A cautionary word for the NSA

Kashmir Times, 11 September 2015

http://www.kashmirtimes.com/newsdet.aspx?q=44865

India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval in a public lecture averred that India’s propensity to punch below its weight needed correction. India’s diplomatic and security shuffles ever since Mr. Modi’s election can be credited to India’s national security reset under Mr. Doval.

The latest example of Indian operational footwork is the creation of conditions under which Pakistan’s NSA was forced to cancel his trip to New Delhi. The trip itself had a promising beginning going back to the very first ‘surprise’ by the government in the invite to SAARC leaders, including Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif, for Prime Minister Modi’s swearing-in.

India roughed up the sheen with its very next move by calling off foreign secretary talks with Pakistan last August. Even so, it yet again created space for a potential opening in the joint statement of the two foreign secretaries at Ufa when the two prime ministers met on the sidelines of the SCO meet in July.

Perplexing move are in other areas as well.

When in Paris, the prime minister made a step-back from ‘Make in India’ to short-circuit the long drawn defence acquisition process in buying 36 Rafale aircraft off-the-shelf. The sudden signing of a framework agreement with Naga interlocutors is another example.

Whereas these actions suggest decisiveness, could they also have an underside in a shortcutting of the decision making process?

That the NSA is in the driver’s seat is unmistakable. He has figured prominently in what would otherwise be matters to be handled by the relevant institutions rather than by intervention of the NSA.

Media let on that the NSA was off, along with the then IB head, to Iraq on a rescue mission for Indians numbering in the double digits reportedly taken hostage by the ISIS. Could not this mission have been left to IB’s Asif Ibrahim who has since taken over as Special Envoy for West Asia and AfPak region?

Doval skipped the prime minister’s Bangladesh trip in order to organize the somewhat belated ‘hot pursuit’ operation in Myanmar after Naga hostiles killed 18 army men in an ambush in Manipur in early June. Apparently, the Indian army chief was also in tow, overseeing a tactical level action that could well have been left to the reputed corps commander there.

Where ordinarily the foreign ministry, in charge of Modi’s ‘Act East’ strategy, could have stepped in, instead Doval went over to assuage Myanmar’s hurt over possible sovereignty violations after the raid.

Another controversy over ‘turf’ has been in his getting on the phone for berating the Pakistani high commissioner in New Delhi and instructing India’s high commissioner in Islamabad to tell Pakistan to lay off firing on the Line of Control.

In what could be seen as undermining state governments, including in the BJP’s, he was spotted in Mumbai to supervise control over any backlash in the aftermath of the hanging of Yakub Memon. He queried Delhi Police on the Uber cab rape case. Though the NIA was already seized of the case, he visited Burdwan over the accidental blast there killed two alleged Bangladeshi bomb makers. In Kashmir, a new strategy to keep Kashmiri youth from radicalism was attributed to him after his visit there.

Clearly, Doval is indeed a man of action, as the numerous hagiographical profiles had it when he took over as one of Modi’s first appointees. However, Doval’s numerous interventions bring under cloud his remonstrations of teamwork, reinforcing criticism of Modi running an over-centralised ship.

Institutional good health depends on due processes and cohesion. The NSA can at best play a coordinating and facilitating role, and needs being self-effacing when about it in order that a national security culture based on institutions rather than individuals develops.

Concentration of power and authority in the person leads to an avoidable premium on personality factors, with an underside. Observers point to a Pakistan obsession resulting from the NSA’s long stint under cover there that can potentially render India’s Pakistan strategy awry.

More significantly, ideology potentially contaminates strategic rationality. The web-pages on culture and history of the foundation Doval headed for close to a decade, Vivekananda International Foundation, and that of his son, the India Foundation, reflect the Hindutva narrative. Ideology leads to a colouring of perceptions of national interest, with corresponding knock-on impact on national security.

Finally, expertise necessarily implies narrowness. A forte for intelligence does not necessarily imply operational dexterity or strategic finesse. Indian cultural constraints and bureaucratic deference, compounded by Doval’s omnipresence from the tactical to strategic level policy making and implementation, can result in a dearth of practitioners willingness to ‘speak the truth to power’.

While it is too early to write his report card or write-off Doval, a cautionary word can prove timely. Policy entrepreneurship and individual hyper-activism are recipes for personal and, worse, institutional failure with prohibitive national security consequences.

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India-Pakistan: With NSA Talks Aborted, What Next?

http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/india-pakistan-with-nsa-talks-aborted-what-next/

Referring to a “whole history of unproductive dialogues with Pakistan,” Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, reflects negatively on whether a “more resolute government as that of Modi (should) get into the rut of sterile dialogues with Pakistan.” Sibal need not worry. Talks between the two countries’ respective national security advisers were aborted just a day prior to their scheduled start.

The talks were first mooted in the joint press statement of the two foreign secretaries at the Ufa meeting of the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers. The two NSAs were to meet in Delhi, potentially clearing the way for the Indian prime minister to travel to Pakistan for the SAARC summit next year.

