How much ammo does it take for the Taliban to breach a ‘maximum security prison compound’? The answer, sadly, is “not much”. If you’re Constable Firdous Khan, one of the guards who was charged with guarding this infamous Taliban den, you would be quite mad at the powers that be. Firdous was only one of 36 men that were on duty at the time of the attack. That’s the number of officers that are on duty at an average precinct over holidays such as Eid. For goodness sake, it takes more officers to populate KPK Chief Minister Ameer Haider Hoti’s motorcade. How anyone in the law enforcement establishment expected to keep a lid on nearly 700 vicious, blood-thirsty, flesh-eating militants by posting a skeleton crew armed with what can only be described as AK-47s with lilies in their muzzles, is beyond me. Or is it?
Whenever I think too hard about the ‘good Taliban versus bad Taliban’ conundrum, my brain blows a fuse. But I’m sure the ISI has better mental wiring and cerebral circuit breakers than I do. You see, the fact that Pakistan needs to keep these troublemakers on a leash is common knowledge. In the longer run, our generals figure, the US will leave Afghanistan; Hamid Karzai will eventually be unseated and Afghanistan will return to business as usual: warlords carving up the country any-which-way they want. That is when the cunning Pakistani fox will trounce all others with its foresight. No one will know what hit them and we’ll be in the VIP enclosure, singing the “We Told You So” song.
But it’s not quite that simple. Before the US plots a hasty retreat or, as they prefer to call it, a ‘smooth transition’, they need guarantees. These guarantees include commitments from the Pakistani intelligence community that no matter what their interests or advantages, Pakistan will not support, harbour or arm groups that are hostile towards the United States, in any way shape or form. Ironically, unbeknownst to them, the US is inadvertently funding the largest anti-US militant force in the world: the Pakistan army. The irony is not lost on those of us who can see the joke: for decades, the US has been pouring money into the pockets of unsavory majors, colonels, brigadiers and the odd Lt General. In return for these favours, the Yanks have had almost unrestricted access to a host of intelligence, military and other assets. Assets cultivated by the Pakistan military and the ISI. All is well as long as the Americans don’t try to cut us out of the deal. But being shrewd businessmen, it’s never long before they hatch a plan to do just that.
Now, the ISI is not as bad as it’s portrayed. They may have missed the Al-Qaeda leader hiding in their backyard, but they certainly don’t miss a beat when the CIA tries to outflank them and brings people like Mullah Baradar, a known Pakistani collaborator, to the negotiating table – all without the guidance of his ISI handlers. When the ISI gets wind of this, the proverbial hits the fan and before you can say ‘Freeze, police!’ the errant militant is picked up by Pakistani law enforcement agencies and taken out of the equation, just like that. It is obvious that our spooks don’t take being dealt out of the game very lightly at all.
But what clues does this latest Shawshank Redemption afford us? Apart from the fact that the KPK political and civil administration is asleep at the wheel while massive corruption eats away at the foundations of our most conflict and turmoil prone province, all is quite well. The military establishment is well and fully in control and can engineer events such as the jailbreak on Sunday, if only to increase pressure on the Americans who are trying to short-sell what Pakistan has invested in the war on terror. An unidentified Taliban commander, who claimed to have masterminded the operation, told the highly unreliable Reuters news agency that they had spent around Rs 20 million on planning and executing the operation, which lasted a little over an hour and yielded several hundred high-value targets. Mind you, this is a far cry from the lax-guarded Police Training Academy in Manawan or the Elite Force Training School in Bedian or the FIA Headquarters in Lahore, which were all located in the sleepy suburbs of Lahore and were guarded just as heavily as the Lahore petting zoo. No, this was an actual prison where the baddest of the bad were being held, ostensibly against their will. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
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