India hitting enemies on global scale, govt winning applause. But there’s cost being paid too

NSA Ajit Doval | ANI file photo

The slightly mad eyes of Lieutenant-Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley—swashbuckling volunteer in the Somaliland camel corps, veteran of a plot that unseated the King of Iraq, comrade to guerrillas in Siam and Greece, and liberator of four thousand prisoners of the Japanese, all “absolutely stark naked”—looked over his new, secret army. Led by the tough anti-communist Bido Kuka, Lieutenant-Colonel David’s insurgents were about to go to war against Enver Hoxha’s regime in Albania.

Few of the two hundred agents sent in would survive: betrayed by the Cambridge-educated double agent Kim Philby, the Albanians knew of each infiltration, down to the drop zone. The covert war intended to tear apart the Iron Curtain had not begun well, historian Ben Wallace records.

The story of the many failures—and occasional pyrrhic victories—registered during the Cold War provides important cautionary for an India increasingly convinced of the need to use the knife to secure its national security interests. Though covert action can sometimes succeed in its aims, it almost always creates dangerous second-order cons.

We might never know if an Indian covert service in fact killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar, as Canada and the United States appear to be alleging. There’s mounting evidence, though, that India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing, is  seeking to expand its ability to target the country’s enemies on a global scale. The campaign is winning the government applause–but its costs must also be dispassionately considered.

In the maze covert warriors must walk through, almost every turn leads the wrong way.

Talk-talk, fight-fight

From their stations in Kabul, United States signals intelligence technicians listened in, as Inter-Services Intelligence officers congratulated members of the Jalaluddin Haqqani Network on this success: Early one summer morning in 2008, an ageing Toyota had ploughed into a corner of the Indian Embassy complex in Kabul, killing 58 people, including defence attaché Ravi Mehta and foreign service officer V. Venkateswara Rao.

Furious, then National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan called for action. “Talk-talk is better than fight-fight,” he told journalists, “but it hasn’t worked. I think we need to pay back in the same coin.”

Through the 1980s, when the ISI staged attacks against civilians in Punjab, India had hit back with its own savage bombing. “The role of our covert action capability in putting an end to the ISI’s interference in Punjab by making such interference prohibitively costly is little known,” former RAW officer B Raman wrote in 2002. In Bangladesh, India hollowed out Pakistan’s power by raising a covert army; it exercised political influence in Nepal and Sri Lanka through its covert services.

From the memoirs of officials engaged in decision-making after 26/11, we know Prime Minister Manmohan Singh considered exactly that. The military, however, did not have the means to deliver precise retaliation. To make things worse, there was the risk of conflict escalating into an economically-crippling long war.

Prime Minister Singh chose to listen to the United States, which promised to use its leverage to rein-in Pakistan.

That decision was to come with political costs. “Indians died, and they did nothing,” soon-t0-be prime minister Narendra Modi raged during his 2014 election campaign. The time had come, he said, to “talk to Pakistan in its language.” For his part, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, a highly-regarded Intelligence Bureau veteran, promised what he called a doctrine of “offensive defence.”

An ambiguous record

The record shows the results of the new strategy have been, at best, ambiguous. Following the terrorist attack at Uri in 2016, India struck across the Line of Control. The ISI responded with a series of effective fidayeen suicide-squad strikes against Indian military installations. The Balakot crisis raised the stakes, and led to a sharp reduction in terrorist violence. That hasn’t stopped the ISI, though, from regularly targeting Indian troops.

Even though hard evidence is impossible to come by, the little detail available suggests both sides engage in tit-for-tat retaliation. Following a bombing near Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed’s home in Lahore, drones dropped bombs close to Indian Air Force helicopter pens in Jammu. The message was not opaque.

True, India’s covert campaign appears to have secured some notable successes—among them, the killing of ageing Khalistan patriarch Paramjit Singh Panjwar, long sheltered in Pakistan, and transborder weapons trafficker Muhammad Riyaz. R&AW is also alleged to have killed former al-Badr commander Syed Khalid Raza, and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen operative Bashir Pir. Killings like these, though, do not transform the security landscape in any meaningful sense: dozens of more important jihadists, after all, are killed in combat in Kashmir each year.

In some cases, the covert campaign comes with significant diplomatic costs. The extradition of billionaire fugitive Mehul Choksi has been put on hold by Interpol after a botched attempt to snatch him from his island home in Antigua.

Worse, a court in Antigua is scheduled to hear Choksi’s claims that a group of UK-based ethnic Indians carried out the bungled kidnapping, led by a figure with political links to the Indian government. This could have significant consequences for other, future extradition efforts.

From RAW assets convicted of espionage in Germany, to former naval officers facing trial for spying on Qatar, India’s efforts to expand its global intelligence reach have led to problem after problem. The question that needs a dispassionate answer is whether the potential costs outweigh the gains.

The regime change game

Like India, the United States soon learned that low-grade efforts like the Albania operations yielded nothing. From 1955, following a brief honeymoon, the United States began targeting the regime of the Left-leaning nationalist leader Koesno Sosrodihardjo Sukarno, even supplying rebels on several islands with B26 bombers. Then, in 1965, Australian-trained rebels engineered a coup against Sukarno’s regime, which catalysed a bloodbath.

“The final solution to the Communist problem in Indonesia was certainly one of the most barbaric acts in a century that has seen a great deal of it,” the historian Gabriel Kolko wrote. “It surely ranks as a war crime as the same type of those the Nazis perpetrated.”

Far across the globe, in Zaire, preparations for a similar operation began weeks after the militant nationalist Patrice Lumumba took power in 1960. Belgian mercenaries captured the resource-rich province of Katanga, forcing Lumumba to call for help from the United Nations. The CIA pitched in on the side of his enemies, leading to the leader’s eventual demise.

Zaire did turn into a pro-Western oasis, Stephen Greenhouse reported in 1988—only to implode again in the next decade, with storm-winds of insurgency and organised crime tearing apart the entire region. Efforts at regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, as is well known, ended in even more technicolour disasters.

Elsewhere in the world, the CIA failed—but got what it wanted. The CIA never did succeed in overthrowing its enemies in Cuba, the communist threat it feared never materialised. And Albania, together with the rest of the Soviet bloc, crumbled—no assassinations or covert warfare needed.

The ability to track down genuine national security threats, and preempt violence directed at Indians, is a critical ability that R&AW and other national security agencies must cultivate. The ability to locate and kill an Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri is one of the tools that ensures the continental United States is safe.

For covert influence to be exercised effectively, though, India will need more than one tool—and be thoughtful if when and how it exercises them. The use of the knife might provide a kind of primal emotional satisfaction, but that isn’t the same thing as national power.

The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)