COMMENT: In search of truth —Shahzad Chaudhry
Why did the Navy insist upon going it alone when the gauntlet had been thrown to them on their territory? Why did they remain hesitant in seeking the Pakistan Army’s support which is, whether we like it or not, more attuned to fighting such a menace on the ground?
Only a few questions may have been answered on Mehran — even that is charitable — and a lot more still remain to be answered. I do not think the whole story is yet out on either Abbottabad or on Mehran. Perhaps, in the case of Abbottabad there remains a Watergate moment awaiting a ‘deep throat’ in the course of time, a Bob Woodward pale, importantly without the threat of being eliminated in such pursuit. Indeed, if there is such a moment, the cover-up till now has been stupendous. Perhaps the dominating question that will stay with us is: how much did we know, especially on the raid itself? As is now in the public domain, Admiral Mullen’s early morning call to General Kayani not only confirmed the raid to the general, it showed far deeper concern over the fallout of American transgression on the sensitive issue of sovereignty. Aggressors usually do not indulge in such niceties. There was little we could do about the Abbottabad raid, not in the operational sense, but on a larger strategic plane. It was more of a ‘political’ moment than a ‘military’ one: the need to define our position clearly on this war against terror and thus our relationship with the US.
Mehran will always remain different — a home issue built around internal responses to internal threats that by now should have become first nature. Why it did not is where the questions lie. If indeed there was enough brewing between the Navy and the militants, why this criminal neglect? Was it only a matter of administrative detail on who was to man the watchtowers between the PAF and the Navy? Did it ever come up as an issue? If indeed such was the case of ambiguous domains, it was criminal again for such an issue not to be brought to the fore. The PAF remains reasonably well protected on most sides with its own residential set-ups; the only exposed entity there is the Navy, which has no protection of its backyard or flanks. Did someone fail in assessing the threat? Or, did someone not check someone failing to assess the threat correctly? These questions will have to be answered. Because if there was enough warning and still we chose to fail in hypothesising the threat correctly, that is systemic failure. Sadly, such systemic faultlines run through most of our work culture.
Physical and ground security, though much better in current climes, remains perennially eclipsed by the higher calling of the main mission. The Navy’s PR department, in an effort to overhaul its negative image following Mehran, issued a picture of a PN Frigate patrolling the seas around Aden as proof of its professional competence. Not that there is any doubt of the Navy being able to fulfil its mission, just that nearer home there are threats that may just unravel the edifice on which we base our capability matrix both in the sense of physical capacity and resolve to stand up to any challenge. An incremental whittling of a presumed capacity is far more brutal than a one-off knock that a service may subsume in the normal run of events. What we lost in Mehran was critical, both in terms of the material as well as perception. That is why it needs urgent introspection and not banal defiance.
Back to the event and the larger questions that it posed in serious gaps of coordination between various players. To begin with, why did the Navy insist upon going it alone when the gauntlet had been thrown to them on their territory? Why did they remain hesitant in seeking the Pakistan Army’s support which is, whether we like it or not, more attuned to fighting such a menace on the ground? Why did the Air Force not launch a helping pincer from their end of the geographical divide in bringing an early closure to this embarrassment? If the Air Force effort was inadequate for such an undertaking at that point in time, should the army not have been launched as a supporting manoeuvre? The Navy fought it alone, with some help from the Sindh Rangers, and shed priceless blood; we need to save this blood for a larger cause not fritter away resources where complementarity regardless of the colour of uniform will help minimise our losses. Sensitivity to service turf is a known quandary but there are times when we will need to rise above these frivolities.
To the next question then, and this I pose to the three regional commanders in the south: was there an immediate meeting of the three that continued till the fracas ended to gauge the nature of the threat and evolve responses in facing up to the challenge? While the troops on the ground grappled with the situation as it presented itself, where and at what level was the strategy being refined and instituted with consistent allocation of more specialised forces and resources to quickly bring the situation under control? Was the CCTV information being fed to a central ops room where the three commanders would have a view of the unfolding drama as indeed the comfort of undisturbed peace to think things through and order actions accordingly? If not, why not? There is still the need to put in place the necessary accompaniments of fighting this menace through joint resource allocation, especially in large vulnerable defence complexes. To begin with, how about placing a company each of army SSGs at all major defence installations under the local commander to develop a hypothesis of threat and prepare with suitable local additions a robust capacity to fight off any such future venture? How about joint user airfields where civil aviation and a service, primarily the Air Force, operate together without gaps in sharing responsibilities?
One is aware of the Achilles’ heel in this entire gamut of joint operations, and this still is a war of a different kind, seeking integrated responses where such concurrent presence exists. For the common reader this is not an exclusive headache of the Pakistani system alone but of most military systems where hierarchical service structures have sustained. While we do not need a single apex system, we have equally failed to comprehend the joint system of command as a concept. The chairman joint chiefs is the head of a committee, i.e. the joint chiefs committee, without which he essentially remains the head of a secretariat. Only when the three service chiefs convene together as the joint chiefs does he gain relevance. The joint command therefore rightfully belongs to the joint chiefs who must thus, without reservations, convene more than often to grapple with the newer paradigms of both conceiving the 21st century threats as much as to allocate relevant defensive or offensive force to neutralise such threats. When they begin to do so, the subordinate commanders spread all over Pakistan will find it that much easier to coordinate efforts among themselves on a geographical basis to present more credible options in fighting our most impending threats. Let’s cross this bridge — we are there.
The writer, while in service, commanded Air Force’s Southern Air Command under relatively benign environs
