Intelligence Games

U.S. officials said Thursday they concluded that elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, aided the attack, based on telecommunications intercepts linking Pakistani intelligence officials to Afghan insurgents.

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The statement was published in Wall Street Journal and taken up by most of the high profile western news outlets during the last week. The central event of discussion was the brutal bombing of Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 that left 58 people dead and more than 170 injured. Among the dead were two senior Indian diplomats posted with the embassy. The news above was a refreshing admission, from the more widely read free world press, of the fact that India has been trying to get out in the open for more than two decades now. In fact various Indian governments, however crippled their response to the threats of internal de-stabilization may be, have never lost a chance to point out the role of padosi desh (neighboring country) in the orchestration of unfortunate terror incidents that seem to have become a part of life in the world's biggest democracy. This fact has been pointed out by multiple Indian leaders so many times that these days the media agencies might not even wait for a confirmation from the government press sources before they get a press release ready that blames Pakistan's agencies for the carnage the latest bomb has unleashed. The customary finger pointing gesture has become almost a joke now and nobody seems to take it seriously. The cycle of events goes like this:

1. A bomb explodes somewhere in India or near Indian interests abroad
2. Indian government: Isme padosi desh ka haath hai (Neighboring country is to blame)
3. Pakistani Spoksmen: Nahi hai (Nope, not true)
4. A bomb explodes somewhere in India or near Indian interests abroad
And so it goes….

But last week, suddenly all that finger pointing by the Indians seemed to make sense. After all it was American Intelligence that came to the same conclusion that the Indian Intelligence had made. So after all, there is truth to all these allegations. US, India, Afghanistan all cannot be lying about the ISIs role in promoting fundamentalist terror activities to sustain their own nefarious goals. With US on the same side of the table, people became confident that it was time for action. Now the rouge elements in the ISI will be reigned in and people will stop dying in carnages for no fault of their own. America's findings found a prominent spot in all of Indian newspapers. Two democracies, biggest and the oldest, would come together and make the world safer and better place to live. This would be a natural extension of the ongoing "War on terror". What could the actions be:

1. Would they work with the Pakistani government an weed out Taliban and terror supporting elements from ISI.
2. Would they work together to make Pakistan a more just and true democracy. After all US holds the key to Pakistan's money chest.
3. Would they pool their intelligence resources to reduce or eliminate the threat that these anti-human forces pose at the life of peaceful citizen worldwide.

With the South Asian eyes glued to any report of possible action, the western press obliged on Saturday Aug 02 2008 with the following recommendations from the US Intelligence and politicians:


Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama proposed just that in an interview last week. "If one of the central concerns of Pakistan is its security posture towards India, then we need to put that on the table for discussion as we try to solve the problems in Afghanistan," he said.

The officials say a better U.S. policy would have been to limit India's high-profile activities inside Afghanistan

"Having the Indians running around Afghanistan was sure to invite retaliation," said a U.S. intelligence official with extensive experience in Afghanistan. "We may need to play a more direct role in calming things down."

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WHAT????

So again, we have decided to run than chase. The policy seems to be that if we take away the target, the terrorists have nothing to shoot at. There may be some substance in that approach if we first gave it a bit of thought. What was the "target" in the first place? Was it to bomb the embassy or get democratic influences out of Afghanistan? Instead of moving the target we end up handing the terrorists scopes that they can attach to their weapons so that they don’t miss the next time. We are losing the war just to avoid a battle. I think the conversation at some high level US intelligence/political headquarters went like this:

Big Politician (BP): So do we have any idea about who caused the bombing
Intelligence Guy (IG): Yes sir, it was Taliban with the help of ISI
BP: Why would they do that
IG: Well sir, the Pakistani intelligence establishment has some elements in it that resent the spread of Indian influence and democracy in Afghanistan so they orchestrated this bombing.
BP: Uh..looks like we should do something.
IG: Really?
BP: Yes yes, after all we are the major force in the region and the stability of the region affects us directly, or something like that. You can read the presidents last speech about why, but something should be done.
IG: OK
BP: Lets analyze this: If Indians stay in Afghanistan, Taliban will be angry and there will be bombings.
IG: Yes sir we need to stop Taliban.
BP: Right, ask the Indians to leave
IG: What?
BP: Yes if they are not there then Taliban will be happy and they will join the main democracy and then they will call us heroes because we bring them peace.
IG: Genius sir.
BP: Mark my words, there will be temples in our names everywhere in Afghanistan.
IG: Err…sir Taliban don’t worship in Temples, in fact they get really angry if they see one.
BP: Oh…ok, no temples. Looks like we have found a real solution to all our problems.
IG: Yes sir we are really winning this war on extremism.
BP: Yeah baby, where is OBL. We are kicking his butt here.