The worst terrorist attack of the year was carried out in the heart of Karachi, the largest metropolis of Pakistan.
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This terrorist strike on the Mehran naval airbase is chillingly shattering, to say the least. And a huge security lapse it was, whatever construct you put on it. What else could it be when just a handful of thugs armed with deadly weapons and loaded with bagfuls of explosives and munitions sneaked into such a high-security area without being intercepted to play havoc with the base, inflicting serious human fatalities and deadly blows to the costly planes like high-tech P3C Orion and other assets? That they had not crossed through the security posts doesn’t mean it was no security collapse. They may have crawled through a drain; they may have climbed over the boundary wall at some low point; whatever it was, a security collapse it was, out-and-out.More frighteningly, the terrorists, just four, kept the base under siege for about 16 hours, as had their thuggish peers-in-trade likewise sometimes back the army GHQ in Rawalpindi. But it was an active base, supposed to be secured extraordinarily; more so, after three naval buses were targeted murderously by the thugs in the port city just a few days ago, giving the sense that the navy was specifically in their vile sights. Indeed, one thought those attacks would have impelled the naval command to mount impenetrable security net on this key naval establishment to make it just impregnable. But the unchallenged penetration of thugs eloquently states it was not. More unsettlingly, this thuggish strike goes to further corroborate the scary feeling that now it is the state, not the people, that is under terrorist assault. The thugs had, though, been attacking security targets even in the past. They had been striking military training centres, staff colleges, intelligence offices, interrogation centres, and police stations, posts and academies. Nonetheless, soft civilian targets like bustling markets and shopping plazas, school buses and public transport, and bus stands bore the main brunt of their thuggery. But, lately, security targets are palpably their main focus. Just a few days ago, they struck devastatingly the Frontier Constabulary Shabqadar training facility, mowing down some 80 people with a combination of donkey-cart blast and suicide bombing. Among the dead were at least 65 FC recruits. As this Mehran base security collapse has come in close heel of the defence vulnerability exposed so disconcertingly by the American Abbottabad adventurism, troubling questions are dismayingly agitating the minds of the people about the capability and preparedness of the armed forces to protect the state. Perpetually, they had looked at them as the guardians of the state. But the increasing terrorist assaults on the military and security establishments has shaken that confidence of theirs. And while the armed forces have to work strenuously hard to regain that erstwhile public trust in its capabilities, the political leadership too has to come out of its inertia and set out on the gigantic task of securing the state from the thuggish onslaught of terrorists. A powerful counterterrorism effort is urgently called for, in which the state’s military power and civil power join hands to prostrate the dark forces of terrorism and extremism. Those customary condemnations, condolences, inquiry orders wouldn’t do any more. By every consideration, the state is up against no riffraff criminals. It is faced with an enemy that is well organised, thoughtfully chooses and reconnoiters its targets, meticulously plans its attacks and methodically carries out its strikes. To take on this vicious enemy, what is required is a comprehensive strategy that covers the whole gamut of the state counter-act starting from intelligence gathering to operations to track down and finish of the thugs’ sources of funding and arms supplies, dismantling their networks and lairs, capturing them and ensuring bringing them to justice. A strategy to this effect was in fact hammered out at a top-level inter-provincial conference chaired by the prime minister quite long ago. That was a fairly robust, pragmatic and promising action plan. Yet for reasons best known to the prime minister he has left it to gather dust on some archive shelf. At least now, he must dust it off and start working it. The state, he must understand, is perilously perched on the precipice because of the mounting unbridled thuggery of terrorists of all brands. If even now he doesn’t act, one shudders to think of the eventuality this country will be ultimately end up for his insouciance and sluggishness, though his own preferred pastimes too would then go down the drain, leaving him and his pals high and dry.
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