turf battles.

Clearly, India’s counter-terrorism responses continue to resemble a lumbering elephant, rather than a tiger ready to pounce.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Pakistan’s Nuclear Doctrine is Destabilising

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Pakistan’s recent announcement that it has successfully tested the nuclear-tipped Hatf-9 (Nasr) short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) with a range of 65 km has caused serious concern in India as SRBMs are inherently destabilising. The announcement has come at a time when a move to eliminate SRBMs from the nuclear arsenals of South Asia had begun to gather momentum.

Unlike India’s nuclear weapons and missile development programme that was completely indigenous, Pakistan received considerable external help and, in turn, has itself been a proliferator. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons – warheads and delivery systems – are India-centric and have been acquired with Chinese and North Korean help. While India follows a “credible minimum deterrence” doctrine and has declared a “no first use” policy, Pakistan follows a “first use” nuclear doctrine and seeks to India that it has a low nuclear threshold.India’s nuclear weapons are political weapons whose sole purpose is to deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons against India.Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are its first line of defence and it aims to use them to negateIndia’s conventional military superiority.

Pakistan has been testing its ballistic and nuclear-capable cruise missiles at the rate of one every two months on average. It is apparently engaged in improving the accuracy of its North Korean origin No Dong and Taepo Dong missiles and of the Chinese missiles M-9 and M-11.

Though Pakistan’€™s nuclear warheads are based on a Chinese design that uses highly enriched uranium as the fissionable core, it is known to be gradually switching over to Plutonium 239 for future nuclear warheads. Dr. Peter Lavoy has written, “According to public estimates of Pakistan’s fissile material stockpile at the end of 2006, Islamabad probably had amassed between 30 and85 kilogramsof weapon-grade plutonium from its Khushab research reactor and between 1300 and1700 kilogrammes of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) from the Kahuta gas centrifuge facility. The Khushab reactor can probably produce between 10 and15 kilogrammes  of plutonium per year. Kahuta may be able to produce100 kilogrammes of HEU each year. Assuming that Pakistani scientists require 5 to 7 kilogrammes of plutonium to make one warhead, and 20 to 25 kilogrammes of HEU to produce a bomb, then Pakistan would have accumulated enough fissile material to be able to manufacture between 70 and 115 nuclear weapons by the end of2006.”

Estimates of Pakistan’s nuclear warheads stockpile vary according to the source. However, Pakistan is generally credited with the capability of having stockpiled 60 to 80 nuclear warheads and is moving rapidly towards triple-digit figures. Unlike India, Pakistan is making efforts to acquire tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. It has also been reported that Pakistan is working towards miniaturizing its nuclear warheads for use on the Babur cruise missile.

Pakistan’s nuclear command and control is firmly in the army hands. Its National Command Authority has an Employment Control Committee and a Development Control Committee. Most of the posts are held by senior members of the armed forces. Staff support for day to day functioning is provided by the Strategic Plans Division (SPD). The strategic missile forces are placed under the Army Strategic Command. While on paper the President is Chairman of the NCA and the Prime Minister is Vice Chairman, the NCA was constituted during the Musharraf regime and it is most unlikely that the army will ever hand over control of nuclear weapons to the civilian leadership. 

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

The Real Tragedy of Memogate

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The key lesson of the Memogate controversy is the readiness of the Pakistani political class to exploit the civil-military imbalance for tactical advantage.

On one level, the widening Memogate mystery/conspiracy drama playing out in Pakistan is yet another example of the endemic dysfunctions between the powerful security establishment and their nominal civilian masters that have lead the country throughout its history to the brink of ruin. But the affair also demonstrates the long-running failure of the political class to understand that, even in the throes of competitive politics, it has a common interest – indeed a fiduciary obligation – in upholding the principle of civilian supremacy over the military.

The unfolding saga centers on an unsigned backchannel note delivered to U.S. military authorities following the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. The document, whose authenticity has yet to be ascertained, requests U.S. help in preempting a feared military coup against Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. In exchange, a host of tantalizing, albeit incredible, concessions is offered, including:

 installation of a new national security team in Islamabad filled with pro-American officials;

 transferring to U.S. custody the leaderships of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Haqqani insurgent network;

 giving American forces “carte blanche” to conduct operations on Pakistani territory;

 bringing greater transparency to Pakistan’s swelling nuclear arsenal;

 abandoning support of militant groups in Afghanistan.

Suspicions over the note’s provenance have come to rest with Zardari himself, and Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, a close Zardari ally as well as outspoken critic of the Pakistani military, is alleged to have orchestrated its delivery.  Both men have denied involvement.  But the controversy has now cost Haqqani his job and speculation is rife that army leaders will utilize the uproar to further diminish Zardari, perhaps even ousting him from office.

