INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.520
B.RAMAN
Like the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has evolved in less than a year from a bunch of suicide bombers to a conventional army capable of set-piece, stand and fight battles with the Pakistani Army and para-military forces. This conversion has been facilitated by the recruitment of a large number of retired Pashtun ex-servicemen living in the Pashtun tribal belt in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in the Malakand Division of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The Swat Valley and the Buner District, less than a hundred kms from Islamabad, which was occupied by the TTP earlier this week without any resistance from the local security forces, form part of the Malakand Division.
2. The agreement signed earlier this year by the coalition Government in the NWFP headed by the Awami National Party (ANP) with Sufi Mohammad of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-a-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), which is a constituent unit of the TTP, for the introduction of Sharia courts covers the entire Division, consisting of seven districts and not just Swat. Now that the agreement, despite strong criticism from abroad, has been got approved by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani by the National Assembly and signed by President Asif Ali Zardari, the TNSM has lost no time in expanding its control to areas of the Malakand Division outside Swat. The occupation of the Buner district is the beginning. The occupation of the other districts will follow.
3. What should be of great concern to both India and the US is that the TTP, which was seen till recently as merely a collection of young suicide bombers with limited capability for territorial control and dominance through conventional forces, has started demonstrating that it has evolved into a conventional army, which can fight, occupy and administer territory. Thus, the TTP has evolved into a mirror image of the Neo Taliban. It shares with the Neo Taliban its objective of fighting for the defeat of the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, it has its own independent agenda of expanding its territorial and ideological dominance to other areas of the Pashtun belt in the NWFP initially and then to non-Pashtun areas. The Neo Taliban does not approve of this independent agenda, but does not oppose it actively.
4. The Pakistan Army headed by Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, its Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), has shown neither the will nor the inclination to counter the advance of the TTP and then roll it back. It is not Kayani’s worries about what could happen on the Indian border, which have come in the way of a vigorous response to the TTP’s military advance. It is his worries over the continuing loyalty of the Pashtun soldiers, who constitute about 20 per cent of the Army, and of the Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary, which are responsible for his anxiety and keenness to make peace with the TTP. The Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary consist predominantly of Pashtun soldiers recruited in the FATA and the NWFP, officered by deputationists from the Army. These units have been showing less and less inclination to fight the TTP. They have been either avoiding a confrontation with the TNSM and the TTP or in some cases just deserting and surrendering to the TTP units.
5. According to reliable sources in the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), it is pressure from an alarmed Kayani to reach an accommodation with the TNSM and the TTP, which set in motion the negotiations with Sufi Mohammad and the developments that have followed. The Army and the para-military forces have already conceded territorial control to the TTP in the FATA and in the Malakand Division of the NWFP. By re-locating his forces and by reducing the Army’s presence in these areas already under the domination of the TNSM and the TTP, Kayani is reportedly hoping to prevent an ingress of the Pakistani Taliban into other parts of the NWFP and beyond.
6. The objectives of the TTP are presently limited to ideological unity of all Muslims in Pakistan based on the Sharia and the ethnic unity of all the Pashtuns in the Af-Pak region to wage a relentless jihad against the US-led NATO forces till they vacate Afghanistan. It has the motivation and intention to extend its ideological influence to non-Pashtun areas too, but is not yet in a position to establish territorial dominance in those areas. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of Altaf Hussain apprehends that the TTP wants to set up a strong presence in Karachi, which has the largest Pashtun community in Pakistan after Peshawar.
7. Confronted with the worsening ground situation in the NWFP and with the danger of a possible collapse of the strategy of President Barack Obama even before it was taken up for implementation, the US is acting like a cat on a hot tin roof. There have been understandable cries of alarm not only from Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, and Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, but also from White House spokesmen. Cries of alarm and the preparation of yet another national intelligence estimate on Pakistan alone will not help. What is urgently required is a national intelligence estimate on US policy-making towards Pakistan, which has been leading it from one critical situation to another.
8. A study of the course of US policy-making would show how those Pakistani leaders who are toasted one day as frontline allies against extremism and terrorism turn out to be either accomplices of terrorism or capitulators to terrorists and extremists the next day. Pervez Musharraf belonged to the first category. Zardari belongs to the second. Despite nearly 60 years of close US interactions with the political and military leaderships in Pakistan, the US has not been able to acquire any enduring influence over policy-making circles in Islamabad. The US has very little to show in terms of changed policies in Islamabad in return for its unending pampering of successive regimes in Islamabad with the injection of more and more money and military equipment. The time has come to stop pampering, but there is a reluctance in the Obama Administration---as there was in the preceding Bush Administration--- to do so due to fears that a stoppage of US assistance and pampering may result in a failed state with the control of its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the jihadis.
9. Unfortunately, the situation in Pakistan has reached a stage where the outcome---ultimate jihadi control of the State and its nuclear arsenal--- may be the same whatever the US does----whether it continues pampering or stops doing so. It is a thankless dilemma. It is easy to criticize the US strategy or the lack of it, but difficult to suggest a viable alternative. The starting point of an alternative strategy has to be a cordon sanitaire around the areas already under the control of the TTP and a crash programme for the economic development of the Pashtun areas not yet controlled by the Taliban. Obama’s plans to spend billions of dollars in the areas of the FATA already under the control of Al Qaeda and the Taliban would produce no enduring results except to waste the US taxpayers’ money. This money should be better spent on immunizing those areas where the influence of the Taliban has not yet spread.
10. An equally important point of the strategy should be to step up the US Predator strikes in the FATA and to extend them to Swat in order to keep the Al Qaeda and Taliban elements running for cover all the time and make it difficult for them to plan new strikes and get them executed.
11. The third point of the strategy should be to restore to the Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan its original role of primacy as the internal intelligence and internal security agency of Pakistan. Over the years, the IB has been reduced to the position of a powerless appendage of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its top ranks militarized through the induction of serving and retired military officers. This has to be reversed.
12. These are medium and long-term measures, which would take time to produce results. The questions requiring an immediate response is how to protect Pakistan from itself. How to stop the advance of the Taliban? How to confront it ideologically? For this purpose, the US needs objective allies in Pakistan. It has none so far. It has been working through opportunistic allies in the army and the political parties. They will accept all the money from the US, but will not produce results.
13. The objective allies have to be found in the Pashtun community. All the talk in Washington DC about their being good Taliban and bad Taliban is ridiculous. But there are good Pashtuns and bad Pashtuns. The US should urgently identify the good Pashtuns and encourage and help them to take up the fight against the Taliban ideologically. After the elections in Pakistan in March last year, I had pointed out that the ANP, which came to power in Peshawar, was a party of good Pashtuns and that the US should work through it, forgetting its past links with the Communists in Afghanistan and the erstwhile USSR. I was given to understand that a couple of ANP leaders did visit Washingtin DC, but beyond that nothing further was done. Now the ANP-led Government in Peshawar has conceded ideological victory to the TNSM in Swat. Despite this, the US should persist with cultivating it and other good Pashtun elements in parties such as the Pakhtoonkwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP) of Mehmood Khan Achakzai. They constitute the progressive component of the Pashtun community and they need to be strengthened and encouraged to counter the Taliban. The present US policy of depending on repeatedly failed elements in the Army and in the mainstream political parties is not working. The regional Pashtun forces have to be encouraged to take up the fight against the Taliban.
14. The survival of Al Qaeda in the FATA and the rise and spread of the TTP are due to support from large sections of the Pashtun community. The resistance to them has to come from the Pashtun community. It cannot come from the likes of Zardari, Gilani and Kayani. ( 24-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, the Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Thursday, April 23, 2009
THE APPROACHING END OF A DREADED TIGER
B.RAMAN
( Written at the request of the “Hindustan Times” , New Delhi )
The decisive defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which is ferociously fighting probably its last battle in a small piece of land (about 20 sq. kms) with little chance of winning it, is partly due to the follies of Prabakaran, its chief, during the last four years and partly due to the determined and ruthless manner in which the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have carried out their operations.
2. Among his follies, one could mention his split with Karuna, the legendary conventional fighter from the Eastern Province and his followers, his increasing reliance on terrorism after the desertion of the conventional fighters led by Karuna and his working for the defeat of Ranil Wickremasinghe, former Prime Minister, in the Presidential election in November, 2005, which was won by Mahinda Rajapaksa.
3.During its existence, the LTTE had developed a capability for conventional warfare as well as for spectacular acts of terrorism. Its best conventional fighters came from the Eastern Province and many of its suicide terrorists from the Northern Province. Unhappiness among the conventional fighters that the suicide bombers from the North were accorded greater importance and honours by Prabakaran led to their desertion under Karuna’s leadership. Karuna helped the Sri Lankan Army in its operations against the LTTE.
4. Deprived of the strong conventional capability, the LTTE increasingly relied on terrorism and intimidatory attacks by its small fleet of aircraft in its fight against the Armed Forces. Its reliance on terrorism at a time when the international community was developing a policy of zero tolerance for terrorism after 9/11 deprived it of even the little public and political support which it had enjoyed in the West. The European Union countries declared it a terrorist organization and took vigorous action to stop its gun running.
5. No Sri Lankan leader was more sympathetic to the aspirations of the Tamils than former President Chandrika Kumaratunge and Wickremasinghe. The latter was prepared to concede in a large measure the political demands of the LTTE within a federal set-up. If Prabakaran had responded positively to the gestures from Wickremasinghe, the latter would have enabled the LTTE to retain control of the territory which it had occupied and given it a measure of autonomy in return for the LTTE giving up its demand for an independent Tamil Eelam.
6. Prabakaran, who had an inflated belief in his own prowess and in the perceived invincibility of the LTTE, spurned his gestures and worked for his defeat in the Presidential elections. His calculation that Rajapaksa would be a weak and indecisive President, whose Sinhalese extremism would further polarise relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, proved terribly wrong.
7. Rajapaksa turned out to be one of the strongest and clear-headed Presidents Sri Lanka has had. He came to office determined to defeat the LTTE as an insurgent and terrorist organization first before addressing the aspirations of the Tamils. He gave his armed forces the wherewithal in terms of money and equipment to enable them defeat the LTTE. He also resisted international pressure to reach a political accommodation with the LTTE. He was determined that the political accommodation will be with the Tamils after the defeat of the LTTE and not with the LTTE.
8. The improved morale and capabilities of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have definitely contributed to their remarkable success in relentlessly rolling back the LTTE from the areas controlled by it, but this success was facilitated by the ruthless use of air strikes against the LTTE.
9.Did Indian assistance also contribute to the success of the SL Armed Forces? The Government of India denies having given any offensive equipment and training to the SL Armed Forces, but Sri Lankan officers and leaders have themselves been saying that the success of their Armed Forces was made possible by Indian assistance. The failure of the Government of India to counter these claims has created growing suspicions not only among the Sri Lankan Tamils, but also among sections of the people of Tamil Nadu that the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh has not been very straightforward and that it had given more assistance to Sri Lanka than it has admitted.
10.The LTTE’s brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 created a revulsion for it in Tamil Nadu. If it has since managed to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of some sections of public opinion in Tamil Nadu, the Manmohan Singh Government and its senior functionaries cannot escape the responsibility for it. The failure of the Government to condemn the air strikes and its seeming helplessness in the face of the humanitarian disaster affecting over 200,000 Tamils have cast it considerable public support in Tamil Nadu and made support for the Sri Lankan Tamils once again a popular cause. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by the LTTE has been forgotten.
11. People tend to compare what they perceive as Manmohan Singh’s helpless attitude in the face of the repeated rejection by the Rajapaksa Government of the requests for a humanitarian approach to Rajiv Gandhi’s action in sending the Indian Air Force to drop humanitarian supplies to the Tamils despite strong criticism of the Indian action not only by the SL authorites, but also by the international community.
