Intelligence Failure in South Asia: A Comparative Analysis 9789843393906

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INTELLIGENCE, NATIONAL SECURITY, AND FOREIGN POLICY A South Asian Narrative

Edited by ASM ALI ASHRAF

Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA) Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka

Published by Shahdeen Malik Honorary Director Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA) Suhrawardy Bhaban, House no. 22 Bhasha Shoinik M.A. Matin Road Road no. 7, Dhanmondi R.A. Dhaka - 1205, Bangladesh. Tel: 9111718, 9143245; Fax: 880-2-8110970 Email: [email protected] Web: www.biliabd.org In collaboration with Department of International Relations University of Dhaka Social Science Building (Level 6) Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh. Tel: 9661900, Ext, 6541, 6542; Fax: 8615583 Email: [email protected] Web: www.duir.ac.bd First Published: June 2016 Copyright © Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA) Cover Design: Masud Al Mamun Cover Image: Mounted warriors pursue enemies. Illustration of Rashid-ad-Din's Gami' at-tawarih. Tabriz (?), 1st quarter of 14th century. Water colours on paper. Original size: 17.5 cm x 25.8 cm. Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Orientabteilung, Diez A fol. 70, p. 59. Probably it features a conflict between Mongols. Courtesy: Dschingis Khan und seine Erben (exhibition catalogue), München 2005, p. 255. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA). ISBN 978-984-33-9390-6 Printed by S.A. Printers, 1/1 Sheikh Shaheb Bazar Road, Azimpur, Dhaka - 1205, Bangladesh. Price: Tk. 750

Chapter 16

Intelligence Failure in South Asia: A Comparative Analysis ASM ALI ASHRAF NOOR MOHAMMAD SARKER

On 25-26 February 2009 an armed mutiny in the headquarters of Bangladesh Rifles (BDR), a paramilitary border force in the country, killed 74 people, mostly senior ranking army officials. During the 36 hour-long rebellion, junior ranking BDR soldiers looted the arms depot, deliberately killed the military officers, and projected the mutiny as an outburst of their grievances against poor career prospects, abuses, and misappropriation of funds by senior officers. Four months before the mutiny in Bangladesh, in a completely different context, a coordinated terrorist attack in India’s port city Mumbai in November 2008 killed 164 people and wounded more than 300 others. The Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, a Pakistan-based and Kashmir-focused terrorist group, was accused of planning and executing the Mumbai attack. In yet another context, a little over two years after the BDR Mutiny, in early May 2011, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in a commando operation executed by U.S. Navy SEAL. The unilateral military action by U.S. forces was described by Pakistan as an assault on its sovereignty and the greatest humiliation in four decades. Despite sharp differences among them, the three incidents described above exhibited the common features of surprise attacks and intelligence failures. In the backdrop of huge public criticisms, the national governments in Bangladesh and

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Pakistan, and the provincial government in India’s Maharashtra state formed high profile inquiry committees to investigate the circumstances that contributed to the intelligence failures, and the extent to which the security and intelligence agencies were able to develop a crisis management strategy in response to the evolving threat scenarios. Contrary to public expectations, none of these investigative committee reports were officially published. Instead, the full or abridged versions of inquiry reports were leaked to the media, which form the basis for this study. This chapter explores the competing theories of intelligence failure, and examines their utility in the South Asian context. It employs the method of structured and focused comparison, developed by Alexander George and Andrew Bennett (2005), to understand the discourse of intelligence failure in South Asia. There are strong rationales for choosing the three cases. First, although they do not offer any representative samples in the universe of intelligence failures in the region, their widespread media coverage, coupled with the release of unofficial version of inquiry reports provide us with an opportunity to take a critical look at the politics and culture of intelligence agencies in South Asia. Second, most accounts of intelligence failure tend to be single country case study. While such in-depth case studies are useful for generating new hypotheses, there is hardly any comparative study of multi-country intelligence failures, especially in the South Asian context. Our study addresses this gap. The chapter is divided into several sections. The first section explores the competing theories of intelligence failure. The next three sections test the utility of those theories in light of the publicly available reports of inquiry committees. The concluding section offers a comparative discussion of those three inquiry reports. The scope of this chapter is focused. It does not aim to finger point at any particular intelligence agency. Instead, it relies on the available probe reports to explore the extent to which their accounts of intelligence lapses fit with the contending approaches to intelligence failure. Thomas Copeland (2007: xvi-xviii) notes that any study of intelligence failure may be constrained by two factors: over-reliance on open-source data, and hindsight bias. We address these concerns in two ways. First, given the fact that the intelligence agencies in South Asia operate in a highly secretive culture with no practice of declassification, it is nearly impossible to conduct an analysis with the basis of primary and de-classified data. Therefore, our study relies on inquiry reports, which were leaked to the media, but are widely accepted as the basis for discussion among the academics, journalists, and practitioners. Since the official versions of the inquiry reports were never made public, we try to test the authenticity of the leaked reports – by reviewing existing open source literatures such as peer reviewed journals, think tank reports, parliamentary documents, as well as media analyses. Second, hindsight bias may be caused by an under-appreciation of the complex threat environment and the decisionmaking environment. In our discussion of intelligence failure, hindsight bias may distort the vision of an outside commentator who may magnify the gravity of a threat after a disaster has taken place (Hoffrage et al 1999; Shlaim 1976). In mitigating the

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hindsight bias in this study, we attempt to offer a balanced analysis of the complex threat environment and refrain from assigning undue blames. Theories of Intelligence Failure According to John Hedley, a seasoned intelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, “The study of intelligence failures is perhaps the most academically advanced field in the study of intelligence” (Hedley 2005: 437). This is certainly true when one looks at three major perspectives in the study of intelligence failure. The first two highlight the role of intelligence organization and cognitive beliefs of policymakers and intelligence analysts. In contrast, the third emphasizes operational performance of security and intelligence agencies. Among the organizational theorists, perhaps the most authoritative study of intelligence failure comes from Loch Johnson. Johnson, who had served as a staff member of the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee on intelligence reform, focuses on the cyclical process of intelligence to explain failure. He notes: “Weaknesses exist in each step of the intelligence cycle, from planning and direction to collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination” (Johnson 2006: 116). Following Johnson’s theory, there are four possible types of intelligence failure. These are discussed below: 

Planning and Direction Failure: This can be caused by the lack of well defined planning and direction by senior government officials and intelligence customers. The problem of such policy failure is simple: it makes intelligence officers “ignorant” of the type of information needed for policymaking (Johnson 2006: 118).

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Collection and Processing Failure: Abundance of data can overwhelm the task of intelligence collectors, who may fail to process the data in a timely manner and provide it to the analysts (Johnson 2006: 120).

