Flying solo

The tightened ring of security at airports will handicap passengers but this is the price we simply have to pay.

Pakistan faces the risk of becoming a country which fewer and fewer international airlines are willing to fly to. Following the attack on the Karachi airport and then the shooting of a PIA airliner as it flew in to land at the Peshawar airport, several airlines have already suspended operations to Pakistan, or airports within it. We are in danger of turning into a country on which the world has turned its back. In these circumstances the orders issued by the federal government that the army and Rangers secure Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar airports, the destinations where international airlines land, are welcome. It is vital that Pakistan shakes off its isolation, and the only way it can do this is by making airlines, and the passengers flying in on them, feel that the country is a safe place to land. This will not be easy to achieve, given the image of Pakistan as an epicentre of terrorism. The two airport attacks will only have added to this. But under the circumstances the enhanced security measures are the best we can do to try and combat this impression.

This is precisely what the Prime Minister’s Special Adviser on Aviation, Shujaat Azeem, has tried to achieve by stressing that the Rangers will manage runway security and the army funnels as well as areas around airports. The Airport Security Force is to be involved too. Mr Azeem has also made a bid to persuade a few foreign airlines to resume at least some operations to Peshawar, during daylight hours. Three commercial airlines and one cargo airline had stopped flying into that airport. It is of course true that the tightened ring of security will handicap passengers, most, of course, with no nefarious purposes. But this of course is the price we simply have to pay. The fact is we are living in a state of war. This of course brings consequences, and they are ones we will have to live with, even if they mean greater inconvenience. The alternative, of being cut off from the world, is simply not acceptable. It will damage us in too many ways, and right now we simply cannot afford further damage of this kind.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 1^st, 2014.

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