How many times would we still talk of failures, lapses and criminal negligence instead of learning lessons and improving our systems? For how long would we fight terrorism by sacrificing our soldiers, policemen, Rangers, officials of other law enforcing agencies and civilians?
Despite attacks after attacks by terrorists at their free will wherever they choose to, we haven’t learnt any lesson. The whole of Pakistan, including even the otherwise most secured strategically-important sites whether airports, air bases, military’s GHQ, air force and naval complexes, everything has appeared so far as easygoing for the terrorists.
Just half-a-dozen or even less number of terrorists, all in their teenage, can unnerve the whole of Pakistan. They have been repeatedly doing this in the recent years and did it again on Sunday night at the Karachi airport. They don’t enter the strategic places to capture such sites, rather want destruction, killing and most importantly create mayhem.
Getting them killed by the army, Rangers, police commandos etc. is normally a job of a few hours but by the time they are overpowered or killed, they would have achieved the objective of terrorising the whole country and making it a laughing stock in the whole world.
The challenge for Pakistan is not how many terrorists or militants are killed in a military/police offensive, the challenge is how could we preempt such terrorist attacks and how could we secure the life and property of the people as well as official installations and sites? Here comes the role of the intelligence agencies.
We have over two dozen agencies but none had a clue about half a dozen teenage terrorists — all foreigners as per the Karachi Rangers claim — who last night attacked the Karachi airport. They were carrying loads of sophisticated weapons, had supposedly travelled from Afghanistan to the tribal areas of Pakistan and then all the way to Karachi yet were not intercepted by any of the agency’s official.
They successfully entered the well-protected Karachi airport and easily achieved their target of terrorising Pakistan besides conveying to the whole world that it’s the most insecure place to live. Over a dozen law enforcers were martyred and this is how we fight terrorism here.
The over two dozen intelligence agencies of the country are said to have tens of thousands of agents. They have billions and billions of rupees at their disposal but still the teenage terrorists, their handlers and masterminds are beyond the agencies’ reach. Why is it so? What are these agencies doing? Is there anyone around who could hold these agencies accountable? What the agencies usually do is not a secret from the media, politicians, governments and even from the military establishment? The test is how to get the agencies focused on their prime job.
