Islambad's Sikkandar Drama: ''Facing the music''

Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has said that Sikandar was part of a large network and not a lone gunman taking Islamabad hostage on August 15. He said that the investigation into the incident has revealed Sikandar’s links reaching as far as Abu Dhabi and some suspects have also been arrested from Hafizabad and Azad Kashmir. There were, according to him, some big names involved who could not be revealed because of security reasons. The opposition parties in parliament have been critical of the performance of the security agencies that had made a mockery of the country by not taking out a lone gunman and allowing him to paralyze the capital for five and a half hours. Fingers are being pointed at the professional abilities of Chaudhry Nisar to head the interior ministry, responding to which the minister has offered the formation of a multiparty parliamentary national security committee to oversee his ministry’s performance. He has even asked the opposition parties to suggest the names of honest and professional police officials who should be appointed on sensitive jobs. The crux of this initial investigation however has been the oft-repeated involvement of the ubiquitous foreign hand. Governments in Pakistan have been using the foreign hand for as long as memory serves as a fig leaf to hide their failings. Earlier it was Rehman Malik taking refuge in the mystery of international involvement to explain Pakistan’s dire security situation, now it is Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan adopting the same ‘explanation’. Having become a cliché, this resort to blaming everything that happens on the ‘invisible’ foreign hand does little to console the nation. The Islamabad incident was a sharp reminder of our institutional failure, not so much for their inability to coordinate with each other but for the professional failure they exhibited by not identifying the level of the threat and the response needed to thwart it. Now, instead of accepting the failure, operational, functional and tactical, the minister is passing the blame onto unnamed others. The theory of the ‘other (unknown) factor’ conspiring to destabilize Pakistan has more than passed its sell-by date. The reality is that it was a sheer failure of the police and other security agencies assigned the job to maintain law and order in Islamabad. The same has been revealed by the initial report of the interior ministry on the Islamabad incident. Therefore facing the music is the best option and far more graceful too. No matter how the interior minister tries to justify his and the law enforcement agencies’ role in the Islamabad incident, the fact is that the duration of that drama should not have been dragged out to over five hours. Senator Raza Rabbani has rightly inquired about the officer heading the operation. There should be someone owning the show? Or, worse, there was no one, making it easier for Zamurad to bring the curtain down on the suspense.