At the beck and call of FBI

By K.N. Pandita

Recent powerful bomb blasts in Ankara (Turkey) and Riy-adh (Saudi Arabia) — the two important Islamic countries — have alerted Pakistani authorities against a possible Islamists’ strike in their country. Their apprehension is based on their knowledge that Pakistan is the mother of wide Islamist terror group network.

Consequently, Pakistani security establishment launched a campaign of arrests, searches and scrutiny of suspected terrorists under the broad nomenclature of Al-Qaeda and pro-Taliban. These counter-terrorist activities have received exceptional media hype evidently to please the Americans who know, as do the Pakistanis, that extremist religious groups in Pakistan are deeply averse to action against the Islamic activists.

Terrorist and counter terrorist activities along the sensitive border of NWFP of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the American and Pakistan troops clashed some time back, are becoming a virtual nightmare for the Pakistani security and intelligence agencies. The crisis is deepening with large areas of Waziristan becoming restive owing to unwanted intrusion by the American FBI detectives supported by Pakistani police and military units into their private life.

While arrests, searches and sporadic violence between the Islamists and the security personnel go on, involvement of political parties in NWFP, especially the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal (MMA) are capitalizing on the volcanic situation. Day after day Pakistani ruling circles are getting stuck up in the fundamentalist-terrorist quagmire. The time has come for Pakistan to reap the whirlwind out of the wind she had sown earlier.

A recent report disclosed that Pakistani intelligence authorities arrested at lest 15 Afghans in the NWFP for allegedly spying for Kabul. Three of them carried small cameras and were arrested in the vicinity of Abbotabad and Mansehra. Pakistanis claimed that the arrested persons were sent to locate Al-Qaeda/Taliban hideouts and the training camps for militant Kashmiris. The inference was that they were spying both for the Americans and the Indians. At the same time, these authorities believe that the arrested persons might be a small fraction of a large group sponsored by foreign countries in Afghanistan, primarily the Indians, to carry on spying work throughout the sensitive regions of Northern Pakistan including PoK.

But the authorities believe that the network of espionage industry in the region will gradually develop into a monster in which not only the Pushtoons but many Pakistanis and locals will get involved to the total frustration of the Pakistani intelligence outfit.

Even today, there is a growing suspicion among most of the Pakistanis that General Musharraf has sold out the Pakistani ace intelligence outfit ISI to the Americans. It is virtually the FBI that is controlling the ISI now. The recent call given by Osama’s lieutenant Al-Zawahiri to the Pakistani Army and people to rise against and overthrow Musharraf was not totally out of context. The FBI is conducting house searches in Waziristan, and in the process, while seizing documents from private houses, even the copies of the holy book are also confiscated.

Having sold out to the Americans, Pakistani authorities are now desperate how to deal with what they think massive intrusion of the Indians in regional scenario. Pakistani missions in Afghanistan reckon that as many as 100 Indian diplomats, intelligence officials, technocrats, and engineers are present in that country and posted to various locations in Afghanistan. Close to 70 such Indian personnel are based in Kabul alone. After Karachi blasts, General Musharraf had said that the opening of the Indian Mission in Kandahar had raised Pakistan’s security concerns manifold.

A wire agency reported on October 21 that a team of Indian CBI arrived in Afghanistan to interrogate the former Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil who had surrendered (or deserted) to the American forces on January 8, 2002 and was put under arrest in then US Bagram military headquarter.

The two- member CBI team that had interviewed Mutawakkil on October 13 could not elicit much information from him about his alleged role in the hijacking and subsequent release in Kandahar of the Indian airliner IC-814. Informed Indian sources have leaked out that FBI had already conducted interrogation of Mutawakkil on the question of the Indian airliner but they would not share their finding with their Indian counterpart despite the mandate of Indo-US Anti-Terrorism Group. Pakistani sources assert that the FBI did not pass on to the CBI the sensitive documents recovered by the agency from Mutawakkil. These documents reportedly shed good deal of light on the hatching of the conspiracy of hijacking.

