Pakistan's First Independent Weekly Paper - May 27 - June 02, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No. 15
The Friday Times, 72 FCC Gulberg IV, Lahore, Pakistan
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Ph: 92-42-5763510, Fax: 92-42-5751025,
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Rules of engagement
Najam Sethi E d i t o r i a l
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The attack on PNS Mehran is being propagandized by the state and opposition as a conspiracy by foreign enemies of Pakistan because two India-specific P3C Orion surveillance aircraft were targeted and destroyed. The Navy Chief has also dramatized the attack as one by highly trained terrorists using sophisticated weapons. This is self-serving nonsense designed to cover up for one of the most outrageous security lapses in Pakistans history.
The Navys FIR on May 24 alleges 10 terrorists, despite the Navy Chiefs assertion on May 23 that only four terrorists were involved and all were killed. The terrorists were armed only with AK-47 rifles, hand grenades and a shoulder-fired rocket launcher with one rocket each, all items in the everyday use of Taliban tribals in Waziristan. And the conspiracy theory is true only to the extent that the operation could not have been conducted without precise assistance from insider Pakistan Navy personnel (not foreign spies) sympathetic to the TTP.
Indeed, the attack has the planning hallmark of similar high-optic operations (including the one against GHQ in Rawalpindi in 2009) planned by Saif al Adal, OBLs Al Qaeda successor and the Al-Qaeda mastermind behind the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Daras Salam in 1998 and the compound attack in 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the operation was probably the handiwork of Ilyas Kashmiri, a Punjabi, who heads the Harkatul Jihadul Islam allied to Al-Qaeda and based in South Waziristan. Mr Kashmiri was once an ISI trained stalwart of the Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT) who broke away from both organisations and tried with insider help to assassinate General Pervez Musharraf after the latter closed the jihad tap in 2003. The astonishing thing is that this is the fourth terrorist attack on the Pakistan Navy in Karachi. But no security lessons were learnt from the earlier ones or from the interrogation of three Navy personnel in custody with links to Waziristan. Small wonder then that angry Pakistanis are demanding to know how the Armed Forces are spending the nations scarce resources and questioning their lavish expenditures on BMW cars, Land Cruisers, golf courses, Defense Housing Societies, Bahria townships, marriage halls, school systems, petrol and CNG stations, various preferential industries and farmsteads for their own welfare. Not since the 1971 debacle have the Armed Forces been scrutinized so critically.
Unfortunately, however, this is just the beginning of another damning story that is running parallel to the narrative on terrorism in Pakistan. This is the plummeting graph of US-Pak relations whose carefully contrived and mutually agreed ambiguity has now run aground without any new agreement on the rules of engagement. The Pakistanis are insisting that drone strikes in FATA must end and no unilateral US action along the lines of Operation Geronimo may be taken inside Pakistan. But the US has flatly rejected both demands and is determined to carry on regardless. Worse, the nuclear-scare scenario a terrorist attack on, or seizure of, Pakistans nuclear assets by Al-Qaeda has resurfaced internationally after the Mehran incident, provoking calls for preemptive operational planning by the US to protect, or take-out, Pakistans nuclear assets, depending on the situation. Inside Pakistan, this has only served to fuel the conspiracy theory that foreign elements, especially the US, are destabilizing Pakistan with a view to knocking out its nuclear program. In other words, the more Al Qaeda-Taliban terrorists succeed in exposing and attacking the fatal weaknesses in Pakistans security apparatus, the more the populace is inclined to succumb to anti-Americanism and the more state institutions are riven by dissent, which serves the objectives of the terrorists. Certainly, the demands of the opposition to spurn US aid and hold America responsible for Pakistans Taliban travails feeds into and is sustained by this rising anti-American sentiment.
The worst is yet to come. Two high profile trials of LeT agents or sympathizers in the US are going to further strain the crumbling US-Pakistan relationship. The first is the trial in Chicago of a Pakistani-American businessman, Tahawar Rana, who is accused of abetting the terrorist attack in Mumbai by a state-approver witness, David Headley, a self-confessed Pak-American LeT/ISI agent. The second is in Florida where two Pak-American Imams are accused of funneling $50,000 to terrorist organisations in Pakistan. The first will demonise the ISI as a double-dealing anti-American, anti-Indian organization and the second will fan anti-Pakistan sentiment in a scared but gullible American public. At home, a running series of Wikileaks exposing the hollow, lying, corrupt civil-military leadership will add to Pakistanis woes and fears. In this developing scenario, any major American unilateralism in Pakistan or Al-Qaeda-Taliban attack in India will lead to an explosive situation for all stakeholders. Therefore, if next weeks visit to Pakistan by Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, is unsuccessful in finally defining and implementing the rules of domestic and regional engagement, all our fears will likely come true sooner than later.
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May 27 - June 02, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No. 15