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Analytical Failure: Johnson describes intelligence analysis as the ‘heart’ of intelligence cycle, which requires the analyst to add his/her ‘insight’ to convert a piece of information into actionable intelligence (Johnson 2006: 120). Several factors can cause poor analytical judgment: professional incompetence, limited information, or political manipulation.



Dissemination Failure: Intelligence analysts may fail to draw the attention of the national security decision makers who are often preoccupied with multiple competing issues. In addition to this lack of attention, policymakers’ tendency to “cherry-pick” preferred information from intelligence reports may also cause dissemination failure (Johnson 2006: 121).

Although Johnson does not suggest which of the four steps in the intelligence cycle is more vulnerable to failure, James Bruce stresses the relative weight of collection and analysis as the major sources of failure. Bruce (2008) defines ‘collection failure’ as a

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broader phenomenon to include “erroneous or misleading information”. He also argues that “the failure to correct for the impact of missing information, when combined with lack of imagination, is an almost surefire predictor of analytical failure. Other factors such as poor collection requirements, poor information sharing, and the impact of faulty assumptions, also “pile on,” helping to ensure intelligence failure” (Bruce 2008: 191-192; emphasis added). Anthropologist Rob Johnston (2005: 6) appears to agree with Bruce when he notes, intelligence failure often results from “incorrect, missing, discarded, or inadequate hypotheses.” Amy Zegart also takes an organizational perspective and argues that intelligence agencies are bureaucratic organizations which prefer to maintain compartmentalization rather than coordination. In Zegart’s analysis, intelligence failure prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks was caused by ‘adaptation failure.’ This means both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed to adapt to the evolving threats of transnational terrorism posed by al Qaeda. In contrast to the organizational theorists, Richard Betts emphasizes the role of policy and leadership failure in the intelligence process. In Betts’ analysis: “The most crucial mistakes have seldom been made by collectors of raw information, occasionally by professionals who produce finished analyses, but most often by the decision makers who consume the products of intelligence services (Betts 1978: 61).” While Betts focuses on the cognitive biases of policymakers, Irving Janis (1972) warns about the adverse effect of ‘group think’, a phenomenon that refers to analysts’ search for consensus rather than multiple competing hypotheses. Richard Heur (1999) identifies four distinct cognitive biases: biases in evaluation of evidence, biases in perception of cause and effect, biases in estimating probabilities, and hindsight biases in evaluation of intelligence reporting. Taken together, these four types of biases not only constrain the ability of intelligence analysts but also cause strategic surprises. One may notice an interesting similarity between organizational and cognitive theories in their identification of data abundance as a problem for intelligence processing. As Johnson argues, prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) failed to translate a telephone message in Farsi, which was intercepted the day before 9/11. The message was translated on 12 September 2001 saying: “Tomorrow is zero hour” (Johnson 2006: 120). Although this may appear to be a case of processing failure, one has to understand how ‘noise’ or irrelevant data can impede the process of analyzing ‘signals’ of an impending threat. Alberta Wohlstetter’s masterpiece Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision illustrates the problems of ‘signal-tonoise ratio’ in the following words: “In short, we failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of relevant information, but because of a plethora of irrelevant ones” (Wohlstetter 1962: 387). Although the organizational and cognitive theories tend to dominate the field of intelligence studies, a third perspective suggests that many strategic surprises are not caused by missing intelligence or warning failure but by operational failures. For instance, Eliot Cohen and John Gooch challenge the Wohlstetter thesis on Pearl Harbor. They argue that the Japanese attacks on U.S. naval platform in 1941 revealed “a failure of vulnerabilities and an absence of precautions, an operational failure, not solely

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or even primarily an intelligence failure” (Cohen and Gooch 2006: 49). Cohen and Gooch do not lay the blame to any specific individuals but suggest lack of coordination between the army and navy caused the military commanders’ failure to “take reasonable defensive precautions that would have mitigated the effect of the attack” (Cited in Dahl 2013). Cohen and Gooch (2006: 130) also observe that the Yom Kippur War of 1973 can best be understood as the shared responsibility of Israeli policymakers and intelligence officials: “The operational and the intelligence brains of the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] had failed, and had done so together.” Drawing on an analysis of the 9/11 Commission Report, Stephen Lee (2015: 28) observes why the U.S. intelligence community, State Department, and aviation administration should share responsibility for ‘operational failures’ prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In Lee’s assessment, the FBI and the CIA did not watch list several al Qaeda suspects, the State Department failed to recognize fraudulent passports of terrorist suspects, and the aviation authority did not make use of a terrorist watch list where two 9/11 hijackers were listed. Janda et al argue (2012: 470) that the fragmented nature of bureaucratic culture in the U.S. government had caused lack of coordination which was responsible for the “intelligence and operational failures” associated with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In summary, we identify three hypotheses on intelligence failure: organizational breakdown, psychological limits, and operational failure. The first hypothesis suggests that surprises can be caused by problems at any stage of the intelligence cycle. The second hypothesis suggests that leadership failure, groupthink, and cognitive biases are responsible for intelligence failure. In contrast, the third hypothesis emphasizes operational failure or the inability to act by security and intelligence agencies in a timely manner. There is no doubt security and intelligence agencies are often able to foil an attack and perform their duties in a professional manner that serves their national interests. Despite that failures are hard to avoid. The three cases in South Asia—BDR Mutiny in Bangladesh, Mumbai attacks in India, and U.S. military raids in Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Abbottabad—offer us a fresh opportunity to explore the utility of the competing theories of intelligence failure. BDR Mutiny, 2009 When the mutiny by junior soldiers killed 74 people including 57 army officers and the then director general of BDR Major General Shakil Ahmed, it was widely described by the media as a worst case of intelligence failure in Bangladesh. Reuters described it as “one of the bloodiest episodes” in the country’s violent history (Ahmed 2009). Brigadier Shahedul Anam Khan, a well known strategic analyst in the country, described the mutiny as “a gross intelligence failure” in which the principal intelligence agencies failed “to get an indication of what was afoot (Quoted in Hussein 2009).” Former Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, Veena Sikri, describes the BDR mutiny as an embarrassment for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina who just came to power in less than