12. What next after the defeat of the LTTE? Rajapaksa has been repeatedly promising that he would address the aspirations of the Tamils for greater political and economic rights. Will a bloated Army and the Sinhalese extremist elements allow him to keep his word even if he wants to or will he, egged on by his army, try to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils? One has to keep one’s fingers crossed. (23-4-2009)
(The writer is former Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India. )
( Written at the request of the “Hindustan Times” , New Delhi )
The decisive defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which is ferociously fighting probably its last battle in a small piece of land (about 20 sq. kms) with little chance of winning it, is partly due to the follies of Prabakaran, its chief, during the last four years and partly due to the determined and ruthless manner in which the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have carried out their operations.
2. Among his follies, one could mention his split with Karuna, the legendary conventional fighter from the Eastern Province and his followers, his increasing reliance on terrorism after the desertion of the conventional fighters led by Karuna and his working for the defeat of Ranil Wickremasinghe, former Prime Minister, in the Presidential election in November, 2005, which was won by Mahinda Rajapaksa.
3.During its existence, the LTTE had developed a capability for conventional warfare as well as for spectacular acts of terrorism. Its best conventional fighters came from the Eastern Province and many of its suicide terrorists from the Northern Province. Unhappiness among the conventional fighters that the suicide bombers from the North were accorded greater importance and honours by Prabakaran led to their desertion under Karuna’s leadership. Karuna helped the Sri Lankan Army in its operations against the LTTE.
4. Deprived of the strong conventional capability, the LTTE increasingly relied on terrorism and intimidatory attacks by its small fleet of aircraft in its fight against the Armed Forces. Its reliance on terrorism at a time when the international community was developing a policy of zero tolerance for terrorism after 9/11 deprived it of even the little public and political support which it had enjoyed in the West. The European Union countries declared it a terrorist organization and took vigorous action to stop its gun running.
5. No Sri Lankan leader was more sympathetic to the aspirations of the Tamils than former President Chandrika Kumaratunge and Wickremasinghe. The latter was prepared to concede in a large measure the political demands of the LTTE within a federal set-up. If Prabakaran had responded positively to the gestures from Wickremasinghe, the latter would have enabled the LTTE to retain control of the territory which it had occupied and given it a measure of autonomy in return for the LTTE giving up its demand for an independent Tamil Eelam.
6. Prabakaran, who had an inflated belief in his own prowess and in the perceived invincibility of the LTTE, spurned his gestures and worked for his defeat in the Presidential elections. His calculation that Rajapaksa would be a weak and indecisive President, whose Sinhalese extremism would further polarise relations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils, proved terribly wrong.
7. Rajapaksa turned out to be one of the strongest and clear-headed Presidents Sri Lanka has had. He came to office determined to defeat the LTTE as an insurgent and terrorist organization first before addressing the aspirations of the Tamils. He gave his armed forces the wherewithal in terms of money and equipment to enable them defeat the LTTE. He also resisted international pressure to reach a political accommodation with the LTTE. He was determined that the political accommodation will be with the Tamils after the defeat of the LTTE and not with the LTTE.
8. The improved morale and capabilities of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces have definitely contributed to their remarkable success in relentlessly rolling back the LTTE from the areas controlled by it, but this success was facilitated by the ruthless use of air strikes against the LTTE.
9.Did Indian assistance also contribute to the success of the SL Armed Forces? The Government of India denies having given any offensive equipment and training to the SL Armed Forces, but Sri Lankan officers and leaders have themselves been saying that the success of their Armed Forces was made possible by Indian assistance. The failure of the Government of India to counter these claims has created growing suspicions not only among the Sri Lankan Tamils, but also among sections of the people of Tamil Nadu that the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh has not been very straightforward and that it had given more assistance to Sri Lanka than it has admitted.
10.The LTTE’s brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 created a revulsion for it in Tamil Nadu. If it has since managed to rehabilitate itself in the eyes of some sections of public opinion in Tamil Nadu, the Manmohan Singh Government and its senior functionaries cannot escape the responsibility for it. The failure of the Government to condemn the air strikes and its seeming helplessness in the face of the humanitarian disaster affecting over 200,000 Tamils have cast it considerable public support in Tamil Nadu and made support for the Sri Lankan Tamils once again a popular cause. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by the LTTE has been forgotten.
11. People tend to compare what they perceive as Manmohan Singh’s helpless attitude in the face of the repeated rejection by the Rajapaksa Government of the requests for a humanitarian approach to Rajiv Gandhi’s action in sending the Indian Air Force to drop humanitarian supplies to the Tamils despite strong criticism of the Indian action not only by the SL authorites, but also by the international community.
12. What next after the defeat of the LTTE? Rajapaksa has been repeatedly promising that he would address the aspirations of the Tamils for greater political and economic rights. Will a bloated Army and the Sinhalese extremist elements allow him to keep his word even if he wants to or will he, egged on by his army, try to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils? One has to keep one’s fingers crossed. (23-4-2009)
(The writer is former Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India. )
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
AFTER THE LTTE, WHAT?
B.RAMAN
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is in its death rattle. It was decisively defeated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces weeks ago, but a handful of its leadership headed by Prabhakaran has cynically and cruelly prolonged the agony of the Tamil civilians by using them as a buffer and human-shield in order to delay the re-establishment of the writ of the Sri Lankan Government in a miniscule piece of territory (about 20 sq.kms), which has been declared by the Government as a no-fire zone to avoid collateral casualties among the civilians still under the control of the LTTE and to enable them to escape from the clutches of the LTTE.
2. Prabhakaran is a leader with a split personality. During the 26 years he has dominated the Tamil landscape in Sri Lanka, he had shown a remarkable organizing capacity and an ability to motivate his followers to perform virtual miracles. His motivating his cadres to acquire a capability for action by air and sea would go down in the history of insurgency and terrorism as indicating an organizing capability of a high order. The LTTE under his leadership managed to bring almost the entire Tamil-inhabited territory in the Northern and Eastern Provinces under its control. The determined manner in which the LTTE fought against the Indian-Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s and frustrated its efforts to defeat it spoke highly of its capabilities for a conventional warfare.
3.If Prabhakaran had the activities of the LTTE confined to conventional warfare and developed the LTTE as a purely insurgent force, which targeted only the armed forces and not innocent civilians, he would have acquired greater support from the international community for the Tamil cause. The rational side of his personality as illustrated by his organizing capabilities had to constantly contend with a highly irrational side, which drove him to simultaneously take to terrorism of a shockingly brutal kind.
4. The targeted killings by the LTTE of many Sri Lankan Tamil leaders, who were perceived by Prabhakaran as possible impediments to his rise as the unquestioned leader of the Tamil community, and its brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 were the outcome of the irrational side of his personality. No other Indian leader had done more to help the Sri Lankan Tamil cause than Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Only a sickly and sickening irrational mind could have ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and Laxman Kadirgamar, a highly-respected Tamil leader, who was a senior adviser on foreign policy to former President Chandrika Kumaratunge. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on Prabhakaran’s orders shocked Indian public opinion----including public opinion in Tamil Nadu--- and weakened Indian support for the Tamil cause. The assassination of Kadirgamar shocked the Western public opinion and led to the declaration of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the Western world, thereby denying the last vestiges of Western support for the Tamil cause.
5.As the LTTE faced one defeat after another during the last three years from the Sri Lankan Armed Forces---initially in the Eastern Province and finally in the Northern Province---- the irrational side of Prabhakaran’s personality erased his rational side. His shocking use of the Tamil civilians in order to delay the final end of the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaign undertaken by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces is driven by this irrational streak in him, which now dominates his personality.
6. The prolonged agony of the Sri Lankan Tamils caused by the final bout of Prabhakaran’s irrationality and loss of lucidity in thinking has to be ended. The Sri Lankan Armed Forces, which have shown patience till now and deliberately slowed down their operations, cannot be faulted if they have come to the conclusion that the time has come to liberate the no-fire zone too from the clutches of the LTTE by undertaking limited operations with small arms and ammunition even at the risk of some collateral casualties to the civilians.
7. The desperate attempt of Prabhakaran to use the civilians to protect himself from the advancing Sri Lankan Army can be attributed to the total loss of lucidity in his thinking and his consequent inability to face the bitter truth that he and his organization have been defeated decisively by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and that there is no chance of their staging a come-back. The Requiem for the LTTE could be written without fears of going wrong, should the LTTE stage a come-back as it had done on occasions in the past. It has been defeated beyond recovery. His conventional as well as terrorist capabilities are in shatters. Earlier conventional wisdom that small groups of the LTTE might still be able to keep indulging in sporadic acts of terrorism in different parts of Sri Lanks needs re-consideration. His desperate delaying action at the cost of immense suffering to the Tamils, whose cause he claims to espouse, is meant to give him an opportunity to seek safe sanctuary either in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere from where he could try to re-start his fight against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. It is in the common interest of India and Sri Lanka that Prabhakaran is finally able to make peace with his Maker by either being killed by the Armed Forces or by taking his own life. A defeated Prabhakaran, if left alive in India or elsewhere, would not be a threat, but could be a nuisance for both the countries.
8. After the final death of the LTTE, which is expected any day, what is the future of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Would a Requiem for the LTTE also mean a Requiem for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Hopefully not. It is in India’s interest that the LTTE as a terrorist organization is destroyed once and for all, but it is not in India’s interest that the Sri Lankan Government and Armed Forces proceed from the destruction of the LTTE to the destruction of the Tamil aspirations for greater political and economic rights in their traditional homeland and for greater human dignity.
9. Let us not forget that ever since our independence in 1947, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan, the Balochs and Sindhis of Pakistan and the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India’s natural allies. It was this reality which persuaded Indira Gandhi to assist the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan to achieve their independence. Even though successive Governments in New Delhi refrained from supporting the causes of the Sindhis and the Balochs, Indian public opinion sympathized and continues to sympathise with their cause. It was sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause at New Delhi when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and in Tamil Nadu, which induced India to take up their cause in the 1980s.
10.There is no reason why India should not pride itself and seek to be the paramount power of the region. To emerge and remain as the paramount power, we need natural allies in the region around us. We should not let the legitimate aspirations of our natural allies---whether they be the Sindhis and Balochs of Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamils--- be crushed by a brutal regime--- whether in Islamabad or in Colombo.
11. Since 1947, the Balochs rose twice in revolt in favour of independence for their homeland. On both occasions, they were defeated by the Pakistani Armed Forces as decisively as the LTTE by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. The Pakistani leadership brutally used the Air Force against the Balochs to crush their freedom struggle. Undaunted by this, the Baloch people, under a new leadership, rose in revolt for a third time two years ago and their third war of independence is still going on.
12. The remarkable victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the LTTE was partly due to their improved counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism capabilities made possible by Indian assistance in the form of training and sharing of intelligence and partly due to their emulating the Pakistani Armed forces in the brutal use of the Air Force against people whom they portray as their own. Just as the Balochs were defenceless against the brutal Pakistani air strikes, the Sri Lankan Tamils were defenceless against the Sri Lankan air strikes.
13. The US has used air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan----but in foreign territory and against foreign nationals. Only three countries in the world have used air strikes in their own territory against their own people---- the Pakistanis against the Balochs, the Russians against the Chechens and the Sri Lankans against the Tamils.
14. President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly promised that once the LTTE is defeated, he would be generous in meeting the political aspirations of the Tamils. He gives the impression of being a sincere man, but will the Sinhalese Army with its head bloated by its success against the LTTE allow him to do so? The indicators till now are not encouraging. Many Sri Lankan officers might have been trained in India, but their mindset and their attitude towards the minorities have more in common with those of their Pakistani counterparts than with those of their Indian counterparts. Therein lies the danger that after winning the war against the LTTE, the Government, strongly influenced by a victorious army, might trey to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils.
15. If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community and it has drawn the right lessons from the brutalities of the LTTE.
16. The LTTE is deservedly dying, but long live the Tamil cause. (22-4-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is in its death rattle. It was decisively defeated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces weeks ago, but a handful of its leadership headed by Prabhakaran has cynically and cruelly prolonged the agony of the Tamil civilians by using them as a buffer and human-shield in order to delay the re-establishment of the writ of the Sri Lankan Government in a miniscule piece of territory (about 20 sq.kms), which has been declared by the Government as a no-fire zone to avoid collateral casualties among the civilians still under the control of the LTTE and to enable them to escape from the clutches of the LTTE.
