The problem is that we are playing a new game according to old rules

The recent controversy over the exact whereabouts of Dawood Ibrahim demonstrates how ill-equipped all Indian governments are when it comes to handling trans-national terrorism and crime.

It now seems probable that a previous government did not know whether to negotiate Dawood’s surrender. Another government was uncertain whether to allow a plan to nab Dawood to go ahead.

 

And this government stumbled in Parliament by abrogating India’s long-standing (and entirely factual) position that Dawood is being protected by Pakistan’s ISI in secure locations.

 

   Some of the confusion stems from India’s limited view of the options available to governments who wish to act against terrorists. The Indian position has remained broadly the same for several decades. We send in the army – as we did with Sri Lanka during the IPKF misadventure. Or we train and arm rebels – as we have done time and again: the Mukti Bahini in what was then East Pakistan, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Balochs in Pakistan. Occasionally, we stretch ourselves a little. We set up the armed police in Nepal to fight the Maoists when it seemed that the regular police force was failing.

 

   But what we never do is consider modern-style covert action. Many Indian politicians seem to think that covert attacks, kidnappings and assassinations do not befit a civilized society. When Inder Gujral was Prime Minister, he made R&AW stop financing rebels in Pakistan on the grounds that these rebels often went on to harm innocent civilians. It is no secret that Manmohan Singh repeatedly rejected covert options, arguing that they would dehumanize India and went beyond the rules of acceptable statecraft.

 

   The problem is that we are playing a new game according to old rules.

 

   The first people to realize this – perhaps because their state was the first to be so brutally threatened by terrorists – were the Israelis. It is Mossad, the Israeli secret service that wrote the textbook on covert operations. Most famously, Mossad agents sought out and killed everyone responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympics.

 

   In the beginning, Mossad ops were regarded as rogue operations by the global intelligence community. But, in this century, most Western nations have come to the conclusion that covert ops are the only way to effectively combat terrorists. The US trains special units to enter hostile territory and nab those on its most-wanted list. Often the intention is not to capture terrorists and to bring them to justice. For instance, the Abbottabad operation was always intended to result in the execution of Osama Bin Laden.

 

   During the Barack Obama presidency, the emphasis has shifted from operations that involve putting men on the ground to assassinations carried out from the skies. It is now widely known that the US has a ‘kill list’ and that the President approves the execution (usually through drone strikes) of those regarded as a threat to the safety of the United States.

 

   There can be no question about the efficacy of these tactics. There has not been a single major terrorist attack on US soil from plotters located abroad since 9/11.

 

"There is something shameful about our failure to have apprehended Dawood Ibrahim, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Indians in the Mumbai blasts."

   You can argue about the morality of the covert approach. But interestingly enough, the debate about drone strikes focuses less on the ethical questions surrounding the executions of terrorists and more on the collateral damage. Is it right to carry out drone strikes, critics ask, when they could lead to the deaths of civilians who just happen to live in the vicinity of the targeted terrorists?

 

   Within South Asia, only one country has understood how covert operations work. In the old days, the Pakistanis were just like us. If they wanted to wage an undeclared war, they either financed rebels (in the 60s, it was the Nagas, in the 80s, it was Khalistanis, and it then became Kashmiri separatists) or they sent their regulars in plainclothes: the ‘Mujahideen’ who allegedly captured the commanding heights of Kargil in 1999 were Pakistani soldiers who had been told not to shave and to wear civilian clothes.

 

   The Pakistanis have now moved away from that approach. Just as the Americans have raised covert divisions, the Pakistanis have created terrorist brigades. These terrorists are armed, financed and trained by the Pakistani state and army but they remain nominally independent, allowing Islamabad to refer to them as ‘non-state actors’.

 

   If you look at the Mumbai attacks through the prism of covert operations, then you realize just how sophisticated the Pakistanis have become. A dozen men, most with no previous military experience, were trained so well that they managed to slip through India’s coastal defences on a fishing boat and held an entire city to ransom despite never ever having been there before. It took India’s elite commandoes three full days to defeat a handful of trained operatives.

 

   In this world of ‘kill lists’, ‘snatch-and-grab operations’ and drone strikes, the Indian approach to covert operations not only seems dated and ill-advised, it also seems irresponsible. It is because our politicians dither over what needs to be done that so many Indians keep dying in Pakistani covert operations which are disguised as terrorist attacks.

 

   There is something shameful about our failure to have apprehended Dawood Ibrahim, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Indians in the Mumbai blasts. And the way in which New Delhi huffs and puffs about Pakistan’s failure to restrain Hafeez Saeed is pathetic.

 

   If India wants to be a first-rate power or, at the very least, the pre-dominant power in this region, then it needs to master and adopt the new rules of warfare. By now, we should have either nabbed Dawood Ibrahim or taken him down. Similarly, the plotters of the Mumbai attacks should have faced the kind of justice that the Israelis meted out to those who killed their Olympic athletes, or the retribution that the Americans handed down to Osama Bin Laden.

 

   Instead, we fumble and we fail. We scream and we shout. We protest and we grumble. But we never do what needs to be done.

 

   With a National Security Advisor who is said to favour covert operations and a Prime Minister who has promised to stamp out terrorism, India is now ideally-placed to develop a world-class covert-action capability. It’s not difficult to do: the Indian army has some of the finest soldiers in the world and the weapons and drones required are easily available.

 

 

   But what we lack is will. And until our politicians recognize that the world has changed, terrorists will continue to murder Indians, secure in the knowledge that there will be no retribution.