The Pathankot attack has brought out
a lot of shortcomings in our system, from the quality of our border management
to that of local policing and counter-terrorism response. One aspect has been
the indication that the whole response is being directed from the very top by
NSA Ajit Doval. If so, this is wrong, and Doval must not confuse his role as a
strategic leader of India’s national security system with that of a tactician.
As the supervisor of the
intelligence agencies, he runs the loop and must, of course, keep the PM in it.
But when it comes to actual ground action, he should leave it to pre-designated
people along assigned lines of authority. The problem is, as the Pathankot
events have revealed, there does not seem to be a clearly laid out line of
command to deal with such events.
In the past two days, we have seen
the base commander Air Commodore JS Dhamoon and NSG Major-General Dushyant
Singh, brief the press in Pathankot, while in New Delhi, Home Secretary Rajiv
Mehrishi and Air Marshal Anil Khosla (Director General Air Operations at Air
Headquarters) spoke to the media. Earlier, we were told that the Air Officer
Commanding in Chief of the Western Air Command, Air Marshal S B Deo, had
reached Pathankot on the evening of January 1, several hours before the attack.
So who was in charge?
With the Pathankot attack having
dragged on for the third day, we need to ask questions about our
counter-terrorist strategy and tactics. First, the strategic aspect: The attack
was not entirely unexpected. Every time efforts are made for normalisation,
there is a push-back by forces opposed to it. The question is whether Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore was carefully thought
through? Was there any effort to assess the mood of the Pakistan Army? Because
you can be sure that the attack was ordered by the Inter Services Intelligence
(ISI) Directorate of the Pakistan Army, which does not seem to be particularly
happy about the Nawaz-Modi meeting.
Then there is the question of the
Indian response. This is the fifth attack since September 2013, following a
near identical pattern. A small group of militants in army fatigues cross the
international border in Jammu & Kashmir, which runs roughly parallel to the
National Highway 1A in a south-easterly direction from Jammu to Kathua, and
then loops south at the Ravi river to Pathankot and Gurdaspur. After crossing
the border they make their way to the highway, hijack a passing vehicle and
attack their target, usually a police station or an army camp.
In the case of the Pathankot attack
— from available reports — it seems the attackers crossed the international
border and audaciously hired a taxi around 8 pm on December 31. When it had an
accident, they hijacked the car of the SP of Gurdaspur, Salwinder Singh, near
Dinanagar, and used it to reach the Pathankot air base. They hid out through
the entire day of January 1 and launched the attack in the early hours of
January 2.
Remarkably, by the evening of
January 1, the authorities knew that an attack was imminent and the government
had dispatched an NSG unit under Major-General Singh to Pathankot, along with
the Western Air Command chief. Reportedly, two companies of the Army were also
sent to the base.
Officials initially said that four
attackers and seven security personnel had been killed by midday January 3. But
subsequently, they said that some of the attackers may still be around and
operations continued through till Monday, when the remaining militants were
killed some time around noon.
There are many questions about the
manner in which the attack was handled. Why, despite the SP and his driver
alerting the Punjab Police, was nothing done by way of search and arrest operations
through Friday? The Mehrishi press conference indicates that the NSG was only
deployed after the attack was launched in the early hours of Saturday. Dhamoon
acknowledged that the attackers had managed to reach the mess of the base,
where unsuspecting jawans — possibly unarmed — were killed while readying for
breakfast.
The biggest question really relates
to the ability of the Pakistani teams to penetrate the border, which is
supposed to be fenced, floodlit and surveilled with TV cameras and heavily patrolled
by the BSF. True, the terrain is riverine and heavily serrated, but successive
attacks should have led the authorities to raise their level of surveillance
capabilities, perhaps adding thermal imagers, motion sensors and the like to
their arsenal. In the history of recent and troubled relations between India
and Pakistan, such terrorist attacks take place whenever there are efforts to
improve relations. It would be downright foolish to play into the hands of
these people and stop the process of normalisation. Sustained engagement is the
only way to neutralise them.
But knowing that such attacks will
occur whenever we try to improve relations with Pakistan, it becomes all the
more important to anticipate them and be prepared.
Mid Day January 5, 2016
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