Whatever the truth, the fact is that the ISI is loosing its standing as the powerful organization of the Pakistani State structure essentially because as a result of Musharraf’s surrender to the Americans, this organization has to serve the interests of the Americans. Naturally, it cannot counter the fast growing resentment among various sections of Pakistani society, especially the religious constituency, against it for a total sell out to the Americans, A situation in which the army is divided between the religious hard liners and moderates, in which civil society is torn by ideological conflict between democracy and dictatorship and in which religious zealotry is struggling to jump into the driver’s seat, conditions are created for a widespread civil disturbance and upheaval.

The situation is compounded by the real or perceived role of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), For example the pressure brought by the Americans for the arrest of Gunawan, the brother of Hanbali – the alleged master mind behind the Bali blasts in Indonesia – and the expulsion of more than two dozen Indonesian seminaries from Abu Bakar seminary in Karachi, has created deep resentment among the religious organizations in Pakistan. Most people believe that FBI has been given a carte blanche and Pakistani agencies are "at the beck and call of FBI".

Frustrated in her ambitious plan of strategic space westward in 1990s, defeated in her designs of assuming key role importance in regional strategy, cowed down by increasing threats from the fundamentalists turned terrorists and pushed to political isolation on the Central and South East Asian political chessboard, Pakistan, in the words of Prime Minister Vajpayee, is virtually getting unnerved.

Unified licence: Caught in cross-connections

By Suresh Khanna

The Government expects the wireless subscriber base to reach 100 million by December 2005. Even the announcement of the unified licence regime for basic and cellular services recommended by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), and approved by the Government of India, may not meet these expectations.

The policy-makers have failed to put in place a comprehensive and stable framework to ensure a litigation-free environment in the sector. In the process, the policy framework has been titled in favour of the two key basic operators – Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices.

By leaving several key issues unresolved, the Government has failed to create a transparent environment for propelling growth and intensifying competition in the sector.

Raising the bogey of concerns from intelligence agencies, the Group of Ministers on Telecom (GoM) backtracked on its proposal to hike the foreign investment limit from 49 per cent to 74 per cent (let alone raising the foreign direct investment limit from 49 per cent to 74 per cent.)

At a meeting on September 25, the GoM had, in principle, agreed to this hike. This was approved by the Union Cabinet and referred to the Finance Ministry to be taken up as part of the annual budgetary exercise for 2003-04. This means a delay of at least five months, and there is no certainty that it will be allowed.

On the one hand, TRAI spells out the need for investment of about Rs. 50,000 crore to reach the 100-million wireless subscriber target. On the other, the Government, by keeping the policy framework ambiguous, has made it difficult for existing cellular operators to raise additional funds quickly and made the market itself unattractive for international telecom operators.

Two existing cellular operators that stand to lose from this move are Bharti Tele-Ventures, which has a strategic tie-up with Singtel of Singapore and a few prominent foreign institutional investors, and Hutchison Telecom, in which Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong has a 49 per cent equity stake.

The opaque regulatory environment in India and the global downturn in telecom have led to numerous international operators, such as British Telecom, Hughes, Telecom Italia, Telstra, Swiss Telecom and Bell Atlantic, pulling out completely from the Indian market over the past few years.

Even if the fifth and sixth cellular operator slots are opened up, international operators may not find India’s telecom sector an attractive investment bet. Their confidence in the quality of regulation is likely to have eroded after the moves of TRAI and the Government over the past month.

Spectrum allocation holds the key to the strategic moves of operators in the basic and cellular services. In its recent recommendations, TRAI attempted to delink spectrum allocation from the unified licence (between basic and cellular) by stating that no additional spectrum would be allotted to basic operators because of migration.

TRAI has conveniently sidestepped this issue by saying it will make its recommendations on efficient utilisation of spectrum, its pricing, availability and allocation procedures shortly.