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two months (Sikri 2009: 151). The revolt forced the government to introduce sweeping reforms in the BDR, including renaming it to Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), and disbanding its intelligence arm—Rifles Security Unit. The post-mutiny reforms also established a three-tiered border intelligence structure, which would be integrated with the other powerful agencies such as Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) and National Security Intelligence (NSI) (Ashraf 2014; Financial Express 20 Aug. 2009; The Daily Star, 22 Dec. 2010). A brief history of the BDR is necessary to understand the causes and consequences of the BDR mutiny, as they relate to intelligence failure. Until 2009, the BDR was the principal border protection force in Bangladesh responsible for patrolling 4,500 km long frontier with India and Myanmar. It had a checkered history that dates back to 1795, when the British colonial regime in India established the Ramgarh Local Battalion for suppressing local insurgency (Rahman 2010: 44). It was later renamed to Frontier Guards in 1861, Bengal Miliary Police in 1891, and Eastern Frontier Rifles (EPR) in 1920. After the partition of India and Pakistan, the force was further renamed to East Pakistan Rifles (Ahmed 2009). During the Bangladesh Liberation War 1971, the EPR soldiers put a huge resistance against the West Pakistani forces. Following the independence of the country in1971, Bangladesh Rifles was established in 1972 with officers drawn from Bangladesh Army. Since then it had emerged as the principal border force in Bangladesh combating transnational crime such as drugs and arms smuggling, and cross-border infiltration of hostile forces. While the fight against organized crime would receive low media coverage, occasional border clashes between BDR and India’s Border Security Force (BSF) and Myanmar’s border force NASAKA would draw huge media attention (Baweja et al 2001; BBC News, 8 Jan. 2001; BBC News, 18 April 2001, Schendel 2005: 332-362; Singh 2005:20, 201). It was quite surprising that the biggest threat to BDR came from its disgruntled soldiers, not from the border forces of neighboring states. This study finds that the security and intelligence agencies in Bangladesh failed to collect, collate, and analyze any mutiny-related intelligence that could have saved more lives and avoided the crisis. They also lacked any human or technological resources to generate intelligence while the mutiny was progressing. The government adopted a crisis management strategy which also failed to take any swift action. Johnson’s framework of intelligence failure fits very well in analyzing the warning failure prior to BDR mutiny. However, as the mutiny continued for nearly two days, the civilian and military leadership failed to develop a strategy which could have thwarted an operational failure. The Bangladesh government formed three investigative committees to examine the causes and evolution of the BDR Mutiny. Among the three inquiry bodies, the most widely known committee was chaired by retired home ministry official Anis Uz Zaman Khan (referred hereto as Anis Committee).1 It received huge media coverage for two 1

The second inquiry committee was chaired by Quartermaster General Lt General Jahangir Alam Chowdhury, former director general of BDR, and the third committee was led by senior assistant superintendent of police, Abdul Kahar Akand, a seasoned official at the Criminal Investigation Department of Bangladesh Police.

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principal reasons: first, its inclusion of high profile government officials representing the civilian administration and the three branches of the armed forces; and second, its broader scope of investigation, compared to the other two committees. The Anis Committee was formed on 3 March 2009, and submitted its final report on 21 May 2009. The 309-page long final report was presented to the then home minister Sahara Khatun, with the state minister for home affairs and the home secretary, and members of the Anis Committee present (The Daily Star, 22 May 2009). Although the full report of the Anis Committee has never been officially released, a 7-page summary was made public by the government. Home Minister Khatun told the media about the disclosure of the summary report: “Previous governments have never made such reports public before. We gave our word that we would make public the findings of the probe committee and we have done it” (Quoted in Al-mahmood 2009). In contrast to the declassified 7-page summary report, a 27-page abridged version of the report was posted online by Human Rights Watch (HRW), a transnational advocacy group with a headquarters in New York. The analysis in this chapter is based on the abridged version of BDR Mutiny inquiry report leaked by HRW. The Anis Committee was composed of 10 senior government officials—five from civilian organizations and five from military institutions.2 The exclusion of the civil society members from the committee indicates the state of governmentalizing the inquiry process. It also indicates the way the government constructs intelligence to be too sensitive an issue to be discussed with the public. The remit of the Anis Committee focused on three issues: developing a historical background of the mutiny; disclosing the reasons behind the mutiny; and offering recommendations on relevant matters. The Committee began its investigation with a list of ten probing questions. Broadly speaking, those questions were designed to understand whether the mutiny was an isolated incident or part of a larger conspiracy, and whether it was caused by junior level soldiers’ grievances over poor pay and compensation or orchestrated by any ‘external force’ assisting from outside. Although the committee’s ‘agenda’ of inquiry, does not spell out the issue of investigating intelligence failure, on several occasions, the abridged report refers to the failure of detective agencies to collect, collate, and coordinate secret information to prevent the mutiny. The inquiry committee employed a variety of techniques for the collection of data. It interviewed civilian, military, and paramilitary personnel either employed by or attached to the BDR and its headquarters in Peelkhana, the family members of those officials. The list of interviewees also included former director generals of BDR, as well as concerned political leaders and business persons affiliated with the BDR. More tellingly, the committee talked to members of the principal intelligence agencies in the country to learn about the extent to which “these agencies had alerted the government 2

The civilian officials represented the ministry of law, justice, and parliamentary affairs, prime minister’s office, cabinet secretariat, Bangladesh Police, and ministry of home affairs. In contrast, the military officials were delegated by the director general of defunct Bangladesh Rifles, three representatives from the army, navy, and air force, and the office of judge advocate general. An additional secretary from the home ministry served as a member secretary for the committee.

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in advance” and whether they had “monitored the happenings of 25th and 26th February [2009]” (Khan 2009: 4). Written statements were collected from several law enforcement and intelligence agencies including the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP), Special Branch (SB), Criminal Investigative Department (CID), Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), and Special Security Force (SSF). After criminal investigation began following the mutiny, the committee also exchanged information with the CID and RAB to reconstruct the mutiny, and trace its causes. The Anis Committee admitted that it failed to receive the desired level of cooperation from the principal intelligence agencies in Bangladesh including the National Security Intelligence (NSI), Directorate General Forces Intelligence (DGFI), RAB, CID, and SB (Khan 2009: 5). In the absence of any detective information and ‘adequate material evidence,’ the Committee failed to “identify the main conspirators behind this [BDR] revolt and massacre” (Khan 2009: 5). The probe committee found that planning for the mutiny lasted for at least two months. During this time, the agitating soldiers met several influential political leaders of the ruling party Awami League, and asked them to press the government to fulfill their demands of better salary, compensation, and in-service career promotion. When the disgruntled BDR soldiers found that the influential politicians were reluctant to lobby for their demands, they planned to “extract the demands by keeping Officers as hostage” (Khan 2009: 6). As part of their hard line approach, they distributed leaflets (flyers) containing derogatory comments on the senior leadership structure in the BDR and demanding massive reforms in their status, salary and compensation. Unlike many government-sponsored inquiry committees in Bangladesh, which rarely speak about intelligence failure, the Anis Committee Report appears to be quite bold and candid. It blames the BDR authority for not sharing the information on soldiers’ deviant activities in distributing propaganda materials against the military high-ups. The Committee observes that the BDR mutiny was caused by a failure of the detective agencies at various stages of the intelligence cycle. In the first place, the major agencies “associated with the security of the Head of the Government” were “unaware” of the BDR soldiers’ propaganda tactics. It was precisely a collection failure, which blinded their ability to “evaluate” the gravity of the threat (Khan 2009: 7). The Rifles Security Unit (RSU), the internal intelligence wing of BDR, was also partly responsible for not exchanging the reports of leaflet distribution and the possibility of a threat at the BDR headquarters. While the RSU’s participation in the BDR mutiny can be interpreted as a case of counterintelligence failure, this has certainly weakened the collection efforts of other national intelligence agencies.3 Is it possible that the routine intelligence direction and tasking process made the collection failure an inevitable phenomenon prior to the BDR Mutiny? This question arises for two obvious reasons. First, since the prime minister and her entourage were scheduled to visit BDR headquarters on 24 February 2009 to inaugurate an annual program called BDR Week, the intelligence agencies were directed and tasked to collect any information pertaining to the physical protection of the prime minister and other 3

