India mulls all options including cyber warfare to make Pak pay

As the country clamours for some cost to be imposed on Pakistan government, 72 hours after the killing of 18 soldiers in Uri Brigade Headquarters, various military options are being developed for the decision-makers to accept. Most of them are conventional options that in turn can bite back when implemented. But one man, Dr Gulshan Rai, the so-called cyber czar, really the National Chief 

Information Security Officer in the prime minister’s office is steaming up.

Appointed in March last, this is his trial by fire. For the first time, the government is discussing all options to make Pakistan’s authorities pay for its action. This includes cyber warfare. And that is on the table too. The man who focused attention on it was the former national security adviser, MK Narayanan, who prescribed it as the most viable option in a newspaper article published Tuesday (21 September)

Dr Rai’s job is cut out for the possibility that Narayanan has talked about. There are five agencies that has the capability to launch an operation against an enemy of the country: the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), the three services and a division of the ministry of defence. Rai’s job is to make them all come up with cohesive plan jointly to target a subject across the western border and bring it down.

But again this apparently has many imponderables? Let’s say hypothetically, that the country’s cyber whiz’s have the capability to take out the power transmission system of Rawalpindi or Islamabad. Or they can take out the financial infrastructure of the Lahore stock exchange. Will the country not be showing its hand in the process?

Detailed conversations with a few signals top honchos of the army – obviously retired - and other senior officers of the kinetic combat arm, makes one see reason in one being careful in choosing this option. Actually, this reticence is based on the thin dividing line between cyber espionage and offensive strkes.

Think of the Stuxnet virus that was launched by Israel-US combine to destroy the computer networks of the Iranian nuclear establishments. While that had obviously been done after a long period of quiet espionage when codes were broken; firewalls were tested for robustness, when the attack was launched the preparations were complete.

Even then there was no clarity about who actually commited the act. Or take the case of the Lebanon War of 2006. One of the reasons the Hezbollah could give a bloody nose to the Israeli Defence Forces was command, control, communication, computer and intelligence and information was penetrated by Hezbollah (read Iranian) fighters, while the IDFs cyber warriors tried to block Hezbollah’s communication networks. This was truly the first cyber war of the world and peace has prevailed since.

But our conservative generals do not wish to countenance that show of hands so easily. They think we should do it some other day, some other time when the retribution has to be decapitating.

Of course, one man who was one of the few who created some of the early capacities of cyber defence and offensive capabilities made an intriguing comment. He said while strongly arguing for anonymity, “The beauty of a cyber attack is that it can be launched from anywhere on the globe.” And that is ‘plausible deniability.’