But there is scope for regulatory tussles on this contentious issue. Especially as TRAI has indicated that efficiency in spectrum utilisation will be rewarded through a different pricing regime. Therein lie the seeds of a major dispute.

Second, some of the questions that TRAI had raised in the Consultation Paper on August 14 have also been left un-addressed.

Some issues that have been voiced by both basic and cellular players in their responses to TRAI’s Consultation Papers are likely to resurface:

* The Cellular Operators Association of India claims that the CDMA (code division multiple access) spectrum (used by basic operators in limited mobility services) has about five times higher capacity than GSM (Groupe Speciale Mobile) spectrum (used by the existing cellular operators). This effectively means that with the same spectrum, CDMA can cater to five times more subscribers that GSM.

In a sense, it means that 5 MHz of spectrum (currently allotted to CDMA players) is equivalent to 25 MHz of GSM spectrums. The upper level of GSM spectrum is now 10 MHz for any single cellular operator. Cellular operators are expected to ask for the spectrum allocated to GSM to be enhanced in terms of subscriber servicing capability to make it equivalent to that allocated for the CDMA platform.

The contention of the basic operators on this point will be that as the fourth cellular bids were technology-neutral between CDMA and GSM, cellular players could have chosen CDMA instead of GSM for network deployment. But cellular operators will contend that a technology switch was hardly possible, as economies of scale had come into play in their operations through the use of GSM technology.

And before 1999, GSM was the only technology platform mandated as a part of government policy for cellular players. So, switching to a new platform was hardly desirable from the network economics angle. The cellular obviously cannot be penalised for the earlier restrictive policy prescriptions.

At present, some of the spectrum that is used in CDMA technology can also be used by GSM services in the extended GSM band. Given the technology-neutral policy, a transparent framework has to be set out for additional spectrum between CDMA and GSM, which may become overlapping technologies.

* A common yardstick for the annual spectrum usage charge has to be evolved between the basic and cellular operators. At present, basic operators pay a revenue share of 2 per cent of adjusted gross revenues from limited mobility subscribers for spectrum allocation up to 5-plus-5 MHz.

Cellular operators pay a revenue share of 2 per cent of adjusted gross revenue up to 4.4-plus-4.4 MHz, going up to 4 per cent for 10-plus-10 MHz. Given the differences in spectrum efficiency between CDMA and GSM; this will again become a fairly contentious issue.

Finally, the CDMA 2000 1X technology installed by both Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices is a third generation (3G) mobile technology, according to International Telecommunications Union standards.

TRAI will have to decide the pricing of additional allocation of spectrum for this service as, internationally (in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific), 3G licences have been assigned through competitive bidding.

TRAI’s recommendations pave the way for consolidation in the sector through intra-circle mergers and acquisitions, which were so far not allowed in the telecom sector.

But in its unwarranted haste to push through unified licensing between basic and cellular, TRAI has deferred the issue of guidelines for mergers and acquisitions to a later date.

Since the interest of all the stakeholders–basic, cellular and consumers–are involved, passing the unified licence without regulatory clarity and consensus was unwarranted. Some of the issues that need to be addressed are:

The Union Cabinet has in-principle approved intra-circle mergers as long as the number of operators in each circle does not go below three. But as TRAI has not issued specific guidelines on whether spectrum will allowed to be retained or surrendered by the acquirer, basic/cellular operators cannot plan acquisitions.

Both the TRAI Consultation Paper and the recommendations on Unified Licensing fail to clearly spell out how consumer interest will be protected or improved through intra-circle mergers.

The odds are stacked in favour of such dominant players as Reliance Infocomm. Tata Teleservices, Bharti Tele-Ventures and Hutch. The smaller cellular operators, who do not have a national footprint, may not have the comfort level necessary to stay in the cellular game. These players are likely, sooner or later, to become part of the consolidation exercise. INAV

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