There are two principal critical comments
regarding the performance of the R&AW, namely, its identification of 13 Pakistani
battalions only out of the 15 deployed across the border in the Northern Areas (Gilgit and
Baltistan) and its ruling out the possibility of any major action by the Pakistani army in
this sector because of the economic crisis in Pakistan.
There are also some general observations relating to inadequate
knowledge of developments across the border.
The principal criticism of the Intelligence Bureau relates to its
failure to share with the R&AW and certain others concerned an important assessment of
1998 having a possible bearing on likely Pakistani plans for the future.
While one cannot fault the KRC for drawing attention to these
deficiencies, which could have partly contributed to the failure of the national security
managers to anticipate Pakistan's Kargil invasion, the KRC report would have been more
balanced and as painstakingly fair to the intelligence agencies as it has been to the
armed forces and the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), if it had gone into the reasons
for these deficiencies.
After a careful reading of the published extracts of the KRC
report, one finds it difficult to avoid the impression that, whereas in the case of the
armed forces and the JIC, the focus of the report has been more on the reasons for their
pre-Kargil complacency than on the gravity or criticality of their inadequacies, in the
case of the R&AW, the focus has been more on the criticality of its deficient
reporting than on the reasons, which should have been gone into in order to put their
deficiencies in the proper perspective.
The KRC has rightly highlighted how acts of omission such as the
infrequent and low-level representation of the military intelligence directorates at the
JIC meetings, the failure to mark all relevant reports to the JIC etc hampered its work as
the principal intelligence and national security assessment and watchdog machinery of the
Govt. of India, but doesn't examine what action the JIC took to bring this regrettable and
serious state of affairs to the notice of the Prime Minister, as the head of the national
security management apparatus, and what corrective action was taken.
If these were not brought to the notice of the Prime Minister
pre-Kargil, what were the reasons for it? One is also left in the dark about the number
and nature of the pre-Kargil assessments of the JIC.
The KRC would have been equally fair to the R&AW, as it has
been to the JIC, if it had highlighted the facts that till 1999 the R&AW's main focus
in the Ladakh sector was more on Tibet than on the Northern Areas of Pakistan; that the
absence of winter posts of the army near the LOC in the Kargil area, which provide the
security and logistic cover to the border intelligence collection posts of the R&AW,
ruled out any observation posts of the R&AW near the border during the winter; and
that the only way of overcoming the resulting handicap was to have given the R&AW a
better technical intelligence (Techint) collection capability in this area, but,
unfortunately, the R&AW's proposal for improving its over-all Techint capability
reportedly remained unacted upon till the intrusions took place.
Fairness to the R&AW would have also demanded that the KRC
point out that there have been very few instances in the history of the craft of
intelligence where any intelligence agency anywhere in the world had been able to identify
one hundred per cent of the order of battle of the adversary and that an over 80 per cent
identification of the order of battle by an intelligence agency is considered an above
average performance. The remaining gap in the knowledge is made good and possible
surprises prevented through competent assessment.
No intelligence agency can provide a 100 per cent coverage,
whatever be its resources and competence. If it can, there would be no wars and no other
breaches of security and there would be no need for a separate assessment agency. The
setting-up of separate assessment agencies all over the world is based on the realisation
that in the absence of a 100 per cent coverage, the only protection against surprises is
through perspicacious assessment on the basis of available intelligence and past knowledge
of the mind-set of the adversary.
At the time of its creation in 1968, the R&AW was given the
responsibility for over-all strategic external intelligence, human as well as technical,
plus concurrent responsibility with the Directorate-General of Military Intelligence for
tactical trans-border military intelligence upto a certain depth across the LOC and the
international border. This concurrent role of the army intelligence for tactical
intelligence was reiterated by the Government in 1990.
Keeping this in view, it would have been appropriate for the KRC
to find out and highlight how many of the 15 Pakistani battalions were identified by the
Military Intelligence Directorate and how did their assessment differ from that of the
R&AW.
The then Director-General of the British Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS-or the MI-6 as it is generally known) had told the Lord Franks Committee,
which went into why the British Government failed to anticipate the Argentine invasion of
the Falklands in 1982, that the MI-6 could not provide any warning of the invasion because
the Government, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office, had rejected his proposal for
an MI-6 presence in the British Embassy in Argentina.
Lord Franks, therefore, concluded, in total fairness to the MI-6,
that it could not be blamed for failing to do something for which it was not equipped by
the Government.
In view of the post-1962 assessments of successive Governments
that the main preoccupation of the intelligence community in the Ladakh sector has to be
with likely intrusions from Tibet and not from Pakistan, the R&AW was tasked and
equipped largely to look Tibet-wards and not towards the Northern Areas of Pakistan.
By failing to highlight this and by using unfortunately harsh
language against the R&AW, the KRC has created a public perception that the R&AW
was the principal guilty party in Kargil.
That this was definitely not so would have been evident from a
perusal of the statements made by responsible leaders of the Government during the height
of the conflict that it was not due to any intelligence failure. Fairness demanded that
the KRC should have at least taken note of these statements and, if it disagreed with
them, explained the reasons.
The nameless, faceless, voiceless, lobbyless and defenceless
officers of a secret intelligence agency are trained to silently suffer the barbs of
others, in or outside the Government, without succumbing to the temptation to respond in
public to them. This self-assumed obligation of silence in the over-all national interests
calls for absolute fairness from others such as the KRC in evaluating their performance.
Attempts to make them the whipping-boy and suggestions for a
major restructuring of the R&AW on the basis of a condemnatory judgement, unjustified
by the facts on files to which public opinion has no access, are ill-advised.
The R&AW, like any other intelligence agency, has many
deficiencies in its working to which this writer himself had drawn attention in the past.
To remove those deficiencies, one has to analyse them objectively with an open mind,
instead of letting pre-conceived ideas and prejudices affect one's conclusions.
There were five possible suspects in the Kargil tragedy--the IB,
the R&AW, the JIC, the National Security Advisory Board, and the armed forces. Three
of them fortuitously found themselves represented as members of the KRC from which the IB
and the R&AW were excluded and used this opportunity to hang the R&AW and the IB
from the nearest lamp-post without any examination or introspection on their moral right
to do so when their own pre-Kargil performance was not free of serious blemish.
