‘Curb terror outfits’It is a wonder that in 26/11, the jihadis after successfully breaching three layers of Indian maritime defence, inactive in all but name – the outer zone manned by the Indian Navy, the coastal zone patrolled by the Coast Guard, and the inner-most defensive line policed by Harbour patrols — merely shot up a couple of hotels when they could have done something really spectacular — a “Pearl Harbour” by sinking a good part of the Western Fleet anchored at the time in the Mumbai naval base, only a few hundred meters from where they landed.
That the raiding team did not have expert frogmen capable of attaching limpet mines to warships below the waterline to sink them; and, instead, the AK-47-toting yahoos (like Ajmal Kasab) were given license to raise hell on Mumbai streets and in hotels, suggested that while the Pakistan Army was quite happy to show off its ISI-managed terrorist-operational prowess and, its flipside, India’s vulnerability, it was simply not prepared to risk instigating action — such as the destruction of the Indian naval strike fleet that was well within its capacity to prosecute — that would have triggered total war, ending in Pakistan’s extinction. In other words, for all its risk-taking propensity, Pakistan Army understands that it cannot afford to provide India provocation so outré as to push Delhi into a justifiable ratcheting up of violence to the strategic level.
This, in essence, rules out the possibility of ISI in any way helping its creatures — the numerous Islamic extremist outfits, such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) — to access nuclear weapons from its fast-growing arsenal. Such a possibility can be ruled out on another count as well — Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are the absolute responsibility of another directorate in GHQ, Rawalpindi, the even more powerful Strategic Plans Division (SPD) at Chaklala — the secretariat for that country’s Nuclear Command Authority, which is fully manned by the military and takes its job as the guardian of Pakistan’s last resort nuclear capabilities extremely seriously. So, a leakage of nuclear weapons for terrorist use can be ruled out, unless it is assumed that, ordered by the Army Chief, SPD joins ISI in wreaking nuclear havoc in India, except it will be at the cost of Pakistan’s survival — a sure-fire deterrent against the Army brass approving any such damn-fool action, in the first place.
That said about the SPD and Pakistan Army, however, there is no gainsaying that fundamentalist loudmouths, such as Jaish-e-Mohammad leader Maulana Masood Azhar and the emir of LeT, Hafiz Saeed, would not mind Pakistan committing national suicide by getting into a nuclear tangle with India. After all, if they can motivate young men to become suicide bombers, there’s no reason to believe they will not welcome Pakistan’s end in the cause of fighting the infidel. Except, the bulk of the officer corps in the Pakistan Army, especially those in the higher command ranks, would rear up at this prospect. However, Islamist rants do serve a military purpose. They rattle a habitually nervy Indian government, fortify SPD’s strategy of keeping Delhi on the defensive, and constitute effective deterrence!
The SPD takes enormous care in selecting military officers with intense psychological tests and background checks, and once in, nobody can opt out (which is unlike the Indian Strategic Forces Command where military personnel are rotated). Major General Ausaf Ali, Director-General, Operations & Plans, SPD, in a briefing on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme in 2007 described the personnel system as “cradle to grave surveillance”. The programme, he said, was heavily monitored — no person being permitted access to nuclear materials, leave alone nuclear weapons, except on a restricted, need to, basis. That said, there is the remote possibility that an officer or a scientist, after years of service, discovers the ‘righteous’ path and turns ultra-religious. Keeping this personal change to himself lest he be turfed out, he succeeds in smuggling out minute quantities of fissile material at a time until there’s enough golf-ball sized enriched uranium to onpass to an organized terrorist organisation, like the al-Qaeda. With a competent physicist, radio-chemist, and a metallurgical engineer to work on this uranium/ plutonium, a kiloton weapon can be cobbled together. But this is still onerous business.