2. Prabhakaran is a leader with a split personality. During the 26 years he has dominated the Tamil landscape in Sri Lanka, he had shown a remarkable organizing capacity and an ability to motivate his followers to perform virtual miracles. His motivating his cadres to acquire a capability for action by air and sea would go down in the history of insurgency and terrorism as indicating an organizing capability of a high order. The LTTE under his leadership managed to bring almost the entire Tamil-inhabited territory in the Northern and Eastern Provinces under its control. The determined manner in which the LTTE fought against the Indian-Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in the late 1980s and frustrated its efforts to defeat it spoke highly of its capabilities for a conventional warfare.
3.If Prabhakaran had the activities of the LTTE confined to conventional warfare and developed the LTTE as a purely insurgent force, which targeted only the armed forces and not innocent civilians, he would have acquired greater support from the international community for the Tamil cause. The rational side of his personality as illustrated by his organizing capabilities had to constantly contend with a highly irrational side, which drove him to simultaneously take to terrorism of a shockingly brutal kind.
4. The targeted killings by the LTTE of many Sri Lankan Tamil leaders, who were perceived by Prabhakaran as possible impediments to his rise as the unquestioned leader of the Tamil community, and its brutal assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 were the outcome of the irrational side of his personality. No other Indian leader had done more to help the Sri Lankan Tamil cause than Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Only a sickly and sickening irrational mind could have ordered the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and Laxman Kadirgamar, a highly-respected Tamil leader, who was a senior adviser on foreign policy to former President Chandrika Kumaratunge. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on Prabhakaran’s orders shocked Indian public opinion----including public opinion in Tamil Nadu--- and weakened Indian support for the Tamil cause. The assassination of Kadirgamar shocked the Western public opinion and led to the declaration of the LTTE as a terrorist organization by the Western world, thereby denying the last vestiges of Western support for the Tamil cause.
5.As the LTTE faced one defeat after another during the last three years from the Sri Lankan Armed Forces---initially in the Eastern Province and finally in the Northern Province---- the irrational side of Prabhakaran’s personality erased his rational side. His shocking use of the Tamil civilians in order to delay the final end of the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism campaign undertaken by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces is driven by this irrational streak in him, which now dominates his personality.
6. The prolonged agony of the Sri Lankan Tamils caused by the final bout of Prabhakaran’s irrationality and loss of lucidity in thinking has to be ended. The Sri Lankan Armed Forces, which have shown patience till now and deliberately slowed down their operations, cannot be faulted if they have come to the conclusion that the time has come to liberate the no-fire zone too from the clutches of the LTTE by undertaking limited operations with small arms and ammunition even at the risk of some collateral casualties to the civilians.
7. The desperate attempt of Prabhakaran to use the civilians to protect himself from the advancing Sri Lankan Army can be attributed to the total loss of lucidity in his thinking and his consequent inability to face the bitter truth that he and his organization have been defeated decisively by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and that there is no chance of their staging a come-back. The Requiem for the LTTE could be written without fears of going wrong, should the LTTE stage a come-back as it had done on occasions in the past. It has been defeated beyond recovery. His conventional as well as terrorist capabilities are in shatters. Earlier conventional wisdom that small groups of the LTTE might still be able to keep indulging in sporadic acts of terrorism in different parts of Sri Lanks needs re-consideration. His desperate delaying action at the cost of immense suffering to the Tamils, whose cause he claims to espouse, is meant to give him an opportunity to seek safe sanctuary either in Tamil Nadu or elsewhere from where he could try to re-start his fight against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. It is in the common interest of India and Sri Lanka that Prabhakaran is finally able to make peace with his Maker by either being killed by the Armed Forces or by taking his own life. A defeated Prabhakaran, if left alive in India or elsewhere, would not be a threat, but could be a nuisance for both the countries.
8. After the final death of the LTTE, which is expected any day, what is the future of the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Would a Requiem for the LTTE also mean a Requiem for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause? Hopefully not. It is in India’s interest that the LTTE as a terrorist organization is destroyed once and for all, but it is not in India’s interest that the Sri Lankan Government and Armed Forces proceed from the destruction of the LTTE to the destruction of the Tamil aspirations for greater political and economic rights in their traditional homeland and for greater human dignity.
9. Let us not forget that ever since our independence in 1947, the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan, the Balochs and Sindhis of Pakistan and the Tamils of Sri Lanka have been India’s natural allies. It was this reality which persuaded Indira Gandhi to assist the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan to achieve their independence. Even though successive Governments in New Delhi refrained from supporting the causes of the Sindhis and the Balochs, Indian public opinion sympathized and continues to sympathise with their cause. It was sympathy for the Sri Lankan Tamil cause at New Delhi when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister and in Tamil Nadu, which induced India to take up their cause in the 1980s.
10.There is no reason why India should not pride itself and seek to be the paramount power of the region. To emerge and remain as the paramount power, we need natural allies in the region around us. We should not let the legitimate aspirations of our natural allies---whether they be the Sindhis and Balochs of Pakistan or the Sri Lankan Tamils--- be crushed by a brutal regime--- whether in Islamabad or in Colombo.
11. Since 1947, the Balochs rose twice in revolt in favour of independence for their homeland. On both occasions, they were defeated by the Pakistani Armed Forces as decisively as the LTTE by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces. The Pakistani leadership brutally used the Air Force against the Balochs to crush their freedom struggle. Undaunted by this, the Baloch people, under a new leadership, rose in revolt for a third time two years ago and their third war of independence is still going on.
12. The remarkable victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces against the LTTE was partly due to their improved counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism capabilities made possible by Indian assistance in the form of training and sharing of intelligence and partly due to their emulating the Pakistani Armed forces in the brutal use of the Air Force against people whom they portray as their own. Just as the Balochs were defenceless against the brutal Pakistani air strikes, the Sri Lankan Tamils were defenceless against the Sri Lankan air strikes.
13. The US has used air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan----but in foreign territory and against foreign nationals. Only three countries in the world have used air strikes in their own territory against their own people---- the Pakistanis against the Balochs, the Russians against the Chechens and the Sri Lankans against the Tamils.
14. President Mahinda Rajapakse has repeatedly promised that once the LTTE is defeated, he would be generous in meeting the political aspirations of the Tamils. He gives the impression of being a sincere man, but will the Sinhalese Army with its head bloated by its success against the LTTE allow him to do so? The indicators till now are not encouraging. Many Sri Lankan officers might have been trained in India, but their mindset and their attitude towards the minorities have more in common with those of their Pakistani counterparts than with those of their Indian counterparts. Therein lies the danger that after winning the war against the LTTE, the Government, strongly influenced by a victorious army, might trey to impose a dictated peace on the Tamils.
15. If the angry Tamils once again look up to India, there is no reason why we should not reciprocate provided a new leadership emerges in the Tamil community and it has drawn the right lessons from the brutalities of the LTTE.
16. The LTTE is deservedly dying, but long live the Tamil cause. (22-4-2009)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-Mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Sunday, April 19, 2009
TERRORISM & ELECTIONS
B.RAMAN
As we have been facing a grave problem of insurgencies and terrorism of different hues----jihadi, ideological, ethnic and separatist--- in different parts of the country since 1947, one would have expected a serious and professional debate on insurgency,terrorism, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism during the election campaign---- particularly from the Congress (I) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The expectations have been belied.
2.There has been hardly any meaningful debate, which has been trivialised by both the Congress (I) and the BJP. Personal attacks and exchanges of mutual recriminations and ridicule of a highly personalised nature by both the parties have become one of the defining characteristics of the election campaign. While the Congress(I)'s campaign has been marked by false projections and assertions with a cover-up of the failure of the Governments at the Centre and in Mumbai to prevent the terrorist attack in Mumbai from November 26 to 29,2008, the campaign of the BJP has been rich in rhetoric and negative with almost the entire focus being on the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) by the Congress (I) led coalition and its perceived reluctance to carry out the death sentence passed by a court on Afzal Guru for his role in the attack on the Indian Parliament House on December 13,2001.
3.It is surprising that the BJP and other Hindutva organisations,which like to project themselves as strong on counter-terrorism, have not been able to come out with positive ideas as to how to deal with the threat. Their approach has been more tactical and denunciatory than strategic and reflective. The result: the public is none the wiser as to what changes it could expect from any new coalition Government that might come to power after the elections.
4. The various insurgencies confronting the country since 1947----whether the tribal insurgencies in the North-East or the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insugencies in the tribal belt in Central India--- started during the long Congress (I) rule between 1947 and 1977. While the Congress (I) was able to find a political solution to the insurgencies in Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura, it has been totally at its wit's end in dealing with the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insurgency, which continues to gather strength and adherents and spread its area of political influence and territorial dominance despite tall claims by the intelligence and security agencies of eliminating many Maoist cells.
5. After the Congress (I) came to power at the head of a coalition in 2004, it had set up a special task force of the party headed by one of its Members of Parliament (MP) from Andhra Pradesh to recommend a strategy on counter-insurgency in the Naxalite-infected areas.Its report-- for whatever its worth--- has been gathering dust without implementation. The Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, has made more statements and issued more warnings on the threat posed to internal security and our economic progress by the unchecked activities of the Naxalites (Maoists) than on the threat posed by the Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terrorists. From this, one would have thought that his
Government would have come out with at least a workable counter-insurgency strategey to deal with the Naxalites since the so-called vote bank politics does not operate in their case.Surprisingly, the statements and warnings of the Prime Minister have not been translated into concrete action on the ground.
6.During the 28 years that have seen terrorism emerge as the most serious threat to internal security, the Congress (I) has been in power for 18 years---from 1980 to 89, from 1991 to 96 and now since 2004. During this period, the BJP was in power for six years from 1998 to 2004. Other coalitions headed by V.P Singh,Chandrasekhar, Dev Gowda and Inder Gujral were in power during the remaining four years.
7. Khalistani terrorism, the ethnic terrorism of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the Pakistan-sponsored separatist-cum-religious terrorism of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) started when the Congress (I) was in power due to the mishandling of the grievances of some sections of the Sikh community in Punjab and in the Sikh diaspora abroad and of the grievances of sections of the Assamese students over the Government's failure to take action against the hundreds of thousands (now millions) of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh into Assam. The ground work for the proxy war of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in J&K started when the Congress (I) was in power before 1989. This proxy war started in J&K when the V.P.Singh-led coalition, which had the support of the BJP,was in power in 1989-90 and it acquired momentum after the Congress(I) returned to power in 1991. The unchecked infiltration of Pakistani terrrorist organisations into J&K started in 1993 and it spread to other parts of India subsequently.
8. Both the Congress (I) and the BJP have to be held equally responsible for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India outside J&K starting from the Mumbai blasts of March 1993. The demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by a Hindutva mob in December,1992, acted as the trigger for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India..
9. The Congress (I) has to be held equally responsible because it was in power in New Delhi at the time of the demolition and its inaction in the face of reports and assessments that the Hindutva elements congregating in Ayodhya might target the Masjid indirectly facilitated the demolition. The role of the BJP was public knowledge,but not the negligence of the Congress (I) Government led byNarasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister. He failed to act on the advice of his senior bureaucrats to dismiss the UP Government and impose the President's rule in order to protect the Masjid.
10.While the Congress (I) has to be blamed for the birth and growth of terrorism in many parts of the country, it has had a better record than other governments in dealing with terrorism after it started threatening the country. The credit for the petering-out of Khalistani terrorism in Punjab and the bringing under some control of the indigenous terrorism backed by the ISI in J&K should largely go to the Governments headed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
11 There were eight hijackings of aircraft of the Indian Airlines to Pakistan by terrorists when Indira Gandhi was in power--- seven by the Khalistani terrorists and one by the Jammu & Kashmir LiberationFront (JKLF).She refused to concede the demands of the hijackers in any of these cases. Similarly, she refused to concede the demand of the JKLF kidnappers who kidnapped Ravi Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted at the Indian Assistant High Commission in Birmingham, in 1983for the release of Maqbool Butt, who had been sentenced to death for an act of terrorism, The terrorists killed Mhatre. She retaliated by having the death sentence on Maqbool Butt carried out. The only instance of weakness by a Congress (I) Government was in not taking action against the terrorists responsible for occupying the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar in 1993. They were allowed to escape into Pakistan by Narasimha Rao in return for their agreeing to lift the siege.
