Things More Important than Sovereignty and Honor

Zia Ahmad
7 days ago, a motley crew of a handful militants raided and occupied a highly sensitive and supposedly heavily fortified Naval air base in Karachi. The ensuing battle lasted for sixteen plus hours at the cost of ten military personnel, fourteen injuries and two surveillance planes. Bear in mind, these are the official numbers. We can’t really blame the people if they find the official toll of damages suspect and assume a higher count of casualties.
It is also said that a contingent of a hundred commandos was deployed to reclaim the naval base. Let’s run the numbers again:
15 – 20 militants
100 “elite” commandos
16 hours of combat
Don’t fault yourself if the numbers don’t add up. Unlike the Abbottabad fiasco, one can bet on incompetence on part of the khakis rather than complicity. The kind of incompetence, as it happens more often than one cares to keep up with, on so many levels that most of us (being the tax payers) have a right to demand if the bloated defense budget is being put to any use.
Now that the Pak Army and ISI have acknowledged a major intelligence failure on the Osama episode, one would have expected them khaki jawans to be on their toes. Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaida didn’t waste any time in promising a fierce backlash in the wake of Osama’s death. That ought to have set all sorts of rainbow colored alarms going around in GHQs of all sizes and shapes. Security and intelligence would have been expected to be an utmost priority. Soon after, a suicide explosion claimed 80 lives at a military training academy near Charsadda. Do we expect the ISPR to issue out another brazen proclamation that nobody was prepared for this.
Last night’s attack and the consequent marathon attempt to reclaim the naval base have done much to dent our confidence in those who are sworn to protect us. What we all ask is if the armed forces can’t protect their assets and indeed themselves, what about us bloody civilians?
It may be too much to ask for the unhealthy fixation with men in khaki amongst the children and adolescents of all ages to wear thin. Our collective amnesia or perhaps the innate tendency to avoid our own grave follies and look the other way (think of episodes as far back as ’71 or as recent as a similar TTP attack on GHQ in ’09) may risk this instance to be sidestepped by some political circus attraction. Even worse, some of the less than bright and more than emotional right wingers would start whining about the drone attacks (wikileaks be damned) and gripe on about the imagined sovereignty and fanciful honor.
Speaking of which, didn’t our dear general make a very “ba-ghairat” claim of not letting anything frivolous such as prosperity compromise our honor. Dear sir, please remember you lead the army of a third world country struggling with drinking water and energy, not the Klingon empire. He also made this claim about breaking the TTP’s back. That was a bit premature sir.
The reverence extended towards the Pak fauj doesn’t show any sign of letting up. TV channels and    certain talking heads go on about reminding how the Pak army is the one of the biggest in the world (its all about the size) and offer one kind of justification or the other. Please sirs and bajees, don’t you think with all the tall and mighty claims, the Pak army should also be expected to fight threats other than Indian in origin. And most of you already think India’s behind TTP so that argument doesn’t bode well.

As for our civil benefectors; Mr Rehman Malik and PM Gilani offer their predictable patterns of condemnation and resolves of fighting on the good fight…or something. Hats off to them for keep issuing those tired old monotonous comments one bad event after the other. And you’ll agree there have been fairly a lot of them over the last couple of years. One thing I always wanted to ask the PM was, if God forbid someone was to bomb his front yard of his residence away, what would be his response….another tired old condemnation. Then again he is authority on what is absurd and what is not.
We ask our esteemed Chief of Staff to reclaim our confidence in our own army. With a grim realization we should brace ourselves for more ugly attacks on something more important than our sovereignty and that is hope.