To the man on the backseat of the bullet-proof limousine the world outside seen through tinted glass looks so very placid, all the more so when the road ahead has been cleared of usual traffic mess by the hooter blowing advance escort. He puts aside the newspaper and begins chewing on his minions' soothing accounts of the day before, that were so much 'distorted' by the media. No wonder then that kind of make-believe 'sub achha hae' (all is well) has come to obtain aplenty in the nation's capital. Islamabad was never safe and secure as its guardians would claim. Last month when the chief of crisis management cell in the Interior Ministry told parliamentarians that the city sits on a volcano of terrorism, his minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali, lost no time in refuting his subordinate's briefing. How far away from reality on the ground the minister had moved we saw it first hand on Monday morning as a clutch of terrorists attacked the district and sessions courts of Islamabad located in the commercial area of F-8 sector. Wearing suicide jackets and armed with grenades and guns they entered the courts complex unchecked and undetected - because all four CCTV cameras were out of order, and the police on duty were having their morning tea on the roadside eateries. As the intruders went on their hunting spree, the otherwise medically fit police jawans, heard nothing of the sort and remained unconcerned - while hundreds of others took refuge behind tables, walls and trees. It took the so-called law-enforcers almost 45 minutes to wake up to the horror of the apocalypse unfolding right in the heart of the capital. Not only there were some 50 police constables supposed to be on duty to protect the courts complex, the Margalla police station shares its back wall with the courts complex. And also so closely located are the offices of the capital's top bureaucracy. Except for the two suicide bombers who did their job and died the rest walked away as unruffled and unharmed as they came. If at all the suitably-armed police did anything sort of protecting judges, lawyers and their clients there is no proof, at least no injured assailant was captured from the site of the incident.
And all of it was coming. Islamabad was never safe and secure against terrorist strikes; if the ongoing spell of tranquillity was courtesy the much ballyhooed upgraded security arrangements of the capital city that's not true - only the terrorists were busy somewhere else. And when they decided to put the official claim to test - for whatever reason, to sabotage the so-called peace process or to take revenge on a judge - they did with impunity. The gun-toting assailants fired at will, killing a judge, four lawyers and many others who were there at the time. Given the congestion of the tightly-packed judicial premises with scores of makeshift lawyers' offices, wayside tables of stamp vendors and application-writers and closely surrounded by some 200 shops, dozens of eateries and some teaching centres the F-8 Markaz has all the makings of a forbidden warren. As courts open their doors in the morning, thousands of justice-seekers turn up jam-packing the place, their vehicles are parked in the narrow open spaces between the plazas and even on the footpaths. If someone gets past the entry points that are supposed to be well-guarded by metal-detectors and CCTV cameras then it is almost impossible to get a hand on him. This is where the Islamabad police failed. And fail they had to because all the mess at the site is their own creation. You can enter from the exit point, ride a motorbike on the footpath, park your car blocking others' and entertain your guests at one of the eateries encroaching the pedestrian walkway. There is nobody to stop you from that, because everyone else is also doing the same and the law-enforcers have no spine left in them to intervene. So a kind of lawlessness abounds in the capital city but remains invisible when seen through the tinted glass. There is no 'sub achha hae' in the capital city - a charade that foreigners residing in the city uncovered earlier than the locals. Every fourth house in the posh sectors of the city has its own security guard who is properly armed and is open-eyed unlike their counterparts who failed to protect the Islamabad courts. Maybe as a polity we have decided to co-exist with the terrorist instead of confronting him or lost the verve and will to stand up to the devil or we don't know how to go about it. Neither the rapid response force showed up nor any minister as long as the carnage lasted, except for Chief Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani. All of it happened in the heart of the capital, under full glare of the media and personally verified by the country's top judge. Hopefully, the court's verdict on this colossal failure would set an example by duly punishing those who failed to do their duty.
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