Why can't India do a US to the likes of Dawood, Saeed?

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NEW DELHI: If the US can take out Osama bin Laden, why can't India do the same with Dawood Ibrahim, Hafeez Saeed and others of their ilk? For starters, lack of political will, essentially due to the fear of an escalation with a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

But even if the traditionally risk-averse political leadership did decide that enough is enough, India simply does not have the wherewithal to execute back ops. This is truer in terms of intelligence and planning, rather than the capability of special forces themselves.

Moreover, Pakistan is not a country with rag-tag armed forces. Any move to insert and later extract special forces deep inside Pakistan through helicopters, like the US did to eliminate Osama, will have to contend with robust air defence networks and combat air patrols geared to shoot down "enemy" aircraft.

With military bases, logistics, over-flight facilities and ongoing operations in Pakistan, the US faced no such hurdles. In the India-Pakistan context, it would be tantamount to declaration of war. A "surgical strike" would, in all probability, lead to a war-like situation, with Pakistan always being over-eager to brandish its nuclear weapons.

But let's take intelligence first. Indian intelligence agencies like RAW and IB suffer from several serious lacunae that prevent them from generating and sustaining credible intelligence on high-value targets within Pakistan.

A former senior intelligence official, for instance, admitted that they were never able to gather specific details of all the anti-India terrorist-training camps that they have claimed exist in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. This absence of "real-time" intelligence, with exact coordinates, was one of the reasons that came in the way of an aerial strike by IAF fighters after the horrific 26/11 Mumbai attacks.

India, as yet, also does not have high-tech surveillance tools used by the US, which can pick up even match-boxes on the ground through satellites, or for that matter combat drones like Predators controlled from thousands of miles away.

Another officer pointed out that Indian intelligence lacked the kind of discipline the US agencies had, especially on cultivating and sustaining sources. "Every source cultivated by an US intelligence operative is accounted for, and is verifiable," he explained. Conversely, in the Indian system, "there are far too many loopholes" and most of the intelligence flow is "hampered by vested interests and inabilities of individual operatives". In fact, he said, that is one reason why many of them are in favour of parliamentary accountability, which would help improve the intelligence set-up.

While Indian intelligence operatives have carried out successful operations in places like Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar to target Indian terrorists, the record of surgical strikes deep inside Pakistan is virtually non-existent. Indian special forces, on their part, are well trained, capable of giving others a run for their money. The problem, however, lies in the fact that they have for long largely been treated as adjuncts to regular troops, restricted more to the tactical arena rather than being considered strategic assets to be used sparingly but with decisive effect.

Moreover, it's only now that India is slowly strengthening its "irregular" or "unconventional" warfare arm by modernizing the special forces of Army (Para-SF), Navy (Marcos) and IAF (Garuds) with specialized equipment to undertake covert missions deep behind enemy lines and hit high-value targets with precision.

Much more needs to be done. The crying need is for a tri-Service Special Forces Command, tasked with planning and executing clandestine warfare, on the lines of the Strategic Forces Command, which deals with nuclear weapons.

The around 10,000 personnel of Para-SF, marine commandos and Garud need to function under one umbrella, not in isolation as they currently do. "They should come under one command and control authority, with direct access to the PMO and a separate budget," a senior officer said.

"The stress should be on quality, not quantity. Special forces should be used to apply calibrated pressure at the strategic level, with plausible deniability if required, and not be reduced to some kind of super-infantry," he added.