Nawaz Sharif, the leader of Pakistan’s main opposition party, has now waded into this combustible mix. His remarks this past weekend offer a particularly egregious example of the political class habitually using the issue of civil-military relations for myopic gain. Speaking at a political rally, Sharif blasted Zardari for “bargaining on national sovereignty and people’s self-respect.” He thundered that Haqqani is “asking the U.S. to control the Pakistani military when we should resolve our own problems.” His younger brother, Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, has likewise charged Zardari with selling out the country’s sovereignty, while Sharif’s political supporters even accuse Zardari of committing treason.

Given how Nawaz once committed the very same acts for which he is now bludgeoning Zardari, he is trafficking in rank hypocrisy. In 1999, during Nawaz’s second stint as prime minister, he was the target of considerable criticism, including accusations of undermining the army’s honor and betraying the Kashmir cause, for cutting a desperate deal with President Bill Clinton to end the Kargil War. (A vivid portrait of Nawaz’s panicky state at the time, which included apprehensions that his life was endangered, is contained in Bruce Riedel’s first-hand account about the deal.) Fearing that the Pakistani army, under the leadership of General Pervez Musharraf, was about to take its revenge by overthrowing him, Nawaz urgently dispatched Shahbaz to Washington to seek the Clinton administration’s intercession.

As British journalist Owen Bennett-Jones relates in his acclaimed book, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, Shahbaz pleaded that Washington had a moral obligation to protect his brother given the political risks he ran on Kargil. But Shahbaz also padded his case by passing along Nawaz’s offer to take a harder line with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and help hunt down Bin Laden. The trip had the desired effect when U.S. officials signaled their opposition to “extra-constitutional actions” against Nawaz.

In the end, the warning shot failed to avert a military take-over and Sharif was expelled from the prime ministership and subsequently exiled to Saudi Arabia. Given his vexatious history with the army chieftains, one might expect Sharif to have a greater sense of solidarity regarding Zardari’s own travails with the military. Yet there he was over the weekend appearing to pander to the generals in Rawalpindi, announcing that his antagonisms with them were a thing of the past and that they would find in him a most suitable partner in the event they grow tired of Zardari.

To be sure, Sharif is only following a well-worn script. Pakistani history is replete with examples of opportunistic politicians who view the imbalance in civil-military relations as something to be exploited for tactical gain rather than rectified for the nation’s good. In an irony that ultimately cost him his life, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto built up ISI’s capabilities in order to suppress his political opponents. As the military constantly rotated them in and out of the prime minister’s office in 1990s, Benazir Bhutto and Sharif took turns celebrating the other’s demise rather than condemning the debasement of the Constitution. And instead of uniting following the Abbottabad raid to claw back decision-making authority from a humbled military, civilian leaders instead equated patriotism with fealty to the army.

The Rawalpindi crowd deserves the lion’s share of the blame for the deep morass that Pakistan has fallen into. But as the Memogate controversy illustrates, the political class is all too often willing to come along for the ride.

 

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Emerging Contours of the Indo-US Strategic Partnership

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At a symposium on the emerging contours of the Indo-US strategic partnership, organised by the Woodrow Wilson Centre at Princeton University on November 11-12, 2011, most participants agreed that the partnership was indispensable and that it would shape the geo-political contours of the 21st century. The present state of drift in the relationship does not portend a break down in the long term. The symposium was attended by leading members of the strategic community, including policy analysts, military experts, academics and journalists, from India and the United States.

An Indian analyst was of the view that the balance of power is shifting gradually from Europe and America to the Asia-Pacific region. He ascribed this to the ongoing rise of China and India as emerging economic and military powers. China is investing rapidly in enhancing its military capabilities as it wishes to safeguard its sea lanes of communications (SLOCs) in the Indian Ocean by deploying the PLA Navy.

A U.S. analyst identified three main trends in China’s rise: China is governed by ‘arbitrary despotism’; the main engine of economic growth, i.e. the large-scale move of rural population to urban centres is declining; and, nationalism is on the rise in China. China is likely to engage in a new Cold War with its regional neighbours and the U.S. can and must play a role in acting as a balancer.

Another U.S. analyst spelt out three core pillars of the U.S. strategy in Asia: U.S. engagement anchored by treaty obligations; developing a strong relationship with emerging Asian powers like India, Indonesia and Malaysia; and, building multilateral institutions like ASEAN for stability.

Speakers from both the countries were critical of the sense of gridlock that has gripped domestic politics, particularly when there has been an economic downturn. Both the governments appeared to have ceded space on driving the respective national agendum. There is a need to enhance diplomatic engagement and reduce the newfound proclivity for military interventionism.

