Zarvan
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An injured member of the police personnel is carried away by his colleagues, after gunmen stormed a restaurant popular with expatriates in Dhaka. (Source: Reuters)
“Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies”, wrote Brigadier SK Malik, Pakistani military despot General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s ideologue of war, “is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him”.
Now, as we consider last night’s tragic events in Dhaka, those words help us understand what terrorists are trying to do—and what we can do about it.
From Istanbul Atatürk airport to the Bataclan theatre in Paris and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, attacks across the world have hammered home just how easy it is to inflict fear on modern cities. This kind of killing, we sometimes forget, isn’t new: in 2004, Chechen jihadists killed 330 people, including 186 children, they’d held hostage at a school in Russia’s Beslan.
The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Dhaka attack, putting out photographs of the carnage inside the café. This isn’t a surprise. In April, the Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, had featured an interview with a Bangladeshi Islamic State commander, vowing attacks. The Islamic State has carried out over a dozen strikes in recent months, targetting Hindus, Buddhists, Shi’a Muslims and the government.
The big question is something police forces and city administrations across India’s major cities ought to be spending some time considering today: how do you protect the public against Holey Artisan Bakery-like attacks? India’s major cities are littered with targets, from shopping malls to movie theatres to fancy restaurants. Each of these is a potential hostage situation—or, potentially, a 26/11 type national crisis.
The truth is there isn’t a great answer—but we know the things we could be doing that we’re not doing.
For years now, governments have encouraged businesses to invest in private security. The guards at malls in hotels and malls are mainly there to give a sense of psychology security. They’re mostly untrained in proper explosives-detection drills—and couldn’t, in any case, withstand an attack by armed attackers.
Part of the answer lies in better training for first responders—the beat police officers who are likely to be at the site when a crisis starts. In India, though, these are the weakest link in the chain.
But because of human resources shortages, less than 5 per cent of these street cops go through any kind of training in a given year. The overwhelming majority—99 per cent in most states— get no firearms training at all on a proper range, with a qualified instructor.
Then, there’s the problem of élite special weapons and tactics, or SWAT, units that intervene in crisis. The British-trained Bangladesh SWAT unit actually did well, rescuing most of the hostages and killing the perpetrators. In India, that outcome’s far from certain.
Force 1 in Maharashtra, set up specifically to deal with these kinds of situations, still doesn’t have its own firing range. Elsewhere in the country, things aren’t very different. Punjab, for example, has had to shut down training courses for its commandos because of lack of funding. India also needs uniform national standards to evaluate the training and preparedness for state SWAT units—and ’till that’s in place, the odds are good that a crisis will end in disaster.
Pathankot was the latest wake-up call that all isn’t well with India’s SWAT set-up. There, the élite National Security Guard spent over 48 hours battling an empty building. Earlier, in Gurdaspur, the Punjab Police’s commandos were tested, and found wanting,
Top-class policing isn’t magic—but it can help. High-quality intelligence work has so far succeeded in preventing a major attack in India since 26/11—helped, on a couple of occasions, by luck. The time will come, though, when some terrorists succeed—and for that day, India’s police forces needed to be properly prepared.
http://indianexpress.com/article/op...y-for-a-dhaka-cafe-siege-like-attack-2889174/
