To talk(via back channel), or not

India recently rejected the option of back channel diplomacy with Pakistan. I wonder why?

A back channel talk option would have given both the countries the opportunity to discuss a range of issues, including countering terrorism sponsored by its Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, away from the media’s glare. And away also from the expectation of the masses to produce immediate results, which make a few politicians and Generals play to the gallery.

Any counter-terrorism effort, if it were sincere, especially from the Pakistani side, would require exchange of real time intelligence and tactical details. This can happen at a back channel stage, where specialists could sit down to produce a meaningful result.

For instance, Pakistan keeps talking of India/US not sharing intelligence they might be having about an impending terror attack.

We can check its sincerity across a back channel parley. We can identify an individual/group of individual located in that country who would be plotting something bad against us and demand it to act against hi/them.

Test the model; discard it if they fail it.

Though I understand, it might be India’s way to snub Pakistan for not doing what they are required of: acting against Lashkar e Tayyeba chief Hafiz Mohammed Saeed and following up on the non-Karachi end of the 26/11 conspiracy that might expose the role of even ‘state actors (read ISI and serving/retired Pakistan army/Special services group commandos) in setting the stage for it.

In that case, it might look like a super snub, considering Pakistan’s stated enthusiasm for the ‘idea’, in short term. Well done, India.

But the idea itself should be examined, as a prop to the official, structured diplomacy.

Storm in the Pakistani teacup

 Hakimullah has not yet sent the video of his jihadi boss, Beitullah Mehsud. Though by calling up an Associated Press reporter familiar with his voice, he at least sought to dispel a theory that he is no more as well. This much is confirmed that a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone struck Mehsud’s wife’s family home in north-west Pakistan.

It is clear the wife died. But not clear whether her father, Ikramullah, who is suspected to have signalled Mehsud’s presence at the house to the US/PAK authorities, is alive or dead.

It is said that Mehsud was on drip when the missile struck. That points at a superb penetration of the top rungs of the Tehrik e Taliban Paksitan by human intelligence by either the ISI or the CIA.

Pakistan is now worried about the Al Qaeda stepping into the eventual void in the Pakistani Pashtun Talibani terror and appointing a successor to Mehsud.

In the end, it seems the Predator drones, with the aid of precise human intelligence, could do what the land-based Special Forces had failed at. A day could come when the Predators might take out the absconding top leaders of the Al Qaeda and the Afghani Taliban, as well.

26/11 and the silence of the celebrity hawks

NSG men slither on to Nariman house

They are the celebrity-intellectuals who love being in the eye of controversies, grabbing headlines, and holding forth from the pulpit.                                                                                          But through the 59 hours, between November 26 to 29 last year, when the 10 Pakistani Lashkar e Tayyeba suicide attackers were unleashing mayhem in Mumbai, film-maker Mahesh Bhatt, activist Teesta Setalvad, actress-activist Shabana Azmi and Booker award winner Arundhati Roy were nowhere to be seen or  heard.                                                                                                                                                                                                                             And neither was the enfant terrible of Marathi politics, the ‘basher of the Biharis and UP-wallahs,’ Raj Thackeray seen. Raj, the Marathi ‘Lion’, whose men were thrashing poor hawkers and cabbies in Dadar and Navi Mumbai only a few months ago, was taking a break.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                For the rest, it was war. As the countrymen prayed and stayed glued to their TV sets, the gallant NSG + MARCOS commandos, Mumbai police and Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad teams risked their lives to snuff out the terror challenge. So did teams of RAW and IB officers. And they were men representing the entire country; fighting for our beloved Mumbai and famed bindaas way of life.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Four months on, I am yet to hear or read them— on 26/11. Raj, I must admit, and his men have though made their presence felt. Again, with dubious agenda though—like threatening potential lawyers of the sole surviving 26/11 attacker Mohammed Ajmal Kasab. 

