Discussion

India Today, The Telegraph and Indian Express have carried the best and most detailed reports on this matter. Of these the India Today article (see Joshi) has a detailed account of the facts and their chronology and will primarily be used here. It is astonishing that inspite quality information which could have provided early warning of Pakistan’s intentions Kargil came as a surprise. These reports started coming in prior to the Lahore Declaration. Let us construct a time line based on this.

June 1998

Intelligence Bureau's Leh office reports a noticeable Pakistan Army build-up at Skardu.

Heavy artillery exchanges begin in the Kargil Sector and continue through the year.

September 1998

RAW headquarters in Delhi informed of a Pakistani plan to send infiltrators into Kargil.

October 1998

An IB report from Leh spoke of preparations for Pakistani special operations in the Kargil sector. IB officers in the sector shared the information not only with their HQ but also with 121 Brigade stationed at Kargil.

The most critical piece of information came from the G-Branch, the intelligence wing of the Border Security Force (BSF) stationed in Srinagar, when it interrogated Azhar Shafi Mir, a Kashmiri militant, in Baramulla. He revealed that he was one among a group of 80 militants trained by a Colonel Shams for specialised road-sabotage operations focusing on the Leh-Srinagar highway. IB also interrogated him, but both the agencies didn't act on the IB reports.

Pakistan Army surveys the Kargil area using Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) for reconnaissance.

December 1998

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Speech to the United Nations

January 1999

An Indian Army analysis in January concluded that Pakistan did not use RPVs for surveillance.

February 1999

Lahore Declaration

A Pakistani Mi-17 helicopter was seen over Indian territory near Kaksar in Kargil (Pakistan preparation for supplies). The army says the chopper even opened fire but later went back.

4-14 May 1999

Indian Army patrols go missing in the first two weeks in the Dras/Kargil area.

Routine air recce mission fired on over Indian territory.

26 May 1999

Indian Air Force begins airstrikes

These incorrect assessment resulted due to systematic problems and had little to do with the Lahore process. Blaming Lahore is red herring to cover-up improper assessment. Manoj Joshi (India Today, 14 June) points out, rightly, that information was shared but not acted upon. Indeed information about the intrusions were brought to the notice of the key decisions makers in the Home and Defence Ministry rather belatedly. Furthermore, wrong conclusions were drawn from cross border UAV flights, Pakistani chopper incursions in Kaksar and shelling around Kargil earlier in the year. Joshi the "surprise" on bureaucratic infighting, vague assessment reports, and improper evaluation of data, under-staffed Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), inadequate controls and oversight and ad-hoc personnel policies. There remarks point to a lack of long term strategic perspective among politicians and senior officials, and the inadequacy of inter-agency interaction. This is not the first time in recent memory that such lapses have occurred. It was ordinary shepherds who alerted the authorities of Pakistani infiltrators in 1965. Press reports notwithstanding, the Ghauri test in 1998 was a definite surprise, and this in turn led to the Pokhran-II. Another was the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995. There have been successes no doubt. The obtaining a recording of conversations among members of the Pakistani General Staff, is a pointer to this aspect among others.

It appears that Indian intelligence agencies are very good at collecting information and data but not well versed in assessment. This points to the police origins of such agencies in India. They are like giant vacuum cleaners sucking up facts, relevant or not and building up dossiers. It would appear that due to a high degree of compartmentalization in these agencies, dubious and simplistic opinions pass off as estimates and cause policy failures. This failure to create dedicated assessment groups is an administrative failure on the part of both the bureaucrats and the political leadership. As access to such information is restricted, the recipients are grateful for the flow and do not question the estimates. Moreover, the existence of personality cults around strong Prime Ministers (such as Pt.Nehru and Mrs. Gandhi- both of whom did their own assessments) for much of India’s history has meant that here has been no institutional emphasis on the quality of assessments. Demanding better quality could show them up in bad light. Indeed much as been written in the press about Gujral’s contempt for RAW’s efforts and advice.

Angelo Codevilla in his book Informing Statecraft- Intelligence for a New Century tries to explain why a disconnect often exists between the analyst and the policy maker. He feels it happens when the analyst is separated from the policy maker and this works to the disadvantage of both. He quotes Kautilya’s dictum about asking advice from "ministers about distant undertakings…either approach the subject with indifference or give opinion half-heartedly. This is a serious defect." In other words those who make analysis have to be in the shoes of policy makers.

Surprises in international affairs are not new. Barbarossa, Pearl Harbour, Yom Kippur, the collapse of the Soviet Union are all examples of this phenomena. Uri Bar and Zachary Sheaffer (see J. of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, Vol.11, No.3) have studied the topic of surprise and its causes in much detail. The main variables that they discuss are 1) surprise, 2) preventing surprise, 3) indicators, 4) crisis and 5) cover & deception. A surprise is caused by failure of early warning systems and/or policy makers who ignore warnings. In preventing surprise they examine the zero-sum relationship between the victim and the initiator which results in the victim treating all indicators as noise as opposed to signals. Indicators are signals and warnings are indicators about initiator's intent. The quality of a warning is based on clarity and timing. In crisis they identify the strategy of the initiator in reducing the timeframe for the victim to react. In cover and deception these are described as key elements of achieving strategic surprise. They argue surprises are not caused by a lack of early warning indicators or intentional inaction by policymakers with hidden agenda, but rather results from the relevant people not comprehending the meaning of the available indicators owing to the interaction of various factors involved in the process.

These factors can be broadly divided into psychological, organizational, political, and strategic interaction and warning response related factors. These have further sub-divisions.

Psychological factors (Psy) are:
1) Fear of superiors
2) Dearth of skepticism
3) Paranoid-megalomaniac leadership.
4) Cognitive dissonance
5) Heuristic judgments
6) Bridge Over River Kwai syndrome- escalating commitment to chosen course of action
7) Over confidence syndrome- Drowned and Boiled frog syndrome
8) Managerial stress
9) Self-enactment
10) Conflictual and introverted managerial style
11) Aversion to discrepant information
12) Group-think

Organizational factors (O) are:
1) Organization atrophy
2) Politicking & hierarchy orientation
3) Centralization of authorities
4) Over reliance on SOP
5) Compartmentalization

Political Inhibitors (Po) are:
1) Politicking of information
2) Policy makers act as own estimators
3) Instinctive acceptance of estimate
4) Intelligence intervention in policy-making
5) Politicizing of professional product
6) Commitment to political agenda
7) Political intervention in the process

Strategic factor (S) are:
1) Cover
2) Deception
3) Cry Wolf syndrome
4) Time lag factor
5) Initiation factor

Let us see how many of these factors apply to Kargil based on Manoj Joshi’s article.

Psychological factors - 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, & 11
Organizational factors - 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5
Political factors - 1(?), 3 & 6.
Strategic factors - 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5.