Any intelligent state that wants to prevent its system from decaying needs statecraft, which is comprised on economic power, professional intelligence, a strong military and mature diplomacy. The case is quite different in India where emerging contradictions in the state system and failure of intelligence and internal security strategies generated a countrywide debate in which experts deeply criticised the waste of financial resources by the Indian intelligence agencies in an unnecessary proxy war against Pakistan. India is spending a huge amount of money on its secret agencies to make them competent and professional, but lack of authentic information, trained manpower, intelligence-sharing on law enforcement level and between centre and provinces, and political involvement affect all sincere efforts.
Intelligence reforms have become the most controversial issue as reform committees are under pressure from political parties to procrastinate the process of reform. In fact, the challenges India faces to control its intelligence agencies and introduce security sector reforms have become more complicated when stakeholders refuse to change the culture of spying on their own people.
In fact, there is little public awareness in India about the intelligence operations of RAW, the Intelligence Bureau and military intelligence on Pakistan’s borders in Afghanistan and Kashmir; these operations cause unnecessary confrontations between the three neighbours. India is fully involved in Afghanistan. From military planning to intelligence operations and foreign policy issues, India interferes in every legal and political issue of the state. Afghan policy makers perceive such interference of the Indian government in a failed state like Afghanistan and its proxy war against its traditional enemy against the interests of the country.
Clandestine operations of RAW and National Directorate of Security (NDS) are too irksome for the Afghan population when Pakistan translates its inner pain into military, trade and economic action. However, the extension of its intelligence operations over a large area across the country raises many questions including the large-scale recruitment of young men and women in its secret training camps. Moreover, India has changed the interface of relationship from all Afghan nations to specific mafia groups in the northern parts of the country, which causes ethnic conflagration. India’s approach towards the Afghan nation has largely been the desire to undermine the political and military influence of Pakistan, China and Iran. In view of the exponentially growing Taliban and ISIS military power in Afghanistan, Washington also showed propensity to use the services of an Indian satellite in Afghanistan to get quicker weather information, crucial for the transportation of its military assets.
Two years after the establishment of its own spy agency, RAMA, in Afghanistan, India signed an agreement on strategic partnership with the Karzai administration in October 2011, which gives India the right to deploy its intelligence units along China and Pakistan’s borders. Consequently, Pakistani politicians and intelligentsia raised the question of financing terrorism in Pakistan from Afghanistan. They believe that RAW provides arms and military training to the TTP and the Baloch insurgents, while Afghans think that India is fighting its own proxy war against Pakistan, which is against the interests of their country.
On February 15, 2015, the former president, General (Retd) Pervez Musharraf, admitted that during his tenure Pakistan had tried to undermine the Karzai government due to its propensity towards India. “In President Karzai’s times, yes, indeed, he was damaging Pakistan and, therefore, we were working against his interests. Obviously, we had to protect our own interests.” This statement deeply affected those Afghans who viewed Pakistan as a friendly neighbour, but understood that everything was not going in the right direction in their own country.
Pakistan’s foreign office recently accused India of financing terrorism in Pakistan, and the former interior minister, Rehman Malik, blamed India for fomenting unrest in Balochistan. However, Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif warned that the army was fully aware of India’s nefarious designs. Mentioning Prime Minister Narendra Modi and India’s intelligence agency, RAW, General Sharif said that Pakistan’s armed forces are fully capable of defending the country. “We don’t care what the world says, but we are fighting for our survival,” he said. Pakistani politicians, clerics and government officials, in their statements, raised the issue of the collaboration of Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies that reached to an alarming level.
This collaboration became a hindrance that prevented collaboration between the ISI and NDS last year. Pakistan’s defence secretary recently spotlighted RAW’s special cell in New Delhi to sabotage the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project via Afghanistan. General Mohammad Alam Khan Khattak claimed that RAW and NDS launched a joint secret operation using the Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif: “The three consulates in Afghanistan are providing weapons, money, training and other logistic support to agents for subversive activities in FATA, Balochistan and Karachi.”
This modus operandi by Pakistan and India of helping ‘rebuild’ Afghanistan is absurd and destructive. Pakistan allegedly attacks Indian positions in Kashmir, while India allegedly targets army and civilians in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The traditional rivalry between the two states deeply impacts the peace process in Afghanistan. With the instruction of the United States, the former Afghan president left no stone unturned to make Afghanistan an India ‘colony’ in the name of strategic partnership. The NDS took the country into RAW’s control for its own interests. Now RAW, allegedly, is using the war-torn state for its terrorist operations inside Balochistan.
Last week, President Ashraf Ghani, during his visit to India, condemned the “sponsor of terrorism” — Pakistan. He also threatened the blockage of Pakistan’s transit route to Central Asia to show his propensity to the Modi government. In fact, his artificial government has failed to address the outstanding security challenges, while the nation has lost trust in his government, which is caught in many political and legal crises, and has no clear policy that could improve security across the country. President Ghani did not raise the issue of military assistance with the Indian prime minister. Political observers believe that the United States and India fear that providing sophisticated weapons to the Afghan factional army may possibly fall in the hands of Taliban and ISIS.
The writer is the author of Fixing the EU Intel Crisis, and can be reached at [email protected]