The authors are thankful to Prem Mahadevan for bringing attention to the issue of counterintelligence failure.

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dignitaries. Second, given that the rise of Islamist militancy had emerged as a violent threat in 1999-2005 targeting secular parties, foreign emissaries, and religious symbols, the intelligence community was apparently focused on looking for such terrorist threats. In retrospect, the confidential reports from major intelligence agencies such as SB, NSI, and DGFI provide some ideas about their collection requirements which focused on physical protection and the search for terrorist threats. In their confidential reports to the SSF director general, the SB, NSI, and DGFI ruled out the possibility of any terrorist attack on the VIPs (very important persons). The Anis Committee report notes that the defense detective department [DGFI], was more specific in its reporting: “there was no specific threat perception of organized or isolated attack by terrorist groups” (Khan 2009: 16). While two days before the mutiny, on 23 February 2009, the NSI came to learn about the BDR soldiers’ propaganda materials addressing the prime minister, it only “verbally informed” a junior army officer attached to RSU but “did not inform the government” to take any further actions (Khan 2009: 16). This narrative of NSI not reporting to the government, and the DGFI ruling out the possibility of a terrorist attack perhaps reveal a broader case of poor analytical judgment magnified by the collection failure. If collection failure had impaired the analytical process, then the role of missing information needs to be understood in explaining the mutiny. As Bruce discusses, collection failure can be caused by faulty information or missing information. The Anis Committee observes that planning for the BDR mutiny evolved in such a way that indicates missing information rather than faulty information. Here Bruce’s concern of missing information coupled with lack of imagination as a “surefire predictor of analytical failure” is very relevant for understanding the surprise attack by BDR’s rebel soldiers against their superior officers. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, one can note that the NSI failed to imagine the far-reaching consequences of the provocative propaganda leaflet received by its sources a day before the mutiny. Lack of human intelligence also contributed to collection failure. The Anis Committee observes “NSI, SB and DGFI failed to provide necessary information to the government during or before the revolt, as they did not have any detective network inside Peelkhana [BDR headquarters]” (Khan 2009: 16). The probe committee blames the intelligence agencies for their professional incompetence and the inability to warn the government before the mutiny. The Anis Committee also blames the major intelligence agencies for their inability to provide any information during the 36-hour long mutiny (Khan 2009: 17). One should also note that the complicity of BDR’s intelligence outfit, Rifles Security Unit, in the planning and organizing of the mutiny had further complicated the intelligence collection process. The Anis Committee observes: The higher authority could not collect any prior detective information regarding the revolt, as the BDR members on duty (FS, field staff) at Rifle Security Unit (RSU) and BDR’s own detective unit themselves were involved in the revolt. The lack of awareness and failure of the Officers on duty at RSU had obstructed collection of detective information (Khan 2009: 16).

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The Anis Committee findings also indicate operational failure and a poor crisis management strategy. As the mutiny progressed for 36 hours, in which the rebel BDR soldiers took the senior military officers and their family members as hostage, looted the arms depot, and started a killing spree against senior military officials, the intelligence agencies had no assets inside the BDR headquarters to learn what was happening. Although an advanced team of paramilitary law enforcement agency RAB arrived at the mutiny area during the first hour of the crisis, the army took nearly two hours to send its first team (Khan 2009: 17). In a few hours, 500 army soldiers and 350 RAB personnel were deployed in the area, but were ordered to take a defensive position at a safe distance. The commando battalion was located a few hundred miles away in Sylhet district, and hence was not involved in a swift rescue operation. Although an air force helicopter started hovering the sky just an hour after the mutiny started, the rebel BDR soldiers kept firing at the helicopter (Khan 2009: 11). While the helicopter was dropping leaflets asking the rebels to surrender, it was hit by six bullets forcing the pilot to abandon the mission. It appears that the government’s crisis management strategy focused on political negotiations with the rebels rather than taking any military actions against the mutineers. The probe report suggests that during the mutiny on 25-26 February 2009, at least five such negotiations took place, all of which failed to persuade the rebels to surrender their arms and release the hostages. The first negotiations took place between the prime minister and a delegation of rebel soldiers. The rest of the talks were held between delegations of senior ministers and parliamentarians on one side and the BDR rebels on the other. When the negotiations failed to persuade the mutineers to surrender, the prime minister decided to consult the cabinet members and the three service chiefs before delivering a speech on the second day. The speech was broadcast in television and radio on the 30th hour of the mutiny. The rebels took a few more hours to flee the area by leaving their arms. Many of the rebels and their families living inside the residential compound of BDR’s Peelkhana headquarters had fled on the first evening taking advantage of a deliberate power outage. The probe committee describes the crisis management strategy as an utter failure. It observes: “Neither a political solution nor a military operation was successful even after 29 hours of revolt” (Khan 2009: 18). The rebels eventually “got a long time including a night to run away, after executing a massacre, hiding the dead bodies, torturing people and plundering the place” (Khan 2009: 18). The committee notes with dissatisfaction that the failure of the civilian police, paramilitary RAB and the military forces to cordon off the area eventually opened up an opportunity for the rebels to flee the BDR headquarters (Khan 2009: 18). An investigative media report also suggests weaknesses in the government’s strategy to deal with the hostage-takers: According to internationally accepted operating procedure in a standoff, a professional negotiator must immediately establish contact with the hostage takers. Did the police, the army or the home ministry have such a negotiator? If there is evidence of bloodshed, the negotiator must ask for “proof of life” i.e., he must ask the hostage takers about the condition of the hostages, and if

