Rethinking Islam with Sultan Shahin

War on Terror

26 May 2011, NewAgeIslam.Com

Implications of the Mehran Attack
	The world must now seriously worry about the security of Pakistan's rapidly growing nuclear arsenal. The message from Mehran is clear: If Pakistani terrorists can raid a top-security naval airbase in Pakistan, they can attack a nuclear weapons facility too. Pakistan has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal and a delivery system which may soon acquire continental reach. What happens if fundamentalist Islamists allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda take it over or attack a nuclear silo and escape with a couple of warheads? The world needs to ponder. -- Hiranmay Karlekar

Implications of the Mehran Attack

By Hiranmay Karlekar May 26, 2011 The world must now seriously worry about the security of Pakistan's rapidly growing nuclear arsenal. The message from Mehran is clear: If Pakistani terrorists can raid a top-security naval airbase in Pakistan, they can attack a nuclear weapons facility too. The attack on PNS Mehran, the Pakistani Navy’s important airbase near Karachi, which began at 10.30 pm, Pakistan time, on Sunday May 22, raises uncomfortable questions about the ability of that country’s armed forces to defeat terrorism. The attack has some similarities with the 26/11 outrage in Mumbai in 2008. In both cases, well-armed and extremely well-trained terrorists entered building complexes, divided themselves into groups, stayed put, killed and destroyed, and held security forces at bay for prolonged periods — nearly 60 and 16 hours in the case of the Mumbai and Karachi attacks respectively. The parallel, however, ends there. In Mumbai, terrorists, recruited, trained, and equipped by the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba in collusion with the powerful intelligence-gathering and covert operations arm of Pakistan’s Army, the Directorate-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, attacked soft targets like luxury hotels, a busy railway station and a Jewish centre. PNS Mehran, in sharp contrast, is a highly protected restricted area and Pakistan’s largest helicopter base. Yet, the terrorists entered it undetected with rocket-propelled grenades, grenades and automatic weapons. Prima facie, the attack indicates a massive intelligence failure, underlying, once again, the need for a thorough scrutiny of the role Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus, particularly the ISI, in the country’s ‘war on terrorism’. The point needs to be made particularly since the attack came three weeks after the killing of Osama bin Laden and a little over nine days after a suicide attack on Pakistan’s Frontier Corps’ fort near Shabqadar in Charsadda, which serves as a training facility, on May 13, killing over 80 people and injuring more than 100 others, in two devastating blasts. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, which claimed responsibility for the attack on PNS Mehran, had also claimed responsibility for that attack. In both cases, it had announced, its aim was to avenge Osama bin Laden’s killing. Surely, the Shabqadar attack should have put the ISI and other Pakistani intelligence agencies into a surveillance overdrive and prompted the defence establishments to step up security. In fact, Pakistan should have made its key defence establishments almost impregnable long ago, and particularly after the terrorist attack on the General Headquarters of its Army at Rawalpindi in October 2009. Its military establishment’s failure to do so assumes a special significance in the light of the ISI’s claim, made after Osama bin Laden’s killing, that it had no idea that the Al Qaeda leader was living in Abbottabad, a town known for its heavy military presence, in a house located 685 metres from Pakistan Military Academy, the premier institution for training regular officers of the Pakistani Army and the country’s equivalent of the US’s West Point and Britain’s Sandhurst. Even if one chooses to believe this breathtakingly incredible claim in respect of officers at the ISI’s topmost echelon, especially its Director-General, Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, one can hardly dismiss the thought that a powerful section of the organisation knew of Osama bin Laden’s presence and protected him. Significantly, US President Barack Obama has remarked, “We think that there had to be some sort of support network for Osama bin Laden inside of Pakistan.” Stating that he did not know whether “there might have been some people inside of Government, people outside of Government” manning the network, he had added, “that’s something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani Government has to investigate”. Did these people also provide the support system for the terrorists involved in the May 22 attack, which, as Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mr Rehman Malik, has said, was tantamount to an attempt to destabilise Pakistan? How would these elements react to an effort by the Government to purge the Army and the ISI of jihadis? Will there be a civil war? Or will there by no purge and the current drift will continue, leading to chaos and, eventually, a take-over of the country by fundamentalist Islamists allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda? One might have been indifferent to such a prospect but for a simple fact: Pakistan has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal and a delivery system which may soon acquire continental reach. What happens if fundamentalist Islamists allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda take it over or attack a nuclear silo and escape with a couple of warheads? The world needs to ponder. Source: The Pioneer, New Delhi URL: http://newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarOnTerror_1.aspx?ArticleID=4705