Omar Sheikh: If Not Daniel Pearl, a Trail With Links to ISI, 9/11 Mastermind and Bin Laden

Was it a coincidence or was it purposely timed for when everyone was too busy worrying about the Covid-19 crisis?Last week, the Sindh High Court overturned, citing a lack of evidence, the conviction of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh on charges of murdering Daniel Pearl. It, however, found him guilty of a lesser charge of kidnapping and sentenced him to seven years in prison.Omar Sheikh, who has been in custody since 2002, will be released as the sentence for kidnapping will be deemed to have been completed.In India he’s remembered as one of the three terrorists released at Kandahar after the hijacking of IC 814. The other key figure released with him was Maulana Masood Azhar who went on to found the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM)...Read the full article on The Telegraph India here.

India's Troops in Afghanistan: An Old Request in a New Context

Boots on the ground are secondary; India's key objective in Afghanistan should be to help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan claim a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force. India can contribute a lot towards the capacity building of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF). The biggest challenges it currently faces are related to the decline in the quality of human resources at hand, rather than a shortage of financial resources.Read the full article on The Telegraph here.

The Battle in Pakistan’s Military-Jihadi Complex

Contrary to popular belief, Pakistan's military-jihadi complex (MJC) has not been brought to its knees by Balakot, Uri, or even FATF. India's actions in Kashmir, for example, have provided the MJC with the perfect excuse to interfere as it does best. The reason for its current quiet is internal political turmoil connected to COAS Bajwa. India can ill-afford to take it for granted.For more, read The Telegraph Online.

Misguided Talks With the Taliban Won’t Bring Peace to Afghanistan

Dark, bizarre, surreal: we are short of adjectives to accurately capture the current political situation in Afghanistan. On May 8, even as they were in talks with the US, the Taliban attacked the Kabul office of a US aid NGO, killing nine. On May 5, the Taliban mounted attacks on armed forces outposts in northern Afghanistan, killing more than a dozen servicemen.Earlier in March, the Taliban’s shadow police subjected women to public lashings evoking comparisons to their brutal medieval-era style rule between 1996 and 2001. This is to say nothing of the 75,000 plus Afghan civilians who have been killed in heinous acts of terrorism since 2001. And despite all this, the US seems determined to strike a deal with the Taliban through negotiations which erode the authority of the Afghan national unity government, a government midwifed by them and one that couldn’t have survived this long without them. On May 9, the US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted that slow but steady progress was made on the framework to end the Afghan war and the Doha round of talks were now getting into the ‘nitty-gritty’.If we are to believe Khalilzad, the US remains hopeful of forming an interim government involving the Taliban on the basis of this quid pro quo: the US will scale down its presence in Afghanistan in return for security guarantees by the Taliban. Though the details are yet to be worked out, there appears to be an in-principle agreement on this broad arrangement between the US, the Taliban, and the Taliban’s minders – the ISI. If it works out, President Trump will appeal to the voters in the 2020 presidential elections that he has brought soldiers back from Afghanistan – from a war he now refers to as “ridiculous”.

This article first appeared in The Wire

How India Should Respond to Trump’s Barbs on Afghanistan

An article on Trump's barbs that India is only building 'libraries' in Afghanistan. We find that though conveyed crudely, there is some truth in his argument - India has not done much since August 2017 when Trump announced his previous Afghanistan approach. So we look at some options for India on the security, political, and cultural fronts in this piece. Finally, it is for India’s own national interest that we need to do a lot more and help build a strong, resilient, democratic and peaceful Afghanistan.Read more on TheWire.in

In its sixth decade, R&AW needs to look at the world outside terrorism

Without HUMINT assets, it will gradually become only a collection agency and not an anticipatory agency

The Research & Analysis Wing, the department I served in for 37 years, is 50. It came into being on September 21, 1968, following a realisation that intelligence had been inadequate during the 1962 Indo-China conflict. This year is also the 100th year of the birth of its first chief, the legendary R N Kao.It was one of the first such post-Independence structures created for a specific need, much like the nuclear establishment and ISRO. It owes much to the vision of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who recognised that a modern state needed an agency for external intelligence.Indira Gandhi chose Kao, then in the Intelligence Bureau (IB), to set up a specialised and independent organisation. V Balachandran, in his excellent commentary on the R&AW on its 50th anniversary (‘Struggling to preserve ‘Kaoboys’ legacy’, The Tribune, September 30, 2018), writes ‘Kao told me that the only advice Indira Gandhi gave him in 1968 was not to structure the new organisation as a Central Police Organisation (CPO). In this she did not mean to deride police work but that foreign intelligence needed something more than police skills. Police is a hierarchical and transparent organisation, accountable to law and society for their actions’..….whereas foreign intelligence often operates outside the law.Read more here>