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DECISION- MAKING IN
FOREIGN POLICY
Decision-making in foreign policy involves the analysis and assessment of
past and current data, in the light of our past experience and that of
others, who had dealt with similar situations, in order to identify the
need and available options for action in the future and the likely
implications of each of those options for the protection and promotion of
our national interests.
Foreign policy has four aspects---political,
internal and external security-related, economic including commercial, and
societal, which has a bearing on our society as well as those of others. A
successful conduct of foreign policy protects and advances our national
interests and contributes to the preservation and enhancement of our status
and power, without being unduly detrimental to the national interests,
power and status of others. It seeks to avoid conflicts and, where this is
not possible, to minimise the likely damage to our national interests,
power and status.
The process of decision-making in foreign
policy has become more complex than in the past due to the following reasons:
* The emergence of ethical issues such as
human rights, democracy, disarmament etc as important components of the
political aspect of foreign policy.
* The greater focus on non-political aspects
such as economic, environmental etc.
* The new complexities of the security aspect
due to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the
never-diminishing threats from trans-national religious and other terrorist
groups and narcotics smuggling gangs to national and regional security.
* The trend towards greater
trans-nationalisation of the decision-making process due to the impact on
the process of a country's membership of international and regional
organisations.
* The increasingly assertive role of national
and trans-national non-State actors such as the non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), think tanks etc in seeking to influence the process.
* The networking of such non-State actors, at
the national and trans-national levels, in order to strengthen their
ability to influence policy making and implementation.
* The insatiable demand from the non-State
actors and other sections of the public for transparency and
accountability.
* The role of the printed and electronic
media and the Internet in spreading greater awareness of the database of
the process and in providing yardsticks by which the success of the
policy-formulation and implementation could be judged. The availability of
knowledge at the mouse-tip has contributed to a greater non-State
participation in policy-making and implementation and to an instant and
ever-continuing scrutiny of policy-making.
Provided one has a clear idea of one's
national interests, meaningful decision-making depends on the following
factors:
* Effective storage of past facts, experience
and assessments and the capability for their rapid retrieval in order to
use them for current decision-making.
* Capability for the collection of current
data, open as well as secret.
* The availability of knowledge of how other
countries handled similar or comparable situations and with what results.
* The quality of the in-house expertise and
the availability of external (non-State) expertise to analyse and assess
the relevant data and experience and to identify the available options for
the future and the willingness of the in-house experts to continually seek
and use such external expertise.
At least theoretically, computerisation
strengthens the process of storage and rapid retrieval, provided one uses
the computer as it is meant to be used. Computerisation is not just the
physical availability of the computer, but its effective use as an aid for
storage and retrieval of data and experience. The computer is only as good
as the data fed and stored into it. If the human element fails to feed and
store data systematically, computerisation fails to be an effective tool of
the storage and retrieval process.
A striking example was the unsatisfactory
handling, from the security and diplomatic perspectives, of the hijacking
of an Indian aircraft by a group of Islamic jehadists of Afghan war vintage
to Kandahar in December last. The much-criticised crisis management could
be attributed to the failure of the human element to computerise data
relating to the past hijackings of Indian planes, including details of
techniques and channels used to enlist the co-operation of the United Arab
Emirates in dealing with the situation, negotiators used, the behaviour
pattern of Islamic jehadists of Afghan war vintage who had in the past
carried out similar hijackings in other countries and how they were tackled
by those countries etc. There was no use of the video-conferencing facility
to enable the participation of the field officers at Amritsar with the
decision-making process in New Delhi in real time.
Thanks to the modernisation of the media and
the advent of the Internet, there has been a phenomenal increase in the
availability of current open data at reasonable cost to the State as well
as the non-State actors. About 80 per cent of successful decision-making is
based on open information which, thanks to the Internet, is now available
in much greater quantity and much better quality than in the past.
The remaining 20 per cent is based on secret
information collected by the intelligence agencies. Though the collection
of intelligence agencies has immeasurably benefited from modern
technologies, resulting in a leap in the quantity of intelligence collected
by them through technical means, there are still important gaps in the
quality of collection and analysis.
This should be evident from some of the
recent happenings, which had a bearing on international relations such as
the failure of the US intelligence community to predict the Indian nuclear
tests in May, 1998, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by NATO
planes last year due to wrong target identification by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Indian failure to anticipate the Kargil
conflict etc.
The frequently-recurring intelligence gaps
are partly due to the neglect of the human factor in data collection and
assessment and partly to the fact that modern technologies, while improving
the collection capability of intelligence agencies, have also strengthened
the capability of the adversaries to protect their secret data from being
stolen.
There is now a dawning realisation of the
need to correct the past neglect of human intelligence. Only a human mind
can discern and analyse the intangibles of policy-making. A computer
cannot.
Even the best of facts can lead to wrong
decisions in the absence of high-quality expertise in analysing the facts
and assessing the implications. Expertise is the product of institutional
training, on-job experience, opportunities for interactions with other
experts and first-hand knowledge of the past difficulties in implementation.
The quality of in-house expertise has
definitely improved in recent years, but more spectacular has been the
growth of a reservoir of non-State expertise which governmental
policy-makers can tap with benefit.
The growth of the non-State expertise has
been facilitated by the rapid increase in the number of NGOs and think
tanks helped by private funding and the trend towards their trans-national
networking. Non-State experts enjoy certain advantages over their
governmental counterparts such as the following:
* They can be more objective in their
assessments since they do not have to be politically correct and
acceptable. Their assessments are not unduly influenced by purely
nationalistic considerations. They are prepared to view a problem in a much
broader perspective.
* Their trans-national interactions with one
another are generally free of the inhibitions and mental blocks which
characterise the interactions of State experts with one another. This
enables them to pick the brains of their trans-national counterparts much
more easily than State experts can do.
The readiness of the State policy-makers to
make use of the expertise of non-State actors has contributed to many
innovations in policy-making. One could cite the recent correctives to the
US policy of over-focussing on China to the benign neglect of India as the
outcome of the growing influence of non-State actors on foreign
policy-making in the US.
Non-State experts were closely involved in
the confabulations which preceded the recent visit of the US President,
Mr.Bill Clinton, to South Asia and one could attribute his decision to
visit Pakistan despite Indian objections and his blunt messages to Pakistan
in his pronouncements at New Delhi and Islamabad to the advice received
from non-State experts such as the Independent Task Force of the Brookings
Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Apart from academics, experts of think tanks
and activists of NGOs, other non-State actors playing an increasingly
active role in foreign policy making are businessmen, whose influence on
the evolution of US policy towards China has been considerable, and special
interests and human rights groups, which have had great impact on US
policy-making towards Myanmar and the Taliban-controlled Government of Afghanistan.
While non-State experts are increasingly
being consulted by State policy-formulators in India, their role in
policy-making is still limited since governmental experts view their
analysis and approach as highly esoteric and cut off from reality.
There is an urgent need for an examination of
the positive and negative aspects of our policy and decision-making process
in respect of foreign policy in the light of the experience of other
countries in order to improve the quality of the decision-making.
B.RAMAN
(30-4-00)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India,and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical
Studies, Chennai. E-mail:corde@vsnl.com)
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