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Be prepared for many hiccups and some frustration: Asad Durrani

Praveen Swami

The former Inter-Services Intelligence chiefspeaks out on the prospects of the India-Pakistan Joint Counter-Terrorism Mechanism.

Lieutenant-General Asad Durrani commanded the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate in 1990-1991, the time when Pakistan's covert war in Jammu and Kashmir exploded on the world's consciousness. With India still mired in the brutal insurgency in Punjab, the ISI campaign brought Pakistan closer to seizing the troubled northern State than at any time before or since.

But Lt. Gen. Durrani is also believed to have been part of one of the most closely-guarded secrets of an organisation that harbours many: a series of covert meetings between the chiefs of the ISI and India's Research and Analysis Wing, which were held between 1986 and 1990 to avert the prospect of the conflicts in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir escalating into full-blown war.

According to credible insider accounts, which bear out reports first published in The Hindu in 2004, Lt. Gen. Durrani met his RAW counterpart, G.S. Bajpai, in Singapore in 1990. Like the two earlier rounds of dialogue, this third meeting between the covert services of India and Pakistan proved abortive. Sceptics within India's intelligence meetings have cited the failure of these meetings as illustrations of the challenges confronting the India-Pakistan Joint Counter-Terrorism Mechanism set up last year.

Lt. Gen. Durrani refused to discuss the secret meetings, even for the limited purpose of confirming or denying whether they had ever been held. He agreed, however, to offer his professional assessment of whether meaningful India-Pakistan counter-terrorism cooperation was conceivable — and workable. Excerpts from an interview:

The initiation of the India-Pakistan Joint Counter-Terror Mechanism has generated a great deal of optimism that a new era of cooperation against terrorist groups is in the offing. Do you share this optimism?

In principle, the mechanism is workable. It could work if the two sides keep an open mind and a predetermined conclusion was not intended. After the attack on the Samjhauta Express, I was an online guest on a television programme. All three participants from India started out by saying that it would be wrong to prejudge who the perpetrators might be, but then went on to say that these must be from Lashkar-e-Taiba!

For this mechanism to work sensibly, this approach must be avoided. After a preliminary enquiry, if India finds that there was some reason to suspect that someone from Pakistan was involved, it needs to share with its Pakistani counterparts credible information. Pakistan could then pursue whatever leads were available.

True, it may not work out the first few times, because of the trust deficit. India might suspect that Pakistan did not seriously follow up the leads. Pakistan may believe that the Indian aim was in the first place to embarrass Pakistan. But if both governments remain focussed and patient, there is no reason for the Mechanism not to work. We need to accept, though, that confidence-building is a slow process. Be prepared for many hiccups and some frustration.

How, in your opinion as an intelligence professional, do you get around this issue of trust?

It is a serious problem — and as I said, it will take time to resolve. Suppose India provided a few clues. Pakistan investigated them, and genuinely found no substance in them. Indian doubts about our sincerity would be understandable. Pakistan may react in the same way to Indian denials of a role in acts of sabotage and subversion on our soil.

Now, speaking as an intelligence professional, such scepticism is healthy. But counter-terrorism cooperation needs to be seen in the overall context of Indo-Pakistan relations. The environment now is much better than in the past. Some positive developments have taken place. This would encourage the managers of this instrument to take their work more seriously. Especially in those cases where India and Pakistan have mutual interest in taking action against individuals involved in acts of terrorism, it will work.

Could you give some examples of such individuals?

I've no idea. These things have to be discussed at the appropriate level, by the appropriate people.

Many in India would say Pakistan could build up trust simply by handing over individuals wanted for terrorist operations in India — individuals like Dawood Ibrahim, for example. After all, it has done just that with suspects wanted by the United States of America.

I am not going to get into this useless debate about who was or was not in Pakistan. There is a process to deal with this kind of stuff. If an individual was indeed in Pakistan, and was actually involved in acts of terrorism, there is a legal framework to deal with the extradition question.

We learned from General Pervez Musharraf's book, In the Line of Fire, that many individuals were handed over to the United States of America because they were alleged to have been involved in acts of terror. Now, it turns out, that in many cases nothing could be proven against them. There is widespread anger in Pakistan on this issue, and rightly so. One should not therefore demand that suspects be handed over without due process of law.

If handing over suspects isn't workable, what benchmarks might there be to see if the mechanism is working or not?

It is dangerous to link a process to benchmarks. Timelines and deadlines do not help. What we are talking about here is a process that, ten or twenty years down the line, might help make both the countries feel more confident and thus more secure.

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Be prepared for many hiccups and some frustration: Asad Durrani

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