Get To The Basics

… a skilled commander seeks victory from the situation and does not demand it of his subordinates. 

--Sun Tzu 

The facts themselves are fairly simple. On the evening of Tuesday, May 13, 2008, a coordinated series of eight explosions of low to medium intensity occurred across six locations in the crowded walled city of Jaipur. The targets included two Hanumantemples (on a Tuesday, the day dedicated to the Hindu god, Hanuman, devotees were packed in large numbers at these temples). According to thestate's home minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, the eventual toll stood at 80 dead and more than 150 injured. A ninth unexploded device was subsequently recovered from the Chandpole area, where another blast had already occurred, and provided significant leads to investigators. 

It was immediately apparent that the attacks were part of an extended series of Islamist terrorist attacks that have occurred, with sickening regularity, at intervals ranging between one and four months, for the past years, and that have been executed by one or various combinations of more than one of four principal groups-- the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B), Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and theStudents' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)

A Special Investigation Team (SIT) was quickly set up, and as with cases in the past, apparent breakthroughs were initially rapid. Descriptions of some of the perpetrators quickly yielded composite sketches of seven suspects, and one of these was potentially identified as'Shameem', an associate of the HuJI militant, Maulana Mohammad Waliullah, currently in jail for providing logistical support to the strike team in the Varanasi serial blasts of March 2006. The SIT worked quickly, in coordination with investigators in Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, to push the leads forward.

If the record of the past is a guide, however, these leads will just as quickly disappear into a wilderness of doubts and suspicions pointing relentlessly to sources across the border. The decentralised and dispersed patterns of operation adopted and progressively refined by Islamist terrorist, with their command centres in Pakistan and Bangladesh, over the past three years, give little hope of bringing the guilty to justice.

The tragedy of the Jaipur blasts -- as with virtually every major terrorist outrage in India-- is infinitely compounded by the utter obtuseness, the manifest incomprehension and the pervasive disorder and confusion that attend official responses. Despite an experience with terrorism that has extended over decades, it is evident that the state and its agencies are yet to establish even the most basic protocols of response-- at least minimally for the securing of the incident location and the ordered and humane transport of the injured and dead. 

Each new incident sees seriously injured people being picked up and carried around without basic aides such as even rudimentary stretchers, in a manner that can only intensify the trauma of their wounds, and that may, in many cases, reduce the chances of lives being saved.

Worse, a frenzied electronic media appears to have pressured, indeed, panicked, high state officials to issue a continuous slew of unverified and often contradictory observations that could only have added to public confusion and anger. Among these, of course, was the very early and obviously premature observation that RDX had been used in the serial blasts in Jaipur-- a claim articulated by senior police officials and subsequently and authoritatively repeated by thestate's home minister and the union minister of state for home. 

Visual examination of the sites, however, was far more consistent with a low or medium intensity blast and while traces of RDX-- used as an accelerator -- may be consistent with such an explosion, RDX almost certainly was not the principal explosive used. This appears to have been confirmed by subsequent forensic examination.

Government agencies undermined their own credibility, moreover, in almost immediately pinning the responsibility for the blasts on the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami (HuJI). This claim may, of course, eventually be confirmed-- HuJI is certainly high on the list of suspect organisations, and the course of the initial investigation appears to reinforce these suspicions. But informed speculation is best left to people outside the institutions of the state. 

The police and the government need to deal with what has already been established as fact on the basis of verified evidence. Regrettably, thestate's agencies are yet to learn to deal with an aggressive, ill-informed and often hysterical media, and invariably succumb to the pressure to disclose every line of investigation-- each of which is then reported as incontrovertible 'fact' by the media.

The complete elimination of the risk of soft-target terrorism is, of course, nigh impossible. There are, nevertheless, a significant range of measures that can, on the one hand, mitigate such risk and, on the other, ensure that our incident responses display a far greater measure of coherence and efficiency than has been visible in the unending series of terrorist strikes over the past years, most recently culminating in the attacks in Jaipur. 