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possible ask to speak to the hostages. Was this procedure followed in the case of the Peelkhana incident? For two days, there was no official word on the condition of DG BDR and other missing officers, although there were rumors the DG had been killed along with his wife (Al-mahmood 2010). With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to criticize the security and intelligence agencies for their inability to collect and analyze available warning indicators. It is also convenient to put the blame on the government for its failed crisis management strategy, which led many mutineers to flee, and which could do nothing to protect the lives of nearly five dozen army officers. Others reject such cynicism, and argue that the government strategy of negotiations focused on avoiding further blood-shedding and saving the lives of those civilians who were taken as hostages inside the BDR’s residential compound. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the parliament: “I opted for talks to save lives, to save the officers and their families” (The Daily Star, 2 March 2009). The fact that nearly 150 hostages were rescued after the rebels surrendered their arms may point to partial success of a peaceful crisis management strategy (bdnews24.com, 26 Feb. 2009; Sobhan 2009). In summary, the BDR mutiny reveals a deep crack in the intelligence community of Bangladesh. Following Johnson’s typology of intelligence failure, one can argue that the causes of intelligence failure can be located at the collection, analysis, and dissemination stages of intelligence cycle. As the mutiny continued for two days, the military and paramilitary forces as well as civilian law enforcement agencies also demonstrated poor operational performance to develop a crisis management strategy that could have saved more lives by adopting a hostage rescue mission. Mumbai Attacks, 2008 The deadliest terrorist attacks of 2008 in India’s port city Mumbai present another interesting case study to test the hypotheses of intelligence breakdown and operational failure. It was a series of coordinated terrorist attacks which took place on 26-27 November 2008 in Mumbai, widely known to be the commercial capital of India. Ten operatives from Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), a Pakistan based Islamist terrorist group, participated in the attacks. They were armed with AK-47, grenades, and low-intensity bombs. As the attacks evolved, the terrorists primarily targeted Victoria Terminus, Leopold Café, Jewish Center in Nariman House, and two popular hotels – Taj and Oberoi. The secondary targets included the Cama Hospital, the neighborhood of Metro Cinema, a police station near Nariman House, and two taxis. Unlike the primary targets, which were carefully chosen, the secondary targets were selected by accident as an opportunity to create panic and fear among the public (Acharya et al 2009: 11). These attacks killed 174 people including 148 Indians and 26 foreigners (Acharya et al 2009: 21). In addition, 311 people were seriously injured. The largest number of fatality took place in the Victoria Terminus, the Taj Hotel, and the Oberoi Hotel. The Victoria is one of the busiest train stations in India, while the Taj and Oberoi are the

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most popular hotels in Mumbai. The terrorists, aged between 22 and 38, executed their plans by splitting up in five teams. Rohan Gunaratna notes that the Mumbai attacks “bore resemblance to the eight-member PLO attack on the Savoy hotel in Israel” in March 1975, where the terrorists used the maritime communication strategy to arrive at Tel Aviv (Gunaratna 2009: 2). It was not the first time Mumbai was attacked. In 1992 the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu extremists sparked Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai. It was in this context the Mumbai bombings in1993 targeted 13 locations including the Bombay Stock Exchange, and killed 250 people (Acharya 2009: 4). Later in 2006 Mumbai commuter train attacks caused 209 fatalities (Rabasa et al 2009: 1). Which theories of intelligence failure are relevant in analyzing the 2009 Mumbai attacks? Findings from an inquiry committee report and other scholarly analyses indicate a mix of both intelligence failure and operational failure. On 30 December 2008, the Maharastra Government formed the High Level Enquiry Committee (referred hereto as Ram Pradhan Committee) to probe the issues of intelligence failure and government response to the Mumbai attacks. The Enquiry Committee presented its report to Maharastra chief minister on 21 December 2009. The Committee was chaired by former union home secretary Ram Pradhan. The other member of the committee was Vappala Balachandaran, former senior official at Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s premier intelligence agency. The Ram Pradhan Committee had two terms of reference: (i) to investigate intelligence ‘lapses’; and (ii) to examine ‘lapses’ in the ability to act or react promptly to the terrorist attacks (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 22). The terms ‘lapses’ and ‘failures’ are used interchangeably in the Pradhan Committee report. By contrast, the Anis Committee in Bangladesh hardly mentioned the terms ‘intelligence agency’ and ‘intelligence failure’ and instead referred frequently to ‘detective agencies’ and ‘detective failure’ throughout the report. This was perhaps a deliberate strategy of the Anis Committee to avoid bullying against the secret services and intelligence agencies, which the committee found less than cooperative. On the other hand, the Pradhan Committee in India was very straightforward. It referred to the terms ‘intelligence agencies’ and ‘failure’ or ‘lapses’ in intelligence more often than the Anis Committee. The Pradhan Committee also frequently mentioned the term ‘Central Intelligence Agencies’ in India to refer to the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the RAW. The Pradhan Committee’s central findings are divided into seven parts: intelligence, action to handle the attacks, means to face terrorist attacks, command and control, coastal security, modernization of police anti-terrorist squad, flying squads, and handling of security intelligence at operational levels. Regarding intelligence failure, the Pradhan Committee report categorically notes that although the central intelligence agencies such as IB and RAW issued nearly two dozen intelligence alerts between 2006 and 2008, there was no actionable intelligence upon which the Mumbai Police could mobilize its resources to prevent the attacks. The Committee refers to the problem of groupthink in Mumbai Police which anticipated a bombing attack, rather than a commando style attack in the city.