We might not fancy it, but India needs to let Kasab and the other accused defend themselves in the case according to the best traditions of a great democracy that goes by the  rule of the law. This is where we are different from Pakistan and the Talibanis.                                                                                                                                                                                                                              The other four otherwise are often seen being amidst fiery television debates, in blockbuster conferences, or in newspapers. The trio’s pet topic: the human side of err, terrorism or talking about specific set of incidents each time a bomb is set off.  They would count for you those who fell dead in riots when asked to react to a terror blast! And will go on and on.  They are always straining their eyes to find a partisan angle in the discourse on terror.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  In my view, terror has no religion and or flag.                                                                                                                                              Look at Pakistan. The fire of Islamic jihad, its army and the ISI have been stoking till now to destroy India, is now threatening to swallow it.

A New Deal For Riots

3,000 Sikhs were butchered in New Delhi and elsewhere in 1984. The trigger was the assassination of the late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards. The roles of top Congress leaders like Jagdish Tytler, HKL Bhagat and Sajjan Kumar were suspected.

But nothing happened; no rioter was made to pay either with his life or years behind the bars.

Six years later, hundreds of Hindus and Muslims died in riots across two phases in Mumbai in 1992-93. The trigger was the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh by thousands of maniacal Hindu right wingers. Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray admitted his role as rightful reactions to Muslim actions. But nothing happened; no rioter, Hindu or Muslim, was made to pay either with his life or years behind the bars.

Merely ten years later, Hindus killed over 1,500 Muslims across Gujarat in the 2002 riots. The trigger was the torching of a few train bogeys that led to tortuous death of 54 Hindus at Godhra. Gujarat’s Chief Minister and his ministerial, bureaucratic goons were involved, it was alleged.

Again, no rioter, Hindu or Muslim, paid up.

Three things are clear then. Riots in India are almost a recurrent affair, as they bob up every eight or ten years.

Two, killing, maiming, looting and raping as part of a riotous mob is a win-win option. No body seems to get booked for these crimes; none at least seems like getting severely punished for these.

Three, when it comes to tolerating riots and shielding rioters, the country’s entire political spectrum—from the leftists (just see what happens to the dissenters in West Bengal) to the rightists to the centrists—stand united.

So, power-hungry politics it seems fattens on riots one way or the other.

Now, can we think afresh on this? Can we build a national probe-cum-prosecution agency tasked dedicated to just punish rioters?

Can we replicate this agency at the state level?

Can we have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on riots, like post-apartheid South Africa had? I think these might work.

Varun Modi?

To begin with, Varun knows how rewarding such a morphing would be.

And why not…

From nobody, Varun is suddenly somebody.

He is a toast, reluctantly though, of the Sangh parivar now. And the media, especially electronic, just can’t have enough of him.

So is he a neo Modi? While the jury is still out, let’s see what it might mean in case the answer turns out in affirmative in the days to come.

Scene 1: If Varun turns out to be as good an administrator and pro-development decision-maker as Modi has lately turned out to be, then good luck to Pilibhit/Uttar Pradesh.

Scene 2: If he turns out to be what Modi is seen to be, as allegedly a hate-spewing Hindu right-winger, then, well, that’s bad luck for Pilibhit/UP/India. 

Since, India is already paying the price of what Modi spelt for Gujarat and India in general, in 2002: When the state allegedly did not protect the defenceless Muslim civilians from getting slaughtered by Hindu rioters.

Dozens of Indian Muslim terrorists caught since the 2002 riots have repeatedly claimed that they chose the path of wanton bloodshed to avenge the 2002 riots and the 1992 Babri mosque demolition and the riots that followed. And to wage jihad, to convert India to Islam.

Those arrested included men of all sorts, matriculates, or having degrees in software engineering, human rights and medicine. Their fury and hatred united them.   

