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I am quoting relevant passages from Dhruva Jaishankar's (grandson of late K Subhramanyam) blog.
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Polaris
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========In a March 2009 online roundtable on Pakistan, hosted on Foreign Affairs' web site, Dr. Fair wrote: "Having visited the Indian mission in Zahedan, Iran, I can assure you they are not issuing visas as the main activity! Moreover, India has run operations from its mission in Mazar (through which it supported the Northern Alliance) and is likely doing so from the other consulates it has reopened in Jalalabad and Qandahar along the border. Indian officials have told me privately that they are pumping money into Baluchistan." These were serious allegations, and were disputed by another roundtable participant, Ashley Tellis: "I am not sure I buy Christine's analysis of Indian activities in Pakistan's west: this is a subject I followed very closely when I was in government, and suffice it to say, there is less there than meets the eye. That was certainly true for Afghanistan. Convincing Pakistanis of this, however, is a different story." Fair did not detail when she was in Zahedan, what it was the Indian consulate was doing, when India supported the Northern Alliance from Mazar (i.e. before or after the initial expulsion of the Taliban in 2001-2002), and which officials told her about Indian activities in Balochistan. She surmised, based on India's alleged activities in Mazar, that its consulates were doing the same in Jalalabad and Kandahar. Her lack of detail meant that the worst was implied. Sure enough, the Pakistani press went to town over her statement, as it was a seemingly neutral and expert confirmation of Pakistani claims about its insecurities vis-a-vis India. Such claims have been used to justify Pakistan's clandestine activities against India as retaliatory. Later, when pressed on the sources for her claims in an interview, Dr. Fair said: "I have never gone to any lengths to look at that issue and I do not know anyone who has a line of credible information." Perhaps, then, she could have been more transparent about this at the outset.
A second example was as the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai were raging. Very little credible information was then available in the public domain about the perpetrators and planners of the attacks. In an interview with the New York Times, however, Dr. Fair, while at first careful to say there was little evidence about the perpetrators, concluded: "Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda"¦But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11." There have undoubtedly been attacks both before and after 26/11 linked to domestic terror groups, but her assertion was nonetheless a strong one, based on little credible information, and particularly insensitive given that the gunmen's rampage was still ongoing. As it turns out, the attacks were not domestic but planned in Pakistan and executed by Pakistanis. Lashkar-e-Taiba, rather than al Qaeda, was fingered. And many Indians do equate the events of 26/11 with 9/11. Okay. In all fairness, everyone—myself included—has made statements in public with relatively little thought, and short quotes in newspapers can easily obscure context. Academic arguments, by contrast, are generally more nuanced. That leads me to my third example.
In the Summer 2007 edition of The Washington Quarterly, Dr. Fair published an article on the India-Iran relationship. She argued that India-Iran relations had been deliberately underestimated by American proponents of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, and that relations had "much to do with India's great power aspirations and New Delhi's concomitant expansive agenda for Central Asia and beyond, within which energy is only one, albeit important, consideration." This contradicted the U.S. government's emphasis on the energy dimension of the relationship. She supported her assertion of shared Indo-Iranian wariness about American unipolarity by quoting then Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's call for "dialogue" to resolve Iran's nuclear impasse, a statement in line with most of the international community at the time. On defense cooperation, she relayed Iran's wish-list for arms sales, refitted equipment, and spare parts from India, but did not detail whether India had agreed to supply these (later in the article, she conceded "Even if the volume of hard military transfers is inconsequential at this point"¦"). She made her claim about the Indian consulate in Zahedan being a bastion for Indian intelligence, saying it "affords New Delhi an enhanced ability to monitor Pakistan and even launch subconventional operations against Pakistan." And she also brought up the prospect of greater civilian nuclear cooperation between India and Iran, based on a handful of questionable media reports. All of this—particularly in the absence of the broader context of Indian foreign policy (including its burgeoning relations with the United States and Israel)—served to exaggerate the proximity of Indo-Iranian relations at a particularly delicate juncture for enhancing ties between India and the United States.
There's more evidence to support my claims that Nicholas Schmidle's sins were not at all uncommon, and less to show that Indian intelligence agencies are up to no good in Afghanistan, Iran and Balochistan.
Dr. Fair graciously responded to my previous blog post: "FP's Roundtable didn't offer the luxury of elaborating on Zahedan. I did subsequently. AND loathed wikileaks backed me up!"
