My Account | RSS
| ||
|
[ Sign in ] | |
Rupee News
Moin Ansari
The end of an innocent age
New York, NY, United States, June 18 — Around 1980, when visiting Frankfurt, I was aghast at the blatant display of tall, lethal-looking German gendarmes who openly displayed their Uzis and walked around intimidating the hell out of innocent tourists on way to the New World or to hedonistic destinations in Turkey, Greece or Spain. I have always wondered about that particular scenario and often compared it to the freewheeling airports in America, where one would never see an armed agent in sight. Obviously, the German authorities had much to fear from Palestinian hijackers, the ruthlessness of the Baader Meinhof gang, the viciousness of the Basque separatist group ETA, and a host of other militants that spanned the airports of Europe waiting for a chance to claim the headlines by attacking poor, innocent civilians. The United States at the time was easygoing, where anyone could get a driver’s license and where walking into an airport was as easy as walking into a shopping mall.
All that changed after 9/11. The U.S. airports are no longer shopping malls. They are like armed forts. One has to go through multiple checkpoints, and furious-looking armed policemen are ubiquitous. The airlines taking advantage of the security situation have become rude and obnoxious. They threaten to, and occasionally have, thrown people off the plane because of complaints against bad service.
Many said that the world changed on 9/11. America surely did. To get a driver’s license renewed in most states is a bureaucratic labyrinth that is intricately cumbersome and very aggravating. 9/11 was the end of innocence for America.
We joked about how free Pakistan was, where there were no security checks on the roads and where anyone could do anything if one had good communication skills, drove a good car, and had some money to flash around. Policemen stood around cracking dirty jokes, security guards usually slept, and one could waltz into the U.S. Embassy on a whim. No more.
Everything changed in 2005. A steady flow of suicide bombers has changed all that. Each attack on a hotel or a park galvanizes the country into motion with more resolute action. The recent attack on a mosque incensed the local natives of Dir so much that they surrounded and hounded the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan’s umbrella organization for the Taliban, with lethal force.
Pakistan's citizens are sick and tired of the death and destruction rained on them by foreign agents and their acolytes. One doesn’t find lackadaisical cops hanging around, and trigger-happy gendarmes show their Kalashnikovs to any and all who dare attack. Social Darwinism has come to town. The citizens want and expect security as well as efficiency by the police, the army, and the politicians. Those who are inefficient will find out quickly the dangers of the urban jungle, where only the fittest survive.
The Pakistan state and its actors have learned the lessons of apathetic negligence and indifferent inattentiveness. The state machinery has learned lessons from Europe and America. The state apparatus is not dealing with petty thugs and insignificant crooks. Now it is dealing with heavily armed foreign criminals and agents who play the most ruthless games in the history of the planet.
The Pakistan Army was told to take aggressive action in draining the swamp in the Swat region. The age of innocence is over.
The magnificent performance of the rank and file of the Pakistan Army fighting the counterinsurgency in Swat is not surprising. Pakistan’s officers and men have kept their commitment, whether in Kashmir in 1947-48, in Dir in 1958 and 1976, in the Rann of Kutch, in occupied Kashmir with Operation Gibraltar and later in the full-fledged Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, during the 1971 war, in the Balochistan counterinsurgency in 1973-75, in Siachen since 1985, in Kargil in 1998, and in FATA since 2004 (as well as in many more small conflicts that would take many more pages to name).
In his June 11th article published by Pakistani news website The News International, Ikram Sehgal wrote, “The average officer-to-soldier ratio in combat fatalities during conventional operations being 1:17 or 1:18 in most Armies represents the command structure at the field level functioning adequately, young officers (including lieutenant colonels) leading rather than sending men to their deaths. In the Pakistan Army and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the superior 1:10 or 1:11 average through many conflicts means that the young officers are far more enthusiastic at leading from the front in the face of fire. This ratio is also usually higher among commandos (Special Forces).”
Keywords
India Pakistan 9/11 terrorism
All that changed after 9/11. The U.S. airports are no longer shopping malls. They are like armed forts. One has to go through multiple checkpoints, and furious-looking armed policemen are ubiquitous. The airlines taking advantage of the security situation have become rude and obnoxious. They threaten to, and occasionally have, thrown people off the plane because of complaints against bad service.
Many said that the world changed on 9/11. America surely did. To get a driver’s license renewed in most states is a bureaucratic labyrinth that is intricately cumbersome and very aggravating. 9/11 was the end of innocence for America.
We joked about how free Pakistan was, where there were no security checks on the roads and where anyone could do anything if one had good communication skills, drove a good car, and had some money to flash around. Policemen stood around cracking dirty jokes, security guards usually slept, and one could waltz into the U.S. Embassy on a whim. No more.
Everything changed in 2005. A steady flow of suicide bombers has changed all that. Each attack on a hotel or a park galvanizes the country into motion with more resolute action. The recent attack on a mosque incensed the local natives of Dir so much that they surrounded and hounded the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan’s umbrella organization for the Taliban, with lethal force.
Pakistan's citizens are sick and tired of the death and destruction rained on them by foreign agents and their acolytes. One doesn’t find lackadaisical cops hanging around, and trigger-happy gendarmes show their Kalashnikovs to any and all who dare attack. Social Darwinism has come to town. The citizens want and expect security as well as efficiency by the police, the army, and the politicians. Those who are inefficient will find out quickly the dangers of the urban jungle, where only the fittest survive.
The Pakistan state and its actors have learned the lessons of apathetic negligence and indifferent inattentiveness. The state machinery has learned lessons from Europe and America. The state apparatus is not dealing with petty thugs and insignificant crooks. Now it is dealing with heavily armed foreign criminals and agents who play the most ruthless games in the history of the planet.
The Pakistan Army was told to take aggressive action in draining the swamp in the Swat region. The age of innocence is over.
The magnificent performance of the rank and file of the Pakistan Army fighting the counterinsurgency in Swat is not surprising. Pakistan’s officers and men have kept their commitment, whether in Kashmir in 1947-48, in Dir in 1958 and 1976, in the Rann of Kutch, in occupied Kashmir with Operation Gibraltar and later in the full-fledged Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, during the 1971 war, in the Balochistan counterinsurgency in 1973-75, in Siachen since 1985, in Kargil in 1998, and in FATA since 2004 (as well as in many more small conflicts that would take many more pages to name).
In his June 11th article published by Pakistani news website The News International, Ikram Sehgal wrote, “The average officer-to-soldier ratio in combat fatalities during conventional operations being 1:17 or 1:18 in most Armies represents the command structure at the field level functioning adequately, young officers (including lieutenant colonels) leading rather than sending men to their deaths. In the Pakistan Army and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), the superior 1:10 or 1:11 average through many conflicts means that the young officers are far more enthusiastic at leading from the front in the face of fire. This ratio is also usually higher among commandos (Special Forces).”
KeywordsIndia Pakistan 9/11 terrorism
|
