17 June 2002

 

POST KALUCHAK OPTIONS:

 

FIRST GET TO KNOW THE ENEMY

 

-Yashwant Deva

 

   Note. This piece was written on the week-end following the attack on Kaluchak. It was sent to www.ipcs.org for Web posting but withdrawn on the request of Hindustan Times who sealed it for their use. It has since remained unpublished. That the newspapers play this type of games with writers is widely known. Lest the piece loses its relevance and the readers lend credit to the imputations implied in the lead story" Operators pick up phone-tap tab" appearing in the Hindustan Times of 16 June 2002, I am putting it up on this Web site.

 

   Let us for once admit that we have been biffed and buffeted and that too right in our own house. Our mahaanta has been humbled. The worse is our discomfiture and feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. Even the television and newspapers have been indiscreet; public showing of a grieving jawan, calling our soldiers soft, and making comments about their morale, suggesting that we have not fought a war since 1971 and that it is time we redeemed ourselves. Rhetoric apart, our concerns for national security are only skin deep.

 

   Wallowing in grief has become a rage. Even the sacrifices made by soldiers in Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka, Vijay in Kargil and Operation Rakshak from which there has been little respite, recess or relief, are forgotten, often belittled. The ghosts of the IC 814 Hijack and infamous response of our establishment are back again to haunt us.

 

   Saber rattling is other facet of our psyche, fostered and inflicted by parties who thrive on conflict-creation and whose track record is cowardly-mayhem and street-violence borne of misplaced patriotism. They too swear by soldiers' morale and pride. We have a Chief Minister who tells our jawans "to go back to the barracks" if they are not willing to do his bidding; while in another State, the minority community shudders to think the fate they would meet should the Army withdraw.

 

   Do we go to war? If the response that "we have been at war for decades" is not convincing, it is because we have been singularly wanting in taking a tough, no-nonsense stand in the past. Were we not fighting a war against terror, while we made a bus ride to Lahore, or said, "Adab arz General Sahib" at Agra or abjectly licked our wounds at

Kandhar .

 

 

   War against terror cannot be won by a conventional war, and certainly not by a nuclear war. Of course there are options --options for inflicting punishment on the perpetrators, abettors and sympathizers. These are courses of action, each loaded with pros and cons, and therefore can never be for public consumption. Further, in their consideration, there is neither a place for euphoria nor apathy, neither influence by a media hype of the kind of big-fight, box-on variety, nor the pseudo-intellectual, unwise surgical dissection of options which every out-of-job, leisure-earned, strategy analyst is fond of making.

 

   Undoubtedly the time for action is now; the time for pratikaar is now - but at a moment of our own choosing, place of our own choosing and the course of our own choosing. The targets cannot but be obvious, indisputable and well recognized. These are moles within and the ISI operatives and bhare ke dehshat pasand (mercenary terrorists) without. Let us get them with every instrument and tactic of ingenuity, ruse, bluff, surprise and deception that we can muster and mount.

 

   Of the seven subsets of information warfare, viz. command and control warfare, electronic warfare, cyber warfare, hacker warfare, economic warfare, intelligence warfare and psychological warfare, we are totally at sea regarding the last two, whereas Pakistan has shown a marked ingenuity and craft in either field. We created hype about issuing a white paper on ISI and declared, that too in the Parliament that the Government will expose their deeds of terror, abuses and violations; but we never went beyond the verbal flatulence. First the naivete showed and then the bluff.

 

   A series of well thought out, well planned and well coordinated black-bag and counter-intelligence operations along with psychological blitz are the first that we should launch laced with stealth, pertinacity, novelty and finesse. A black-bag job is a covert operation involving secret intrusion or search-and-grab operation by the law-enforcement or intelligence organizations. All such operations are part of information warfare, designed to clandestinely search the hideouts, implant or sweep bugs and key-loggers, conduct wiretaps, sniff, snoop and spoof physical and electronic storage and files, and gather incriminating materials.

 

   In the US, Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) authorizes black-bag surveillance operations for national security reasons. In October 1993, Attorney General Janet Reno authorized FBI to enter the home of Aldritch Ames, who was a suspected CIA mole. The legal authorization was given months after the grueling, unauthorized electronic and physical surveillance, including "dustbin sweep" had been successfully conducted. In the year 2000, the FBI secretly raided the office ofNicodemo Scarfo. They installed a key-logger, which paid handsome dividend in capturing Scarfo's password and decrypt PGP-encoded e-mail. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy, a popular e-mail coding algorithm. In 1987, I led a break-in on a militant-run "electronic workshop" in Mandpam near Rameswaram and captured an HF transmitter station working to Jaffna,

electronic components for making radio-controlled Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), an abundance of electronic literature and incriminating papers.

 

   Of course there are many instances of goof-up too, Watergate being the most glaring. We do not have to follow such examples. However, it is time we took tough decisions to get to know the enemy and deny him information. Let us not be victims of pretenders of human rights and democracy. Offensive intelligence and counter-intelligence operations can only be launched if there is a secrecy shield as part of home security. That calls for self- regulation by the media and if that does not work, its public censorship.