12.The Congress (I)'s Prime Ministers---- Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao---realised the importance of covert action by the intelligence community to counter Pakistan's proxy war. They had a well though-out strategy for countering Pakistan's proxy war. Covert action formed an important component of this strategy. It played an important role in countering the ISI's designs in Punjab. This
capability was reportedly wound up by Inder Gujral when he was the Prime Minister in 1997.It should also be underlined that in 1993 Narasimha Rao had succeeded in having Pakistan declared as a suspected state-sponsor of terrorism by the Clinton Administration --- though only for six months.
13.The BJP's record in dealing with insurgency and terrorism, when it was in power between 1998 and 2004, was marked by the mishandling of the hijacking of an IAC aircraft to Kandahar by terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) in December 1999, which led to the release of three notorious terrorists from detention of whom one MaulanaMasood Azhar later founded the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) and another Omar Sheikh had Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, kidnapped and murdered in Karachi. Maulana Azhar released by the BJP-led Government later played an important role in the conspiracy to attack the Parliament House.
14. In the history of Indian counter-terrorism, there have been two instances of pathetic surrender to the terrorists by the Government.The first was in 1989 when the V.P.Singh Government shockingly surrendered to the demands of the indigenous Kashmiri terrorists to release some terrorists under detention in order to secure the release of the daughter of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the then Home Minister, who had been kidnapped by the terrorists. The second was in 1999 when the BJP-led Government agreed to release three terrorists---two of themPakistani nationals--- to secure the release of the IAC passengers.
15. However, I would blame more the bureaucrats in the national security establishment under the BJP-led Government than A.B.Vajpayee,the then Prime Minster, L.K.Advani, the then Home Minister, and Jaswant Singh, the then Minister for External Affairs, for the Kandahar fiasco. The bureaucrats were responsible for ensuring that the aircraft was not taken by the hijackers to a hostile territory where commando action would not be possible. They failed to do so.Once they mishandled the hijacking and allowed the aircraft to reach Kandahar, no commando action was possible because Kandahar is in hostile territory and Pakistan would not have allowed an Indian plane carrying commandoes to overfly its territory. As a result of thismishandling by the bureaucrats, the BJP leadership was in the unenviable position of having no other option but to swap the three terrorists for the release of over 100 innocent passengers. Manmohan Singh has been less than honest in comparing his action in sending commandoes to Mumbai during the terrorist attack of November,2008, to the BJP's failure to send the commandoes to Kandahar. Mumbai is in Indian territory, but Kandahar is in hostile foreign territory. A commando raid in Kandahar was out of the question.
16.The BJP, when in power, failed to implement its pre-election promise to issue a White Paper on the ISI's proxy war in India and to have Pakistan declared as a state-sponsor of terrorism. What was more,the security bureaucracy was surprised by the BJP-led Government's decision not to reverse the decision of Gujral to wind up the covert action capability.
17. Against this, the BJP's dubbing the Congress (I) led Government as soft in dealing with terrorism would hardly carry conviction. All political parties without exception mishandled counter-terrorism.They viewed terrorism not as a national threat to be countered with determination but as a political weapon to be exploited for partisan purposes.
18. There was a consistency of firmness in the policies of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao in dealing with Pakistan. Such a consistency was missing in the policies of the Government led by Vajpayee as well as its successor Government headed by Manmohan Singh. Both of them followed a policy of "kabi garam, kabi naram"(sometimes tough, sometimes soft). Vajpayee's decisions to go to Lahore in February 1999 to meet Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister,and to invite Pervez Musharraf to India in 2001 and take him on a high-profile visit to Agra for talks were taken without consulting the intelligence community on the implications of the decisions on the ground situation. Both the visits ended in an embarrassing fiasco.
19. It swung to the other extreme after the attack on the Parliament House in December 2001 and confronted Pakistan with the threat of a war by mobilising the Armed Forces and keeping them in the mobilised state for nearly 10 months without achieving any results on the ground. The anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in February 2002 after the massacre of some Hindu pilgrims travelling by train at Godhra allegedly by some Muslims and widespread perceptions in India and abroad of conscious inaction by the Narendra Modi Government in the initial stages deprived the Vajpayee Government of any moral high ground in its confrontation with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism.The Muslim anger over the riots added fuel to jihadi terrorism.
20. The much tauted coercive diplomacy with a doubtful outcome was followed by another swing by the agreement reached by Vajpayee with Musharraf in Islamabad in January 2004 under which Pakistan agreed that it would not support any terrorism emanating from Pakistani and Pakistan-controlled territory. The BJP-led Government mishandled the overtures for peace talks from a section of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) in 2001.This section had got tired of terrorism. This mishandling enabled the Pakistan-based leadership of the HM to identify and eliminate the members of this section.
21.Manmohan Singh's record in dealing with Pakistan on the terrorism issue was no better than that of the Vajpayee Government.He swung to the soft extreme when he signed an agreement with Musharraf at Havana in September,2006, for setting up a joint mechanism for dealing with terrorism despite strong reservations from the security bureaucracy and non-Governmental security experts over the wisdom of this action.When he was embarrassed by the November,2008, terrorist attack, which was carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) from Pakistani territory at least with the complicity of the ISI, if not at its instance, he swung to the other extreme of coercive diplomacy There has been a meaningless debate between the Congress (I) and the BJP as to who has been more coercive in dealing with Pakistan. Neither has been as seen from the post-Mumbai surge in infiltrations into J&K by Pakistan-trained terrorists.
22.It must be said to the credit of P.Chidambaram, who took over as the Home Minister after the Mumbai attack, that of all the HomeMinisters since Rajesh Pilot, who was Minister of State for Internal Security under Narasimha Rao, he has shown greater lucidity and energy in dealing with at least Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, though his record against the ULFA and the Naxalites (Maoists) is yet to be felt on the ground.His strategy as unveiled in the beginning of April shows the beginnings of a professional approach... Please see the report in'The Hindu" of April 8,2009, titled "Congress Unveils Roadmap to Tackle Terror".
23. Some of the points in the road map such as the setting up of a Permanent Crisis Management Group ( a war room) and the preparation of an operating manual( a war book for counter-terrorism) are old ideas of R.N.Kao, when he was the Senior Adviser to Indira Gandhi before her assassination in October,1984. These ideas were evolved by Kao in the context of the then raging Khalistani terrorism. The idea of a better state of preparedness by the counter-terrorism community was originally Rajiv's. Other ideas in Chidambaram's strategy such as improving the rapid response capability, the concept of joint action in which all agencies are jointly responsible for dealing with terrorism and improving threat-level communication not only to various layers of the bureaucracy, but also to the public have been heavily borrowed from the post-9/11 counter-terrorism architecture set up by the Homeland Security Department of the US.Chidambaram has paid welcome attention to strengthening the number and capability of the police, in order to strengthen its role as the weapon of first resort against terrorism.
24. His strategy seeks to deal comprehensively with terrorism----particularly of the jihadi, Pakistan-sponsored kind--- as a threat to national security. The measures outlined by him are meant to deal with acts of terrorism----preventive as well as dealing with them when prevention fails. But it hardly speaks of measures to deal with terrorist organisations in order to impose a high rate of attrition on them. It was the success of the Sri Lankan counter-terrorism machinery in imposing such a high rate of attrition on the LTTE, which has contributed to its remarkable success against the LTTE. The attrition component is missing from Chidambaram's strategy.
25. Despite this, it is a good beginning and shows a professional approach to counter-terrorism. One would have expected such a professional approach to emerge from the BJP, which projects itself as having greater expertise and a greater number of experts in counter-terrorism. But one's hopes have been belied. Its entire thinking seems to be based on the belief that the re-introduction of the POTA and the execution of the death sentence on Afzal Guru would mark the death-knell of terrorism. It would not. There is more to counter-terrorism than additional powers for the Police, which are necessary, and deterrent punishments.
26. The inability of the Government to prevent the Mumbai 26/11 attack provided the BJP with a wonderful pre-election opportunity to analyse what went wrong in Mumbai and confront the Government with a professional debate on its sins of commission and omission. It has failed to grasp the opportunity.(20-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
As we have been facing a grave problem of insurgencies and terrorism of different hues----jihadi, ideological, ethnic and separatist--- in different parts of the country since 1947, one would have expected a serious and professional debate on insurgency,terrorism, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism during the election campaign---- particularly from the Congress (I) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The expectations have been belied.
2.There has been hardly any meaningful debate, which has been trivialised by both the Congress (I) and the BJP. Personal attacks and exchanges of mutual recriminations and ridicule of a highly personalised nature by both the parties have become one of the defining characteristics of the election campaign. While the Congress(I)'s campaign has been marked by false projections and assertions with a cover-up of the failure of the Governments at the Centre and in Mumbai to prevent the terrorist attack in Mumbai from November 26 to 29,2008, the campaign of the BJP has been rich in rhetoric and negative with almost the entire focus being on the abolition of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) by the Congress (I) led coalition and its perceived reluctance to carry out the death sentence passed by a court on Afzal Guru for his role in the attack on the Indian Parliament House on December 13,2001.
3.It is surprising that the BJP and other Hindutva organisations,which like to project themselves as strong on counter-terrorism, have not been able to come out with positive ideas as to how to deal with the threat. Their approach has been more tactical and denunciatory than strategic and reflective. The result: the public is none the wiser as to what changes it could expect from any new coalition Government that might come to power after the elections.
4. The various insurgencies confronting the country since 1947----whether the tribal insurgencies in the North-East or the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insugencies in the tribal belt in Central India--- started during the long Congress (I) rule between 1947 and 1977. While the Congress (I) was able to find a political solution to the insurgencies in Nagaland, Mizoram and Tripura, it has been totally at its wit's end in dealing with the left extremist or Naxalite (Maoist) insurgency, which continues to gather strength and adherents and spread its area of political influence and territorial dominance despite tall claims by the intelligence and security agencies of eliminating many Maoist cells.
5. After the Congress (I) came to power at the head of a coalition in 2004, it had set up a special task force of the party headed by one of its Members of Parliament (MP) from Andhra Pradesh to recommend a strategy on counter-insurgency in the Naxalite-infected areas.Its report-- for whatever its worth--- has been gathering dust without implementation. The Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, has made more statements and issued more warnings on the threat posed to internal security and our economic progress by the unchecked activities of the Naxalites (Maoists) than on the threat posed by the Pakistan-sponsored jihadi terrorists. From this, one would have thought that his
Government would have come out with at least a workable counter-insurgency strategey to deal with the Naxalites since the so-called vote bank politics does not operate in their case.Surprisingly, the statements and warnings of the Prime Minister have not been translated into concrete action on the ground.
6.During the 28 years that have seen terrorism emerge as the most serious threat to internal security, the Congress (I) has been in power for 18 years---from 1980 to 89, from 1991 to 96 and now since 2004. During this period, the BJP was in power for six years from 1998 to 2004. Other coalitions headed by V.P Singh,Chandrasekhar, Dev Gowda and Inder Gujral were in power during the remaining four years.
7. Khalistani terrorism, the ethnic terrorism of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and the Pakistan-sponsored separatist-cum-religious terrorism of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) started when the Congress (I) was in power due to the mishandling of the grievances of some sections of the Sikh community in Punjab and in the Sikh diaspora abroad and of the grievances of sections of the Assamese students over the Government's failure to take action against the hundreds of thousands (now millions) of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh into Assam. The ground work for the proxy war of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in J&K started when the Congress (I) was in power before 1989. This proxy war started in J&K when the V.P.Singh-led coalition, which had the support of the BJP,was in power in 1989-90 and it acquired momentum after the Congress(I) returned to power in 1991. The unchecked infiltration of Pakistani terrrorist organisations into J&K started in 1993 and it spread to other parts of India subsequently.