I replied: "Thanks. If you can send me links, I'll gladly post a correction. My overall argument still stands, though."
Dr. Fair: "My claims re[garding] India in B[alochi]stan, Iran, A[fghani]stan also stand. Western dip[lomat]s [are] FINALLY acknowledging this."
She then provided two links to support her case, both articles by her. The first was to the Washington Quarterly article on India-Iran relations that I had already critiqued. The second was to an article in the same publication on India's end game in Afghanistan, which I had read upon its release earlier this year. The key passage in the latter article, I believe, supports my points and I'll reproduce it here in full:
ome analysts interviewed by this author in the United States, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, and Pakistan believe that India is engaging in intelligence operations against Pakistan from Afghanistan as well as Iran. UN officials told this author in Kabul in August 2009 that the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan's domestic intelligence organization, is running weapons to Baloch insurgents in Pakistan on behalf of India. British analysts have also conceded to this author that they too have inferential evidence that India's involvement in Afghanistan is not entirely benign. Pakistan believes that Afghanistan is a willing partner in India's purportedly anti-Pakistan designs. For instance, Afghanistan has long harbored Baloch rebels. According to information made available through WikiLeaks, President Karzai admitted in January 2007 to sheltering more than 200 Baloch nationalists and their families who had fled Pakistan. However, Karzai denied that India is helping them—a claim Pakistan rejects.
The information Dr. Fair uses about Indian intelligence activities is second hand. The implication that Afghanistan was supporting Baloch separatists at India's behest is inferred, as is the "inferential evidence" provided by British analysts. Why Karzai would admit sheltering Baloch nationalists, but deny India's involvement is also left unexplained. The subsequent paragraph elaborates upon Pakistani claims. And then the kicker:
The first-hand "anecdotal evidence" is not detailed by Dr. Fair in this article, nor is there a footnote. In sum, Dr. Fair bases her claims of Indian clandestine activity in Afghanistan, Iran and Balochistan almost solely on second-hand anonymous accounts, not entirely free of bias, and argues that even the absence of firm evidence is not indicative of a lack of meaningful Indian support for Baloch separatists. Again, I want to reiterate that this is not an uncommon practice. I have published entire articles based on unnamed sources, but I do try to ascertain their reliability and assess their statements against conflicting points of view. My central point is that what Dr. Fair does here is not all that different from what Schmidle did with his New Yorker report.While these allegations are nearly impossible to verify, they should not simply be ruled out for the sake of convenience or deference to the burgeoning U.S. —Indian strategic relationship. For one thing, the United States intelligence community does not collect on these activities and thus is not in a position to empirically adjudicate the merit, or lack thereof, of Islamabad's claims. Based on this author's fieldwork in Iran (where India has a consulate in Zahidan, which borders Pakistan's restive Balochistan province), Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, anecdotal evidence suggests that although Pakistan's most sweeping claims are ill-founded, Indian claims to complete innocence are also unlikely to be true. The United States is simply ill-served to discredit Pakistan's claims in the absence of intelligence to shed light on the issue. In fact, not collecting intelligence on these claims provides further grist for Pakistan's anti-American mill, conveying disregard for Pakistan's legitimate security interests. While conceding the possibility that some of Islamabad's claims are valid, it is also important to remind Pakistan's leadership that the scale of India's activities against Pakistan pale in comparison to Pakistan's sponsored activities in and against India.
Although she did invoke WikiLeaks, Dr. Fair did not provide any links to cables detailing Indian involvement in Balochistan that supported her claims. I did a preliminary search of the vast WikiLeaks archives that revealed nothing. A more detailed search brought up only two documents. The first records a meeting between Secretary of State Clinton and Foreign Minister Krishna, in which Clinton "expressed appreciation with India's assistance in Afghanistan and said the best way to dispel allegations about India's possible role in Baluchistan would be to address them directly with Qureshi." A second cable makes only a solitary mention of President Zardari claiming "he knew Indian intelligence was operating in Balochistan, and it had to stop." Neither passes for credible evidence of Indian intelligence activities there, the first because neither the U.S. nor India appears to lend them credibility, the second because Zardari is, in this case, an unreliable and biased source. The WikiLeaks cache is vast, and it is quite likely that more substantive evidence of Indian activity is available. If so, I have yet to see it.
Polaris
