India has the largest number of domestic designated terrorist organizations in the world. In contrast to the West, the U.S. and Canada have 40+ each though none operate on their soil, some 27 operate within India’s borders. 5 operate out of Pakistan, 7 operate internationally.

This picks up on a meme I’ve been working on for a while. Jug Suraiya discussed the multiple centers of gravity that are emerging at the sub-state level yesterday. Would have been nice to be cited rather than summarized but that’s the nature of providing open-source analysis.

By decapitating a proxy police force and attacking militarized police forces in actual battle, and winning, Naxals are setting the stage for a strategic overreach on the part of the state. Already, information operations are beginning to shape the public perception of this development:

Free of Left shackles, the Centre on Friday finally told West Bengal what security and intelligence agencies had been urging it to do for a long time — ban Maoists in the state.

By further isolating the Naxals, the state will further remove itself from the actual act of governance (as compared to the perception of state legitimacy). This actually helps drive the dynamic that this action is ostensibly supposed to bring to an end.

Lalgarh’s equilibrium has yet to be found.

The Naxals are, more than a classic insurgency, the enablers of a very robust black market that lends itself to a type of  equilibrium called ‘controlled chaos.’ Ongoing events in West Bengal reveal how this type of equilibrium is adjusted in response to stimuli:

A Naxal-backed outfit calling itself People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA) had set up a semi-permanent road block (effectively turning this major artery into a PCAPA toll road). In response to this road system hijack, the insufficient police force ‘outsourced’ night law enforcement to a legitimized militia (along the lines of Salwa Judum) calling itself the Maoist Resistance Force (MRF).

However, instead of just guarding the sides of the road, the MRF took down the toll booth. Open source intelligence reveals that the Naxals responded by conducting a decapitation attack on the MRF as well as the government currently in place (which runs the police force). Three senior officers were murdered, and several government official homes and businesses were simultaneously looted.

The situation has yet to reach a state of equilibrium.

Two colleagues have done incredible work on tracking unfolding events in Iran on Twitter: Chris Albon, author of the great weblog War and Health, and Steve Schippert, one of the founders at the think tank 2.0 Center for Threat Awareness have tiredlessly been tracking the full feed of Tweets (at 10 tweets per second) emerging from Iran and acting as funnels, synthesizers, and enablers (in part by providing proxy ports for those in-country).

As I learned during my experience prototyping this type of analysis during the Mumbai attacks – something the legacy think tank world reprimanded me for – tapping into global information flows in this way is an exhausting endeavor. They deserve credit for their efforts. It can save lives.

You can follow them at @ChrisAlbon and @Steve_Schippert .

Iran, a strategic ally of India, is facing significant levels of unrest. While current mob actions are still firmly in the “protest” category, there is potential for tensions to escalate to the “insurgency” category. This is unfortunate for those participating in this collective action. Protest is dead (has a very low return on investment). Taking down the governance platform (an insurgency) is much more rewarding. Those on the ground in Iran would be well served reading how the world’s smartest insurgencies have accomplished this particular task (Naxalites are indeed among them, having disconnected almost half of India from its governance system.)

We will know this transition has taken place once the insurgency absorbs conventional military capability (the conventional arsenal) or starts crashing critical networks. (For much more on this dynamic, consult my colleague John Robb’s Global Guerrillas weblog.)

Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson describes the networked effects of the hotel bombing in northwest Pakistan: by targeting the executive officers of international relief organizations, the attackers have significantly hurt efforts at managing the humanitarian crisis that is 3 million displaced residents of the region.

(H/T to reader Pradeep.) The Indian National Security Advisor has prepared a document to create a “National Network Security Architecture” for the ‘new’ government. It calls for a National Counter Terrorism Centre along the lines of the United States model as well as the equivalent of ‘fusion centers’ at the subnational (state, district) level.

It’s a good idea, and one I’ve written about pretty extensively (including a chapter aptly titled ‘Reconfiguring the National Security Architecture‘ in a book put together by the first think tank 2.0, email me if you’d like to read it). The trick for properly executing this strategy however, isn’t one of reshuffling bureaucracies and moving personnel around.

Instead, it involves what an Indian Army officer and myself were working on a few months ago – collaborative security. This strategy centers upon effectively managing the appropriate information flows – from chowkidars to rural-stationed policemen to military officers to intelligence officers. Fusion centers need to be opened up to private collaboration, and built on smart strategic technology.

Note: Doing so does not have to involve a large bureaucratic IT department, or a huge budget. It can be done in a way that makes it incredibly cheap (yielding an enormous ROI) while enabling every layer of security within the state. Getting started just requires building the momentum, finding a politician with vision, and getting the right talent in the right place.

It is important to understand what exactly has recently occurred in Sri Lanka. The hierarchical geospatially-bound LTTE network was crashed. However, it’s reason d’etaire as well as its external sources of funding guarantee that the same fight will be rebooted in another form. If current global trends are any indication, it will be faceless, it will be small and agile, and it’s structure will almost be flat.

The Tamil Tiger is far from dead.

By way of post-election analysis: My November predictions played out correctly: The BJP required a security crisis to win. That did not happen. Instead, economic uncertainty yielded a Congress win.

More interesting, however, is this useful visualization by Ushahidi reveals the underbelly of the election process (violence, corruption etc).

CNN:

Authorities believe 90 percent of human trafficking in India is “intra-country.”

India’s home secretary Madhukar Gupta remarked that at least 100 million people were involved in human trafficking in India.

“However, studies and surveys sponsored by the ministry of women and child development estimate that there are about three million prostitutes in the country, of which an estimated 40 percent are children,” a CBI statement said.