Militants warn Pakistan over tribal
offensive By Malik Ayub Sumbal
ISLAMABAD - A brazen attack by Pakistani
Taliban militants on Minhas Airbase in Punjab
province on early Thursday will likely make the
country's military think twice about an offensive
it is planning in the restive North Waziristan
Agency.
According to reliable sources, at
about 2am militants from the Tehrik-e-Taliban
Pakistan (TTP) entered the air base in the town of
Kamra from a rear wall adjacent to a village.
Disguised in PAF uniforms, they then rushed
towards aircraft hangars.
A two-hour long
firefight ensued between the security forces and
the militants. Finally, PAF security crew
succeeded in gunning down all nine attackers, with
one security official also killed in the skirmish.
The Pakistani Army is preparing to launch
a military operation in
the North Waziristan
Agency (NWA), and some analysts have interpreted
Thursday's attack as a warning.
"Just when
the Pakistani army was preparing to finally
undertake a military operation to crush the
intransigent Haqqani network in North Waziristan,
it has again come under another brazen attack",
wrote the Khaleej Times." As was the case in the
PNS Mehran attack, there are strong reasons to
believe that insiders were involved in this
sophisticated assault".
The TTP has
claimed responsibility for the attack, with
spokesperson Ihsanullah Ihsan describing it as
"revenge" for the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama
Bin Laden and former TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud.
"The Kamra base attack is a terrifying
sign that the khakhis [the army] might not be able
to tackle the blowback triggered by the
forthcoming offensive against North Waziristan's
tenacious militants," added the newspaper.
The incident is not the first attack of
its kind. Militants have launched several brazen
attacks on army, navy and air force bases in
recent years.
On October 10, 1999
militants stormed the General Head Quarters in
Rawalpindi, the supreme command and control office
of the Pakistan Army. In the attack six Pakistani
soldiers, including a brigadier and a lieutenant
colonel lost their lives, while four terrorists
were killed in the siege.
The recent
attack is similar to the assault in May 2011
assault on Mehran Naval Base in Karachi by
suspected al-Qaeda militants. During that attack,
the Taliban destroyed two US-made 3C Orion
maritime surveillance planes and killed 10
Pakistani troops.
According to reliable
sources and intelligence reports, TTP chief
Hakimullah Mehsud in early August allocated 25
million Pakistani rupees (US$264,700) "to carry
out attacks on the PAF base [in] Lahore, the
Inter-Services Intelligence, the Military
Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau, and the
Counter-Terrorism Department offices in the
province."
The intelligence reports
further revealed that prominent Taliban
commanders, including Qari Yasin of the Qari Aslam
Group, were planning attacks similar to the 2011
assault on PNS Mehran.
The air base in
Kamra is home to Mirage and JF-17 fighter jets
built with Chinese cooperation. It has has come
under attack twice before, in 2007 and 2009.
Talking exclusively to Asia Times Online,
Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed said, "When there
were intelligence reports of an expected militant
attack like the former attacks on the army, navy
and air force bases, then definitely this is
negligence and a security lapse. We lack a
counter-terrorism strategy and coordination. This
leads to such lethal incidents."
When
questioned about the security measures for
Pakistan's nuclear arsenals, the chairman of the
Senate's Defence Committee said, "It is irrational
to question the insecurity of the Pakistan nuclear
weapons arsenal as it is quite safe in Pakistan,
even more than the United States' atomic
armaments."
A Foreign Office spokesman,
Moazzam Ali Khan, also said in a weekly briefing
on Friday that US concerns over Pakistan's nuclear
weapons security were baseless.
"No one
need worry about our nuclear assets and we know
how to protect them, they are in safe and sound
hands,"said Khan.
Pakistan's Defense
Minister, Syed Naveed Qamar, rejected reports that
security lapses had led to the attack on the
Minhas Air Base.
In a sign of intensifying
sectarian tensions, just an hour after the air
base attack 22 Shi'ites were gunned down by TTP
militants near Mansehra in the country's Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province.
A bus carrying
passengers to Gilgit from Rawalpindi was stopped
by a gang of a dozen insurgents, with the identity
cards of passengers checked to determine who was
Shi'ite.
The TTP's Khyber Agency
spokesman, Muhammad Afridi, has claimed the
killings and warned of more attacks on Shi'ites in
future.
Malik Ayub Sumbal is a
senior investigative journalist based in
Islamabad. Malik won the Syracuse University
Mirror Award for 2012. He can be reached at
ayubsumbal@gmail.com
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