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The problem of group think was shaped by the Mumbai Police’s experience with two decades of violence in the city. Prior to the 2008 terrorist attacks, the Mumbai Police had to deal with several high profile bombings such as the ones in 1993 and 2006 in which the stock exchange and the suburban railway system in Mumbai were targeted. The Pradhan Committee observes that these prior terrorist incidents had “led the police mindset into thinking only of stealthy bomb attacks” (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 44; emphasis added). Analytical failure also reduced the opportunities to prevent the attacks. The Ram Pradhan Committee finds that between August 2006 and November 2008, there were at least 20 intelligence alerts – six on the possibility of sea-born terrorist attacks, 11 on multiple and coordinated attacks, and three on the possibility of commando attacks. In response to each of the intelligence alerts, issued either by the IB or RAW, the Mumbai Police took prompt actions on the ground to secure a potential target and prevent an attack. Although none of those 20 warnings had materialized, the Committee notes “an overall assessment of these [intelligence warning] reports would have revealed a strong indication that some major terrorist action was being planned against Mumbai city, had the essence of these intelligence reports been analyzed (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 30; emphasis original). The effect of analytical failure can better be understood in the context of the ‘soft targets’ including the Taj and the Oberoi hotels and the Jewish Center. In the absence of a sound analytical process, the Mumbai Police merely responded to those intelligence alerts by inspecting the Taj and the Oberoi, and giving security briefings to those hotel authorities. Despite that the hotel managements did not take sufficient security measures nor did they ask the Mumbai Police “to augment police security for them [the hotels] in view of such alert” (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 8). In a similar manner, the Committee found that the IB had previously issued at least three intelligence warnings of possible attacks on Jewish targets (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 46). Although the Nariman House was not specifically mentioned in any of those warnings, a better coordination among Maharastra state-level and central intelligence agencies and Mumbai Police could have identified Nariman House and other Jewish pockets in Mumbai to enhance their security. The Ram Pradhan Committee puts the blame on to the State level intelligence processing system. It finds that intelligence warnings are usually processed by the junior desk officers, while the senior leaders in the home ministry are kept in the darkness about such alerts. It recommends a high level State official to keep a ‘constant watch’ on the operational requirements of police and take ‘follow-up and preventive measures’ if needed (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 8-9). The high level committee also recommends forming a core group of senior law enforcement intelligence officials at the State level to convert the threat alerts into operational responsibilities for local police (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 9). The High Level Enquiry Committee also criticizes the strategy of Mumbai Police in dealing with a ‘war-like scenario’ with a typical law enforcement approach. This happened due to the shortage of weapons and protective gears to deal with heavily armed terrorists (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 11). The deployment of Quick

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Reaction Teams (QRTs) also failed to produce any tangible results, as they were dispersed rather than used as a composite force with a central command and control (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 11). In addition, lack of a central crisis management leadership in Mumbai Police caused an evolving responsibility that failed to make the optimal use of counterterrorism strategy. Bureaucratic competition between the Maharastra State Police and the Mumbai City Police also impaired the operational responsibility of the Anti Terrorism Squad of the Mumbai Police. Although the Ram Pradhan Committee refers to both intelligence and operational failures, it does not put the blame on to any individuals. Instead, it refers to ‘systemic failure’ in the central and state governments of India. The Committee is candid when it views: What we have found are instances of lack of: intelligent appreciation of threats, handling of intelligence, maintaining high degree of efficiency in instruments specifically set up to deal with terrorist attacks and certainly lack of overt and visible leadership in carrying out operations to face multi-targeted attacks. In fact the last factor has led to public anger and resentment, both against the political as well as the administrative establishments (Ram Pradhan Committee 2009: 4). Scholarly assessments of LeT’s Mumbai attacks have also produced similar conclusions. Two such assessments by Gunaratna (2009) and Rabasa et al (2009) argue that although Mumbai has long been a target of terrorist attacks, and there were prior intelligence warnings from the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and India’s foreign intelligence agency –Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), LeT’s 2008 attacks on Mumbai revealed a pattern of intelligence failure. In a study prepared for Rand Corporation, Rabasa et al (2009: 9) note that although the CIA and RAW had earlier issued warnings of impending terrorist attacks in Mumbai, such warnings lacked a greater degree of specificity, and thus did not generate any specific response from Mumbai Police. The Rand study also finds that although RAW-intercepted data indicated the probability of a sea-borne terrorist attack in India, the Coast Guard lacked the necessary equipment for coastal surveillance. In essence, “the coast guard’s shortage of equipment for coastal surveillance” indicates a collection failure with far-reaching consequences (Rabasa et al 2009: 9). The Rand study also points to poor response and operational failure: “inadequate counterterrorist training and equipment of local police, delays in the response of the NSG [National Security Guard] commandos, flawed hostage-rescue plans, and poor strategic communications and information management all contributed to a less-than-optimal response” (Rabasa et al 2009: 22). In summary, the inquiry committee report and external reviews of 2008 Mumbai attacks indicate the twin challenges of intelligence lapses and operational failures. A mix of cognitive limits in Mumbai Police, lack of actionable intelligence, and poor analytical capability have produced an inefficient intelligence structure which eventually caused the failure to prevent the LeT’s attacks on Mumbai. In addition, lack of intelligence sharing and Maharashtra state’s senior leadership’s failure to appreciate intelligence

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alerts have produced a poor dissemination system, in which low level desk officers treat high level alerts as a routine affair. Finally, capacity gaps in Mumbai police and coast guard added additional problems which produced a poor response in dealing with the sea-born terrorist threat. Bin Laden Killing, 2011 The covert operation that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011 (Pakistan local time) is seen by many Pakistanis as the “greatest humiliation” since the secession of Bangladesh in 1971 (Strange 2013). The Laden killing mission was planned by the Central Intelligence Agency and executed by U.S. Navy SEAL, with no official record of Pakistan’s involvement in or prior approval of the mission that took place at Laden’s secret compound in Abbottabad in the Kyber Pakhtunkhwa province. A total of five people, including Laden, were killed in the mission, code named Operation Neptune Spear. The other four persons were Laden’s son, two Pakistani citizens working as Laden’s courier, and wife of one of the Pakistani couriers. After the forty-minute long commando operation, the U.S. forces took Bin Laden’s dead body along with computer data devices and intelligence evidence (Brown 2012). Laden’s dead body was later dumped into the Indian Ocean. Operation Neptune Spear received mixed responses from the world (Thorp 2011). U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his satisfaction saying “Justice has been done” (White House video 1 May 2011). Legal and counterinsurgency experts differ on the utility of the ‘assassination’ of Laden but appear to agree that it was unavoidable and perhaps well justified (Thorp 2011). The unilateral military action by the United States surprised many Pakistanis who consider it a case of intelligence failure. To what extent do the theories of organization breakdown, cognitive limits, and operational failure offer useful explanations to analyze the case of Laden killing? The rest of this section addresses this question. A week after Neptune Spear, on 9 May 2011, a joint session of Pakistan’s national assembly and senate decided to set up an independent inquiry commission “to hold a detailed probe into the incident” (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 19). Six weeks later, on 21 June 2011, the Abbottabad Commission was formed under the Pakistan Commission of Inquiry Act 1956. The Commission was headed by the senior most judge in Pakistan Supreme Court, Justice Javed Iqbal. Three other members in the Abbottabad Commission were a retired police chief, a retired diplomat who was heading a national think tank, and a retired senior military official. A cabinet secretary acted as the secretary for the Abbottabad Commission. The Commission had four mandates: “(a) Ascertain the full facts regarding the presence of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan; (b) Investigate the circumstances and facts regarding the US operation in Abbottabad on May 2, 2011; (c) Determine the nature, background, and causes of lapses of concerned authorities, if any; and (d) Make consequential recommendations” (Abbottabad Commission 2001: 20).

