Lahore terrorist strike

The lethal terrorist strike on the Lahore police training school manifests chillingly the damning unpreparedness of the state to face up to a vicious monstrosity threatening its very existence. Not just that the strike came within days of a deadly attack on Sri Lankan cricketers not far off from this police academy in the city, whose perpetrators escaped scot-free and remain still at large. It was yet another security establishment to bear a daring terrorist assault. Over the time, terrorists have been systematically attacking security targets, supposed to be highly protected. They have struck military cantonments, training centres and various other establishments. Spared they have not even state intelligence apparatus’ key facilities. The ISI has been so attacked. Even the GHQ in Rawalpindi bore their wickedness in close vicinity. In Lahore itself, a naval college and the FIA complex were attacked. Doesn’t this reflect a method to their madness? Isn’t the intent more than evident that they want to degrade the state security apparatus in the people’s eye, erode their trust in it, demoralise the apparatus itself, and emasculate the state from inside so destructively as to survive? Then, why is the state top hierarchy acting so lackadaisically, showing itself to be out of its depth, just vacillating between certainty and uncertainty without conviction? Internal security czar Rehman Malik is routinely given to ascribing instantly every terrorist assault to Baitullah Mehsud’s brigands, without ever substantiating his charge. And since the Mumbai strike, his usual suspect is Lashkar-e-Taiba. At times, he alludes to a “foreign hand”. But with certainty he speaks not even long after a terrorist act. But even if he is right on his assertion of local militants’ involvement, the question he never answers is as to who is training, arming and bankrolling these thugs, without which they cannot attack and kill a lamb, what to talk of taking on a security establishment? Nor do those intellectual lights, gracing nightly media’s talk shows. They think big, they talk big, and such a “petty thing” registers not on their high minds. What agitates them troublingly is what they euphemistically call our military establishment’s “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and its “extraterritorial interest” in the Indian-occupied Kashmir. Their argumentation’s upshot is that this establishment is harbouring its proxies in its obscure havens for its ventures in Afghanistan and Kashmir; and it is these touted proxies of theirs they point their finger at for every terrorist act in the country. But is it really plausible that the military establishment trains, arms and bankrolls these proxies and unleashes on its own people to kill and maim them? This bunk has gone too long; it must now cease. Too much is at stake. This country’s very existence is at great risk, presently enmeshed as it is precariously in the throes of an international conspiracy. The fountainhead of this diabolical conspiracy lays in Afghanistan where it is being spearheaded by America’s CIA in league with India’s RAW, Israel’s Mossad and Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance-dominated intelligence agency, Central Directorate of Security. And Islamabad’s top hierarchy too must come out of its sweet delusion about Obama administration’s benign hand on its back. The mere carrot of $7.5 billion in aid that this administration has dangled before it has transported this hierarchy in a binge of song and dance. But it has just to listen to President Barack Obama’s imperial tone about Pakistan in his latest American television channel, talking of us as if we are no self-respecting people but another Puerto Rico, an American protectorate. In the American lexicon, this hierarchy must know, there is no free lunch. And for this aid, we have to barter away our independence, living in subjugation of America’s will and diktats, giving our army and the ISI to the subordination of Pentagon and the CIA. And if with an orchestrated vociferous vilification campaign they have discredited the Pakistan army and the ISI to be their credible partners in Afghanistan, worse is to come. While they have already embraced India warmly as their real partner in Afghanistan and helped it massively to embed there menacingly to us, they are now toying with the Indian army’s induction there as well. Their top soldier Admiral Mike Mullen has publicly stated India has a military role in Afghanistan. The Indian army chief too has spoken of it. So the Islamabad establishment must come out of its delusions, see what the country is up against, and think out how to cope with surging terrorism having its roots across our borders, and act to counter it bravely.
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Dated: Tuesday,March 31, 2009, Rabi-us-Sani 03, 1430 A.H.