Former CIA analyst and noted counterterrorism expert Bruce Riedel brought great cheers to hard-liners in India by sweepingly blaming the Pakistani spy agency ISI for the recent terror attack on a strategic Indian Air Force base, close to the Indo-Pakistan frontier in Punjab.
At a time when even the Indian Premier Narendra Modi, renowned for his anti-Pakistan posture and rhetoric in domestic circle, has refused to name and shame Islamabad, what made Riedel jump to this conclusion and take partisan sides willfully? Surely, viewing strategically vital events through distorted mirrors is not a hallmark of any master analyst. However, to be fair to Riedel he did attribute the source of the information, on which his assessment was premised, to some well-informed press and knowledgeable persons, who it is needless to mention, are from the Indian side. This precisely is the reason why Riedel failed to honestly analyze the deeper subtext of the “blame Pakistan” discourse and the sustained effort to spread it globally.
Did any impartial expert ever tried to ascertain why sensational terror acts that causes very little strategic damage to the target nation has always accompanied India-Pakistan engagement? The dramatic Pathankot terror raid was similarly preceded by brief euphoria as Modi’s bold gesture of landing in Lahore unannounced raised the expectations of renewing a stagnant tie that has affected peace and tranquility in the Indian subcontinent. A section of the Indian security establishment aided by experts and a pliant media started pressurizing the government by calling for immediate revocation of all engagement with Pakistan, holding the Pakistani state apparatus responsible for anti-Indian subversive activities. But why would Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif make a fool of himself by allowing his country to be used for unsettling terror attacks against neighbors after having staked so much on peaceful engagement with India?
Is it also not peculiar that within 24 hours of Pakistan Army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif declaring his resolve to completely eliminate the nexus of terrorism, crime and corruption from his country by the end of 2016, the confounding assault took place in Pathankot? After all, who would gain, other than neighboring countries like India, if Pakistan can indeed root out terrorism from its soil? Intriguingly, the Pathankot raiders, despite India’s security apparatus possessing actionable intelligence about the attackers and target, got unhindered access to a critical military installation, as if somebody wanted them to come in and stage a calibrated attack so as to create a public outrage across India. Strategic intelligence sources reveal that there was no way the perpetrators’ objective of destroying military hardware could have been achieved because all high-value assets were shifted out of the Pathankot military base, as per instructions, long before the motley group of six terrorists wreaked mayhem.
The counterterror operation was, in fact, personally micro-managed by India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, who postponed his vital China trip to stay put in New Delhi and if indications received by this writer from high level sources are correct, the input of an impending terror strike was actually shared from across India’s western borders not by Indian operatives, but the Pakistani security agency, which reportedly tipped off a common friendly nation. The big question is if indeed Pathankot was that rare example of discreet yet productive Indo-Pakistan collaboration in combating cross-border terrorism, why was the multi-layered security web in a strategically critical place like Pathankot breached so easily in the first place?
Was the unusual tardiness displayed by the multifarious security agencies, deployed in this sensitive area all throughout the year, deliberate as there is a whiff of a sinister design to spike Modi’s attempt to build a strong foundation for an irreversible friendly tie that will not remain hostage to the whims of saboteurs? Or else, how is it that the heavily armed militants, who hijacked the vehicle of a high-ranking police officer after abducting him temporarily before moving into the non-classified area of the airbase unchallenged, managed a free run on a heavily patrolled highway linking Indian-administered Kashmir with rest of India?
Did India’s border guards, the police and military personnel, lowered their guards in tandem to ensure a safe passage for the perpetrators allegedly belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terror group? Why did the local police ignore those credible information provided by the abducted police official and most importantly why did Doval, having single-handedly choreographed the entire operation to neutralize the extremists, failed to put the border guards on highest alert despite knowing in advance that a group of criminal with mala fide intent was about to cross into Indian territory from a specific point?
Above all, when the entire Pakistani security establishment is on the same page with premier Sharif so far as improving relations with India is concerned, who assigned the JeM to carry out such a mission? A top official of the Vajpayee regime had once confided in this author how JeM was created through painstaking manipulation of Maulana Masood Azhar by Indian intelligence prior to his dramatic 1999 release. It is indeed puzzling that Azhar’s men could happily operate across diverse stretches in both nations, evading stringent security screening. Whatever the reasons for such laxity, time is ripe for an uninterrupted Indo-Pakistan entente on sub-continental security, while continuing to strengthen the peace constituency simultaneously.