The political executive charged with overseeing thenation's security does not, however, display any great awareness of these measures.

Over the first days after the incident, in the incessantly televised discussions on the imperatives of response, various political leaders, both at thecentre and in the state, gave the impression that a 'failure of intelligence' was principally to be blamed-- a cry eagerly taken up by the media -- and that they thought that the challenge was simply a matter of'improving coordination' between Delhi and Jaipur and 'better sharing ofintelligence'. 

This was the only apparently coherent formulation that emerged from the extended and shrill television debates after the blasts. This was reinforced at the highest level when National Security Advisor (NSA) M.K. Narayanan sought to put an end to the finger-pointing betweencentre and state, squarely blaming the country's intelligence agencies for their failure to "see the Jaipur blasts coming", adding, "Why have they been unable to identify sleeper cells and why don't state agencies co-operate with the Intelligence Bureau?" 

But this is profoundly misleading. The principal deficiency is not the inability to communicate and act on some abundant flow of intelligence, or to coordinate between various agencies, but rather the acute paucity of actionable intelligence, and severe deficits in the capacities for generating such intelligence, and for preventive action. 

While the state government cannot be absolved of its own failure to generate credible intelligence on subversive and extremist activities within its jurisdiction, the Rajasthan Chief Minister was not wrong in suggesting that a large proportion of thecentre's warnings relating to potential terrorist activity "are generally vague" and "more like weather reports."

While this would, on first sight, appear to confirm the NSA's charges, and be a severe indictment of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), the premiercentral agency responsible for internal security intelligence-gathering, the truth is, it is in fact an indictment of thenation's political executive under successive governments. 

In terms of the sheer size of the country and its population, the IB's material, technical and human resource capacities are nothing short of laughable. Sources indicate that the IB, for instance, has a bare 3,500 field personnel involved in intelligence gathering for this entire country of 1.2 billion souls, and only a fraction of these are focused on counter-terrorism. 

Various capacity deficits have been pointed out repeatedly by experts and governmentcommittees, but despite the continuous escalation of challenges to India's internal security,governments have failed to act to sufficiently augment capacities.

Much of this has been written before, but deserves reiteration, since it does not appear to have registered within policy circles. After the Kargil War in 1999, a comprehensive review of security and intelligence had been undertaken, and this included the work of the Girish Saxena Committee which examined the state of thecountry's intelligence apparatus. 

The Saxena Committee's report pointed to the gaping holes that existed in thecountry's intelligence establishment, and had called for massive upgrading of technical, imaging, signal, electronic counter-intelligence capabilities, and a system-wide reform of conventional human-intelligence gathering. 

Every suggestion in the report was accepted by the Group of Ministers (GoM), who released their recommendations in February 2001. 

Nevertheless, the recommendations of the report remain unimplemented, beyond a few symbolic changes. 

The Saxena Committee had, for instance, recommended the immediate recruitment of an additional 3,000 cadres in the Intelligence Bureau. This was in 2001, and till the present just 1,400 additional posts have been sanctioned, though the requirements would by now be substantially greater. 

Another significant recommendation called for a 'multi-agency setup' to confront the challenges of terrorism, and this was, at least formally, implemented through the creation of two new wings under the IB-- the Multi Agency Centre (MAC) and the Joint Task Force on Intelligence (JTFI). MAC was charged with collecting and coordinating terrorism-related information from across the country; the JTFI is responsible for passing on this information to thestate governments in real-time. 

Regrettably, both MAC and JTFI remain under-staffed, under-equipped and ineffective, with even basic issues relating to their administration unsettled. Their principal objective, the creation of a national terrorism database, has made little progress. The JTFI was also given the responsibility of upgrading counter-terrorism capabilities in thestate police forces, as part of its mandate to improve intelligence-gathering across the country, but no actual programme of training or capacity enhancement has been initiated.

A critical aspect of existing intelligence gathering operations in India -- one that constitutes both a strength and weakness-- is that these continue to rely overwhelmingly on HUMINT, with the TECHINT component in urgent and drastic need for improvement. 