They chose to target unarmed Hindu civilians since it involved negligible risks for them and their community(Muslim). Since targeting them was permitted as a legitimate retribution by their version of jihad.

narendra modi

   

It must be said here, that despite their claims about why they did it, what they did eventually, as a response or an act of avenging them, was purely terrorism.

It involved slaughter of innocent unarmed civilians, including kids, old people and women. These suspects became willing tools of India’s arch-rival Pakistan who is ever ready to bleed the former.

India needs to neutralise terrorists. India needs to punish the Gujarat rioters and other law-breakers too.

Politics of hate will beget more hatred.

Varun should stay who he is. One Modi was enough.

Did Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab ‘sing’ well, or enough?

You may often read how a terror suspect is described by his police interrogators as being a hard nut to crack. Yet how, days and weeks later, he begins cracking up and begins to ‘sing.’

Not always though.

Even when a seasoned suspect starts ‘singing’, which means him making verbal revelations, he might still keep a few of his core operational secrets intact in his heart and won’t let them out.

Sometimes, asking him about a particular detail repeatedly might not still make him oblige his interrogator/s. A case in point is 26/11 Pakistani attacker Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, a 21-year-old Lashkar e Tayyeba suicide attacker.

He ‘broke’ and expressed regrets over his actions almost immediately after getting overpowered by policemen; till he got arrested at Girgaum chowpatty on the night of November 26 last year, though, he and his buddy Ismail Khan now dead had already butchered around 60. Without batting their eyelid.

Days later, though Kasab had given details on the 26/11 conspiracy hatched in Pakistan, he had still managed to hide a few things it appeared.

Kasab mentioned nothing about who was the Pakistani Lashkar controller addressed as “major general saab” by the other 9 26/11 attackers in their telephonic conversations during the 59-hour hold-up.

He did not give any clue of a key attacks’ coordinator named Zarar Shah, who according to the FBI’s probe had set up the communications support needed to execute the amphibious terror attack.

Kasab, similarly, gave no clue on the Karachi address where he and the other attackers had spent three months in isolation before sailing for Mumbai from near Karachi.

And if the preliminary findings of the Pakistani probe into the attacks are worth its salt, then it also means that Kasab did not reveal the role of another main accused, Sadiq Hammad identified in their probe as the main attacks’ operator.

Well, Indian suspects did not ‘sing’ well either

The two known Indian 26/11 conspirators, Mumbai’s Faheem Ansari and Bihar’s Sabahuddin Ahmed, who are currently facing the trial in the case along with Kasab in Mumbai, had kept their worst secrets to themselves until recently that could have otherwise alerted the Indian authorities.

The duo had in effect handed over the maps/diagrams/videos of possible targets in Mumbai to their top Pakistani Lashkar handlers, Muzammil and Abu Al Qama in sometime after January last year. These indicators were exhaustively internalised before the attackers set their feet in Mumbai.

And yet though Ansari and Sabahuddin were in police custody since January last year, they did not reveal anything beyond that Ansari gave the materials to Ahmed.

After 26/11, the duo admitted of it after Kasab had already spilt their secret.

Is Mohammed Ajmal Kasab now experimenting with truth?

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving 26/11 Mumbai attacker, has more on his mind these days than perhaps just the ‘Chachu’ and jihad. Kasab, who is lodged at Mumbai’s high security Arthur Road jail, said a little birdie, has been busy trying to make sense of the best known treatise on non violence, My Experiments With Truth, of late.

Authored by India’s father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, this book stands for values that are diametrically opposite to those held by Kasab’s ‘Chachu’ and LeT’s Wahhabist, distorted interpretation of jihad.

 

Chachu, as you know, is the nom de guerre of Lashkar e Tayyeba (LeT)’s operations chief and co-founder, Zaqiur Rehman Lakhvi, who directly recruited Kasab and his nine associates and orchestrated the 26/11 attacks from Karachi.

Rehman is currently in the custody of Pakistani authorities, having been deserted by LeT’s supreme Hafeez Saeed. Kasab’s heart must be pining to say “Aap salaamat rahein Chachu, bas.”

