The Hindu Business Line : The business of diplomacy and the diplomacy of business

"India's real challenge and opportunity remain at home," thinks Sanjaya Baru, media advisor and spokesperson for the Prime Minister, in Strategic Consequences of India's Economic Performance. Ron Suskind in The One Percent Doctrine critiques the war on terror and the changed role of Intelligence after 9/11. Active reads for a Saturday afternoon, suggests D. MURALI.

Lately, the PMO has been in the news for just the wrong reasons. Be it about the `missing' mole or the much-hyped security `breach'. So, it comes as a relief to read something different. Such as, Strategic Consequences of India's Economic Performance, by Sanjaya Baru, from Academic Foundation (www.academicfoundation.com).

As you may be aware, the author is the media advisor and spokesperson to the Prime Minister. However, Baru makes it clear that the essays included in the book "do not reflect the thinking of the Government of India or the PM." Evident. Because the essays were what Baru wrote for journals and newspapers, and presented at seminars, between 1996 and 2004, before he joined the PMO.

Opinions about economics and politics don't normally have a long shelf-life. While that fact may act as a dampener to the popularity of any compilation such as the one on hand, it should still be relevant to read a bit of history on topics that currently rage on.

For instance, Mr Jaswant Singh, who is caught in the mole avalanche he triggered, may be happy to read the essay on his famous doctrine on `tied' foreign aid. Baru recounts how Denmark cut its aid to India when we went nuclear. "For over four decades accepting foreign aid had become a habit. Plan models had been built to show why we needed aid," he notes. "Aid never comes easy. It always comes with conditionalities... Some countries are brazen in pushing their own agendas along with aid."

Mr Jaswant Singh's message was clear, chronicles Baru — that India is in no mood to cling on to "funds that are costly to administer and come with sermons, especially on national security." Not something we have shaken off totally, if the US-India nuclear energy agreement is an example, though of a different kind of aid. In a report dated July 27, Forbes (www.forbes.com) cites the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, that he has asked the US administration for assurances that the `goalposts are not tampered with.'

His predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee gains accolades in another essay, on nuclear policy. "Vajpayee took the view that the economy could withstand sanctions and he proved correct. India tested, the sanctions came, but proved to be less hurtful than widely imagined." On the question of whether to sign the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), Baru asks why we should "remain stuck on dogma, dubious principle and a negative attitude to the rest of the world." He says, "A robust nuclear energy programme is as much an investment in national security as building a nuclear deterrent." Just what his current boss may approve of, though the view may be seen as being too naïve by the opposite camp.

"An India that is economically stable and prosperous and is increasingly involved in global economic flows is more likely to build webs of economic inter-dependence which offer it greater political security," reads a snatch in a piece titled `The economics of national security'. Such webs are to be woven not merely with the biggies but the smaller powers too, plus `the major players in the world economy — the big corporations and banks'. Baru opines that, "An inward-looking economy, a navel-gazing polity and a people that will not give but only ask, are unlikely to be a secure nation."

A web of words that may mean little to most politicians. For, as K. Subrahmanyam writes in his foreword, "The Indian political establishment is totally absorbed in domestic politics and does not have much familiarity with international politics and economics." But sadly, that's exactly what Baru too would advise in an article titled `Doing our own thing', on the US invasion of Iraq. "We must stop worrying about whether the world will be uni-polar or multi-polar as a consequence of US unilateralism today. Irrespective of the global balance of power, India's real challenge and opportunity remains at home."

That should also explain why the index has no entry for `World Trade Centre' before `World Trade Organisation', or `Lebanon' after `Lawrence Summers'.

A code from the secretive core of the US

After that exploration of `the business of diplomacy and the diplomacy of business', let us go `deep inside America's pursuit of its enemies since 9/11'. Or, as the blurb says, "A game of kill-or-be-killed, from the Oval Office to the streets of Karachi" in Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine from Simon & Schuster (www.simonsays.com).

The book begins on a critical note, of the US President, Mr George W. Bush. That he trusts his eyes to size up people `swiftly and aptly' when taking countless decisions each day. "The trap, of course, is that while these tactile, visceral markets can be crucial — especially in terms of handling the posturing of top officials — they sometimes are not. The thing to focus on, at certain moments, is what someone says, not who is saying it, or how they're saying it," notes Suskind.

The title of the book draws from `The deeply secretive core of America's real playbook: A default strategy, designed by Dick Cheney'. That you pursue even a one per cent chance as if it were a certainty! Such as, the slim probability of there being weapons of mass destruction, which led a nation to war.

In the first chapter titled `False positives' meet George Tenet, at the DI, the Directorate of Intelligence. DI is the home of CIA's army of analysts, "who read the human intelligence or humint, collected by field agents, clandestine agents, and foreign sources of human intelligence, and the signals intelligence, or sigint, from the vast US network of eavesdropping."

Elsewhere, Tenet pops up in the first reference to India. "We're going to work with others in a way we haven't before," he tells a group that is discussing `the shackles' to be loosened, since the new era demanded `creative partnerships.' With Egypt, Syria, Russia, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and India. "The Brits were strong with Pakistan and Algeria. Australia had leverage with India and Indonesia. Who had relationships that were active and productive? How could all those relationships be shared?"

One of the first casualties was privacy. "A country may not be able to tap the lines of its own citizens without legal authorisation. But there's nothing to stop it from listening in on some other country's citizen, and then filing very thorough reports to that foreign citizen's government," explains Suskind. "Privacy laws of the leading democracies would, essentially, be skirted. The idea was: This is war. This is what is demanded."

A different chapter, titled `Wages of fear' speaks of how Pakistan panicked "after India conducted an underground nuclear explosion, about equivalent to the power of the Hiroshima blast, in 1974," and how a decade later, "Pakistan proved to be the most compelling advertisement for nuclear upward mobility."

A must-read is the section on A.Q. Khan, who surfaces first in a page where Suskind describes a campfire in Kandahar, `three weeks before 9/11' attended by Osama bin Laden. Khan was the driving force behind Pakistan's efforts to build a nuclear bomb. "Khan and his associates had been under intense surveillance for years by the CIA and M16 — a tight mesh that included sigint and financial tracking."

In a chapter named `Necessity's offspring', you'd stumble on Echelon, `developed during World War II to intercept radio communications,' but growing `with each step of the technological revolution.' What does it do? "Largely managed out of Fort Meade by the NSA (National Security Agency), with 38,000 employees worldwide, and by the British out of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) based near Cheltenham, England, the system catches an estimated three billion communications each day that are carried by radio, satellite, telephone, faxes, and e-mails." Suskind describes more: "Automated computer analysis sorts the intercepts. It is essentially one system — with shared satellites, fibre-optic pipes, listening posts, and devices placed at telephone switching stations — that has firewalls built within it... "

In the concluding chapter, the author notes, "The traditional warning against `the ends justifying the means' carries a corollary. Without clear, attainable ends, means have a way of becoming unbound, improvised, born of dictates of the `gut' and unexamined assumptions."

Suskind wraps with a quote from Deuteronomy, `Justice, justice, this you must pursue.'

He says that Hebrew scholars agree that the word justice has been used twice, once for the ends, and again for the means. "Fight well. And God bless," wraps the author, on an ominous note, to rob us of all hopes of global peace in the near term.

Suggested active reads for an otherwise sleepy Saturday afternoon.

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