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Journalism of Courage
The core strategic policy group of the National Security Council, comprising the heads of the intelligence agencies, various ministers and secretaries and the service chiefs, has finally met and declared the future to be a difficult but essentially safe place. How reassuring. And at the same time, how pathetic, for it took a quot;war-like situationquot; to get its members to meet for the first time, months after it was constituted. How disquieting, too, for this meeting, which should have been the stuff of high strategy, took place under an embarrassingly public shamiana at Delhi8217;s Hyderabad House in a sort of plenary session, with everyone even remotely linked with security in attendance. Lunch was on the house, catered by a five-star kitchen. Fortified with rather better fare than the K-rations the jawans were opening at about the same time on the Line of Control, the NSC finally came out with its vision of the future: sustain the Lahore process, but be prepared for chicanery. Well, how very trenchant.
Nationalsecurity bodies are supposed to anticipate the future, not report on it when it is already in danger of becoming the past. With the second Himalayan blunder in history, the Council had already demonstrated its prognosticative value. It is reported that its board of advisors had been lunching rather relentlessly in the period when Pakistan was breaching the Line of Control, completely oblivious to the development. In fact, months of activity, usually peaking between one and two in the afternoon, have not produced a single useful insight or document of value. Sadly, our national security establishment blends the self-deluding flaccidity of Whitehall between the wars with the macho naivete of The Dirty Dozen pace Lee Marvin. In the months leading up to the infiltration in Kargil, it should have taken note of the early-warning signs that were coming in from various agencies. In the days after the engagement began, it should have had something more to offer than regurgitated newspaper headlines. In thedays in between, it should have be-en the most visible agency of the government 8212; after all, national security crises are supposed to be managed by national security agencies. The NSC has failed on all three counts.
