Where is the Pathankot investigation heading?

DG of India’s National Investigation Agency clearly exonerated Pakistan government of involvement in the Jan 2 attack

How can anyone believe that the statement of a top Indian official regarding the lack of culpability of the Pakistan government in the Pathankot attack had no meaning? Coming from a man who headed the investigation for almost five months, this was no flash in the pan comment given by an outsider, but a deliberate statement given for an interview by Sharad Kumar, the Director General of India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA). During the interview, he clearly exonerated the Pakistan government of any involvement in the January 2 Pathankot attack. But hardly had a day passed that the NIA itself came forward and issued a statement saying that its DG has been misquoted and the observations attributed to him “are strongly refuted”. This subsequent statement not only poured cold water on the ‘vindication celebrations’ that were taking place in Pakistan, which had consistently defended itself against such allegations, but also confirmed that nobody on the Indian side is allowed to unilaterally mess with the national security strategy — which is state-guided and state-controlled.

Have we heard from Kumar since the NIA rebuttal? We haven’t — and will we? I doubt it. In a matter of two months, we have seen a DSP of police, Mohammad Tanzil of the NIA, who was investigating the Pathankot attack, being shot dead and now the DG NIA being softly reminded to watch his words. Where is the Pathankot investigation heading? With such controversies abounding, can one put a mark of fairness and transparency on the Indian side of the investigation? Like the Mumbai attack in 2008, the Pathankot attack has also been attributed by Indian investigation agencies to non-state actors from Pakistan. It has now been determined by the NIA that the Pathankot attack was carried out by the banned Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM).

I remember reading in 2010 a statement of General Stanely McChrystal who said that “I grew up in a military in which half of doing something was getting there”. The statement stuck with me as being from infantry, I remembered how challenging it was to reach your objectives during night trainings. But here we have six attackers who presumably entered India from Pakistan along the banks of the Beas River carrying assault rifles, 50kgs of ammunition, and 30kgs of grenades and instead of finding the usual difficulties of reaching their target area, by good fate they intercept a vehicle carrying an Indian SP, his friend and his cook. These heavily armed terrorists, along with their three hostages (I have no idea how all of them, along with all the load they were carrying, could fit in one car), then travel approximately 30km without drawing any suspicion and evading all police checkpoints along the way and reach the village of Akalgarh, which is just 500m away from the Pathankot base. My gut feeling tells me that no group of terrorists (those targeting an air base would presumably be the best in the trade) would like to lock themselves up in a car and present themselves as static targets to the many police check posts that they negotiated on their route. If this so-called plan has come off, it is not because the terrorists were brilliant tacticians but only because the road leading up to the airbase was least protected. The Indians may question who the terrorists were and from where they came, but shouldn’t they be reflecting on their shortcomings as well? An internal review of their own failure is also important. There has been plenty that has been reported in the media regarding the attack: the shortage of personnel in the Indian Border Security Force and the Punjab Police; lack of funds for establishing police check posts and night patrolling; lack of fencing along the 91m stretch of the India-Pakistan border along the banks of the Beas River; trees and tall grass surrounding the walls of the Pathankot base, which enabled the terrorists to approach the perimeter wall undetected and loop a nylon rope up and across the 3-4m wall to enter the airbase; even the floodlights on the stretch of the wall where the terrorists entered are reported to have been out of order.

No wonder with such lack of security consciousness on display and also violations of standard operating procedures, the job of the terrorists was made much easier. Much has been written about the attack. But I would like to quote Christine Fair, the author of Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War. She wrote two articles on the attack titled “Pathankot attack aimed at probing Modi government’s red lines” (January 9) and “Bringing back the Dead: Why Pakistan used Jaish-e- Mohammad to attack an Indian Air Base” (January 12 2016). In both articles, she blames the Pakistani security establishment for refurbishing the JeM to execute its regional strategies. She asks why Pakistan needs to keep organisations like the JeM in its “vast stable of terrorists” and execute Pathankot-like attacks in a “revisionist agenda” against India. Not only Fair, but the international community as a whole continues to thrust this allegation upon Pakistan. So, what should we do to come out clean?

Army Chief General Raheel Sharif, during his tenure can be credited for leading the military through a major strategic orientation. Initiating Operation Zarb-e-Azab, which targets the entire spectrum of threat is a manifestation of this change of orientation, which demanded the abandonment of some of the core policies that guided the military in the past. “Refurbishment of the JeM” as alleged by Fair or patronisation of any militant organisation as a strategic asset could not have been an option that the establishment could afford to work with. All capabilities that any military deploys to threaten an adversary has a definite lifespan. For the establishment, the lifespan of these assets to be deployed as part of the failed strategic depth concept is long over. Today credible conventional defence and nuclear weapons are enough not only to deter Indian aggression but also to conduct independent domestic and foreign policies.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 10^th, 2016.

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