Season's Greetings

Wish You a Merry Christmas
&
A Happy and Prosperous New Year

Actionable Intelligence

Reliable sources say that there definitely was useful information that was available. If an input says that a ship carrying terrorists has left from Karachi, the Navy and Coast Guard cannot say we want the name of the ship and the names of the terrorists so that we can intercept them. What they should have done is to send out a message to subordinate formations and ask them to step up surveillance and board a few ships at random so that the terrorists would know that they were taking a major risk of being apprehended. If the terrorists managed to land despite such checks, the Navy and the Coast Guard could then have said that with the available intelligence we did what we could.
This is not to say that the intelligence agencies did all they could. However the technical competence of our intelligence gathering, especially the external intelligence gathering, is very high. They can’t go to town crowing about their supremacy for it will compromise our sources of information as well as intelligence gathering techniques.