KARACHI: This is with reference to your editorial of January 30 titled, “Attack on the PMA”.
Rockets fired by terrorists hit the walls of the Pakistan Military Academy. I wonder, though, whether these rockets dented the walls that are still present inside the minds of those who manage this country’s safety, security and survival.
Since the time the Marriott Hotel was bombed in Islamabad and GHQ attacked in Rawalpindi, there is no radical departure in the manner in which we fight the terrorists. Are we waiting for any concessions on Kashmir from the Indians to bring down the ‘walls of hesitancy’ in our minds and use all-out force against the militants?
Do we even once think about the slit throats, the unarmed murder of our men, whose only fault is that they fight a war that is not being fought in the manner it should?
The point I am trying to make is that military indoctrination converts civilians into members of a military service. The most effective indoctrination is the reliance and trust soldiers have in each other. In combat situations it is this teamwork that stands between victory and defeat. The army must revisit its allocation of forces between the front and the rear and needs to take more drastic action to ensure that the isolated posts are not soft targets but are in fact, always provided military reinforcement when under attack. For this purpose, the army must fill in the gaps in its operational plans.
Our unarmed soldiers are lined up and executed and all we do is to ‘reinstate’ our belief in human rights, call the Heads of the ISI and the MI to the Supreme Court to submit their statements in case of missing persons. The men picked up by intelligence services are not angels. Those speaking for their rights are least informed on where, when and how these militants crossed the ‘red lines’. The prime minister, and the parliament that he leads, need to view the possibility of empowering the Pakistan Army in the way India has, if we are to take the fight to the militants.
Let me remind our civil leadership that the key issue today is not democracy and its continuity, or the NRO, or drone attacks, or the energy crisis but, the inability of the civil government to employ the army as an instrument of power to support our national objectives. The most vital national objective today is to fight terrorism at the national level. And to do that the government must come out with a clearly defined policy.
Lt-col (retd) Muhammad Ali Ehsan
Published in The Express Tribune, January 31st, 2012.
