I am no expert, but just wanted to put some thoughts that I have on how the country should deal with terrorism. This is in continuation to my last blog entry emphasizing that we as a country need to do something about terrorism. We have had enough. Note that these are only high-level thoughts (mainly common-sense):
MUST DOs:-
- De-politicize homeland security. Like the armed forces, internal security should be miles away from any political linkage. The institutional mechanism should be such that no political party can take any kind of mileage out of terrorism and related actions.
- Create a single central agency/organization to coordinate anti-terrorist operations. This agency should coordinate with various forces and should have the lever to call the shots at all levels during a counter-terrorist operation; maybe with direct reporting to the PMO.
- The intelligence bureau should be made fully accountable. The bureau’s responsibility should not end at just providing loose pieces of intelligence reports; it should be accountable to ensure that the central agency has acted upon its intelligence. The intelligence bureau chief should also have direct reporting to the PMO (if it is not already done).
- To deal with terrorist routes through the sea, there should be one agency comprising the police, the coast guard, and the navy to keep vigil in high seas. Right now there is a lot of confusion since all three agencies have their area of operation tightly defined with little coordination, which leads to confusion.
- The NSG kind of crack teams should be based in all states (which is what the PM has already proposed). These men should be taken off VIP security – the state police can do that very well (hopefully).
- Coordinate with FBI, the UK intelligence, the Israeli intelligence, etc. All-said-and-done, these countries are better at dealing with such situations. Putting all egos aside, our agencies should collaborate with them, and learn from them.
- Security should be increased manifold at all public places.
DONTs:-
We should however stay away from two specific knee-jerk reactions:
- This should not escalate to a war like situation at the border. The political/international pressure tactic route should work better in this regard.
- This should not lead to targeting of people with specific religious beliefs. There should be no religion-based profiling, etc.
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Sunil - Definitely agree with your point of view. The issue in a place like India in most cases is one of execution. One way to learn execution is to look at the parts of the government which have in fact produced some decent results. What those parts I don't yet know, but we should look at those.
Nextly, we have a large population of very smart youth in the country, and a huge expertise in writing software. Can't we be the leaders in IT for National Security? Write code to analyze every phone call, every email, every secuity-camera-footage, create ID cards for people and monitor movements, ???
Gone are the days when the focus of the military budget should be bofors guns, fighter jets (which I don't see as relevant anyways! bombers should be enough), tanks... These are not what we need. We could write great code in the cost of a tank.
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