Intelligence Oversight

Two issues that grabbed the headlines in the last few weeks occurred on two different continents. In the United Kingdom, the internal security service, MI 5 saw a successful end to their investigations in 2003-04 -- a large-scale investigation into a terrorist conspiracy known as the 'fertiliser plot' -- so-called because a group of individuals planned to detonate a fertiliser-based explosive device in the UK. 
 
What grabbed the headlines was the revelation that MI 5 (or the Security Service as it is known today) had chanced upon two men -- Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer -- who would later emerge as the bombers who played the lead role in the July 7 train bombing in London. As the headlines reacted predictably, there was a Parliamentary Committee set up to investigate the apparent "failures" and a key recommendation that emerged from the deliberations was that MI5 should have share the details of its investigation with the Special Branch, a key aspect of the security establishment that guards the United Kingdom against threats such as terrorism. 
 
In India, a parallel debate was raging when the Gujarat CID arrested three top officers of the Gujarat and Rajasthan police for an alleged fake encounter. The arrested police officers had allegedly killed a man and his wife in a "fake encounter" and had passed them off as "terrorists". 
 
The debate that followed were broadly on the following lines: 
 
Those who approved of the arrests argued:

• That the human rights and the constitutional guarantee of the right to life had been ignored by these police officers
• This episode is endemic of the rot that has set into the policing system in this country
• This will fan further sectarian violence

Those who approved of the accused police officers argue:

• This is the best way to fight terrorism because India is a "soft nation"
• Those killed in the alleged "fake encounters" were "proven" criminals
• The police officers are being unfairly hounded for doing their duty
• That arrest of the police officers is anti-national and will dilute the fight against terror
• That the best way to fight terror is to use the "bullet-for-bullet" approach
• That the arrested policemen displayed "exemplary" courage in doing what they did

On both sides of the debate, the one issue that was missing was the debate on intelligence. 
 
Most experts agree that intelligence today, is the first and perhaps, the only line of defence against terrorism -- that good, actionable intelligence will help pre-empt a terrorist attack. But in India, such matters are rarely discussed in the public discourse, and if there is any discussion following a major failure (such as Kargil), then it is rarely debated and, worse, quickly forgotten.  Which is unfortunate, because intelligence, by nature, may be secretive but is largely participatory. The question is can you gather intelligence in isolation? And that is the fate of our intelligence gathering mechanism today. Which is why, instead of being at the vanguard of the war against terror, it has been reduced to play a supportive role in most states.  Which is why, when encounter specialists emerge, many feel that they are the answer to a system that does not respond to new-age threats such as terrorism. But do they achieve much, or anything at all? 

While a senior police officer told Outlook recently that encounters are necessary, if required, the point is, how many encounters will it take to suppress an armed insurgency, or a terror outfit? While many suggest the success in dealing with insurgency in Punjab as a case for the "bullet-for bullet’ theory, it ignores a major fact that insurgency lost popular support in the state. That sounded the death-knell of the Khalistan movement rather than the encounter-specialists who did a questionable job. 

A few months ago, while researching for an article on intelligence, I spoke to a former additional secretary who had served in the cabinet secretariat with great distinction. His response was "I never speak or discuss matters pertaining to intelligence in India."  It is an interesting response considering the fact that India's intelligence community is incestuous at a certain level, therefore, detrimental to its ability to be dynamic and progressive. Most retired bureaucrats who have served in either of the intelligence services will write reams about how our neighbouring states are a threat to us, but will rarely write on what can be done to counter that threat by our intelligence agencies. They will analyse world or regional events threadbare, but will rarely talk or even hint at the systemic failures within our system that exposes us to external or internal threats. 
 
In the lack of such soul-searching within the public domain, our intelligence set up continues to function without any oversight or performance-oriented auditing. As a result, the system throws up short-term methods such as "encounter specialists" who serve a purpose but cause more harm, sometimes irreparable, to the system than good. 
 