But how come Kasab is now reportedly having a one on one with Mr. Gandhi and his Ahimsa?

So has he finally changed for the better, will he now be a soldier of non violent Satyagraha instead of only a superbly trained suicide attacker?

Well, hardly, I would say. 

For one, he is a STD 1V dropout; even if he gets an Urdu copy of the book it s debatable how much he might grasp its essence in any case! Only a few hours before he would set foot in Mumbai that night, Kasab had been asked by his Pakistani controllers to kill the captain (tandel) of the Indian fishing trawler (Kuber) the terrorists had abducted in the high sea. It’s instructive to know how exactly Kasab went about his job.

He had a loaded AK-47 and hand grenades. But Kasab chose to slaughter the captain like a goat literally—he whipped out a knife and cut the captain’s neck and made hi bleed to death; the captain’s hands stayed tied.

Kasab incidentally belongs to the butcher caste.Once in Mumbai, Kasab and his buddy, Ismail Khan, killed around 60 persons including infants. He would apparently shoot at an injured twice to make sure he/she does not create a racket before dying. After getting captured he blamed his father for putting him on to the path of jihad and said “mujh se bahot galti ho gayi.” He wrote a letter to his mother expressing the same sentiments.

But then. How can a man who underwent rigorous training for months learning how to kill the unarmed suddenly turn so coy and apologetic?

Has his heart really changed or is it the same old phenomenon when hardcore offenders begin singing and regretting once inside a police lockup?

You decide.

 

 

 

 

Let the Predators bomb Lashkar camps

It is 27 feet long, with an ultra-light reed-like frame resembling a paper plane or even an abnormally bloated locust.

It costs a mean Rs. 22 crore and soars higher in the skies than commercial aircrafts/fighter jets to loiter and transmit live videos of targeted area to its controllers located faraway.

It also fires the Hellfire missiles at ground targets housing suspected “assets” of the Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Taliban with deadly accuracy in Pakistan’s unruly tribal areas.

These unmanned aerial vehicles, known as Predator and Drones, have in fact killed around 9 top AQ since last September in northwest Pakistan.

Experts are hailing the drones as the most effective combat aircrafts developed since the end of the Cold War. It is also in the forefront of the US search for AQ’s chief Osama Bin Laden who according to latest reports could be dug deep inside a bunker/tunnel/compound located in the inaccessible heights of the Chitral/Hindukush area.

The question to ponder over now is this: will it serve India’s strategic interests to have its own fleet of such drones that could be used to take out Pakistani terror camps during hot pursuit?

Should our armed forces and intelligence agencies acquire these drones as part of their covert strike capability to counter Pakistan’s relentless policy to bleed India through its terror proxies like the Lashkar e Tayyeba and the Jaish e Mohammed? A likely candidate for having such a capability could be of course India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

Could the Predator-like drones spearhead India’s much-debated surgical military strikes deep within Pakistan in the face of a war-like provocation originating from there like the 26/11 Mumbai attacks of the LeT?

Such a drone strike could especially focus on taking out the training camps run in Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir—especially around Muzzaferabad where 26/11 suicide attackers like Mohammed Ajmal Kasab and nine of his associates had trained—and the Punjab province (especially Lahore’s Muridke town where LeT’s headquarters is located and Bahawalpur)?

The American drones, incidentally, are operated and controlled by its external intelligence agency —the Central Intelligence Agency—as well. The CIA drone controllers often direct its operations by fiddling with joysticks in America.

Not only have the drones made up for the lack of precise intelligence that the US forces operating in Pakistan have lacked, they also act instantly without having to involve the vacillating Pakistani authorities in the decision-making chain.

