'Intelligence has to be assessed on three planes'

Excerpts from Vice-President Hamid Ansari's lecture

Too often, governmental intelligence efforts have focused on politico-military and economic intelligence. While its relevance cannot be questioned, its sufficiency can be. The reason is obvious. Most often, the standard checklist does not go beyond or behind the super-structure, does not look at societal realities and pays inadequate attention to other people's ways of thinking and behaving.

Intelligence services, as David Kay of the Iraq Survey Group put it, "don't do a very good job of trying to understand the soft side of societies". Nor does the checklist takes a good look at the national security implications of non-traditional threats, including cyber-attacks, attacks on food and water security, bio-terrorism, pandemics or worst-case apocalyptic visions of the future.

It has, for instance, been assessed that in a post-pandemic world, dangerous patterns of inter-state behaviour may emerge and seriously endanger security of states. The ambit of intelligence, consequently, has to be comprehensive. It is to be assessed simultaneously on three planes: State-centric, society-centric and environment-centric. The dynamics of these may be different and may require different tools of analysis.

A particularly serious problem relates to the misuse of intelligence. The classic instance in recent times is the process leading to the invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. The July, 2004, report of the US Senate Select Committee on Pre-War Intelligence Assessment of Iraq revealed that "group think dynamics" led the intelligence community to interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusive and ignore in the process established mechanisms to challenge assumptions and group think.

Failures propel thinking in the direction of correctives and reforms. They focus analysis on the political or economic pressures at work in individual societies. These, together, propel thinking in the direction of accountability and necessitate oversight. Both are considered unwanted and bothersome by intelligence communities for reasons that range from secrecy and operational efficiency to downright contempt for any individual, body or arrangement that endeavours to assess their functioning.

The problem, nevertheless, exists and was posed by an expert in precise terms: How shall a democracy ensure its secret intelligence apparatus becomes neither a vehicle for conspiracy nor a suppressor of the traditional liberties of democratic self-government?

The traditional answer and prevailing practice, of oversight by the concerned minister and Prime Minister and general accountability of the latter to Parliament, was accepted as adequate in an earlier period. But it is now considered amorphous and does not meet the requirements of good governance in an open society.

Concerns in the matter have primarily arisen on two counts: (a) The nature and extent of supervision over intelligence services exercised by the political executive, and (b) The possibility and scope of misuse of these services by the political executive. Both concerns emanate from the absence of specific accountability, on these matters, to the legislature.

The problem is not a new one and has been faced by other democratic societies. In the late 1970s, opinion in the US reached the conclusion that "oversight of the Intelligence Community is essential because of the critical importance of ensuring the nation's security, as well as checking the potential for abuse of power."

As a result, two Congressional committees were established in 1976 and 1977. Despite this, the 9/11 Commission Report of 2004 found the Congressional oversight of intelligence "dysfunctional" and recommended structural changes. A similar exercise was conducted in the UK through the Intelligence Services Act, 1994 that established the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament to examine the expenditure, administration and policy of the intelligence services. Other countries have also put in place similar mechanisms of public accountability.

Given these models of calibrated openness to ensure oversight and accountability, there is no reason why a democratic system like ours should not have a Standing Committee of Parliament on intelligence that could function at least on the pattern of other Standing Committees.

(Excerpts from the 4th R N Kao Memorial Lecture on Intelligence for the World of Tomorrow, delivered by Vice-President Hamid Ansari in New Delhi on January 9, 2010)