Skeptical reports in the run-up had hinted that the Pakistan army was bearing down on Nawaz Sharif, pressuring him to halt the meeting. This gave a window for Indian skeptics to snipe at the idea. This positioning prior to the talks had more or less ensured that they would have been, at best, as the Pakistani NSA Sartaj Aziz put it, “ice-breaking.”

That the naysayers on both sides managed to scuttle the talks underscores their hold over their respective security establishments. This mirroring is unlikely to go away any time soon.

This answers the question “Why were the talks called off?” The more important question remains: “What next?” It is here that Kanwal Sibal’s policy recommendation comes to fore.

Sibal, miffed by the two attacks by Pakistani proxies – one in Indian Punjab bordering Jammu and Kashmir and the other within Jammu and Kashmir itself – in the run-up to the talks, argues that India should first develop “levers to modulate Pakistan’s conduct” and “then agree to a dialogue should Pakistan seek it.”

With the talks called off, this is the only option India is left with. For that reason, it bears scrutiny.

The problem with Kanwal’s thesis – and he speaks for India’s Pakistan skeptics – is that it is without an end date or exit strategy.

Even had the exploratory talks at NSA level gone on to reopen the dialogue, India would have developed the levers to modulate Pakistan’s conduct. This would have been done both as a measure to keep up the pressure on Pakistan to stick to the table, as well as an insurance should the talks have failed to moderate Pakistan.

These levers are military, intelligence and diplomatic.

Militarily, India has been at it, ramping up its defense budget. A statistic from Modi’s first year in office was that India fast tracked 40 defense projects worth over Rs. 1 trillion ($15.1 billion), intended in part to increase the gap in conventional armaments with Pakistan’s army.

Over the past year, it has given the army liberty to give a “befitting reply” to provocations along the Line of Control and International Border. Pakistan has over the last month made two references to the firing along what it considers the “working border” to the UNMOGIP, the UN mission overseeing the ceasefire since 1949. Both countries have used embassy channels to record their displeasure at the other side’s aggressive firing.

On the intelligence front, India’s defense minister has hinted at proactive intelligence operations in Pakistan. Understandably, the NSA subsequently watered down the defense minister’s remarks and India has denied any proxy action. However, a rare complaint at the Pakistani corps commanders’ conference suggests otherwise – although proof is obviously hard to come by. In preparing for the NSA talks, Pakistan had compiled a dossier with its complaints of Indian “interference.”

Diplomatically, the visits of Obama and Jiang Zemin to New Delhi, though intended by India to suitably isolate Pakistan over the latter’s support for terrorism, can only have limited effect. Pakistan’s strategic location buttresses its indispensability to the eventual outcome in Afghanistan. Pakistan is looking to play the Russian card if necessary.

The call in India will be more of the same and for longer. But this is not without underside.

Militarily, the “two front” problem has already kicked in, with reports of India diluting its Mountain Strike Corps due to lack of finances.

Doctrinally, there is dissonance. While at the conventional level India intends to be on the offensive, its nuclear doctrine has not been able to come to terms with the problem posed by Pakistani nuclear first use in the form of tactical nuclear weapons. The devastating response that the current nuclear doctrine posits can hardly be risked in the face of Pakistan’s vertical proliferation of nuclear warhead numbers into the three digits.

On the subconventional front, Jammu and Kashmir, which has been relatively stable for more than a decade, could slide back into turmoil, offering a fertile ground for penetration of more radical ideologies, such as those of the ISIS. Indian responses and Pakistani reactions would then flirt with the nuclear threshold. Under the circumstances, it would not do to up the military ante.

The intelligence game of using proxies has an unremarked downside, in its impact on the domestic politics of both countries. Using Pakistani extremists against their own state – as Pakistan accuses India of doing – can only strengthen their hand.

The more significant effect is in India’s domestic politics. India’s Muslim minority will come under pressure as a potential conduit through which Pakistan could be expected to strike back. India’s majoritarian extremists, arguably already rampant, will use the canard of a Muslim fifth column to further raise their profile.

Diplomatically, it would be difficult for India to sell a zero-tolerance for terrorism strategy with India letting off “saffron terrorists,” even as it takes Pakistan to the UN sanctions committee. India’s inability to isolate Pakistan will make it more reliant on its military and intelligence cards, accentuating the risks.

Finally, eventually, as Sibal says, these levers will need to be exercised to bring Pakistan round. This will down the line be at an even higher level of risk and cost. Indeed, the NSAs would then have much to discuss but no forum in which to do so, the first ever NSA talks having been aborted at their very inception

India: Dissecting The Doval Doctrine – OpEd

http://www.eurasiareview.com/07082015-india-dissecting-the-doval-doctrine-oped/

Friday, August 7th, 2015

Ajit Doval’s appointment as India’s National Security Adviser (NSA) was among the first appointments made by Mr. Modi on becoming prime minister. That Doval was perhaps tipped off by Modi of post-election possibilities is evident form a lecture Doval delivered at the Sastra University in Tamil Nadu early last year in which he outlined his strategic world view. That he is now India’s NSA makes this speech consequential.

