Mint | Covert action is a troublesome but often useful tool of statecraft

There is not enough information in the public domain to assess the Canadian government’s allegation that Indian officials were involved in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, but we should not be too impressed by media commentary along the lines of “India wants to be like Israel but is ending up like Russia" or that “democracies don’t engage in targeted killings." Covert action—including targeted killings—is an instrument of statecraft that exists in the toolkit of all sovereign states, including democracies. Opening his history of Israeli targeted killing operations, Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist, states that since World War II, the country has assassinated more people than any other in the Western world, killing more than 1,000 people by the turn of the century and carrying out another 800 operations in the years since. Read the full article here.