8. Both the Congress (I) and the BJP have to be held equally responsible for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India outside J&K starting from the Mumbai blasts of March 1993. The demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by a Hindutva mob in December,1992, acted as the trigger for the spread of jihadi terrorism to other parts of India..
9. The Congress (I) has to be held equally responsible because it was in power in New Delhi at the time of the demolition and its inaction in the face of reports and assessments that the Hindutva elements congregating in Ayodhya might target the Masjid indirectly facilitated the demolition. The role of the BJP was public knowledge,but not the negligence of the Congress (I) Government led byNarasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister. He failed to act on the advice of his senior bureaucrats to dismiss the UP Government and impose the President's rule in order to protect the Masjid.
10.While the Congress (I) has to be blamed for the birth and growth of terrorism in many parts of the country, it has had a better record than other governments in dealing with terrorism after it started threatening the country. The credit for the petering-out of Khalistani terrorism in Punjab and the bringing under some control of the indigenous terrorism backed by the ISI in J&K should largely go to the Governments headed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
11 There were eight hijackings of aircraft of the Indian Airlines to Pakistan by terrorists when Indira Gandhi was in power--- seven by the Khalistani terrorists and one by the Jammu & Kashmir LiberationFront (JKLF).She refused to concede the demands of the hijackers in any of these cases. Similarly, she refused to concede the demand of the JKLF kidnappers who kidnapped Ravi Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted at the Indian Assistant High Commission in Birmingham, in 1983for the release of Maqbool Butt, who had been sentenced to death for an act of terrorism, The terrorists killed Mhatre. She retaliated by having the death sentence on Maqbool Butt carried out. The only instance of weakness by a Congress (I) Government was in not taking action against the terrorists responsible for occupying the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar in 1993. They were allowed to escape into Pakistan by Narasimha Rao in return for their agreeing to lift the siege.
12.The Congress (I)'s Prime Ministers---- Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao---realised the importance of covert action by the intelligence community to counter Pakistan's proxy war. They had a well though-out strategy for countering Pakistan's proxy war. Covert action formed an important component of this strategy. It played an important role in countering the ISI's designs in Punjab. This
capability was reportedly wound up by Inder Gujral when he was the Prime Minister in 1997.It should also be underlined that in 1993 Narasimha Rao had succeeded in having Pakistan declared as a suspected state-sponsor of terrorism by the Clinton Administration --- though only for six months.
13.The BJP's record in dealing with insurgency and terrorism, when it was in power between 1998 and 2004, was marked by the mishandling of the hijacking of an IAC aircraft to Kandahar by terrorists of the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) in December 1999, which led to the release of three notorious terrorists from detention of whom one MaulanaMasood Azhar later founded the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) and another Omar Sheikh had Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, kidnapped and murdered in Karachi. Maulana Azhar released by the BJP-led Government later played an important role in the conspiracy to attack the Parliament House.
14. In the history of Indian counter-terrorism, there have been two instances of pathetic surrender to the terrorists by the Government.The first was in 1989 when the V.P.Singh Government shockingly surrendered to the demands of the indigenous Kashmiri terrorists to release some terrorists under detention in order to secure the release of the daughter of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the then Home Minister, who had been kidnapped by the terrorists. The second was in 1999 when the BJP-led Government agreed to release three terrorists---two of themPakistani nationals--- to secure the release of the IAC passengers.
15. However, I would blame more the bureaucrats in the national security establishment under the BJP-led Government than A.B.Vajpayee,the then Prime Minster, L.K.Advani, the then Home Minister, and Jaswant Singh, the then Minister for External Affairs, for the Kandahar fiasco. The bureaucrats were responsible for ensuring that the aircraft was not taken by the hijackers to a hostile territory where commando action would not be possible. They failed to do so.Once they mishandled the hijacking and allowed the aircraft to reach Kandahar, no commando action was possible because Kandahar is in hostile territory and Pakistan would not have allowed an Indian plane carrying commandoes to overfly its territory. As a result of thismishandling by the bureaucrats, the BJP leadership was in the unenviable position of having no other option but to swap the three terrorists for the release of over 100 innocent passengers. Manmohan Singh has been less than honest in comparing his action in sending commandoes to Mumbai during the terrorist attack of November,2008, to the BJP's failure to send the commandoes to Kandahar. Mumbai is in Indian territory, but Kandahar is in hostile foreign territory. A commando raid in Kandahar was out of the question.
16.The BJP, when in power, failed to implement its pre-election promise to issue a White Paper on the ISI's proxy war in India and to have Pakistan declared as a state-sponsor of terrorism. What was more,the security bureaucracy was surprised by the BJP-led Government's decision not to reverse the decision of Gujral to wind up the covert action capability.
17. Against this, the BJP's dubbing the Congress (I) led Government as soft in dealing with terrorism would hardly carry conviction. All political parties without exception mishandled counter-terrorism.They viewed terrorism not as a national threat to be countered with determination but as a political weapon to be exploited for partisan purposes.
18. There was a consistency of firmness in the policies of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao in dealing with Pakistan. Such a consistency was missing in the policies of the Government led by Vajpayee as well as its successor Government headed by Manmohan Singh. Both of them followed a policy of "kabi garam, kabi naram"(sometimes tough, sometimes soft). Vajpayee's decisions to go to Lahore in February 1999 to meet Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister,and to invite Pervez Musharraf to India in 2001 and take him on a high-profile visit to Agra for talks were taken without consulting the intelligence community on the implications of the decisions on the ground situation. Both the visits ended in an embarrassing fiasco.
19. It swung to the other extreme after the attack on the Parliament House in December 2001 and confronted Pakistan with the threat of a war by mobilising the Armed Forces and keeping them in the mobilised state for nearly 10 months without achieving any results on the ground. The anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in February 2002 after the massacre of some Hindu pilgrims travelling by train at Godhra allegedly by some Muslims and widespread perceptions in India and abroad of conscious inaction by the Narendra Modi Government in the initial stages deprived the Vajpayee Government of any moral high ground in its confrontation with Pakistan on the issue of terrorism.The Muslim anger over the riots added fuel to jihadi terrorism.
20. The much tauted coercive diplomacy with a doubtful outcome was followed by another swing by the agreement reached by Vajpayee with Musharraf in Islamabad in January 2004 under which Pakistan agreed that it would not support any terrorism emanating from Pakistani and Pakistan-controlled territory. The BJP-led Government mishandled the overtures for peace talks from a section of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) in 2001.This section had got tired of terrorism. This mishandling enabled the Pakistan-based leadership of the HM to identify and eliminate the members of this section.
21.Manmohan Singh's record in dealing with Pakistan on the terrorism issue was no better than that of the Vajpayee Government.He swung to the soft extreme when he signed an agreement with Musharraf at Havana in September,2006, for setting up a joint mechanism for dealing with terrorism despite strong reservations from the security bureaucracy and non-Governmental security experts over the wisdom of this action.When he was embarrassed by the November,2008, terrorist attack, which was carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) from Pakistani territory at least with the complicity of the ISI, if not at its instance, he swung to the other extreme of coercive diplomacy There has been a meaningless debate between the Congress (I) and the BJP as to who has been more coercive in dealing with Pakistan. Neither has been as seen from the post-Mumbai surge in infiltrations into J&K by Pakistan-trained terrorists.
22.It must be said to the credit of P.Chidambaram, who took over as the Home Minister after the Mumbai attack, that of all the HomeMinisters since Rajesh Pilot, who was Minister of State for Internal Security under Narasimha Rao, he has shown greater lucidity and energy in dealing with at least Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, though his record against the ULFA and the Naxalites (Maoists) is yet to be felt on the ground.His strategy as unveiled in the beginning of April shows the beginnings of a professional approach... Please see the report in'The Hindu" of April 8,2009, titled "Congress Unveils Roadmap to Tackle Terror".
23. Some of the points in the road map such as the setting up of a Permanent Crisis Management Group ( a war room) and the preparation of an operating manual( a war book for counter-terrorism) are old ideas of R.N.Kao, when he was the Senior Adviser to Indira Gandhi before her assassination in October,1984. These ideas were evolved by Kao in the context of the then raging Khalistani terrorism. The idea of a better state of preparedness by the counter-terrorism community was originally Rajiv's. Other ideas in Chidambaram's strategy such as improving the rapid response capability, the concept of joint action in which all agencies are jointly responsible for dealing with terrorism and improving threat-level communication not only to various layers of the bureaucracy, but also to the public have been heavily borrowed from the post-9/11 counter-terrorism architecture set up by the Homeland Security Department of the US.Chidambaram has paid welcome attention to strengthening the number and capability of the police, in order to strengthen its role as the weapon of first resort against terrorism.
24. His strategy seeks to deal comprehensively with terrorism----particularly of the jihadi, Pakistan-sponsored kind--- as a threat to national security. The measures outlined by him are meant to deal with acts of terrorism----preventive as well as dealing with them when prevention fails. But it hardly speaks of measures to deal with terrorist organisations in order to impose a high rate of attrition on them. It was the success of the Sri Lankan counter-terrorism machinery in imposing such a high rate of attrition on the LTTE, which has contributed to its remarkable success against the LTTE. The attrition component is missing from Chidambaram's strategy.
25. Despite this, it is a good beginning and shows a professional approach to counter-terrorism. One would have expected such a professional approach to emerge from the BJP, which projects itself as having greater expertise and a greater number of experts in counter-terrorism. But one's hopes have been belied. Its entire thinking seems to be based on the belief that the re-introduction of the POTA and the execution of the death sentence on Afzal Guru would mark the death-knell of terrorism. It would not. There is more to counter-terrorism than additional powers for the Police, which are necessary, and deterrent punishments.
26. The inability of the Government to prevent the Mumbai 26/11 attack provided the BJP with a wonderful pre-election opportunity to analyse what went wrong in Mumbai and confront the Government with a professional debate on its sins of commission and omission. It has failed to grasp the opportunity.(20-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Monday, April 13, 2009
THAI CONFRONTATION TAKES UGLY TURN
B.RAMAN
The unrelenting political confrontation between the supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, former Thai Prime Minister, now living in exile abroad and those opposed to him, which started in 2005 and led to a brief period of military rule in 2006-07, has taken a nastry turn. His supporters, who have been agitating in the streets of Bangkok since December,2008, for the resignation of Abhisit Vejjajiva , the PrimeMinister and fresh elections, managed to force the cancellation of an ASEAN summit with leaders from India, China and Japan at Pattaya on April 11,2009, despite the strong security measures taken by the Government. The cancellation of the summit has been widely interpreted as a major blow to the prestige of the Prime Minister, who had staked his personal reputation on the Government's ability to hold the summit as scheduled.
2. The expectations of the supporters of Thaksin that the Prime Minister would resign following this humiliation have been belied. On the contrary, the Prime Minister, who enjoys the support of Bangkok's political and business elite, which looks upon Thaksin as a rural upstart, has imposed a state of emergency, called out the army and directed the security forces to disperse the supporters of Thaksin,who have been gheroing (surrounding) the offices of the Prime Minister and some other Ministries since January. A few days ago, they even allegedly surrounded the houses of some Privy Councillors, who are advisers to His Majesty the King, who is highly respected by the people.This unprecedented act of defiance by the supporters of Thaksin came in for strong criticism, but despite this the protesters have shown no signs of relenting in their agitation against the Prime Minister.
3.The Army's attempts to disperse the protesters and arrest their leaders have been resisted by the supporters of Thaksin, leading to at least two reported instances of controlled firing by the Army on the protesters after midnight on April 12. Seventy of the protesters are reported to have been injured. There are no reports of any fatalities.In a message from his exile to his supporters, Thaksin is reported to have warned of a revolution, if the Government uses force against his supporters.
4. The political confrontation, which was triggered off by allegations of arbitrary and corrupt governance by Thaksin and his erratic style of functioning when he was the Prime Minister twice before the military coup of September,2006, has been made worse by the divide between Bangkok and rural Thailand. The Bangkok elite,which has always exercised like the Parisian elite of France, a disproportionately large influence over the country's political landscape despite its numerical minority, had difficulty in accepting a leader, who owed his political rise and survival to the support of the rural poor and not to the elite of the capital. Thaksin is Thailand's Laloo Prasad Yadav, a regional and rural leader, who has consistently ridiculed and challenged the urban elite's pretension to superior wisdom and right to govern the country.
