Pathankot: Policy mismeasures

The visible sequence appeared quite damning. The terrorist operation in Pathankot was preceded by an attack against a serving superintendent of the Punjab Police, whose car was hijacked nearly 20 hours before the assault on the IAF base; an alert had been sounded; the terrorists still managed to penetrate the IAF base and inflict seven casualties beyond the protected periphery, and managed to keep their operation alive (apparently) for a full three days. 

A cacophony of claims and counter-claims commenced immediately after the media got wind of the attack, and conflicting theories — based on plants by ‘highly placed sources’ — began flying about regarding the identity and affiliation of perpetrators. The theme of a ‘botched’ response by security and intelligence agencies was quickly picked up. The general impression of ‘another 26/11’ was quickly disseminated by frenzied anchors on India’s proliferating news channels. 

Tactical assessments of an ongoing operation are fraught with the possibilities of gross errors. A detailed evaluation of each stage of response to the Pathankot attack, commencing with initial intelligence that came in on January 1 and the car hijack incident of the early hours of the same day, must await a much more exhaustive and textured understanding of the minute-to-minute developments that occurred. Certainly, some deficits are likely to be found, but the idea of a debacle is not credible even at the present levels of publicly available information. The reality is, there was no surprise when the IAF Base at Pathankot was attacked; indeed, the NSG had already been flown in from Delhi and had been deployed by the late afternoon of January 1, more than 11 hours before the terrorist attack commenced. Whether the NSG deployment was even necessary in a cantonment town with massive availability of local military force, including specialised units, is a question that requires some attention. There has, over the years, been an unfortunate tendency in New Delhi to project NSG as a necessary component of response to any major terrorist incident, to the neglect and marginalization of locally available forces, and this is unfortunate. Locally available first responders should be given priority in all such engagements — as was the case in the July 2015 Dinanagar incident in Gurdaspur. Only when local responders are routinely mobilised for such counter-terrorist operations can one expect a build-up of confidence and capability to make all of India secure. While this may not be a consideration in the present case, the reality is that the NSG cannot everywhere be in time. 

By the time the terrorists attacked — at about 3.30 am on January 2 — IAF Garud Commandos, an Army contingent and the NSG had already taken positions inside the Base, while Punjab Police units had been deployed around the periphery. For those who understand the processes of assessment and decision making involved, it should be surprising that all this was already in place by late afternoon on January 1. 

At the end of the operation, a group of six well armed and apparently very well trained suicide terrorists were able to inflict just seven fatalities in a well planned attack that was evidently intended to cause mass damage to the strategic assets of the Indian Air Force located at Pathankot. In this objective, the terrorists failed comprehensively. 

A more detailed evaluation of the various elements of response would require far more information than is currently available, but there are several other issues that Pathankot attack does raise. The first of these is the regularity with which intrusions across the Line of Control and International Border with Pakistan continue to occur. At least part of this problem is linked to the massive drug and smuggling operations that continue to occur with significant political and security forces’ collusion in Punjab, and to the deterioration of the system of border policing and intelligence that had been established during the era of Khalistani terrorism. 

A second issue relates to the management of information during an ongoing operation, and the tendency to feed the growing speculative hysteria of the electronic media. While little can be done about the nature of the beast of the 24/7 news cycle today, governments need to learn how to deal somewhat more effectively with the problem. Speaking in multiple and often conflicting voices, often at high levels of government, and muddying waters with motivated plants and ill-informed leaks does no good, either to the public or to the broader projection of national response capabilities. 

Crucially, the gravest failure that the Pathankot attack underlines is the failure of strategy and policy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a long-time critic of the vacillating policy of the previous government, of the constant swings of the pendulum between talks and no talks; he had repeatedly declared that terrorism and talks could not go together, and that Pakistan needed to take visible action against the guilty of the 26/11 attacks and to dismantle the infrastructure of terror based in Pakistan. The inexplicable u-turn that the government has taken on these counts — or rather, the inertial resumption of the fruitless foreign policy postures of the past — cannot be reconciled with the realities of the ground. The truth is the fitful, whimsical and contradictory initiatives of the past two years are rooted, not in any reality-based strategic perspective, but in wishful thinking and strategic and historical incomprehension. Indeed, any set of actions must demonstrate at least a modicum of temporal continuity and consistency to deserve the title of ‘policy’ or ‘strategy’ — and the flip flops of the past year-and-a-half display no such coherence. 

There has been a great deal of nonsense, both within government and by many experts, at least some of whom could have been expected to know better, about the necessity of continuing the ‘dialogue’ with Pakistan despite Pathankot. Indeed, Pathankot, we are being told, will give us the opportunity to present Islamabad with ‘incontrovertible evidence’ about the source and origin of the attack, and to ‘nail Pakistan’ for its involvement in supporting terrorism on Indian soil. This is utter and disingenuous nonsense. The quantum of cumulative evidence of Pakistani involvement in terrorism on Indian soil is overwhelming. The establishment in Pakistan does not need evidence to ‘discover’ what it is knowingly doing; and presenting evidence to a criminal in the expectation that he will punish or restrain himself is, to say the least, naive. Nor, indeed, is there any realistic or rational scope for expectations that the ‘evidence’ uncovered at Pathankot will abruptly convince the ‘international community’ to act with a measure of resolution against Pakistan that has not been visible despite decades of Pakistani malfeasance — including much that has harmed the West (aka “the international community). 

The writer is Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management & South Asia Terrorism Portal