A Disjointed War

 

A few years ago, an old Afghan friend turned up and Delhi and we decided to meet at Lajpat Nagar. "This is AK", he said introducing a compatriot, "He is a Tajik but we are still good friends." 

I knew that my friend was a Pathan but the introduction left me baffled. There I was, a South Indian, born and brought up in the north, sitting in a bustling market built from scratch by punjabis displaced by the partition...but I just could not imagine introducing a friend from UP, Mizoram or Gujarat, or anywhere else in India, in this way.

It is only later, after serving two UN assignments in Afghanistan that I began to understand that the caveat 'still good friends' was actually an achievement in itself. In Kabul I had found a city that was struggling to recover from years of war and strife, a city divided along ethnic lines, where communities sought the safety of numbers.

Once while driving from Jemal Mena and Kabul University towards Sevom Aqrab, we got stuck in a traffic jam. A colleague pointed to the traffic junction and reminisced, "When I was in school this was a dangerous crossing...on this side were the Tajiks, on the other, the Uzbeks and across the road, the Hazaras...all suspicious of each other, trying to keep the Taliban out of their neighbourhoods...there were dead bodies all over the place...you could get killed simply for responding to a casual greeting with the wrong accent of Dari or Pashto.."

It is a difficult world to explain or understand. Steve Coll's latest book, "Directorate S", tries to give you a bird-eye (or blimp) view of the other side of the story. One that enfolds after 9/11 and the arrival of USA into this tinderbox, seeking Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and revenge for the attack on USA. 

An ultimatum was given to Mulla Omar and the Taliban leadership - surrender your guests OBL, and his AQ minions, or else. Bound a code of honour, and, perhaps, by naiveté, they refused and opted for the 'or else'. That autumn US-led coalition dropped about 12,000 bombs on Afghanistan...about 40% were "dumb", unguided resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. 

The Soviet invasion of 1989 had claimed an estimated one to two million lives, or up to 10% of the population. This US invasion also caused about 140,000 deaths directly by the end of NATOs formal combat role in 2014. While the US-led allies spent about $60 billion a year in men, materials and 'humanitarian aid' in Afghanistan, the Taliban found refuge in Pakistan and managed with an estimated budget o $100 million annually. from Arab donations, drug dealing, protection rackets, local taxation, extortion and kidnapping.

Now what about the title of the book, 'Directorate S'? Well the author does not have much to offer other than patchy details about ISI and its machinations. The focus of the book is on allied generals, ambassadors, assorted dictators, dubiously 'elected' leaders and diplomats. 

Steve Coll's latest book reads like a thriller but it leaves you disappointed because the book is essentially about short-sighted Americans, not the Afghans, ISI or a way out of this mess. It describes two decades of disjointed war which has turned out to be as effective as most of the allied bombs - dumb.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Coll, Steve (2018): DIRECTORATE S - The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Kabul's All Seeing Blimps - https://www.wired.com/2011/01/all-seeing-blimp/

USB Vulnerability

Ever so often, whenever I pick up a USB memory stick, a certain train of thought crosses my mind.
"Here is a miracle device", I remind myself, "which one of the 6 billion+ across the world, one that has made data-transfer and battery charging so amazingly simple, and yet, contains within it the power to destroy nuclear plants, water and power supply grids and to unleash starvation, misery and death across the world!"

A few years ago, the Economist highlighted positive features of the 'thumb-drive' in an article very aptly titled. "In Praise of the Humble USB". While reading this piece, I was delighted to know that a computer architect of Indian origin,  Ajay Bhatt, had a key role to play in creating this amazing interface, which his parent company, Intel, decided to make 'the cheap USB plug and socket an open standard, available to manufacturers everywhere free of all royalty charges and licensing fees'. This one move destroyed the Firewire standard that had been patronised by Apple, and made USB a de facto standard across the world.

The ease with which the USB drive could be used also made it a handy tool in the hands of spies, spooks and saboteurs. The most famous example of this is the Stuxnet virus which CIA and Mossad used to destroy a thousand centrifuges in Iran. Ever since I heard of this cyber-attack, I have been awed by the sheer scale of destruction that can be unleashed through the USB drives. It also led me to the mistaken belief that the Iranian nuclear program had been irreparably damaged because of Stuxnet.

A recent documentary by Alex Gibney - "Zero Days" - suggests that in the real world, things are not what they seem. In their eagerness and impatience to destroy the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, Mossad apparently changed the codes created by their CIA/NSA collaborators, and released a version that was a lot less subtle, and left behind an electronic trail that was being used against the USA. It seems Iran has now built up one of the largest cyber-armies in the world, one that was behind two major warning attacks: one on the largest oil company in the world, SaudiAramco, destroyed every line of code on 30,000 computers, and then a surge attack on banks in the USA that crippled commercial operations.

As a friend recently pointed out, our biggest vulnerability is that new technology is being built on old systems that were not intended to be on a network. So, by default, we have gaping holes in just about all the things that now run our lives - utility supplies, banking & finance.

Even the ubiquitous USB works on FAT-32 system which has since evolved into exFAT and NTFS. However, the base continues to be FAT32, and as long as this is the case, our systems will continue to be inefficient - and utterly vulnerable.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Stuxnet - Alex Gibney's Zero Days - https://youtu.be/AcgUGujn_nY
* FAT32, exFAT and NTFS - http://www.pcworld.com/article/3109559/hardware/why-your-usb-drives-file-format-matters-fat32-vs-exfat-vs-ntfs.html

Raw Intelligence

I cannot remember the last time I was shocked by book picked up from a public library.

"India's External Intelligence - Secrets of RAW" by Maj.Gen V.K. Singh, is perhaps the most forthright, lucid, well-written book I have come across from an army officer. Shorn of all possible bombast and hyperbole I had come to expect from a retired fauji reminsing his glory days, the book offers a rare glimpse into the working of an agency that is, by its very nature, not meant to be seen or heard by the general public.

Anybody who has read news reports about the Kargil debacle knows that it was a case of too many spooks spoil the broth. With so many different agencies engaged in collecting intelligence and with each of them working in silos, we seem to have little time to make sense of all the data that is pouring in.

If that was not bad enough, Singh outlines that amazing flaws that have been built-in to our sarkari system when it comes to procurement of critical telecom equipment, of officers who have no qualms about spending public money on overpriced imported stuff, of eminent scientists delivering sub-standard products with an eye on the Padma awards rather than the concerns of the end-users, and of institutions that is compromised by officers who seek nothing more than a better education for their children in foreign universities.

The book potrays the human face of an agency that is controlled solely by the PMO. And the picture is quite disconcerting...

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LINKS

* Manas Publications - http://manaspublications.in/product/indias-external-intelligence-secrets-of-research-and-analysis-wing-raw/

* IntelliBriefs Blog - http://intellibriefs.blogspot.in/2007/07/indian-intelligence-why-top-officials.html