5.Thaksin, an ex-policeman of Chinese origin, who himself came from Chiangmai in the rural north, gravitated to politics from the world ofbusiness, where he had made a name as Thailand's telecom tycoon after leaving the police. He tried to introduce into the corridors of the Government the lessons on efficiency and success which he had learnt in the corporate world. Even his worst critics admit that his contribution to improving governmental efficiency and the resulting economic prosperity was considerable. For a tycoon from the corporate world, he showed more sensitivity to the welfare and problems of the rural and urban poor than any professional politician had done in the past.
6. What undid him despite this was the widespread perception in Bangkok of nepotism and corruption and his seeming disregard for the rules of the democratic game. The overwhelming support of the rural poor for him and his ability to win elections with their support made him disregard the views and criticism of the urban elite, which united against him in 2005 to start a long period of street agitation in the name of good and democratic governance free of the evils associated with his tenure.
7. They projected his continuance in politics as incompatible with good and democratic governance and boycotted the parliamentary elections of April, 2006, which robbed the elections of any constitutional validity despite his securing a majority for his Thai Ruk Thai party. He made a temporary exit from the post of Prime Minister in order to satiate the opposition and make it amenable to participation in a fresh election, scheduled for November, 2006.
8. When the opposition agitation seemed to have started losing steam as a result of his temporary exit, he resumed charge again as the caretaker Prime Minister, thereby provoking them again into a state of confrontation. It was the intervention of the King, who is venerated by the entire country, which managed to restore a semblance of balance to political life in the country. But this did not change his ways of functioning. The on-again, off-again political confrontation between him and the opposition and his chronic inability to change his style of functioning endangered political stability in Thailand, creating fears of its likely negative impact on its prosperous economy.
9. In the face of this confrontation between the Bangkok elite and the rural "aam admi" (common people), who solidly stood behind Thaksin,who has done more for the rural poor than any other Bangkok-centric political leader, the Army intervened in September,2006, and took over power after dismissing Thaksin, when he was away to New York to attend a UN session. He went into exile in London, where his daughter lives.
10. The army, which held power for a little more than a year, had the Constitution amended to make it difficult for Thaksin's party to return to power. It was got declared illegal due to corrupt practices.When fresh elections were held, the supporters of Thaksin, under a new name, managed to come back to power. Thaksin returned from exile and continued to guide his party without holding any position in the party or the Government.
11. His opponents struck back with a street agitation during which they occupied the Bangkok airport for 10 days last September. The Supreme Court intervened and the new party of Thaksin and many of its leaders were held guilty of corrupt practices. Thaksin managed to go into exile once again evading a warrant for his arrest on a charge of corruption and misuse of office. The Government of his supporters was replaced by a Government of his opponents headed by Abishit, aBritish-born Thai, who is the present Prime Minister.
12. The four-year-long confrontation between the Bangkok/urban opponents of Thaksin (known as the yellow shirts from the colour of the T-shirts they wear) and his rural supporters (known as the red shirts) is having a severe impact on the Thai economy, with tourism badly affected. Unless the elite of Bangkok reconciles itself to the political rise of the rural forces and accommodates them in the political structure of the country, this confrontation will not only continue, but will become nastier and unpredictable. The ultimate losers will be the urban elite. The impoverished rural masses have nothing to lose because they have nothing by way of prosperity.The Bangkok elite, which has prospered due to the economic development in the country since the 1990s, has much to lose if the confrontation takes an unpredictable turn. (13-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail:seventyone2@gmail.com )
The unrelenting political confrontation between the supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, former Thai Prime Minister, now living in exile abroad and those opposed to him, which started in 2005 and led to a brief period of military rule in 2006-07, has taken a nastry turn. His supporters, who have been agitating in the streets of Bangkok since December,2008, for the resignation of Abhisit Vejjajiva , the PrimeMinister and fresh elections, managed to force the cancellation of an ASEAN summit with leaders from India, China and Japan at Pattaya on April 11,2009, despite the strong security measures taken by the Government. The cancellation of the summit has been widely interpreted as a major blow to the prestige of the Prime Minister, who had staked his personal reputation on the Government's ability to hold the summit as scheduled.
2. The expectations of the supporters of Thaksin that the Prime Minister would resign following this humiliation have been belied. On the contrary, the Prime Minister, who enjoys the support of Bangkok's political and business elite, which looks upon Thaksin as a rural upstart, has imposed a state of emergency, called out the army and directed the security forces to disperse the supporters of Thaksin,who have been gheroing (surrounding) the offices of the Prime Minister and some other Ministries since January. A few days ago, they even allegedly surrounded the houses of some Privy Councillors, who are advisers to His Majesty the King, who is highly respected by the people.This unprecedented act of defiance by the supporters of Thaksin came in for strong criticism, but despite this the protesters have shown no signs of relenting in their agitation against the Prime Minister.
3.The Army's attempts to disperse the protesters and arrest their leaders have been resisted by the supporters of Thaksin, leading to at least two reported instances of controlled firing by the Army on the protesters after midnight on April 12. Seventy of the protesters are reported to have been injured. There are no reports of any fatalities.In a message from his exile to his supporters, Thaksin is reported to have warned of a revolution, if the Government uses force against his supporters.
4. The political confrontation, which was triggered off by allegations of arbitrary and corrupt governance by Thaksin and his erratic style of functioning when he was the Prime Minister twice before the military coup of September,2006, has been made worse by the divide between Bangkok and rural Thailand. The Bangkok elite,which has always exercised like the Parisian elite of France, a disproportionately large influence over the country's political landscape despite its numerical minority, had difficulty in accepting a leader, who owed his political rise and survival to the support of the rural poor and not to the elite of the capital. Thaksin is Thailand's Laloo Prasad Yadav, a regional and rural leader, who has consistently ridiculed and challenged the urban elite's pretension to superior wisdom and right to govern the country.
5.Thaksin, an ex-policeman of Chinese origin, who himself came from Chiangmai in the rural north, gravitated to politics from the world ofbusiness, where he had made a name as Thailand's telecom tycoon after leaving the police. He tried to introduce into the corridors of the Government the lessons on efficiency and success which he had learnt in the corporate world. Even his worst critics admit that his contribution to improving governmental efficiency and the resulting economic prosperity was considerable. For a tycoon from the corporate world, he showed more sensitivity to the welfare and problems of the rural and urban poor than any professional politician had done in the past.
6. What undid him despite this was the widespread perception in Bangkok of nepotism and corruption and his seeming disregard for the rules of the democratic game. The overwhelming support of the rural poor for him and his ability to win elections with their support made him disregard the views and criticism of the urban elite, which united against him in 2005 to start a long period of street agitation in the name of good and democratic governance free of the evils associated with his tenure.
7. They projected his continuance in politics as incompatible with good and democratic governance and boycotted the parliamentary elections of April, 2006, which robbed the elections of any constitutional validity despite his securing a majority for his Thai Ruk Thai party. He made a temporary exit from the post of Prime Minister in order to satiate the opposition and make it amenable to participation in a fresh election, scheduled for November, 2006.
8. When the opposition agitation seemed to have started losing steam as a result of his temporary exit, he resumed charge again as the caretaker Prime Minister, thereby provoking them again into a state of confrontation. It was the intervention of the King, who is venerated by the entire country, which managed to restore a semblance of balance to political life in the country. But this did not change his ways of functioning. The on-again, off-again political confrontation between him and the opposition and his chronic inability to change his style of functioning endangered political stability in Thailand, creating fears of its likely negative impact on its prosperous economy.
9. In the face of this confrontation between the Bangkok elite and the rural "aam admi" (common people), who solidly stood behind Thaksin,who has done more for the rural poor than any other Bangkok-centric political leader, the Army intervened in September,2006, and took over power after dismissing Thaksin, when he was away to New York to attend a UN session. He went into exile in London, where his daughter lives.
10. The army, which held power for a little more than a year, had the Constitution amended to make it difficult for Thaksin's party to return to power. It was got declared illegal due to corrupt practices.When fresh elections were held, the supporters of Thaksin, under a new name, managed to come back to power. Thaksin returned from exile and continued to guide his party without holding any position in the party or the Government.
11. His opponents struck back with a street agitation during which they occupied the Bangkok airport for 10 days last September. The Supreme Court intervened and the new party of Thaksin and many of its leaders were held guilty of corrupt practices. Thaksin managed to go into exile once again evading a warrant for his arrest on a charge of corruption and misuse of office. The Government of his supporters was replaced by a Government of his opponents headed by Abishit, aBritish-born Thai, who is the present Prime Minister.
12. The four-year-long confrontation between the Bangkok/urban opponents of Thaksin (known as the yellow shirts from the colour of the T-shirts they wear) and his rural supporters (known as the red shirts) is having a severe impact on the Thai economy, with tourism badly affected. Unless the elite of Bangkok reconciles itself to the political rise of the rural forces and accommodates them in the political structure of the country, this confrontation will not only continue, but will become nastier and unpredictable. The ultimate losers will be the urban elite. The impoverished rural masses have nothing to lose because they have nothing by way of prosperity.The Bangkok elite, which has prospered due to the economic development in the country since the 1990s, has much to lose if the confrontation takes an unpredictable turn. (13-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail:seventyone2@gmail.com )
Saturday, April 11, 2009
UK: FROM HOME-GROWN TO INFILTRATED JIHADIS
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.518
B.RAMAN
The arrests earlier this week by the British Police of 11 Pakistanis,who had reportedly come to the UK on student visas, during aninvestigation into a suspected plot for multiple terrorist attacks onsoft targets draw attention once again to possible threats fromlegitimate visitors to the UK . Residents of Pakistani origin in theUK ---characterised as home-made jihadis--- had played the lead rolein the terrorist strikes of July, 2005, in London and in the thwartedconspiracy discovered by the British Police in August,2006, to blow upa number of US-bound flights. The perpetrators or the intendedperpetrators had independently, on their own, decided to organise theattacks and those involved in the July,2005, attacks had then gone toPakistan for being trained in the fabrication of explosives fromcommonly available materials and using them in improvised explosivedevices (IEDs).
2. Threats from legitimate visitors to the UK---as distinguished frompermanent residents--- are not new. The attempted terrorist strikes inLondon and Glasgow in June 2007 saw the involvement of legitimatevisitors---one of them an Indian Muslim student who died of burnsafter a thwarted attempt to blow up the Glasgow airport. There was nodefinitive evidence to connect those involved in the London-Glasgowincidents with Pakistan.
3. The latest arrests are significant for the larger number ofsuspects involved and their arrival in the UK ostensibly for higherstudies with legitimate visas issued by the Britishdiplomatic/consular missions in Pakistan after due verification oftheir antecedents. The issue of the student visas to them would showthat they had not come to the adverse notice of the British earlier.
4. The investigation is in a very preliminary stage due to hasty,premature arrests of the suspects caused by a breach of security byAssistant Commissioner of Police Bob Quick, who carried openly in hisarm in a manner readable by journalists with powerful cameras adocument, which had reportedly summarised the reasons for thesuspicion against them. The Police officer admitted the breach ofsecurity committed which could have compromised the pre-arrestinvestigation and alerted the Pakistanis that they are underinvestigation. To pre-empt the persons figuring in the list fleeingthe country or going underground, the police organised hasty raids ata nember of places such as the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester,Liverpool and Clitheroe in Lancashire. The indications till now arethat the police were able to arrest all those suspected and that noone figuring in the compromised document has managed to evade arrest.
5. The resignation of the distinguished police officer and thesubsequent arrests have given rise to considerable media speculationregarding the nature of any plot in which the arrested suspects mighthave been involved. It has even been speculated that the arrestedpersons were planning to carry out simultaneous explosions at crowdedplaces during the Easter holidays.
