Chhattisgarh attack: What were the major intelligence failures?

What were the major intelligence failures in Chhattisgarh that allowed several Congress leaders to be literally butchered by the Maoists? Praveen Swami, National Security Analyst for Firstpost.com and CNN-IBN, said, “Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong.” The five key failures are: * Intelligence failure of so many people gathering together at the same time * State highway that passes through forested and hilly terrain should have been sanitised before letting several top leaders pass * No security sweeps of the complete area was done even after knowing that Mahendra Karma, founder of Salwa Judum was in the Maoist hit list for a long time * All Congress leaders travelling together in the same convoy leading to chances of such ambush * Maoist build up in the Darbha plateau went unnoticed [caption id=“attachment_819481” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Maoist attack on the Sukma Jagdalpur highway wiped out almost the entire Congress leadership. PTI.[/caption] There were no means of getting in reinforcements due to the hilly terrain and the failure of intelligence, Swami added. “There has been a steady build up of the security forces for two years. These forces are not in a position to be doing very much. There was a directive asking the CRPF to call off operations in areas where they use human shields. However that will not help as that’s what is done in most places,” he said. According to him, increasing the number of camps and deploying more troops is not going to change the scenario in any significant way. “If there isn’t a coherent strategy then nothing is going to happen, “he added.