This is not the first Mumbai-style attack in Pakistan. Pakistani military is not an easy target for bandits based on the Afghan border. The sophisticated attacks inside Pakistan after 2005 reveal formal training and superior equipment for fighting and communication. Pakistani military is under attack by several powers in the region since 2002.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—What happened at a Pakistan Navy aviation base in the past few hours is something that could normally result from an attack by one country on another. An enemy would have to come from across international borders to destroy P-3C Orion surveillance aircrafts parked at a high-security navy aviation base. And not any enemy would do. This enemy would have to possess quality military and intelligence skills to execute such a hit. Up to 15 terrorists can sneak into a maximum-security navy base but cannot simultaneously hold themselves up against commandos from the police, navy marines and the army while still finding time to attack and destroy two major assets in the arsenal of Pakistan Navy.
What is unfathomable is how a ragtag army of bandits, supposedly based in barren mountains on the Afghan border, could have pulled off such a feat against one of the top seven militaries of the world.
This is an impressive feat. The terrorists are still holed up inside the base at the time of writing this report [8:40 AM Monday], nearly ten hours into the attack. They have managed to target several Pakistan Navy assets, create a major hole in Pakistani war capability, shake the national morale, and give a boost to protracted propaganda in mainly US media about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and sites. Not to mention causing a loss of tens of millions of US dollars to Pakistani treasury, and much more in terms of reputation and self-confidence.
This incident is particularly damaging to the morale of the Pakistani nation, coming on the heels of a major security breach on 2 May, when an internal collusion or security compromise at some level of government was probably responsible for allowing the United States military to conduct a major operation on the outskirts of the federal capital for nearly two hours with getting caught.
The only way a group of 15 terrorists could have pulled off PNS Mehran is for them to be top-notch commandos or trained by such commandos. Some analysts, especially in the United States, claim that terrorists on the Afghan border fighting Pakistan are well trained thanks to the training imparted by Pakistani military or intelligence to them before they rebelled post-9/11. But this does not make sense. Pakistani military trained the mujahideen in the 1980s. Most of them are old now whereas most of the terrorists gathered at the border with Afghanistan are too young to have seen fighting in Afghanistan.
Everything about the daring attack on PNS Mehran stinks: the timing, the execution, and the target.
A key observation after this attack is that Pakistani military is under attack by friends and foes alike. The overlap is amazing. From the start of the US occupation of Afghanistan, American media and CIA’s PSYOPs turned focus on Pakistani military and intelligence, discrediting both at every opportunity. In the same vein, it seems that al-Qaeda forgot about the Arab world and Israel and focused only on Pakistan for bombings and mayhem. Even the TTP, the self-designated Pakistani Taliban, ignored US occupation in nearby Afghanistan until recently and focused solely on attacking and killing Pakistanis.
The attacks from both sides against Pakistani military are determined and multifaceted.
US diplomats, military officers and CIA agents have spent years convincing us that ‘extremists’ inside Pakistan have ‘turned against the country’ and are responsible for sophisticated attacks. But the evidence suggests that almost all major terror attacks in Pakistan since 2004 are the work of terrorists belonging to a single place: the Afghan border. Call them TTP, bandits, or guns-for-hire. Whatever you call them, they have the best intelligence, the best training, and very good equipment to fight and communicate.
In November 2007, after weeks of sifting through the record from Pakistan’s ‘war on terror’ since 2002, a small group of Pakistani analysts reached the conclusion that, for Pakistan, the war by the United States in Afghanistan was a sideshow. The real war, we felt, was a simmering one against the Pakistani military that sought to reduce its large footprint in the region.
Evidence has accumulated since 2006 that CIA has been encouraging several allied spy outfits, including that of India, to meddle inside Pakistan.
The group of Pakistani analysts concluded that the United States, while cooperating with the Pakistani military very closely, was pursuing a parallel policy of pushing Pakistani military to transform itself over the short and long terms. The short term goal was to fully assist the US military mission in Afghanistan. The long term goal was to drop Pakistani interests in Kashmir, Afghanistan, China and Central Asia and firmly get in line behind US objectives in all four areas.
If we put the daring attack on the Pakistani navy aviation base in Karachi aside, one can see a long list of daring Mumbai-style attacks that have targeted the Pakistani military. Some of them include:
- The attack on GHQ, the headquarters of Pakistan Army, Rawalpindi, 2009.
- The attack on a mosque on a Friday in a Parade Lane military-dominated residential area, Rawalpindi, 2009.
Both attacks involved commando-style operations at maximum-security military sites, engaging highly trained regular forces and taking hostages where possible. A third attack, on the visiting cricket team of Sri Lanka in March 2009, was also eerily similar to Mumbai.
A common denominator in all three attacks was that it was Mumbai, as in being similar to the attack on Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in November 2008, where 10 or 11 attackers carried out a sophisticated operation, taking hostages and successfully engaging the highly-trained commandoes of Indian military for three days. India accused Pakistan of training the attackers. An American newspaper later revealed that at least one of the planners of the attack was an active informant for CIA, raising the specter that the American spy agency knew of the attack beforehand to the extent of taking part in planning it, but failed to warn the Indians for unknown reasons.
From assessing the available info so far, one thing is obvious: Pakistani military is under attack from multiple directions and players. I’ve been saying this for 3 years now: Pakistan’s military is the target. Different attackers. The same target.
[This analysis must be read in conjunction with two relevant reports discussing current CIA PSYOPS in Pakistan, and how Pakistan can use Russia and China to counter US].
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