India’s Covert Action Capabilities Stymied By CIA, MI6 Pressure 
Chandan Nandy
January 4, 2016, 7:16 am
The biggest question that is on every Indian’s mind even as the messy details of the Pathankot operations gradually come to light is why our intelligence agencies have never had the stomach to resort to covert action to cripple terrorist infrastructures in Pakistan.
What is alarming – and this is based on long and searching conversations I have had with a few covert operation specialists in our intelligence agencies – is that the security organisations have allowed their Western counterparts to control them.
Last evening, as the Pathankot mess unfolded, one former specialist revealed that as far back as 1993-94, the American CIA and British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) literally forbade the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) from launching covert operations in Pakistan. These meetings, which were part of the liaison arrangement that the RAW had – and continues to have – Western intelligence agencies have been to the detriment of India and its ability to strike back clandestinely across the border.
“Their argument was that Pakistan being a rogue state does not mean that you too stoop to its levels,” a former top RAW officer said, quoting his American counterpart at one liaison meeting, adding that “we have been forced to fight but with our hands tied behind our backs just because one of the Western agencies’ stakes in Pakistan are far too deep.”
IMO, this hypothesis cannot be 100% ruled out
The pressure exerted and the control exercised by the two Western intelligence agencies continues. The only difference now is that there is an additional foreign security organisation (which worked closely with the RAW to train the LTTE) which has been able to establish a stranglehold over our intelligence community.
Even as the same forces that have repeatedly attacked India have grown in West Asia, the commonsense wisdom should be that it must rest on our ability to know, to understand, to predict and – when the moment is opportune – to act. But India has never had the capability of acting with artful subtlety or, in other words, undertaking covert operations in our neighbourhood.
As they say, in the intelligence world, you only come to know of an operation, if it fails; if a terrorist threat is "quietly eliminated" and is a success, no one knows about it, until the story becomes "old"
There indeed was a time – in the 80s and early 90s – that the RAW could act with near-total freedom when covert action would be carried out in India’s neighbourhood. Covert operations need not involve sending in special forces across international borders to create mayhem and large scale disturbances in neighbouring countries where governments or non-state actors have been inimical to Indian interests.
Doval-ji's "undercover" stay in Pakistan ?
Specialists have also undertaken covert operations in Afghanistan around the time the Taliban was gaining ground there, clandestinely meeting an Uzbek warlord in European capitals. Others have secretly moved huge consignments of weapons to ethnic insurgent groups in Myanmar.
Former RAW and IB officers recall that the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao has been the “only PM” who understood the foreign policy value of covert operations.
After a series of unpardonable failures and blunders, Pathankot has now thrown up questions that have been asked before. Why didn’t we know? Why didn’t we act more aggressively to prevent the attack? Why were we so unprepared to respond quickly? Why did/do we lack the skills of stealth and deception, contacts/sources/agents and the ability to infiltrate/penetrate the deadly jihadi groups in Pakistan?
The one answer to the clutch of questions is: historically, members of our so-called intelligence community, have been inert with no sense of security first and incapable of the derring-do, expertise, specialisation and commitment that the job of collecting and analysing intelligence demands.
The other question of course is what behind-the-scene agreements have been worked out between the NSA of both India and Pakistan, which the general public is unaware of
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The metaphor has always been scalpel for cancer. But that brings me to whether Islamist terrorism is a cancer, or is it more like a chronic and deadly infection like TB or AIDS, or is it more like a severe mental illness? The treatment metaphor gets linked to the particular illness to which something is linked.
Hindoo