Most argue that intelligence, being secretive, cannot be put under credible oversight. But in democracies such as the United States of America as well as the United Kingdom the US Senate and the British Parliament have committees that have extensive budgetary as well as operational control over the intelligence agencies. In fact, within the US Senate there is a group of eight senators who have access to the highest and most secretive intelligence available in the land so as to determine whether the budgets have been justified by the quality of intelligence that has been produced in that particular year. 
 
In India, many will argue that even the idea of such an oversight committee in Parliament is absurd. Can we really trust our otherwise "corrupt" politicians with such sensitive data? 
 
But aren't the intelligence agencies already under the de-facto control of the politicians? After all, isn't the Intelligence Bureau answerable to the Home Minister and isn't the R&AW answerable to the Prime Minister's secretariat? Wouldn't it be preferable to expand the ambit of control a little more to ensure that an independent body, such as a parliamentary committee conducts an objective oversight of these agencies? 
 
After all, we do vote for the same politicians, and willingly accept any law that they have debated in Parliament. We approach the same politicians when we differ with them on policy issues, and depend upon them to be the architects of such lofty notions such as "foreign policy". We proudly point out to all and sundry that we are a democratic society and nation where civilian control over the military is taken for granted in sharp contrast to our Western neighbors… 
 
The case for parliamentarians could go and on, but the fact is, they already have access and oversight to intelligence, and a capacity to misuse the existing apparatus. Instead, wouldn’t it be better to give them an oversight role that also makes the misuse of intelligence that much more difficult and the intelligence gathering apparatus accountable?  
 
Which is why, is it too much to ask for such a Parliamentary committee, sworn to secrecy, that could ask a Director of Intelligence Bureau (DIB), for example, to explain why despite having passed a budget for Rs 1000 crores the IB failed to warn against the train bombings or the terrorist attack in busy marketplace in Delhi and other such simple questions? Instead, only the Home Minister, the National Security Advisor or the Prime Minister gets to ask these questions, far from public scrutiny, and the debate ends there, within the four walls of North and South Block in a maze of opaqueness that would make Stalinist Russia look like a free-wheeling democracy. 
 
Every member that I met from the intelligence community voices a single frustration: Lack of funds, decisions and  recognition of the work that they do. They also point out how nepotism has now become the hallmark of progress within the agencies. If that is the case, what is the quantum of harm that it is doing to the security establishment from within? 

The IB has similar tales to tell. Take the case of the Multi Agency Centre, (MAC) set up in 2000 to coordinate with state intelligence set ups as well as to set up a comprehensive database on terrorists and other suspects. Little attention has been paid to its growth and it has continued to languish for years. While this may seem trivial, these efforts prove critical in the war against terror. 

While India has faced an armed insurgency for nearly 55 years, it has rarely looked at conflict management as a holistic subject from an official perspective. In western democracies, their intelligence agencies make substantial investments in conflict management as well as resolution along with an army of think-tanks to lend credible support. In India, neither do we have a coordinated approach, nor do we adopt a system that is dynamic enough to recognise this need. Instead, archaic methods of intelligence gathering continue to dominate our intelligence and security apparatus. This is more obvious when dealing with internal security challenges, such as the growth of Naxalism, which, is an issue dealing more with the failure of governance in the affected states, rather than a law and order problem. 

At the end of the day, every successful terrorist attack means that citizens of India, who have a right to life as guaranteed by the Constitution, die. Where is the accountability from the system that is essentially designed to protect that citizen? Instead, we have encounter specialists whose presence has engineered a debate that takes away from the real issue. Just because our intelligence and our police systems is in such a dire need for an overhaul, should we use questionable methods that lets the system continue to rot? 

That is the debate that should have been alive as the first arrests were made. That is the debate that has gripped the United Kingdom and its media as MI 5, on its official website, has attempted to explain, displaying a maturity that is rare in the sub-continent. Even as we come to grips with the encounter specialists, in another Asian country, Israel, the Winograd Commission is making Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet's life miserable for his apparent failures during the Lebanon war.

And in India, we have already forgotten the Kargil war, the recommendations of its several task forces and the several agencies it set up. In our short public memory, these are issues best left untouched.