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The Abbottabad Commission enjoyed authority of a superior court with the power to summon any witness. It decided to use the foreign ministry channel to send any questions to the U.S. government regarding its role in the Laden killing. For “methodological and procedural guidance,” the Commission also chose to consult the reports of Pakistan’s Hamood-ur-Rahman Commission, the U.S. 9/11 Commission, and India’s Ram Pradhan Committee on Mumbai Attacks (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 23). In determining the facts regarding Laden’s presence in Pakistan, the Commission came up with a list of 25 questions, nearly one fourth of them directly related to intelligence issues. Broadly speaking, they focus on the military, security, and intelligence agencies’ connection with Laden’s support network in Abbottabad; the level and possibility of intelligence sharing between the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the CIA; and the complicity of Pakistan’s intelligence community in protecting Laden. The Commission developed another 13 questions to investigate the circumstances and facts regarding the U.S. commando operation in Abbottabad. Some of these questions relate to the failure of Pakistan’s military forces and intelligence agencies to detect and respond to the U.S. covert operations in the bin Laden compound. It also explored whether the ISI and other intelligence agencies missed the location of Laden and failed to track an extensive intelligence network developed by the United States Then the Abbottabad Commission asked eight questions, most of which focus on Pakistan’s political, military, and intelligence leadership for their negligence and failure to protect the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan. The Commission held 52 hearings, conducted seven field visits, and received testimonies from 201 witnesses including 11 from the ISI (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 31). The Commission admits that public response to its request for information sharing was “disappointing” perhaps due to concerns over a “pervasive sense of insecurity” (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 32). The final report of the Abbottabad Commission was submitted to Prime Minister Raja Parvez Ashraf on 3 January 2013 (The News International, 4 Jan. 2013). The report was leaked by Al Jazeera Investigative Unit on 8 July 2013 (Hashim 2013). The Commission chair, Justice Javed Iqbal, rejected the leaked report terming it a draft prepared on the basis of ‘assumptions’ (BBC News, 9 July 2013). A leading Pakistani daily, Express Tribune, also described the leaked report as ‘rough, not final cut’ (Hussain 2013). It appears that due to differing opinions among the Commission members, it was decided to produce three drafts by three Commission members, which would then be synthesized into one. The leaked report is thought to be the one authored by commission member Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, who was very critical of the role of Pakistani armed forces and the ISI (Hussain 2013). A week after the leak, Qazi was invited for testimony to the Pakistan Senate Committee on Defence and Defence Production “for an authentic and firsthand account of the leaked Abbottabad Commission Report” (PILDAT 2013: 14). After Qazi’s testimony, the senate committee urged the Pakistan Government to “make the Full and Final Report officially public and lay the recommendations in the Parliament” (Senate of Pakistan 2013: 60). As of May 2015, the official version was not released by the Pakistan Government (Dawn, 12 May 2015).

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In the absence of an official version of the Abbottabad Commission Report, we are left with no choices but to rely on Al Jazeera’s leaked version of the Report, which has drawn extensive media coverage, and offers a wealth of information to understand the nature and causes of intelligence failure. The leaked report, also known as Bin Laden Dossier, has 336 pages split into 32 chapters including an introduction and a conclusion. For the purpose of this analysis, the most relevant sections are located in chapters 21 and 22 of the report. Chapter 21 provides a review of the inquiry committee findings from the Army and the ISI. Neither the Army nor the ISI accepted full responsibility for its inability to detect bin Laden. They also denied offering a support network for the al Qaeda chief. The Army Board of Inquiry put the blames on the civilian law enforcement and intelligence agencies for their failure to detect Laden’s hideout (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 172). The ISI investigation into U.S. raid and Laden’s killing revealed nothing new. The agency interrogated people who were kept alive and left at Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. The agency was under the impression that the CIA’s special unit for hunting down Laden was perhaps closed down after the Torabora campaign in December 2001. The ISI was also under the impression that Laden was perhaps “no longer alive” and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri had taken control over the operational activities of al Qaeda (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 174). The next chapter in the Abbottabad Commission Report analyzes the testimonies of major civilian and military intelligence agencies. The chief of Intelligence Bureau (IB) claimed that the IB’s role had diminished over time, and the agency lacked human and technical resources to conduct its surveillance over al Qaeda operatives (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 179-180). The IB chief also claimed the failure to detect Laden was a ‘collective failure’ shared by several Pakistani agencies (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 182). The ISI chief also rejected the public outcry about his agency’s failure to detect Laden, and asserted the U.S. Navy Seal operations in Abbottabad reflects ‘systemic failure’ of Pakistan’s civilian and military institutions. Following Loch Johnson’s schema of intelligence failure, an important question is if Osama bin Laden’s six-year stay in a secret hideout in Pakistan constitutes an intelligence failure, where in the intelligence cycle such failure can be located? Drawing on the testimonies of civilian and military officials and the Commission observations, it is reasonable to assess that intelligence failure occurred at multiple stages of the cycle. First, cognitive limits of the senior intelligence leadership have shaped the perception that after the Torabora operations in Afghanistan in late 2011, Laden was perhaps killed or he died, and hence any aggressive manhunt for him would be useless. Second, poor collection capability had also resulted in the failure to detect Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad. The IB came to learn about Osama bin Laden’s son, Khaled Laden marrying a local Pakistani woman. The agency failed to investigate it further and collect more information on the Laden family’s whereabouts (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 182). Although the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) was the lead criminal investigating unit, it had no responsibility for tracking terrorists or controlling international borders (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 182).