6.From the acceptable indicators available so far, all one can saywith confidence is that the British technical intelligence hadprobably overheard these persons discussing among themselves whatappeared to be a terrorist plot. They had identified them, put themunder surveillance and were making enquiries about them. Before theseactions could be completed the breach of security by the policeofficer occurred forcing the police to pick up the 11 suspects evenbefore their investigation had made significant progress. As a result,while the police had been able to collect evidence of a possibleterror talk by the detained Pakistanis, they had not been able tocollect evidence which would show that the plot had progressed fromthe talk mode to the preparations mode. The interrogation of thedetained suspects should show whether the suspects had made anypreparations on the ground for making their talk a reality.
7. During the investigation, the British Police would, inter alia, befocussing on the following questions: To which part of Pakistan thesuspects belonged----tribal or non-tribal areas? Where did they studyin Pakistan? Had they known each other before coming to the UK orwhether they came to know each other after arriving in the UK? Didthey have any association with any fundamentalist or terroristorganisation in Pakistan? Which organisation contacted them topersuade them to volunteer themselves for the terrorist strikes? Hadthey been recruited for the terrorist plot before they left Pakistanor after their arrival in the UK? How were they planning to carry outthe strike---with explosives or hand-held weapons?
8. The past terrorist strikes or attempts in the UK were in anger forthe British role in Iraq. The anger has now dissipated. The Britishtroops have also started withdrawing from Iraq. Anger over the Britishrole in Iraq is, therefore, unlikely to have been the trigger.However,there is considerable anger in the Pashtun tribal belt in theAfghanistan-Pakistan region over the British role in southern andeastern Afghanistan. Next to the US, the UK is playing the most activerole in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Af-Pakregion---particularly in the Helmand provice of Afghanistan.
9.There is, therefore, a strong possibility that the plot thwarted atthe very beginning in the UK had its motivational origin in the Af-Paktribal belt. Sections of the British media have projected the plot asof Al Qaeda inspiration. For security reasons, Al Qaeda avoids directcontacts with Pakistanis either in the Af-Pak region or abroad. Itprefers to have them recruited through intermediaries such as theLashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), theHarkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) or theTehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). A direct Al Qaeda role in thethwarted London plot is of low possibility.
10. The LET, the HUM, the JEM and the HUJI have trans-nationalsleeper cell networks---- all of them across the sub-continent and inSouth-East and West Asia, the HUJI in Central Asia too and the LETand the HUM in the UK and the US too. The TTP did not have atrans-national network outside the Af-Pak region till the beginning oflast year---not even in India. Pashtun terrorists had never operatedoutside the Af-Pak region. The reported discovery by the SpanishPolice of a suspected sleeper cell owing loyalty to Baitullah Mehsud,the Amir of the TTP, in Barcelona in January,2008, was the firstreported instance of a TTP presence in the West. The London cell justunearthed by the British police may turn out to be the secondinstance.
11. As a result of the considerable tightening up of anti-explosivecontrols in the West and Australia by the Police with theco-operation of the public, terrorist attacks of the 2005 type arebecoming very difficult to organise. That is why the London-Glasgowplotters tried using gas/fuel cylinders. This option is stillavailable to the terrorists even in the West and Australia.
12. One has been seeing since the Mumbai terrorist attack of November26 to 29,2008, that mass casualties and mass publicity through themedia are becoming the driving force of terrorist attacks. It was soeven in respect of 9/11, but repeats of 9/11 have become verydifficult due to tightened physical security. Terrorists are revertingto commando-style attacks with hand-held weapons to achieve theseobjectives. After Mumbai, one had seen them doing this in Kabul,Lahore twice and in Kandahar.
13. Commando-style attacks with hand-held weapons are much easier toorganise in the West and Australia than attacks with IEDs. There ishardly any gun control in the US. Gun controls are stricter in othercountries, but the controls are not yet foolproof as one saw in arecent incident in Germany.If it is still easy for irrationalindividuals to play havoc with guns, how much easier it should be forwell-organised and well-motivated terrorists? That is a question whichshould worry counter-terrorism experts and which should call for theirfocussed attention. (12-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
The arrests earlier this week by the British Police of 11 Pakistanis,who had reportedly come to the UK on student visas, during aninvestigation into a suspected plot for multiple terrorist attacks onsoft targets draw attention once again to possible threats fromlegitimate visitors to the UK . Residents of Pakistani origin in theUK ---characterised as home-made jihadis--- had played the lead rolein the terrorist strikes of July, 2005, in London and in the thwartedconspiracy discovered by the British Police in August,2006, to blow upa number of US-bound flights. The perpetrators or the intendedperpetrators had independently, on their own, decided to organise theattacks and those involved in the July,2005, attacks had then gone toPakistan for being trained in the fabrication of explosives fromcommonly available materials and using them in improvised explosivedevices (IEDs).
2. Threats from legitimate visitors to the UK---as distinguished frompermanent residents--- are not new. The attempted terrorist strikes inLondon and Glasgow in June 2007 saw the involvement of legitimatevisitors---one of them an Indian Muslim student who died of burnsafter a thwarted attempt to blow up the Glasgow airport. There was nodefinitive evidence to connect those involved in the London-Glasgowincidents with Pakistan.
3. The latest arrests are significant for the larger number ofsuspects involved and their arrival in the UK ostensibly for higherstudies with legitimate visas issued by the Britishdiplomatic/consular missions in Pakistan after due verification oftheir antecedents. The issue of the student visas to them would showthat they had not come to the adverse notice of the British earlier.
4. The investigation is in a very preliminary stage due to hasty,premature arrests of the suspects caused by a breach of security byAssistant Commissioner of Police Bob Quick, who carried openly in hisarm in a manner readable by journalists with powerful cameras adocument, which had reportedly summarised the reasons for thesuspicion against them. The Police officer admitted the breach ofsecurity committed which could have compromised the pre-arrestinvestigation and alerted the Pakistanis that they are underinvestigation. To pre-empt the persons figuring in the list fleeingthe country or going underground, the police organised hasty raids ata nember of places such as the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester,Liverpool and Clitheroe in Lancashire. The indications till now arethat the police were able to arrest all those suspected and that noone figuring in the compromised document has managed to evade arrest.
5. The resignation of the distinguished police officer and thesubsequent arrests have given rise to considerable media speculationregarding the nature of any plot in which the arrested suspects mighthave been involved. It has even been speculated that the arrestedpersons were planning to carry out simultaneous explosions at crowdedplaces during the Easter holidays.
6.From the acceptable indicators available so far, all one can saywith confidence is that the British technical intelligence hadprobably overheard these persons discussing among themselves whatappeared to be a terrorist plot. They had identified them, put themunder surveillance and were making enquiries about them. Before theseactions could be completed the breach of security by the policeofficer occurred forcing the police to pick up the 11 suspects evenbefore their investigation had made significant progress. As a result,while the police had been able to collect evidence of a possibleterror talk by the detained Pakistanis, they had not been able tocollect evidence which would show that the plot had progressed fromthe talk mode to the preparations mode. The interrogation of thedetained suspects should show whether the suspects had made anypreparations on the ground for making their talk a reality.
7. During the investigation, the British Police would, inter alia, befocussing on the following questions: To which part of Pakistan thesuspects belonged----tribal or non-tribal areas? Where did they studyin Pakistan? Had they known each other before coming to the UK orwhether they came to know each other after arriving in the UK? Didthey have any association with any fundamentalist or terroristorganisation in Pakistan? Which organisation contacted them topersuade them to volunteer themselves for the terrorist strikes? Hadthey been recruited for the terrorist plot before they left Pakistanor after their arrival in the UK? How were they planning to carry outthe strike---with explosives or hand-held weapons?
8. The past terrorist strikes or attempts in the UK were in anger forthe British role in Iraq. The anger has now dissipated. The Britishtroops have also started withdrawing from Iraq. Anger over the Britishrole in Iraq is, therefore, unlikely to have been the trigger.However,there is considerable anger in the Pashtun tribal belt in theAfghanistan-Pakistan region over the British role in southern andeastern Afghanistan. Next to the US, the UK is playing the most activerole in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the Af-Pakregion---particularly in the Helmand provice of Afghanistan.
9.There is, therefore, a strong possibility that the plot thwarted atthe very beginning in the UK had its motivational origin in the Af-Paktribal belt. Sections of the British media have projected the plot asof Al Qaeda inspiration. For security reasons, Al Qaeda avoids directcontacts with Pakistanis either in the Af-Pak region or abroad. Itprefers to have them recruited through intermediaries such as theLashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), theHarkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) or theTehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). A direct Al Qaeda role in thethwarted London plot is of low possibility.
10. The LET, the HUM, the JEM and the HUJI have trans-nationalsleeper cell networks---- all of them across the sub-continent and inSouth-East and West Asia, the HUJI in Central Asia too and the LETand the HUM in the UK and the US too. The TTP did not have atrans-national network outside the Af-Pak region till the beginning oflast year---not even in India. Pashtun terrorists had never operatedoutside the Af-Pak region. The reported discovery by the SpanishPolice of a suspected sleeper cell owing loyalty to Baitullah Mehsud,the Amir of the TTP, in Barcelona in January,2008, was the firstreported instance of a TTP presence in the West. The London cell justunearthed by the British police may turn out to be the secondinstance.
11. As a result of the considerable tightening up of anti-explosivecontrols in the West and Australia by the Police with theco-operation of the public, terrorist attacks of the 2005 type arebecoming very difficult to organise. That is why the London-Glasgowplotters tried using gas/fuel cylinders. This option is stillavailable to the terrorists even in the West and Australia.
12. One has been seeing since the Mumbai terrorist attack of November26 to 29,2008, that mass casualties and mass publicity through themedia are becoming the driving force of terrorist attacks. It was soeven in respect of 9/11, but repeats of 9/11 have become verydifficult due to tightened physical security. Terrorists are revertingto commando-style attacks with hand-held weapons to achieve theseobjectives. After Mumbai, one had seen them doing this in Kabul,Lahore twice and in Kandahar.
13. Commando-style attacks with hand-held weapons are much easier toorganise in the West and Australia than attacks with IEDs. There ishardly any gun control in the US. Gun controls are stricter in othercountries, but the controls are not yet foolproof as one saw in arecent incident in Germany.If it is still easy for irrationalindividuals to play havoc with guns, how much easier it should be forwell-organised and well-motivated terrorists? That is a question whichshould worry counter-terrorism experts and which should call for theirfocussed attention. (12-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt.of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For TopicalStudies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
PIRATES OR NAVAL AL QAEDA OR BOTH?
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR--PAPER NO.517
B.RAMAN
I have been in receipt of the following message on April 8,2009, from ECOTERRA International, which disseminates a periodic "Somali Marine& Coastal Monitor": "Danish owned and US-American operated MV MAERSK ALABAMA, a container ship of 14,120 gross tonnage underUS-American flag with a 21 men crew of at least 20 U.S.-American nationals, who are said to be all unharmed according to the company thatowns the vessel, had been sea-jacked this morning at 07h30 on the Indian Ocean off the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu and about 280 miles(450 kilometers) south-east of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia. The vessel was en route to Mombasa, Kenya, when itwas attacked about 500 kilometers (310 miles) off Somalia's coast, the statement issued by Maersk Line Ltd. said. The 20 unarmed crewmembers fought back against the four hijackers and hours later regained control of their vessel, according to second mate Ken Quinn.Quinn, sounding harried in a terse mobile phone call to CNN, said the crew had released one of the pirates they had tied up for 12 hours. Butthe hijackers were refusing to return Captain Richard Phillips. "Right now, they want to hold our captain for ransom and we're trying to gethim back," Quinn told the US network. "He's in the ship's lifeboat," he said, explaining the four pirates had taken the lifeboat off the MaerskAlabama and that Phillips was in touch with his crew via ship's radio. "So now we're just trying to offer them whatever we can. Food. But it'snot working too good." Quinn added: "We have a coalition (vessel) that will be here in three hours. So we're just trying to hold them off forthree more hours and then we'll have a warship here to help us."
