None of the post mortems of the Pathankot attack seem to agree with each other. Variously they blame the Army, the Air Force, the NSG commandos, and the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. While allocation of blame is an important part of fixing the system, the problem in India usually is that blame fixing substitutes for concrete institutional fixes. It is important therefore to understand the tactical and strategic shortcomings that culminated in the Pathankot attack.
The Tactical
The first thing that becomes apparent is we do not have a well drilled reflexive response to major terror events. Consider how many of the shortcomings of Mumbai on 26/11/2008 have still not been overcome even 8 years later. India’s response to the Mumbai attacks was a clumsy mix of confused command chains, jurisdictional and territorial disputes, and multiple counter terrorism or law enforcement outfits unable to coordinate with each other, with different operating procedures, inadequate equipment and inadequate training.
India’s response to the Pathankot attacks seem to have fixed some of these shortcomings but not all. Clearly in this particular case, the turf and jurisdictional rivalries that bogged down the Mumbai response do not seemed to have played out operationally seemingly because of a powerful NSA taking charge of the situation. Consequently, these turf battles had to be fought out in the press through anonymous sources blaming everyone else except themselves. However this still leaves us with the reality of a deeply dysfunctional system that was able to gather its wits and fight back purely because of one person at the top, rather than because it had morphed into a well-heeled, comprehensive and reflexive system that should have happened after Mumbai. The problem then in blaming the NSA for botching up the operation, assumes that it would have gone smoothly had it not been for his meddling, ignoring the fact that there seems to have been almost no improvement in equipment, training or coordination since 26/11. For example what exactly was the NSA meant to do or how was he responsible for Airbase security not getting its act together even when advance warning of the attack had been given, but not adequately absorbed?
Blaming the NSA for not fixing that situation in the one and half years he has been in office, rests on more solid ground. The problem in India seems to be we do not follow the dictum of “train as you fight and fight as you train”. Consequently training exercises tend to be staged exercises with almost no variables - much like a mediaeval joust between horseback knights. These highly artificial and contrived scenarios have their utility further eroded when they are practiced as stand alones instead of being full-fledged multi agency exercises they should be.
The second problem seems specific to the air force in that we have not seemed to have asked ourselves the difficult questions regarding Air Base security. The American’s learnt this at a very high cost during the Tet offensive in Vietnam where insurgent attacks inflicted heavy damage on air force attacks. The fact remains that to this day our Air Force has not conducted large scale simulation exercises of an insurgent attack on air bases and working out the multiple vulnerabilities. Further the fact that 3 high beam spotlights that should have focussed on the periphery of the air base were turned away from their target is an indication of the laxity with which such “improbables” are treated.
This begs a far more serious question – that of the security of our nuclear stockpile. Group think is that a terrorist attack on our nuclear assets are improbable leading to laxity, we have scant to no evidence of realistic simulated nuclear installation defence exercise, ample evidence of turf and jurisdictional battles on the periphery defence of these installations. The Pathankot attacks simply prove murphy’s law that if things can go wrong they will, and with our base defences – be it air or nuclear there are more unanswered questions and disheartening evidence to prove that all is clearly not well.
The Strategic
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The assumption that General Raheel Sharif was on board the “peace process” was the biggest intelligence failure that was exposed by the Pathankot operation. This was a combination of many factors including a) inadequate penetration of the Pakistan high command by our intelligence, b) internal reports being unduly influence by a self-reinforcing press that only saw the signs it wanted to and c) Deliberate disinformation. The last – the campaign of disinformation wasn’t just from Pakistan but also from the Americans. A few months back a senior US official on a visit to India talking to young security professionals stated unambiguously that “Raheel wants peace, he is both Seedha (straight) and Sharif (decent)”.
The signs if anyone bothered to see were writ large. Raheel Sharif visited DC in early 2015 he reportedly in private meetings equated normalisation with India to surrender on Kashmir. While this meeting and its contents are unverified, he made the exact same remarks to the UK Staff College in London in October 2015. The author has confirmed the contents of this speech through several sources present in the auditorium at the time – an audience which included 3 Indian serving military officers who either did not understand or report the significance of such a statement. If they did, it was clearly lost in the system.
To its credit it was again US scholars that saw and predicted signs of a JEM attack in August 2015. Dr Christine Fair writing in India today had explained that Pakistan’s operation Zarb-E-Azb was in effect the platform for a “ghar wapsi” of JEM cadres – weaned back from the Pakistani Taliban. The effect of this was that stabilising Pakistan’s internal security, is fundamentally dependent on turning these Jihadis outwards and undermining the internal stability of Afghanistan or India. Sadly this is a zero sum equation – one that our own intelligence failed to pick up on.
Conclusion
It is now imperative that we do not get bogged down in nit-picking and settling organisational scores. The Americans unlearnt the lessons of 1968 Vietnam and relearnt it at great cost in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s. India’s imperatives have to be similarly clear – the counter terrorism infrastructure has to be changed from a personality based system to a more institutionalised system. The dangerously contrived “simulations” our security services enact need to be replaced with a clear “fight as you train and train as you fight” philosophy. And finally we cannot have a self-reinforcing public opinion based approach to intelligence analysis.
Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is an independent defence analyst. He has coordinated the National Security at the Observer Research Foundation & been visiting fellow at Sandia National Laboratories and the Stimson Centre. He writes about defence policy, technology & defence cooperation on his blog, Tarkash, a part of Business Standard's platform, Punditry.
Abhijit tweets as @abhijit_iyer