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Journalism of Courage
Operation Badamibagh indicates a porous security net
The storming of the 15 Corps headquarters in Srinagar has qualitatively changed the parameters of the militant campaign in the Valley. If post-Kargil terrorist endeavours, as in a Kupwara army camp in early August, had given ample notice of a new daredevilry, the latest encounter in the Badamibagh cantonment has cast an even more worrying shadow on the decade-long proxy war.
The fact that three Lashkar-e-Toiba goons could practically breeze past one barrier after another in one of the most sanitised zones in the state’s summer capital, kill at will and even have one of the trio escape tells a tale of much more than complacency. Cer-tainly, the army will have to examine and pin responsibility for this shocking security lapse in an area that is normally out of bounds for civilians and police personnel alike.
Wednesday’s strike is painful proof of an increasing porousness in the security network; a painstaking reassessment of the cordons andbuffers currently in place across Jammu and Kashmir should be undertaken forthwith.More importantly, however, the Badamibagh incident indicates a growing weakness in the security forces’ response to challenges in a war of attrition they had been winning till recently.
It is evident that they are no longer dictating the agenda in their engagement with the insurgents and are merely responding to the militants’ operations. This, at a time when the profile of the average militant is being parlously transformed. He is likely to be not only a foreign mercenary, but also part of what a Pakistani journal has christened that nation’s “jehadi diaspora”.
If this has predictably resulted in a perceptible ruthlessness among militants armed with ever more sophisticated weaponry, it also calls for a greater degree of guile and anticipation from the Indian security forces. It calls for more than bit-and-pieces intelligence gathering, for more proactive policing than simple cordon-and-search combing operations, and formore effective morale-boosting coordination among a plethora of paramilitary agencies evidencing all signs of fatigue after a long, debilitating summer. And it definitely calls for exercises in building a spectrum of enduring bridges with the alienated and weary Kashmiri people.
Yet, if Wednesday saw a new dimension added to the militant campaign, it also witnessed a new foreign policy challenge. Even as its Srinagar chief was raining bullets at Badamibagh, the Lashkar-e-Toiba enj-oyed an audacious nod and a wink from the Pakista-ni establishment. New Delhi has rightly registered its outrage at the terrorist organisation being given permission to organise a public meeting near Lahore. But this is too tame a response.
That Pakistan’s aid to militants stalking Kashmir’s verdant valleys amoun-ts to more than moral support is an open secret. Mu-stering global condemnation of Islamabad’s sinister agenda in Jammu and Kashmir requires more aggr-essive lobbying. A country supposedly seeking internationalassistance to clamber out of a deep econo-mic hole cannot be allowed to get away with concent- rating its export efforts on its "jehadi diaspora".