2. The message continues: "Quinn said that all four pirates were on the lifeboat, after sinking their own boat after they seized the containervessel. Earlier, the crew took one pirate hostage, trying to swap him for their captain, but the deal went wrong, he told the American CNNnews channel. Though the ship is the sixth seized within a week in the dangerous region around Africa, Cmdr. Jane Campbell, aspokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said it was the first pirate attack "involving U.S. nationals and a U.S.-flaggedvessel in recent memory." No American merchant vessel has been attacked by pirates since 1804 during the North African Barbary Wars. USPresident Barack Obama's chief spokesman said the White House was assessing a course of action. Press secretary Robert Gibbs toldreporters that officials there monitoring the incident closely. Said Gibbs: "Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members onboard." The White House offered no other immediate details about what actions it was considering. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitmansaid there has not yet been any communications from the pirates for ransom. But he would not go into military plans. "I'm not going tospeculate on any future military actions," Whitman said, when asked what the U.S. military may do.Whitman said there are still no U.S. Navyships within view of the vessel, and instead they are still "hundreds of miles away. "The nearest U.S. Navy warship was about 300 nauticalmiles away at the time of the hijacking," other U.S.-American government sources said. No action has been taken so far, a spokesman forthe U.S. military's 5th Fleet in Bahrain said first, according to CNN. "There is a task force present in the region to deter any type of piracy,but the challenge remains that the area is so big and it is hard to monitor all the time," 5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said. USArmy Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Hibner, a Pentagon spokesperson, said later on Wednesday that the US Navy destroyer Bainbridge wasen route to the scene. The cargo ship is directly owned and operated by a Maersk subsidiary in Norfolk, Virginia, Maersk spokesman MichaelStorgaard said. "We have very strict policies on the vessel ... crews are trained to handle these types of situations," Storgaard said fromMaersk's headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark."
3. The message further adds: '5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said U.S.-flagged ships are not normally escorted by the military,unless they request it from the U.S. Navy. The 155-metre (511-foot) vessel had been due to dock in the Kenyan port of Mombasa on April 16.The hijacked boxship is run out of the huge merchant and naval base of Norfolk by Maersk Line Ltd., a division of Denmark's A.P.Moller-Maersk Group and was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman forthe Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk, but analysts wondered, since relief food is usually shipped as bulk andnot by a rather expensive container-ship. Though the shipping company has had some Defense Department contracts it was said this timenot to be on a Pentagon job when attacked, a governmental statement read. The high seas standoff drew an expression of concern fromHillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, who called on the world to unite to "end the scourge of piracy". "
4.The message clarifies that the information contained in it came from "own sources, AFP, AP, Al-Jazeera, Pentagon, White House et al". Anearlier message of April 6,2009, from ECOTERRA INTERNATIONAL had said: "With the latest captures and releases now, still at least 17 (18with an unnamed sole Barge which drifted ashore) foreign vessels with a total of not less than 297 crew members accounted for (of which110 are confirmed to be Filipinos) are held in Somali waters and are monitored on our actual case-list, while several other cases of ships,which were observed off the coast of Somalia and have been reported or had reportedly disappeared without trace or information, are stillbeing followed. Over 134 incidents (including attempted attacks, averted attacks and successful sea-jackings) have been recorded for 2008with 49 fully documented, factual sea-jacking cases (for Somalia, incl. presently held ones) and the mistaken sinking of one vessel by anaval force. For 2009 the account stands at 52 averted or abandoned attacks and 14 sea-jackings on the Somali/Yemeni pirate side as wellas one wrongful attack by friendly fire on the side of the naval forces. Mystery pirate mother-vessels Athena/Arena and Burum Ocean as wellas not fully documented cases of absconded vessels are not listed in the sea-jack count until clarification. Several other vessels withunclear fate (also not in the actual count), who were reported missing over the last ten years in this area, are still kept on our watch-list,though in some cases it is presumed that they sunk due to bad weather or being unfit to sail. In the last four years, 22 missing ships havebeen traced back with different names, flags and superstructures. "
5. Despite the deployment of anti-piracy patrols from a number of countries including India, China and Japan, the Somali pirates continue tooperate with virtual impunity and have been collecting millions of dollars in ransom money. The vast area involved, the inabilitry of theinternational community----due to legal and operational reasons---to undertake land-based operations against the pirates in Somalianterritory and the suspected (by me) lack of co-ordination among anti-piracy patrols from different countries have come in the way ofeffective and deterrent action against the pirates, who are becoming more and more audacious and innovative.
6. A number of questions remain unanswered: Are different pirate groups operating autonomously of each other or is there a commoncommand and control? Who are the leaders of the different pirate groups and where are they based? Apart from the pirates themselves andtheir leaders, are there any other beneficiaries of the ransom money? Since Al Qaeda has been very active in Somalia for over a decade,does it have any links with the pirates and is it financially benefiting from the ransom payments?
7. The possibility of links between Al Qaeda and at least some of the pirate groups needs to be taken seriously. Ever since 9/11, Al Qaedahas been wanting to organise a major act of maritime terrorism to disrupt word trade and movement of energy supplies. Many of thesepirates----if well-trained and well-motivated by Al Qaeda---- could provide a new source of oxygen to it. The time has come to treat thecampaign against the Somali pirates as seriously as the campaign against Al Qaeda. (9-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies,Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
I have been in receipt of the following message on April 8,2009, from ECOTERRA International, which disseminates a periodic "Somali Marine& Coastal Monitor": "Danish owned and US-American operated MV MAERSK ALABAMA, a container ship of 14,120 gross tonnage underUS-American flag with a 21 men crew of at least 20 U.S.-American nationals, who are said to be all unharmed according to the company thatowns the vessel, had been sea-jacked this morning at 07h30 on the Indian Ocean off the capital of Somalia, Mogadishu and about 280 miles(450 kilometers) south-east of Eyl, a town in the northern Puntland region of Somalia. The vessel was en route to Mombasa, Kenya, when itwas attacked about 500 kilometers (310 miles) off Somalia's coast, the statement issued by Maersk Line Ltd. said. The 20 unarmed crewmembers fought back against the four hijackers and hours later regained control of their vessel, according to second mate Ken Quinn.Quinn, sounding harried in a terse mobile phone call to CNN, said the crew had released one of the pirates they had tied up for 12 hours. Butthe hijackers were refusing to return Captain Richard Phillips. "Right now, they want to hold our captain for ransom and we're trying to gethim back," Quinn told the US network. "He's in the ship's lifeboat," he said, explaining the four pirates had taken the lifeboat off the MaerskAlabama and that Phillips was in touch with his crew via ship's radio. "So now we're just trying to offer them whatever we can. Food. But it'snot working too good." Quinn added: "We have a coalition (vessel) that will be here in three hours. So we're just trying to hold them off forthree more hours and then we'll have a warship here to help us."
2. The message continues: "Quinn said that all four pirates were on the lifeboat, after sinking their own boat after they seized the containervessel. Earlier, the crew took one pirate hostage, trying to swap him for their captain, but the deal went wrong, he told the American CNNnews channel. Though the ship is the sixth seized within a week in the dangerous region around Africa, Cmdr. Jane Campbell, aspokeswoman for the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said it was the first pirate attack "involving U.S. nationals and a U.S.-flaggedvessel in recent memory." No American merchant vessel has been attacked by pirates since 1804 during the North African Barbary Wars. USPresident Barack Obama's chief spokesman said the White House was assessing a course of action. Press secretary Robert Gibbs toldreporters that officials there monitoring the incident closely. Said Gibbs: "Our top priority is the personal safety of the crew members onboard." The White House offered no other immediate details about what actions it was considering. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitmansaid there has not yet been any communications from the pirates for ransom. But he would not go into military plans. "I'm not going tospeculate on any future military actions," Whitman said, when asked what the U.S. military may do.Whitman said there are still no U.S. Navyships within view of the vessel, and instead they are still "hundreds of miles away. "The nearest U.S. Navy warship was about 300 nauticalmiles away at the time of the hijacking," other U.S.-American government sources said. No action has been taken so far, a spokesman forthe U.S. military's 5th Fleet in Bahrain said first, according to CNN. "There is a task force present in the region to deter any type of piracy,but the challenge remains that the area is so big and it is hard to monitor all the time," 5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said. USArmy Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Hibner, a Pentagon spokesperson, said later on Wednesday that the US Navy destroyer Bainbridge wasen route to the scene. The cargo ship is directly owned and operated by a Maersk subsidiary in Norfolk, Virginia, Maersk spokesman MichaelStorgaard said. "We have very strict policies on the vessel ... crews are trained to handle these types of situations," Storgaard said fromMaersk's headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark."
3. The message further adds: '5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Nathan Christensen said U.S.-flagged ships are not normally escorted by the military,unless they request it from the U.S. Navy. The 155-metre (511-foot) vessel had been due to dock in the Kenyan port of Mombasa on April 16.The hijacked boxship is run out of the huge merchant and naval base of Norfolk by Maersk Line Ltd., a division of Denmark's A.P.Moller-Maersk Group and was carrying emergency relief to Mombasa, Kenya, when it was hijacked, said Peter Beck-Bang, spokesman forthe Copenhagen-based container shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk, but analysts wondered, since relief food is usually shipped as bulk andnot by a rather expensive container-ship. Though the shipping company has had some Defense Department contracts it was said this timenot to be on a Pentagon job when attacked, a governmental statement read. The high seas standoff drew an expression of concern fromHillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, who called on the world to unite to "end the scourge of piracy". "
4.The message clarifies that the information contained in it came from "own sources, AFP, AP, Al-Jazeera, Pentagon, White House et al". Anearlier message of April 6,2009, from ECOTERRA INTERNATIONAL had said: "With the latest captures and releases now, still at least 17 (18with an unnamed sole Barge which drifted ashore) foreign vessels with a total of not less than 297 crew members accounted for (of which110 are confirmed to be Filipinos) are held in Somali waters and are monitored on our actual case-list, while several other cases of ships,which were observed off the coast of Somalia and have been reported or had reportedly disappeared without trace or information, are stillbeing followed. Over 134 incidents (including attempted attacks, averted attacks and successful sea-jackings) have been recorded for 2008with 49 fully documented, factual sea-jacking cases (for Somalia, incl. presently held ones) and the mistaken sinking of one vessel by anaval force. For 2009 the account stands at 52 averted or abandoned attacks and 14 sea-jackings on the Somali/Yemeni pirate side as wellas one wrongful attack by friendly fire on the side of the naval forces. Mystery pirate mother-vessels Athena/Arena and Burum Ocean as wellas not fully documented cases of absconded vessels are not listed in the sea-jack count until clarification. Several other vessels withunclear fate (also not in the actual count), who were reported missing over the last ten years in this area, are still kept on our watch-list,though in some cases it is presumed that they sunk due to bad weather or being unfit to sail. In the last four years, 22 missing ships havebeen traced back with different names, flags and superstructures. "
5. Despite the deployment of anti-piracy patrols from a number of countries including India, China and Japan, the Somali pirates continue tooperate with virtual impunity and have been collecting millions of dollars in ransom money. The vast area involved, the inabilitry of theinternational community----due to legal and operational reasons---to undertake land-based operations against the pirates in Somalianterritory and the suspected (by me) lack of co-ordination among anti-piracy patrols from different countries have come in the way ofeffective and deterrent action against the pirates, who are becoming more and more audacious and innovative.
6. A number of questions remain unanswered: Are different pirate groups operating autonomously of each other or is there a commoncommand and control? Who are the leaders of the different pirate groups and where are they based? Apart from the pirates themselves andtheir leaders, are there any other beneficiaries of the ransom money? Since Al Qaeda has been very active in Somalia for over a decade,does it have any links with the pirates and is it financially benefiting from the ransom payments?
7. The possibility of links between Al Qaeda and at least some of the pirate groups needs to be taken seriously. Ever since 9/11, Al Qaedahas been wanting to organise a major act of maritime terrorism to disrupt word trade and movement of energy supplies. Many of thesepirates----if well-trained and well-motivated by Al Qaeda---- could provide a new source of oxygen to it. The time has come to treat thecampaign against the Somali pirates as seriously as the campaign against Al Qaeda. (9-4-2009)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies,Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
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