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COVER STORY: INDIA'S RESPONSE
GUEST COLUMN N.B. RAMAN
Wanted A Spine
Countering catastrophic terrorism requires a political
will for covert action in national interest
 The
day of infamy in New York and Washington DC on September 11 is a wake-up
call for all nations grappling with the menace of terrorism. More so for
India. Security agencies all over the world had been concerned over the
possibility of the three potentially terrifying scenarios, which they
call catastrophic terrorism: the use of weapons of mass disruption (for
example, a computer virus), the use of weapons of mass destruction such
as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and lastly, seizure of installations
like nuclear reactors and using them as bargaining chips to force the
state to concede their demands.
However, none of the scenarios had visualised
the horrendous terrorist attacks on September 11. But irrational and fanatical
minds think alike. A Sikh terrorist had stated during interrogation that
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence had suggested the possibility of
crashing a plane into the Bombay High platform. Mumbai in March 1993 was
the seed from which New York 2001 was born.
US Congressmen have attributed the CIA (Central
Intelligence Agency) failure to "over-focus" on technical intelligence
(techint) than on human intelligence (humint). Catastrophic terrorist
groups, like the Al Qaida of Osama bin Laden, do not use modern technologies.
For the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, and for the bombings
in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998, Laden supporters did not
use modern explosives, but large quantities of nitrate fertilisers, which
can be easily bought without raising suspicion. They stick to old communication
technologies to avoid detection. Since the US bombing of his training
camps in Afghanistan in October 1998, bin Laden has been using couriers
and avoiding his cellphone, which can be tracked.
It follows that unless the humint capability
is strengthened, advance warnings of catastrophic terrorist acts are going
to be difficult. Like the CIA, the Indian intelligence community has also
been strong in techint, but weak in humint. Terrorism demands a multi-agency
approach, with all agencies working under a common roof, a common leadership
and a common national purpose. Other countries adopted it many years ago,
but we have only recently woken up to the need for it.
Terrorist networks are fast shedding their dependence
on the state-sponsors. Flush with narco-dollars, they have easy access
to weapons and explosives. Also, they tend to group together. Bin Laden's
International Islamic Front for Jehad against the US and Israel brings
together nearly a dozen Islamic terrorist groups. It is a hydra-headed
monster. The counter strategy, therefore, has to be directed not only
against a state-sponsor such as Pakistan, but also against the various
non-state actors, who may not be totally under its control.
Terrorism is the core component of Pakistan's
proxy war against India. It is politically overt, but operationally covert.
Even though the international law gives us the right of active defence
against Pakistan, we have not exercised it even once. Nations that become
incapable of retaliating, weakened by misplaced forbearance, add one more
head to such monsters.
Countering terrorism requires strong covert
action. Sadly, our political leadership lacks the determination to use
the capability of our intelligence agencies in national interests, irrespective
of international pressures. The networking of the terrorists has not been
matched by a networking of the victim-states. There has been a mushrooming
of intelligence-sharing mechanisms, but the agencies can only supply intelligence
to the political leaderships. An equally important factor has been the
lack of a lucid analysis of the dimensions of the new menace. One hopes
that the US will now show a greater determination to strike at the source,
wherever it may be, and that India will show some signs of a healthy spine.
(The author is former additional secretary,
RAW.)
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