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The Abbottabad Commission observes that ISI had also demonstrated its inability to collect any actionable intelligence on Laden’s residence. Although sometimes between 2009 and 2010, the CIA shared with ISI four telephone numbers related to al Qaeda operatives in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), the ISI failed to closely monitor those numbers. Later it turned out that two of those phone numbers were occasionally active, and were used by two of Laden’s close associates, who were killed in the U.S. raid in Abbottabad (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 195-196). The Commission further notes that: It [ISI] completely failed to track down OBL [Osama bin Laden]. There was no real search for OBL allowing its foreign and domestic critics to allege that its operatives were too close to their “assets” in the field who would never tolerate a betrayal of OBL who for them was an even bigger symbol of “heroic resistance to the corrupt West,” than Al Qaeda itself (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 176). Given the fact that Laden’s Abbottabad residence was located within one kilometer radius of Paksitan Military Academy (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 16), and the area was under the jurisdiction of the armed forces, the Commission observes that the ISI and the Military Intelligence cannot avoid their responsibilities for the failure to detect Laden’s hideout. The Commission also validates the public perception that some rogue elements inside the organizations might have acted as a support network for Laden (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 309). In this context, it is remarkable to note what Pakistan’s former national security adviser, Mahmud Durrani, says about the nature of intelligence failure. As described by the Commission, Durrani views that “some elements of the state apparatus were aware of the presence of OBL [Osama bin Laden]. The dysfunctional civil-military intelligence network in the country has been discredited as a consequence” (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 213). During his testimony to the Commission, the ISI chief defended his agency by saying that it had closely worked with the CIA in fighting global terrorists hiding in Pakistan. Despite such collaboration, there was a trust deficit between the two agencies, which perhaps explained why the CIA did not inform ISI about the plans to raid Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad. The ISI chief also claimed that his agency was overextended and overburdened with increasing demands for counterterrorism due to the politicization and inefficient performance of the civilian agencies. The Commission agrees with the ISI chief’s remarks that civilian intelligence agencies lack professional competence and the capability to perform their duties. However it is more critical of ISI’s performance: “with all its resources the ISI also failed mainly because it was even more involved with the political, power and “ideological” structures of the country. It had become more political and less professional and the country suffered on both counts” (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 177). Politicization of ISI and other intelligence agencies was caused by longstanding military rule in the country, which had reduced the ability of civilian institutions to oversee the intelligence structure. In the absence of any civilian leadership and

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oversight mechanism, the ISI was engaged in certain areas of intelligence and counterintelligence that lacked any legal coverage (Abbottabad Commission 2013: 177). The Commission observes that the issues of ISI’s failure to detect Osama bin Laden or complicity of some rogue elements in ISI in providing a support structure for the world’s top fugitive has to be understood in the context of a pervasive culture of security and intelligence in which the ISI had operated. The Commission also blames the civilian leaders for their lack of initiative in reining in ISI. Interestingly, the issue of politicization of ISI and MI, and the weak structure of civilian intelligence agencies is nothing new. There is a wealth of open source literature which takes a critical look at the dismal performance of Pakistan’s intelligence community. For instance, Hassan Abbas (2011) notes that resource constraints and coordination gaps have long impeded the works of Pakistan’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Frederic Grare (2008) has also emphasized depoliticizing the intelligence agencies to improve their performance. Grare stresses the role of civilian oversight mechanism as a means to ensure accountability of ISI and MI. Prominent Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul’s book Pakistan: Before and After Osama also describes Islamabad’s broken counterterrorism strategy and faulty intelligence process which have allowed the United States to continue the drone strikes, launch cross-border incursions, and carry out a successful covert operation that assassinated Laden (Gul 2012). In summary, the leaked version of the Abbottabad Commission Report provides a useful starting point to understand why the intelligence community in Pakistan might have failed to track down Osama bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad, and why the Pakistan Government was surprised by a unilateral covert operation into Laden’s hideout in its territory. The Abbottabad Commission finds sources of intelligence failure at various stages of the intelligence cycle, including direction and tasking, as well as collection and analysis. Since the military-controlled intelligence agencies including the ISI and the MI lacked any effective oversight mechanism, perhaps dissemination failure has also eroded the professional standards of these two agencies. While the media analyses and open source reviews have often praised the candid remarks of the Abbottabad Commission, others have warned of the limits of such inquiry commissions of the past. Concluding Remarks There are several areas of comparison between the three inquiries discussed in this study. First, a sharp difference between the structures and leaderships of the three inquiry committees indicates the nature of civil-military relations in the region. For instance, while the Anis and Pradhan Committees in Bangladesh and India relied on retired bureaucrats to lead the inquiries, the Abbottabad Commission in Pakistan was led by a senior-most judge in Pakistan Supreme Court. The Anis Committee and Abbottabad Commission included active or retired military personnel – in an apparent bid to ensure the civil-military balance, whereas the Ram Pradhan Committee did not

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have any serving or retired military official. The Indian case might simply reflect a utilitarian perspective rather than an indication of democratic control of armed forces. The utilitarian logic dictates that inclusion of a crisis manager, Ram Pradhan, and former RAW oficial, Balachandran, had perhaps delivered the best possible outcome in the form of an inquiry into the Mumbai attacks. On the other hand, since the Bangladesh and Pakistan cases involved the interests of the military, there were strong reasons to ensure military representation in the Anis Committee and Abbottabad Commission. Second, there was a significant variation in the duration of the inquiries committees’ investigation period and submission of final report. Among the three committees, the Anis Committee submitted its report in the shortest possible time spanning only three months. By contrast, the Pradhan Committee took a year, and the Abbottabad Commission took eighteen months to complete its report. Why did the probe committee in Bangladesh take the shortest time to complete the report? There are two possible explanations: first, perhaps the civilian government in Bangladesh was under huge pressure from the Army, which was the largest victim of the BDR Mutiny, to get a quick probe report so that it could de-escalate the tensions and repair the civil-military relations. It is also possible that the prompt investigation was done to punish the perpetrators of BDR mutiny and to reorganize the border force. Third, despite the differences in leadership structures, and duration of inquiry, the three committees appear to offer a similar conclusion: intelligence failure was a ‘systemic problem’ rather than an agency-specific weakness. The Anis Committee notes that none of the three major intelligence agencies in Bangladesh—NSI, SB, and DGFI had any detective network inside the BDR headquarters, which could have provided useful information about the mutiny. The Ram Pradhan Committee in India also found systemic problems in the way intelligence is collected, processed, and disseminated by the central and state level agencies. The Abbottabad Commission Report echoes the other two inquiry committees and refers to systemic problems in civilian and military agencies and their level of professionalism in discharging the tasks of intelligence collection, collation, and analysis. Fourth, another striking similarity is evident in the attitude of the central or state governments in South Asia toward the disclosure of inquiry reports. Our study finds that neither the central government in Bangladesh and Pakistan nor the state government in Maharashtra took any initiative to de-classify the reports and release them for public discussion. Instead, all of the reports (in the case of India and Pakistan) or a substantial part of them (in the case of Bangladesh) were leaked to the media, and are now publicly available via the World Wide Web. The attitude of the governments toward non-disclosure of inquiry committee findings clearly indicates how successive governments in the region have maintained a culture of secrecy in dealing with intelligence matters. Further studies are needed to demystify this culture of secrecy and its attendant consequence on the oversight of intelligence agencies.

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