Kasab and The Terror Trail

Mumbai's Taj Hotel Under Attack  26/11

India has hung the infamous Kasab, sole survivor of a terrorist guerrilla team which attacked and held to ransom two 5-star hotels and a Jewish centre at Mumbai on 26^th November 2008, slaughtering more than 150 Indians and foreigners. Will that act of capital punishment, end terror strikes against India?

Even when the news that Kasab, the symbol of the dastardly attack on one of India’s most lived  and loved mega-cities, was being hung  flashed on television screens, I doubted we would have any  such luck in resolving the terror threat from across the border.

Sure enough, soon afterwards, the Pakistani Taliban and Lashkar-e-Toiba, the terror organisation to which Ajmal Kasab owed  his indoctrination and training vowed to hit India and Indians back.

Pakistan Taliban has spun out of the control of its creator – the Pakistani spy agency – ISI. However, Lashkar and its new avatar Jamat ud Dawa remain tied to the spymasters who see them as valuable assets to be used against India and Afghanistan, two nations, Pakistan has traditionally considered its enemies.   

Though a few liberal newspapers in Pakistan have called out for action against the masterminds behind 26/11, the threats made this week by Pakistani terror groups have not been condoned by the Pakistani state. Which seems to indicate that the threats may have the tacit support of sections of the Pakistani establishment, if not the blessings of the state machinery as a whole.  The logic for this is convulated and hard to understand, but it exists. More on that later.

India’s borders with Pakistan, despite fencing off of large chunks remain porous; Its coasts, vulnerable to landings on lonely beaches by small craft piloted by teams of the kind which attacked Mumbai.

The country’s borders with Nepal are totally open and those with neighbouring Bangladesh far less secure than the western one. The trails which terror sellers could take are many.  Indians could also be targeted abroad or on the high seas. At particular risk, would be Indian investments in Afghanistan, which Pakistan resents intensely as it considers this mountainous highland to be its strategic backyard where it hopes to impose its will in the future.   

Indian strategic thinker and former additional secretary in the cabinet secretariat, B Raman in a clinically analytical blog, too seems to feel that the threat would be highest for Indian establishments in Afghanistan and lists LeT, the Haqqani network, the Taliban and the Hizbe Islami as groups whch have the ground capability to launch those attacks.




US leadership watch live footage from the Osama raid

To deal with such probabilities, the Indian state needs to think out responses which will stifle terror. The American, Israeli and Russian state responses to terror perhaps hold lessons from which could learn.

The policy paradigm for these responses are the same, though the exact modus operandi differs. That policy, simply stated, is to attack and diminish the capability of groups which can threaten the countries concerned. The methods differ –  covert operations in some cases, huge state led responses across borders in others.  

With Pakistan shielding its terror groups by using nuclear blackmail – threatening nuclear strikes if India attacks terror camps in Pakistan, there are just two options. The best option remains covert, deniable attacks to finish off these camps. The other, albeit risky option, is to ignore the nuclear bluff, for it is a bluff, and to go in for limited military operations.

The second kind of operation,  will have to be met by Pakistan with some kind of official retaliation, which could escalate and is hence one which should be taken as a last resort. The first, will be grudged, but can hardly be met by official, overt military retaliation. Pakistan understands this kind of covert response, for it has come up with its own covert war against India and Afghanistan, using home grown terror groups, to avoid direct confrontation by denying all that happened.




Indian soldiers celebrate taking back a hill in Kargil ranges

When Pakistani Frontier corps soldiers dug into India’s then unguarded Kargil hills in 1999 and built bunkers from where they lobbed artillery fire onto a main arterial road connecting Ladakh with the rest of India, Pakistan simply denied they were its men. Indian soldiers eventually stormed those bunkers and killed the Gilgit tribal soldiers manning the `nests’. The bodies with their identity cards were offered to Pakistan, which  refused them, denying responsibility ! Though later, Pakistani leaders and generals gloated on their success in launching the sneak attack. 
   
When Kasab and his mates attacked Mumbai, again Pakistan denied they were Pakistanis. When confronted by telephone taps which showed they were being controlled out of Pakistan by men like LeT chief Hafiz Saeed and ISI officers, Pakistan officially claimed these were non-state actors who acted without the knowledge of the Pakistani state! The logic for such attacks is however, more difficult to understand.

Former Pakistani dictator Gen. Pervez Musharaf was recently in India, to address a gathering organised by a Delhi-based media group. He remained unfazed by questions on Pakistan’s attack on Kargil peaks in Kashmir and seemed to indicate that it was merely a tit for tat response for India’s involvement in the independence of Bangladesh!

What that comment revealed, was the mindset of the Pakistani establishment. It is still seeking revenge against India for perceived insults without either (i) introspection into either their role in Bangladesh or (ii) realisation of the high price being paid for the hatred of India which the Pakistani ruling elite nurses.


Indian troops being welcomed by Bangladeshis

Pakistan as a nation, especially its leadership, suffers from amnesia when it comes to Bangladesh. It forgets that Indian troops were forced to intervene in a messy civil war because Pakistani soldiers carried out one of the biggest genocides in the history of mankind – killing some 2 million of their own citizens and raping 200,000 helpless civilian women. The reign of terror which the army, to which Gen Musharaf belonged,  let loose on the civilian population of what was then East Pakistan, forced some 10 million Pakistani citizens to seek refuge in India. If India had not intervened, more millions would have perished. More millions would have been pushed into India to live as penniless refugees.

Yet, the Pakistani leadership instead of introspecting on its crimes, blames India for its “loss” and still demands revenge. Kargil and Mumbai 26/11 are seen as “revenge”.

Hans Kiessling, German researcher working for the Munich based Hanns-Seidel-Foundation estimates that ISI has an annual budget of about $ 300-400 million. The budget for the entire state of Pakistan is $ 39 billion, nearly $ 6 billion or a sixth of that budget is spent on its armed forces.

This extraordinarily high proportion of budget spent on defence is because Pakistan keeps needling India and Afghanistan with sneak attacks and consequently fears retaliation.
 
Pakistan has since the 1950s also tried to fund and arm small rebel groups such as the Naga within India, at great cost to itself.  Pakistan’s spy agency also spend huge sums to try undermine the Indian economy by pushing narcotics and spurious India currency. This massive spending on trying to undermine the Indian state translates into that much less left for Pakistan to spend on its own citizens.

The costs are obvious – deteriorating law and order has already turned Pakistan’s largest city,  Karachi, once touted along with Beirut as the `Paris of the East’, into being one of the world’s most dangerous cities; lack of investment has made Pakistan the slowest growing nation in South Asia; lack of spending on healthcare, education, sanitation and other civic amenities has meant Pakistan has kept slipping every year on the human development index. With little money to spend on the mainstream regions of Pakistan, marginal areas on the border – Balochistan, Gilgit have received even less funds, leading to a sense of deprivation which has fuelled separatism there.   
    
This brings one to consider whether India’s reaction, covert or overt, will actually bring some kind of closure to Pakistan’s export of terror. It may not, till Pakistan changes fundamentally and starts believing as does a section of its intellectual elite, that peace and friendship with its neighbours is the only way forward.

But in the interim, covert action designed to diminish the capability of Pakistani groups to launch against Indian interests, should deter the Pakistani ruling elite and the terror groups it has spawned. In this world of outsourcing, even covert wars can be outsourced. There are quite a few   groups within Pakistan who are struggling against that nation. India's work could be easily outsourced to them in return for training, arms and funding.

The lesson that has to be driven across is that even covert actions begets retaliatory actions and those with more money and men, which India does have, usually win in the end.