Nuclear apologia

As for intelligence failures, intelligence gathering and assessment were poor and so were the demands from and supervision by the political executive and the National Security Council/Adviser. It has been a complaint as long as anyone can remember that Joint Intelligence Committee reports are scarcely read at senior political and bureaucratic levels. Nothing has changed.

The unsolved mystery is RAW8217;s semi-annual report in September 1998 which speaks of a possible swift strike by Pakistan. The army thought this piece of information was out of context and ignored it. Six months later RAW dropped the swift strike from its report. Stra-ngely, the KRC leaves it at that, not bothering to explain whether RAW8217;s first assessment was ba-sed on reliable inputs or not or why RAW fell silent later on. One is left to speculate about the one piece of information that came closest to foretelling subsequent events. Does RAW tend to tell politicians what they want to hear and therefore sanitised its second report which was submitted after Lahore? Was RAW8217;s own view blurred by dust from the bus ride? If a simpler explanation holds that the first RAW report was a shot in the dark the government8217;s concerns in the post-nuclear tests scenario will be redoubled; it should worry not only about getting too little information, it should worry about getting misleading information.

In the intelligence business, as in science, one is not likely to come up with good answers unless one starts with good hypotheses. The intelligence agencies evidently did not have them. Pakistani forays across the LoC in winter at points not held or monitored by Indian troops were considered improbable because the weather and terrain would punish intruders severely. The KRC says, however, the inroads might have been predicted in war games scenarios. This is an important insight. It suggests that a 8220;militarily unsustainable8221; and 8220;politically irrational8221; bid to 8220;alter the LoC8221; and 8220;internationalise the Kas-hmir issue8221; might in certain circumstances have been predicted. War ga-mes would offer one set of circumstances in which to hit upon the right answers; another would almost certainly be a rigorous analysis of the post-nuclear tests scenario. But when no one thought a fundamental change had occurred in the military balance, such hints as the build-up of ammunition dumps on the other side were taken tomean an increase in infiltration; no one could imagine anything more aggressive such as intrusions.

The KRC laments the state of security management, the lack of institutions for robust analyses, long-term planning, coordination with specialists on foreign policy, politics and so on. It is legitimate to ask in this context what assessments the Cabinet Committee on Defence, the still embryonic National Security Council and Army Headquarters made of the impact of Pokharan II and Chagai on Pakistan8217;s military and political leaders. Was it thought that the open declaration of nuclear weapons in both countries would lead to greater restraint and sobriety in Pakistan? Was the boast of a Pakistani general forgotten, the boast that Pakistan8217;s capacity for irrational behaviour would always keep India off-balance? Did the Vajpayee government8217;s belief that nuclear weapons made India more secure filter through the whole security establishment, making it incapable of imagining and therefore guarding against a politically and militarily irrational operation?

A chapter on the nuclear issue tries in a convoluted way to counter the perception in India and abroad that Pakistani aggression in Kashmir was encouraged by the nuclear tests in Po- kharan and Chagai. It goes to great lengths to support the claim that 8220;nuclear deterrence was in place8221; already by 1990, meaning, both India and Pakistan had nuclear bombs by then. Therefore, the tests in 1998 were 8220;not all that significant8221; in influencing decisions in Pakistan. But this attempt to deny any linkage between the tests and Kargil, part of the effort to exonerate the Vajpayee government of responsibility for Kargil, leads to another problem: nuclear deterrence will be seen to have tied India8217;s hands, denying it use of its conventional weapons superiority. To overcome this, former army chiefs are quoted saying that nuclear deterrence had nothing to do with it; co-unter-insurgency operations, including the involvement in Sri Lanka, are what prevented a pro-active response to Pakistan8217;s decade-old proxy war inKashmir. It is not convincing.

Try as it might, the KRC does not succeed in banishing doubts about the effect of Pokharan on Pakistan8217;s political and military calculations and plans made in November 1998 to cross the LoC.