The news that the Taliban has taken 800 police trainees as hostages in Pakistan has come as a rude shock to followers of news, but only as an expected development to people who believe in the universal law of life, "As your sow, so you reap". The Pakistani establishment gave an upper hand to the ISI as it is part of the armed establishment after the military established supremacy over the civil government. We cannot expect civility from armed people who have gross indifference towards the public sentiments and refuse to learn from history that every military dictator in that nation has been overthrown by either the democratic forces or by their heirs apparent.
The Pakistani military has a history of military blunders right from 1948, when they sent hooligans in the name of mujahideen (armed freedom fighters) to Kashmir in an attempt to separate it from India. It miserably failed. They invaded us in 1965 thinking that we were out with the Chinese armed fiasco of 1962, but we proved to them that we were only down. They planned to take over our nation in 1971, when we helped the suppressed East Pakistani people, but we proved to them again that their military thought process was fundamentally wrong.
Their association with the US in an attempt to get the Soviet Army out of Afghan was handled miserably without administrative sense of responsibility, by giving ISI a free hand to operate without any checks and without asking to balance its acts. ISI was allowed to grow like a motherless child, uncared for and unquestioned, that it grew up with a rowdy attitude. No one dared to question ISI because it worked with CIA and US gave money. With the Shariat Law adapted and adopted by Zia-ul-Haq, fundamentalist forces were given a free hand to operate at will.
This resulted in Pakistan slowly being swallowed by the forces of religious fundamentalism and the Government establishment there repeated its mistakes by playing along with the fundamentalists and the moderates with money pumped in to banish the fundamentalists. We have intelligence confirmations that the poor villagers of Pakistan were caught and sent over to Guantanamo stamping them as Al Qaeda operatives. The fact that these people were exposed only to the Islamic culture and knew only Urdu and Pashtun made it enough for the US forces to accept the words and people Pakistani establishment supplied.
Reports say every such man fetched $5000 to the Pakistani Government and thousands of men were sent over. Later this scam was found, but was covered up, as some of the thousands of people sent over were Al Qaeda. The cover up has an unofficial reason, dwelling into it might be revelation of a deal between Bush and Mush. Now that the financiers of war on terror asking to account for the rolled out bills, if not for the thrown out nickels, Government of Pakistan simply blinks. With Mr.10% at the helm and he has no clue of how to rule a nation, but only to play double games with people and groups, we have this grave development of a militant gang holding police trainees hostages.
Pakistan Government was in its usual denial mode when asked about the casualties. They might have thought of denying the very existence of the slain trainees inside the school, but would have later realized that this was not an attack on India to deny identification of the arrested or the killed. Now they come up with 10 terrorists attacking the academy, but this figure is just for numbers' sake. Apart from the 10 there were others. If their accounts have to be taken at the verbal value, it should be about 15-20 militants, some of them clad in police uniforms.
The free for all terror training schools in Pakistan, covered up in the name of Madarassas, were the root cause of this ruin. When the target was India, the ISI (parallel Government of Pak) had helped these establishments with place, pay and people. But now is the time to watch what the Pakistanis are going to do. Their own actions to destabilize their sane neighbor, has now started to back fire. Let me quote from former PM Atalji's poem, “If you think about setting our house on fire, be reminded that you're the neighbor". This was aimed at Pakistan's aiding of terror in India. We have a belief based saying in Tamizh, "Poet's words would come true". They have started to.