Difficulties of integration of intelligence, of professionalism, autonomy and, crucially, of modernization are acute and in many areas, the gap between capacities and needs is growing.India's intelligence penetration is, consequently, severely inadequate, and is overwhelmingly limited to a thin coverage of urban areas and strategic locations, leaving vast hinterlands'uncovered'. 

Crucially, the covert capacities of India's external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) have been systematically dismantled over the past three decades under various political dispensations. The agency, today, has little penetration of the extremist groupings and their support structures in the establishment in Pakistan or in Bangladesh, and virtually no capacity to carry out'special operations' abroad. 

Since virtually the entire command and control structure, as well as the mechanisms for ideological mobilisation, motivation and training are now located abroad, the progressive whittling down of R&AW's operational capacities in these countries has consequences that are nothing short of disastrous. 

The Saxena Committee report remains, predictably, 'secret', and the entire set of its recommendations are not in the public domain. Secrecy-- essential for the operation of intelligence agencies -- has now become a shroud under which these very agencies are being stifled, and being denied the very capacities to act professionally and in the national interest, with no avenues of redress. 

A GoM had approved the Saxena Committee's recommendations over seven years ago. It is time, at least, for another GoM to make a quick and objective appraisal of the implementation of these recommendations over this long interregnum, factor in the escalated threats and additional requirements, and specifically identify the bottlenecks that have prevented implementation over these long years, to the grievous detriment of national security. 

Such deficits at the centre are infinitely compounded by the infirmities of thepolicing and intelligence systems in the states. Peaceful States like Rajasthan are invariably caught off-guard by the first wave of terrorist attacks, because thepolice and intelligence apparatus is simply not trained or oriented to deal with such threats. In any event, India is enormously under-policed andintelligence establishments in most states are, at best, rudimentary. 

The police-population ratio for the whole country averages an abysmal 126 per 100,000-- a number that is grossly insufficient even to deal with basic policing, leave alone the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency activities that are becoming an increasing part of Police duties. Compare this with most Western countries-- infinitely better ordered and more law abiding societies than this fractious nation-- where this ratio normally ranges between 225 and 500 policemen per 100,000 population. 

The Rajasthan police is much worse off, with just 104 policemen per 100,000 population (as on December 31, 2006; Crime in India 2006, National Crime Records Bureau), well below the national average, and a police density (policemen per 100 square kilometres) of 19.1, as against a national average of 44.4. 

Police leadership deficits also afflict most states -- and Rajasthan has a deficits of 31.8 per cent in the ranks of Director General, Additional Director General, Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General; 28 per cent in the ranks of Senior Superintendent of Police, Superintendent of Police, Additional Superintendent of Police and Deputy Superintendent of Police; and 19.6 per cent in the ranks of Inspector, Sub-Inspector and Assistant Sub-Inspector (as on December 31, 2006).

These quantitative deficits are vastly augmented by qualitative deficiencies in manpower profile, training, equipment, technical and technological aids, orientation and mandate, with a cumulative effect that leaves the bulk of the Indianpolice forces firmly rooted in the 19th rather than in the 21st Century. 

None of this should be unknown to the national and state political executive. Nevertheless, despite committee after committee that has variously documented these shortcomings and recommended sweepingpolice and intelligence reforms over the decades, policing has been doggedly neglected (though policemen have been repeatedly denigrated and blamed) by regime after regime, securing fitful and fleeting attention in the aftermath of major terrorist incidents or security debacles, but quickly brushed under the carpet thereafter.

One thing is certain within this scenario of criminal political neglect -- no amount of'cooperation' and 'coordination' between centre and states, and no number of new committees and conferences can diminish the risk of terrorist attack across India. Unless the structural infirmities and manpower and material deficits ofIndia's policing and intelligence systems are addressed, terrorist strikes will continue to occur with impunity, and our leaders will continue with their habitual fits of breast-beating and finger pointing.

Ajai Sahni is Editor, SAIR; Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management.Courtesy, South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal