What Are India's Options?

Writing in a post for his blog on The New Yorker, Steve Coll, an oldand much respected hand on security affairs in South Asia had somethinginteresting to say about the terrorist attack in Mumbai and the likely reactionfrom Pakistan. His argument is that the options for India are limited. Simplybecause the Pakistanis know that they are blessed when it comes to its relevancein geo-politics:

"The Pakistan Army understands this international equation thoroughly and exploits the gaps—it is careful not to expose its direct fingerprints, and yet it is brazenly persistent in pursuit of its objective of military pressure against India in Kashmir and political-military pressure on India more broadly." 

So what are the options that India can exercise in the aftermath of theMumbai terror attack?

If the politicians are to be believed, there was a lot of sabre rattling attwo meetings held by the government on Sunday, November 30 night. While theall-party meet called by the government was a more sedate affair, an earliermeeting organised exclusively for the UPA and its allies, held in Parliament wasmore telling. A representative of the Samajwadi Party is said to have suggestedthat this was a good time to "bomb Islamabad!"

Fine. Let's bomb Islamabad, assuming we have the capability to do so and thatthe frontline aircraft of the Indian Air force are all serviceable, the MiG-21sready to escort the bombers, and we can launch a full-scale military attack bypenetrating the secure skies over Islamabad and then bomb it back to the stoneage. 

But are we really ready for a war? 

Are we ready for the fallout when two nuclear nations go to war? Are we readyfor destroying everything that we have built in the last decade and a half? Arewe prepared for rolling back our consistent 9 percent growth story and undertakehardships that several generations of Indians have never seen?

All this must be weighed before we take on the job of rattling our sabres. Wedid that once, post December 13, 2001 attack on Parliament. What did we reallyachieve from that 11-month old stand off with the Pakistanis? We stood on theborder and they stood on the border, eyeball to eyeball, and we finally sent theforces back to the bunkers after that. But not before we had spent something tothe tune of Rs 6000 crores (the official figures put it at a much lower figurepegging it a few hundred crores) and lost many precious lives of our soldiers,who stepped on mines not mapped, or tried to clear mines with bare hands whileour bureaucrats held back critical mine clearing equipment.

Our air force, sanctioned 39.5 combat squadrons, is down to 30 off squadrons,our armoured corps doesn't have the tanks to roll in, our infantry is horriblytied up in counter-insurgency operations, our soldiers and officers are poorlypaid and cheated in pay commission after pay commission, while we talk about"bombing Islamabad."

But there are options that one could look at as a credible response to theseterror attacks. 

More than us, more than the Americans or the British, it is the averagePakistani who knows that they are living in a failed state. They know that theireconomy is in shambles, their young men are becoming ready fodder for the terrorfactory and governance is being remote controlled by a military-industrialcomplex that is also making billions as we speak.

The international outrage that has emerged after the terrorist attack is anopportunity that rarely presents itself in a nation's history. This is the timeto forge partnerships with all those willing to work with us. Intelligencecooperation has already been ramped up (the first warning for the current attackcame from the Americans) and there are other diplomatic measures that arealready underway. But, this is also the time to build partnerships with thoseelements in Pakistan who recognise the fact that the idea of Pakistan is ingreater danger than from these terrorists than its declared enemies.

This is the time to look for partnerships in intelligence gathering -- notjust the non-functional anti terror mechanism that was set up earlier, but amechanism that produces hard, actionable intelligence that can be put to gooduse. This is the time to look at joint covert operations against terrorists andtheir infrastructure simply because this is a job that the Pakistanis cannot doon their own. The Americans, the British and the NATO forces are already in theregion and this is as good a time as any to build partnerships with them.

Perhaps a partnerships sounds too utopian and unrealistic, a diplomaticimpossibility in times of rhetoric. But look at the facts. There is no terrorattack that can bend a nation as resilient as India. It has an innate strengththat will ensure that the good news story, that India was, will continue to holdtrue.

A lot will have to be done to weed out the systemic failures in our securityapparatus. It is not about "intelligence failure" and as this case hasshown, our intelligence actually produced good stuff. By calling it"intelligence failure" we are trivialising the discussion to a levelthat is insulting to our counter-terror mechanism as well as security apparatus.Instead, we have to realise that systemic faults have to be addressedsystematically. The overhaul, if the political leadership is willing, will haveto happen over months, and perhaps years. But if politics goes back to the usualset of empty promises, the usual rhetoric and the usual coteries, that will bean attack on the very idea of India itself. And the time to act, is now.