The much easier route to nuclear terrorism is the ‘dirty bomb’ — a radiation diffusion device (RDD) that can be configured by terrorists. All that is needed is a bundle of spent nuclear fuel (featuring radio-isotopes such as cobalt 60, strontium 90 and cesium 137) powering X-ray machines, gamma ray cameras, etc., used extensively in the health and industrial sectors, a smuggled ‘pencil’ of fuel at a time. These can then be tied together and fitted into a shoebox, and the entire package blown up with a conventional explosive, such as dynamite. Voila! You have an RDD going off — a small explosion followed by release of radioactivity which, depending on ambient conditions, can spread with the wind and quickly affect an entire city. While few people may be directly killed by the explosion, thousands will be exposed — many hundreds fatally — to the radioactive plume drifting across the city with the breeze. Imagine the mass hysteria, breakdown of law and order, and the quite considerable costs of decontamination in any densely-packed Indian city! Worse, the nuclear material is immeasurably difficult to account for, a condition not helped by India’s lack of a comprehensive nuclear material accounting (NUMAC) system. This means that it is easier for the LeT to rely on radicalized Indian Muslims to procure, by whatever means, commonly-used nuclear material from Indian sources, and explode it, with full confidence that the nuclear forensics capability of the type the National Technical Research Organization has developed will only be able to identify it as Indian-origin nuclear material. If it is contrived so that the Pakistani hand remains invisible, Pakistan Army and ISI may be tempted to back this nuclear terror by RDD, and put India in a spot by hugely complicating its retaliatory response.
The trouble is, the Indian government is neither preparing for such contingencies, nor taking measures — such as instituting a secure NUMAC system — on a war-footing, to prevent pilferage of industrial-use nuclear material. Indeed, Delhi has got so used to free-riding on security, courtesy the US’s engagement policy, the Manmohan Singh regime actually hopes Washington will ride to its rescue should India find itself in a nuclear predicament.
The US, it is true, has deployed several Nuclear Explosive Search Teams (NEXT) in Pakistan, with a view to “map” its nuclear weapons systems lying around, heavily protected, but in a dismantled state. It is not clear though just what the aim of this exercise is. Generally, the idea seems to be that in a crisis, with SPD control over the nuclear arsenal slipping and militants yearning to get their hands on parts of it, the NEXT will either render these soon to be “loose” weapons and fissile material stockpiles unfit for any malign use, destroy them, or spirit them away even as the weapons laboratories and physical facilities are destroyed with timed explosives in collateral action. This, in any case, is what the Pakistanis fear will happen, except they believe India and Israel will actively collaborate with the US in thus disarming and de-nuclearizing their country. The question is, will the US, in fact, pursue this pre-emption strategy were India alone to suffer from nuclear terrorism?
India will have to depend on its own resources. Indian Special Forces capability is limited and, by and large, non-versatile. There is certainly no nuclear commando element — such as the American NEXT and the Russian Vympel — for Delhi to call upon in an emergency to mount aggressive missions to locate-denature-destroy Pakistani nuclear weapons. That leaves India with only the strategy of nuclear retaliation even against RDD attacks not certifiably sourced to Pakistan. The stated strategy will have to be given teeth by the Prime Minister, his cabinet colleagues, and senior government and military officials now and then, spelling out the certainty of Indian nuclear reaction specifically to any RDD-use or like provocation. Periodically iterating Indian nuclear response option in this way puts everybody, including Pakistan Army, on notice. Until, India develops more flexible instruments of coercive nuclear policy, this is all we can do.
But at the core of any punitive Indian nuclear retaliation is the matter of political will. Indian leaders have rarely shown the stomach for a fight, and when it comes to nuclear weapons, what little resolve they otherwise are able to muster, turns to jelly. It is the absence of Indian government’s will even to react to the grossest provocation that the Pakistan Army ultimately banks on to save its goose in a military crisis with India (recall 1990, Kargil, attack on Indian Parliament). Indian leaders rarely disappoint Pakistan on this score and provide Pakistan with the margin of safety it presently enjoys.
–Agencies