The 17-hour assault on the Mehran naval airbase in Karachi by Pakistan’s local Taliban that began around midnight on Sunday is yet another warning that Pakistan is hurtling at the bend with some speed, defying the laws of gravity, thanks to its decades-old policy of consorting with jihadi terrorists especially raised to hurt India and Afghanistan, its immediate neighbours.
There is no knowing when the country will be thrown off its axis notwithstanding all the aid it manages to collect as rent from Beijing and Washington. In spite of the gravity of the situation, however, there are no signs that Islamabad has taken any meaningful political lessons from terrorist attacks of this nature, which are now probably hitting it harder than they are India or Afghanistan. Reports of the in-camera testimonies of the Army brass to the National Assembly after the secret American attack that killed Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, are hardly reassuring. The primary issue to emerge is that Pakistan’s strategic policy will remain India-centric. Quite simply, this means that jihadists will continue to be nurtured as they are seen as “strategic assets” in the military configuration against India.
The jihadi assault unit that sneaked into the Mehran facility carried heavy equipment. This is remarkable, and suggests collusion with those inside the base. Officially, this has been denied, as acknowledging such a scenario would necessarily mean accepting that the Pakistan armed forces have been subverted by the ideology of jihad, and can no longer be trusted to safeguard the Pakistan state; and further, that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is no longer safeguarded although that country is now thought to possess the world’s fourth biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons behind the United States, Russia and China. American analysts have noted that the Masroor airbase, a large depot for Pakistani nukes, is just 15 miles from Mehran. What the story might have been if this had been hit by terrorists is best left to the imagination. The international community has dilly-dallied too long in confronting Islamabad with this question. As it is, in the Mehran attack, Pakistan lost at least two of the five P-3C Orion aircraft it had succeeded in wheedling out of the Americans, besides a batch of F-16 fighters, in the name of combating terrorism. With that it appears almost half of its sophisticated long-range maritime snooping and strike capability has been forfeited.
The terrorist assault on the Karachi naval base has been glibly compared by some US South Asia watchers with the jihadi attack in 2009 on the Pakistan Army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the 2007 engagement at the Lal Masjid in roughly the same area. The GHQ terrorist strike was on the periphery of the Army’s administrative centre, although it carried a big symbolic significance. In the Lal Masjid case, it is the Army that laid siege around that institution as the militants were holed up inside it. The Mehran hit is of an altogether different order. It has led to the destruction of Pakistan’s strategic capabilities, and has for the first time, in the eyes of the world, brought up the question of the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal with some degree of seriousness. Some in Pakistan have been naïve enough to describe the Mehran episode as Pakistan’s own September 11 (attacks on America) or 26/11 (the Mumbai attacks). This is entirely self-serving. In the case of 9/11 and 26/11, international terrorists crossed borders to hit at major cities and the number of civilian deaths was frighteningly large. In contrast, civilians were not killed at Mehran. The Chinese and American specialists at the base could be moved to safety in time. It is time the people of Pakistan came to recognise what is truly happening in their country.