How A Terrorist Is Made- A Comic

US Led Drone Warfare in Pakistan. Strikes or Struck Out

The usage of drone technology by USA inside Pakistan is a hotly debated topic. Supporters of drone attacks cite the death of many Alqaeda and Taliban leaders and the reduction of terrorist attacks inside the Pakistani homeland as an example of the effectiveness of drone strikes. Detractors argue that the collateral damage is far too high for the drone strikes to be permissible and point to the moral dilemma that drone warfare faces.

Nobody denies that religious extremism and fundamentalism is an evil personified by the Taliban and the Alqaeda. Nobody argues that action should not be taken against the militants that are hell bent on the destruction of the fabric of society. Since September 2001, the fight against extremism has been raging on. Although there is no argument that many key terrorists have been killed but we also have to acknowledge that religious extremism has sharply increased rather than decline, which calls into question the USA led war on terror, which ( thanks to USA) has become our war too.

If this war has become ours. If TTP has become our enemy then, do we have to fight this war on the directives and with the assistance of USA, whose own withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan is a case study in strategic failure!

Surely, the enemy we are fighting is not a traditional enemy our operations against them might have reduced their military threat but they have not reduced their zeal to perpetuate terror. How drone strikes counter that shortcoming is anybody’s guess. But look at the bigger picture, there is a collateral damage in the drone strikes involved. That collateral then becomes fodder for the extremists who exploit the havoc wreaked by the drone attacks on civilians to recruit and BRAIN WASH more members and slowly this whole situation degenerates into a vicious circle whose only victim is the innocent civilian who’s killed regardless of a Hellfire Missile or a high velocity shrapnel emanating from the exploding jacket of a suicide bomber. Surely, if the solution to terrorism was a military one then the 11-year long war on terror might have made our world better today.

The drone attacks are one such mistake in a long line of mistakes that have been made when countering the disease of terrorism. To the satisfaction of its supporters, drone attacks produce quick results. Unfortunately, the short-term nature of the attacks is often confused with the rapid availability of results. Hence, important questions regarding the legality and future usage of drone technology has been consigned to the dustbin.  We should have the right to ask our governments that if drones are used a la’ American style, then what sort of precedent does it set up for the future of international military offensives. If USA can, with ease, violate the sovereignty of any country then, can other countries do the same? Can Iran target alleged Jundullah camps in Pakistan or MKO camps inside Iraq? Can India strike Hafiz Saeed in his home by using drones on the oft-used premise that the use of force is in self-defense or an imminent threat.

 Drones cause the local population to live in fear, the psychological toll of the constant fear of drones, the suddenness of a strike, the unseen attacker, may be more damaging to the psyche of the civilians than the battle hardened Taliban.  The argument that drone attacks reduce extremism are baseless because their proponents are sadly confused on the phraseology. Reductions in terrorist attacks do not constitute a reduction in an extremist mindset.

Hence, the question that must be asked is not Can Drones Reduce Terrorism. Rather Can Drones Reduce Terrorist Ideology? An ideology is not some bunker or hideout that could be destroyed by a Hell Fire Missile from the sky. Sadly, the proponents of North Waziristan Operation and drone attacks are similar in mindset to the Taliban who also claim that violence is the only solution. Hence, in my book both are the same. If drone strikes or military operations had been successful, then Malala would not have been attacked in the first place.

The fact that religion inspired terrorism is still alive in Pakistan is a testament to the joint failure of our military and political establishment to come up with a well-defined counter terrorism policy, the nation should be taken into confidence concerning that policy. If Pakistan were given the charge of drone strikes then the situation might have been different. Operations against TTP would have been more successful if it was followed up by commercial development but the rampant corruption, worsening economic situation and trampling of law is a major obstacle in the elimination of terrorism from Pakistan. In that case, drones can be effective against Taliban if they were part of the strategy, not the strategy.

Kamra Airbase Attack.Time to End the Double Game

Within hours of the operation to secure the Kamra Minhas Airbase, the elite military commandos had killed all the militants and readily identified them as foreigners. The identification procedure has not been provided. But looking at the pictures it is my proposition that it looks like they belong to the Punjab and southern KPK regions. But that is just a conjecture and nothing else. So let’s leave it.

dead body of the militant at Kamra Airbase. Courtesy Saach.tv

However, one thing about the attackers that caught my eye was their apparent physique. All of them seem well built and their beards wouldn’t have looked out of place in a professional SSG unit. I am not implying that they were rogue SSG commandos but they seem to have this ‘military man’ look about them.

Factor in their brazen but well coordinated attack on the base, their target intentions and you might suspect that it was an inside job. I am just theorizing, nothing else.

Kamra Airbase is an alleged nuclear installation or at least the base where aircraft can be fitted with nuclear devices before such a strike. Also, it is the home to the prized JF-17s and AWACS airplanes and is supposed to be under the maximum security that the military can offer. Yet, the militants attacked the base even after issuing a threat.

Now here one must observe that although the military’s efforts have been lauded and much has been made about their preparedness and the level of security employed, the real intent of the militant strike has been left untouched.

How determined can one’s enemy be when it openly issues a threat that it’s coming at you and then attacks your premier military installation.  The level of determination and the sophistication of the attack needs to be considered by our analysts, because this attack was doomed to fail once the threat to attack a PAF base was made public . But then maybe it was originally planned as a secret operation but after the intelligence report, it was re designed to be that way.  May be it was used to send a message that they know our military installations and they can attack it and breach the security parameter at any time and which is precisely what they did.

The attack also raises some questions about the level of preparedness and the counter intelligence efforts of ISI and the Army. Why wasn’t this group of attackers intercepted and traced before the attack? How did the attackers breach the security parameters, so much, so that they managed to damage one airplane, which the military has not elaborated much on.

Mehran Airbase Attack

Certainly, the military needs to come out open and clean in its explanation but of course, it never will. The Mehran Airbase attack should have opened the military eyes and one might have been led to believe that the military might have learnt lessons from that debacle but it didn’t.

As is now widely held to be extremely plausible by many experts, the Mehran Airbase was an inside job, led by TTP with coordination from disgruntled naval officers. When a journalist ‘Saleem Shehzad’ published an investigative report on the Army Al-Qaida link and the involvement of its own officers with Al-Qaida , he was promptly abducted and tortured to death ‘allegedly’ by ISI.

Even before the Mehran Airbase, the army had convicted five officers for their links with banned Hizb-ut-Tehreer (HT).  This conviction came after the attack on GHQ where a similar breach of security parameters was carried out.

Our military and intelligence agencies should worry about terrorist infiltration within its ranks because quite frankly the Zia era has left our armed forces quite changed with fundamentalist tendencies and terrorist organizations like HT, Al-Qaida, and TTP find eager supporters inside the army camps. The assassination attempt by army officers, with terrorist links, on Musharraf was one of the early signs of internal strife within the army. This strife is directly linked to the Army and Intelligence’s double game in matters of crackdown against terrorist network and their back channel support. They get confused when they are ordered to attack those same people that they were told sometime back were mujahedeen and defenders of Islam.

The army has to come clear and define once and for all, who its enemies are and who its supporters are. Taking Allied Support Funds, propping up the Haqqani Network and now back stabbing them with an operation in North Waziristan would leave many people, including its own soldiers, asking questions. And as an Army Officer, you do not want your soldiers questioning your orders.