The silent enemies of Pakistan

TTP and other organisations like it are going to find tacit support and succour within the community. Their sympathiser and fellow-travellers are all around us, the silent enemies who look the other way and they are as great a threat as the men with the bombs and guns.
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  As the thuggish terrorists struck the Kamra airbase, sections of the western media, commentariat and political pundits were in a shrill. The terrorists would get away with the nuclear weapons stocked at the airbase, they screamed. How had they presumed that the airbase serves as a nuclear arsenal of ours and how wrong were they on this count is beside the point. Their very tendentious presumption and its shrill parading over the airwaves bring out yet more poignantly one pulsating stark fact. The Christian West is still finding it hard to digest that a Muslim Pakistan has acquired the strategic deterrence and that it wants to deprive this country of this asset at any rate.

Not any secretly, certain powerful western lobbies are working overtime to throw into question the very credentials of Pakistan to possess this asset and thus involve the international community to snatch it from it. To this end, they have been raising the spectres of Pakistan's nuclear weapons falling in the hands of religious extremists and militants. And although the American officials ostensibly keeps vouchsafing for the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear assets, they keep planting leaks and stories in the media to create the impression that safe those are not.

Some indeed break the ranks to say so publicly. Among them, an eminence like Leon Panetta, America's current secretary of defence. He indeed went on record just a day ahead of the Kamra assault, saying that terrorist could lay hands on Pakistan's nuclear weapons. And he has bevies of charlatans in the US Congress, political class, media, think tanks, commentariat and pressure groups and lobbies, toeing the same line. Patently specious scenarios are woven up about Pakistan's strategic assets to frighten the world community, palpably to create a hostile world public opinion to level up the ground for international intervention to divest Pakistan of its nuclear deterrence.

But do our own pseudo liberals too have to join these western detractors of our deterrence, speak their language and toe their line? Do they have to become part of that diabolical campaign? They indeed are far more devastating in their discourse than the western campaigners are. Of course, their spurious ideological antipathies they catapult ostentatiously to sky highs. They give no bound to their self-righteousness either nor to their passion for self-flagellation to capture a high moral ground. But do they have to be so irresponsible as to be playful with a deterrence that is the ultimate to our national security and defence? 

Certainly, terrorism is the biggest, rather the existential, internal threat to our security, solidarity and stability. But where in the world do they put their assets in public parks for any Tom, Dick and Harry to pick and carry away? If that was it, the white supremacists, instead of using guns, would be employing nuclear weapons to massacre Sikhs in gurdwaras, wipe out black ghettoes and knock out Muslim residential quarters in the United States. Everywhere, they go extra miles to secure their nuclear assets. And so definitely it is here in Pakistan, no lesser to secure them from those who are training and rehearsing their special forces to take away Pakistan's nuclear assets in an event they themselves declare to be an emergency.

It is not unimaginable that those entrusted with the responsibility of securing these assets of ours must have put hundred and one systems and mechanisms in place to this end. Yet these pseudo liberals talk as if these assets are lying in the open where the terrorist would come and grab them. In their puerility, they go to the extent of conjecturing that in this adventurism the terrorists could potentially get insider help, without reckoning with the systems of constant vetting and screening of the personnel that the security in-charge of these assets must definitely be having in place. There indeed is too much of nonsense to their discourse on this sensitive matter.

By latching on to some stray incidents of radicalism discovered in our military, they build up the untenable theme that our army, which believably handles the security of our assets, too is getting radicalised. What evades them is the hard reality that the very fact that the radicalised were found out speaks volumes of the effectiveness and efficacy of the inbuilt systems of oversight and monitoring that the army has evolved in its force and put in practice. Furthermore, the fact that the radicalised are hauled up, tried and punished forthwith says much about the army's intolerance of extremism, fanaticism and radicalism within its force.
In any case, the self-styled liberals must put brake on their puerile posturing and stop lending a helping hand to the detractors of our precious nuclear deterrence. It is no plaything and no stupidity could be permitted to belittle it. The liberals should cease to be as blinded extremists as are the terrorist thugs.
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The Frontier Post

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