Singed By The Sons

Revenge Of The Taliban

• May 25: Peshawar: Militants explode a car bomb at a police station, flattening the building and killing four
• May 22-23: Karachi: Mehran naval base attacked, two Orion surveillance aircraft destroyed, 12 killed
• May 21: Landi Kotal, Khyber: NATO oil tanker blown up; 15 killed
• May 20: Peshawar: US consulate vehicles bombed; two dead, 10, including two Americans, injured
• May 18: Peshawar: About 100 militants attack a police checkpost: two security personnel and 20 militants killed
• May 16: Karachi: Four men riding two motorcycles shoot dead a Saudi consulate officer
• May 16: Datta Khel region, North Waziristan: Militants kill two accused of spying for the US
• May 13: Shabqadar, near Peshawar: Suicide bombers target the Frontier Constabulary (FC) training centre, killing 80

(Attacks not targeting police or foreign interests not included)

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The assailants stealthily pressed forward to the heart of the base. Their path cut through a swathe tucked between two searchlight towers. They had minutely worked out the calculations, moving from one patch of darkness to another as the searchlights swept around the compound at preset intervals and surveillance cameras panned at a predictable frequency. At around 10.30 pm, they reached the runway and hangars parked with a fleet of navy aircraft.

It was by no means a random assault. They fired rocket-propelled grenades at one of the two P-3C Orion aircraft there. The plane burst into flames with an explosion, prompting Lt Yasir Abbas, of the Mehran unit of Rapid Reaction Forces (RRF), to abort his telephonic conversation with his mother in Lahore. His last words to her were, “I need to check the explosion.” He and 11 others promptly rushed toward the conflagration. A volley of gunshots brought down Lt Abbas and three others, compelling the RRF contingent to retreat.

Before it could regroup, the militants fired another RPG at the second Orion aircraft. Significantly, the militants did not target the Fokker or the Chinese ZA-6 chopper parked in the vicinity. Perhaps they didn’t have the time as they were now engaged in a ferocious gunbattle. Ultimately, it took a force of 1,500 personnel a good 16 hours to neutralise the four raiders. Two of them were shot dead as they reportedly made a run for the bush. The remaining two blew themselves up as the building they had entered was surrounded. Attempts were made to persuade them to lay down their arms, but one of them, speaking in Urdu, reportedly countered: “We know what you are going to do with us once we surrender.”

Even as the firefight was under way in Mehran, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility saying the attack was revenge for the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. From the time Osama was gunned down in Abbottabad on May 2, there’s been a bloody campaign of retribution by the TTP against the Pakistani security forces, directly targeting them as many as four times and killing well over a 100 personnel (see infographic). In the shadowy world of the militants, it appears there’s unanimity that Pakistan had provided assistance to the Americans to hunt down the Al Qaeda leader. And in choosing to target the two Orion planes, purchased from the Americans only in August 2010 at a cost of $36 million, the militants obviously wanted to blunt the Pakistani military prowess. Experts estimate the destruction of the Orions has reduced the navy’s surveillance capacity to just 20 per cent.

The event exposed the army’s lax vigil—for, to be sure, that it had become a militant target was clear even before the Osama episode. The PNS Mehran attack had been preceded by the bombing of two navy buses in the last week of April. Six months before that, Pakistani naval intelligence had arrested a marine commando, deployed at Mehran, for links with the militants. Belonging to the Mehsud tribe, he had reportedly told interrogators about impending attacks on naval assets. Shouldn’t Pakistan have then reviewed the security arrangement of its military bases following the killing of Osama?

The most worrying aspect here is that the militants were privy to information about the Mehran base that only an insider could have provided. The 2009 siege of the military HQ at Rawalpindi was also an insider job. And so the questions: is the jehadi penetration in the armed forces deeper than feared? Can the jehadis in uniform compromise the country’s nuclear assets?

But these aren’t the questions engaging Pakistanis, who are being fed a military-driven media narrative that exploits popular paranoia and jingoism. The core of it, of course, focuses on India, America and Israel—the triumvirate the militants too often accuse of inflicting misery on Muslims—who have been accused again of conspiring to belittle the Pakistan military. One conspiracy theory accuses the Americans of orchestrating the Mehran assault to reinforce the perception that Pakistan is imploding from within, thus fanning global fears about the security of Pakistani nukes and providing justification for their eventual takeover. India is implicated in the Mehran base attacks, says another theory, because the Orions, now destroyed beyond repair, could detect Indian submarines. As for Israel, well, it’s bound to support any endeavour to deprive the only Muslim nation possessing nukes. No less than former prime minister Nawaz Sharif thundered on, “Pakistan today is under attack by the US as well as the terrorists. The forces behind the Abbottabad and Mehran attacks want to render us incapable of defending the country.”

All these conspiracy theories prompted the Express Tribune to write acidly about the media spin, “What was the method followed by the TV channels? Ring up just any retired officer from one of the three arms of the military, call him a ‘defence analyst’ and let him unload bile on the nation.” Even the pleas of the martyred Lt Abbas’s family— that the country recognise that Al Qaeda and Taliban are engaged in a war against Pakistan—met with deaf ears.

Precisely the point Dr Farrukh Saleem, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, makes to Outlook. He dismisses all the conspiracy theories and says Mehran was the handiwork of elements nurtured, raised, sustained and maintained by the Pakistani military establishment. “Those who framed Pakistan’s National Military Strategy (NMS) that long relied on our armed forces, the nuclear deterrent and non-state militias to safeguard Pakistan’s survival as a nation-state are now failing to differentiate self from non-self. The designers of the NMS are failing miserably in neutralising elements bent upon delegitimising the state itself.”

Meanwhile, Pakistan remains in denial mode, refusing to admit to intelligence failures or security lapses. Chief of naval staff Admiral Noman Bashir even stunned the media with his claims that the 16-hour attack on the naval airbase wasn’t due to a security breach. Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Imran Khan was quick to respond, “If losing 15 soldiers, two Orion aircraft, and being under siege for 16 hours does not constitute a security failure, then our guardians must share their ‘wisdom’ with the rest of the nation...let us know what they consider is failure.”

The Mehran attack has indeed exposed the military’s rhetoric as empty boasts. As defence analyst Dr Ayesha Siddiqa told Outlook, “The myth about Pakistan’s army might has been broken, prompting people to ask if the armed forces can’t even protect themselves, who can they protect?” Agrees defence analyst and writer Imtiaz Gul, “If the objective behind the Mehran attack was to make the Pak defence look vulnerable, the operation came remarkably close to achieving that. If the goal was to embarrass the country’s security establishment, it certainly did...like similar attacks in the recent past.” Above all, Gul adds, the militants have made it clear that their principal target is the security establishment.

The more sober sections in Pakistan believe the military has failed to subjugate and silence terrorists because it is too distracted, either dabbling in politics or deploying its considerable resources to snoop on its own people instead of bolstering the country’s security. It’s time they devoted themselves to waging what has become a battle between the soldier and the militant.