The speech has become infamous since for the wrong reason. Excerpts of the lecture having been uploaded on YouTube early this year, it has erroneously been reckoned that Doval as NSA has threatened Pakistan with losing Balochistan in case it triggers another Mumbai 26/11. While Doval did threaten as much, it was in his capacity then as head of the conservative think tank, Vivekananda International Foundation.

Nevertheless, Doval perhaps anticipating his next assignment used the opportunity of his lecture on ‘India’s Strategic Response to Terrorism’ to lay out his worldview. Since he has been India’s leading spook, with a penchant for the tactical, it is not unlikely that his strategic worldview goes no further than the intelligence domain covered in the lecture. This makes the lecture more important then merely yet another lecture by a think tank head.

That India’s current day strategy appears to be unfolding along the lines he laid out makes the lecture virtually a key statement of India’s strategic doctrine. Since Pakistan is taken as a state sponsor of terror, the lecture also goes some way in also explaining India’s Pakistan strategy. The lecture consequently bears critical scrutiny.

Doval restricted his counter terror strategy discussion only to terror incidents attributed to India’s largest minority, its Muslims. As he was head of IB when a spate of terrorism broke out in the Indian hinterland, dated by him to March 2005, he would know that not all incidents attributable to the minority have been perpetrated by Muslim terrorists.

The manner India’s current regime is covering its tracks in letting off majoritarian terrorists lately is suggestive of something to hide. In case the terror incidents Hindutva elements are responsible for is subtracted from the volume of terror India has been subject to, minority terrorism emerges as a bogey. No wonder the home minister has made a show of taking offence to the term ‘saffron terrorism’, hoping to marginalize such allegations and obscure any truth behind them.

This becomes clearer by dissecting Doval’s prescription. His strategic response to terrorism is, firstly, ‘smothering’ terrorist outfits; pitching nationalist Indian Muslims against the anti-national Islamists within their community; and making Pakistan hurt through a strategic doctrine of ‘defensive offense’.

Of the first, the smothering of terrorists by denial of arms, money and support, superficially, there is little to complain. The problem is when a distinction is not made between terrorists and common folk. Security forces are apt to see potential terrorists everywhere in Muslim ghettos.

Under the circumstance of right wing prejudice now mainstream, resulting impunity can only multiply this tendency. With tall tales of Daesh making a South Asian debut, rushing the home ministry into thinking up a counter radicalisation doctrine, surveillance of the community is not unlikely.

The second – ‘divide and rule’ by using the pro-national and anti-national Muslim against each other – smacks of Chanakyan cunning. Strategy is mistaken for cunning in light of the iconic status of home grown strategist Chanakya.

The association of cultural nationalists with the pro-national Muslims can only serve to marginalize them, leading to non-secular alternatives. Take for instance, Zafar Sereshwala, a Modi acolyte, hardly has a constituency. Instead, ever since mainstream parties were sidelined in the last elections, a firebrand party, the Hyderabad-based Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), appears to be filling the vacuum.

Equally disturbing is Doval’s intent to buy terrorists: by paying out ‘one and a half times’ more of their price! His experience teaches him that since they are mercenaries, they can be bought and turned against theirs sponsors. Is it that this strategy is already in play?

If so it may account for some of the terror Pakistan is subject to and perhaps explains the defence minister’s cryptic remark of fighting terror with terror (‘removing thorns with thorns’). The rare complaint of Pakistan being subject to terror by proxy by India coming as a corps commanders’ conference outcome makes this a compelling possibility.

However, more disturbingly, terrorist turncoats can also be used for questionable strategic purposes. For instance, they can be used to attack Indian targets to project that such attacks are Pakistan perpetrated. The commentary in Pakistan questioning the antecedents of the Dinanager terror attack of last month is a case.

Terror attacks so engineered can enhance the case against Pakistan, enabling that state to be subject to Indian pressures with greater vigour. They can also be used to push India’s minority further into tis corner through manipulation of guilt by association.

Clearly, there is a case for political control of the intelligence apparatus. This cannot be entrusted to Mr. Doval, himself an intelligence czar. With a right wing regime in power, democratic control would instead of implying restraint, may imply quite the opposite.

Finally, and perhaps more importantly on account of the nuclear overhang, is Doval’s assertion that India can prise loose Balochistan. His assumption is that there would be no nuclear fallout, as this would not involve military engagement and the consequent need to be wary of nuclear thresholds

As current custodian of India’s nuclear doctrine in his capacity as head of the Executive Council, he is by now surely better briefed. He would know that Pakistan in an uncharacteristic fit of transparency had in 2002 let on that in case it is faced with internal destabilization on a large scale, it would resort to the nuclear weapon, implying it would up the ante perhaps by first going conventional. This puts paid to Doval’s notion that the military would not come into the equation.

Clearly, the Doval doctrine is problematic with cultural nationalism contaminating strategic rationality. And, worse, remedy is four years away.