Pakistan’s de-MOCK-racy

Either Pakistan has no sense of the ridiculous, or they are hoping no one else will see through their laughably transparent conspiracies and even more absurd cover-up speeches. It ought to be clear to anyone who knows anything about the Lahore incident that it would not have been possible without the active connivance of Pakistan’s internal security set-up.

 

The victims of the attack have been shouting all over the media that the security forces vanished while the cricketers were being fired at! Fourteen gunmen hide in bushes(!), flanking a public road in broad daylight, open fire at a high-profile, high-security convoy (there were 20 armed commandos guarding it), and manage to walk away unharmed!

 

Even if the Pakistani government wants to pretend that they did not abet the attack, they have no way of explaining this massive, shocking, embarrassing security failure! And there are Pakistani leaders thickskinned enough to still assert that India’s RAW perpetrated this act to, ahem, tarnish Pakistan’s image! If the attack was a joke on international politics, this is verily the punchline.

 

It’s all too elementary, my dear janaab.

1. The attack was cosmetically designed to resemble, in an extremely facile way, the Mumbai attacks (attackers were youngsters, carry backpacks, wore sneakers and loose pants and carried backpacks loaded with weapons, even the dry fruits-and-chocolate!!).
2. The targets
   1. couldn’t have been Indian (of course; they couldn’t have blamed India then, which was the whole point)
   2. couldn’t have been Pakistani (then the Taliban would be immediate suspects)
   3. nor from any of the Western countries (since that could jeopardise the aid doled out to Pak).

Yet the targets have to be important enough to ensure front-page headlines & international debate. Who else fits the bill better than cricketers from Sri Lanka?

 

The objective, you ask?

Most obvious: Deflecting some of the international post-26/11 glare away from Pakistan, and towards India.

Less obvious: After accepting the accusations against and arresting LeT members & various other state actors, Pakistan stands cornered. What move could they make next? Actually punish the LeT criminals?! Much safer to project a we-are-victims-too image, and get to point fingers at India, to boot.

 

Will the world buy their story?

La-haul-vilaquwat!