The Rs. 18 lakh a year jihadi

Indian Mujahideen’s chief technical officer was Mohammed Mansoor Peerbhoy. Thirty-one-year old Peerbhoy led two lives effortlessly till the Mumbai Crime Branch umasked him last October. For Yahoo!, his employer, he was an exceptionally gifted internet security expert in his role as principal software engineer. He drew a salary of Rs. 18 lakh per year. 

In his other life, where his heart laid it seems, he was the in-house cyber technical chief of the home-grown terror outfit, the Indian Mujahideen (IM).

 

The beginning

In late 2006, Peerbhoy wanted to pursue theological studies; he wanted to know his Quran better. He joined Pune’s Quran Foundation where educated, well-heeled men would meet for a few hours per week: to discuss matters related to Islam and the Islamic affairs.

His enthusiasm and sincerity did not stay unnoticed.

 

Recruitment to jihad

One Asif Sheikh, a techie himself and linked to the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)’s pro-jihad faction, had spotted him at the Foundation. Sheikh cultivated Peerbhoy, checked him to assess if his professed commitment to Islam was merely an academic boast or contained deeper possibilities.

Once Asif was convinced of Peerbhoy’s ‘commitment’ to Islam and the Qaum (community), Sheikh would introduce Peerbhoy to one Iqbal Bhatkal. Their meeting would change Peerbhoy’s life forever.

Iqbal Bhatkal

Over the next few weeks the trio would meet often and the shared hours were spent over animated discussion and listening especially to the monologues of the silver-tongued Iqbal.

Bhatkal’s fiery narratives on how the Muslims were being slaughtered and humiliated by the Hindus in India—as borne by the 2002 Gujarat riots, the 1992 demolition of Babri masjid and the consequent riots in Mumbai—rattled Peerbhoy.

Bhatkal filled his heart with seething anger and hatred against the Hindus and other anti-Islam forces including the US and the Jews. Peerbhoy would come to feel that Bhatkal’s cries for violent jihad to liberate the oppressed Muslims and avenge their blood were the need of the hour.

 Blast at Mecca mosque

His new resolve was deepened on May 18, 2007. In Hyderabad.

There was a blast that day at Hyderabad’s historic Mecca mosque; nine people had lost their lives in it. Peerbhoy, who was in the city to learn “ethical hacking as part of internet security protocol” from an Italian instructor, had taken time out to visit the mosque after the blast.

“I saw mutilated bodies, severed limbs, and blood. They targeted our mosque and killed innocents for nothing,” Peerbhoy recently revealed in his interrogations. But what riled him allegedly was something else, “I saw some Bajrang Dal men rejoicing a little away from the mosque”, he said.

Peerbhoy vowed “revenge.”

He would later tell his handlers, Iqbal and his younger brother Riyaz, that he was now equipped with the skills required to hacking unsecured Wi-Fi networks to send terror e-mails if necessary. He would get his chance around a year later—between July 26 Ahmedabad blasts to September 13 blasts in Delhi last year, Peerbhoy sent three IM terror e-mails to media houses.

 

King of terror gizmos

Peerbhoy performed another crucial function for the IM—he was in effect their chief cyber technical officer. His work in this regard and the tools he arranged for IM revealed the technological thrust of the home-grown terror to avoid detection and maximise its terror’s impact.

Here is a list of tools/devices Peerbhoy bought to equip the IM’s terror infrastructure:-

1. Radio frequency signal detector (to detect unsecured Wi-Fi networks)

2. Spy camera detector

3. Two laptops

4. Software to improve English language used in the terror e-mails

5. Finally, a software to mask cyber-chatting done by the Bhatkals to coordinate their activities across the country and beyond

 

It must be mentioned here that for India’s intelligence and anti-terror agencies tackling cyber chats in real time currently remains the biggest challenge. For they know this is the preferred mode of terror communications among the absconding terror controllers and their trans-border facilitators.

 

Not personal, please!

When asked about if he worried about his two kids and wife, Peerbhoy stayed non committal. He would only offer: “Allah has chosen me for greater things, greater than my own personal worries.”