An Indian analyst expressed the view that the growing Indo-US relationship merits an ‘A plus’ report card, but there are bound to be some differences in the approach of the two countries to emerging issues like the conflict in the Middle East/ West Asia and Iran’s purported quest for nuclear weapons. Indian participants conceded that India’s nuclear liability Act was problematic and that India needed to suitably address the apprehensions of international nuclear energy suppliers. However, they were of the view that the Indo-US partnership was strategic in conception and should not be reduced to a transactional relationship.

A U.S. analyst stated that international politics is about the distribution of power and the emerging relationship with India was central to the U.S. approach as a strong partnership with India would ensure a favorable distribution of power. An India that was capable and powerful was desirable from the U.S. point of view even if it did not always support U.S. initiatives. There is a perception in India that U.S. power is flagging and if this gains currency, India will have fewer incentives to go with the US.

An Indian participant stated that India is likely to join a future coalition of the willing for joint operations if the desired goal directly affects India’s vital interests. Recent joint military exercises have gone a long way towards resolving interoperability issues and have led to mutual trust and confidence. Major irritants from the Indian perspective include the continuing sale of conventional arms to Pakistan, the lack of U.S. concern about Indian interests in Afghanistan and the enduring reservations on the part of the U.S. about transferring cutting edge defence technology to India.

There was a broad consensus during the symposium that the U.S. and India must work together for peace and stability in Asia. While the Indo-US strategic partnership is not intended to form a joint front against China, should China behave irresponsibly in Asia, or should it implode due to internal instability, both India and the U.S. will need a strong partner to successfully manage the fallout.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

China-India Strategic Relationship

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Relations between India and China have been fairly stable at the strategic level. Economic relations are much better now than these have been in the past and bilateral trade has crossed US$ 60 billion even though the balance of trade is skewed in China’s favour. The two countries have been cooperating in international fora like WTO talks and climate change negotiations. There has been limited cooperation in energy security. However, at the tactical level, China has lately been exhibiting a markedly aggressive political, diplomatic and military posture.

The major cause for instability is the half-century old territorial and boundary dispute over which the two countries fought a border war in 1962. China continues to be in physical occupation of large areas of Indian territory in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). On the Aksai Chin plateau in Ladakh, China is in possession of approximately 38,000 square kilometres of territory since the mid-1950s. In addition, Pakistan illegally ceded 5,180 sq km of Indian territory to China in1963 inthe Shaksgam Valley of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir under a bilateral boundary agreement that India does not recognise. China continues to stake its claim to about 96,000 sq km of Indian territory in the eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which it calls Southern Tibet, particularly the Tawang tract.

Chinese interlocutors have repeatedly claimed that the Tawang tract is part of Tibet and that the merger of this area with Tibet is non-negotiable. In 2005, India and China had agreed on “guiding principles and parameters” for a political solution to the territorial dispute. One important parameter was that “settled populations will not be disturbed”. In the case of Tawang the Chinese have gone back on this. If such errant behavior continues, India will find it difficult to accept Chinese assurances of peaceful resolution of the territorial dispute at face value.

The Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China is yet to be physically demarcated on the ground and delineated on military maps. In fact, despite the Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement (BPTA) signed with the Chinese in 1993 and the agreement on Confidence Building Measures in the Military Field signed in 1996, border guards of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have transgressed the LAC repeatedly to intrude into Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh. They have even objected to Indian road construction efforts and the presence of Indian graziers at their traditional grazing grounds.

Patrol face-offs are commonplace and usually end with both the sides warning each other to go back to their own territory. While no such incident has resulted in a violent clash so far, the probability of such an occurrence is high. Demarcation of the LAC without prejudice to each other’s position on the territorial dispute would be an excellent confidence building measure but little progress has been made in 14 rounds of talks between the two special representatives. Under the circumstances, China’s intransigence in exchanging maps showing the alignment of the LAC in the western and the eastern sectors is difficult to understand.

The military gap between Indian and China is growing steadily as the PLA is modernising at a rapid pace due to the double-digit annual growth in the Chinese defence budget while India’s military modernisation plans continue to remain mired in red tape. China’s negotiating strategy is to stall resolution of the dispute till the Chinese are in a much stronger position in terms of comprehensive national strength so that they can then dictate terms.

During any future conflict with either China or Pakistan, India will have to contend with a two-front situation as both China and Pakistan may be expected to collude militarily with the other – a situation for which the Indian armed forces are not prepared. Hence, it is in India’s interest to strive for the early resolution of the territorial dispute with China so that India has only one major military adversary to contend with. Meanwhile, instability in the security relationship has the potential to act as a spoiler and will ultimately determine whether the two Asian giants will clash or cooperate for mutual gains.