Taliban Take Hostages at Pakistan’s Military HQ, Push Towards Nukes

Four-to-five assailants held  between 10 and 15 officers hostage in a building near the main gates of Pakistan’s army headquarters in capital Saturday, Oct. 10 after an audacious invasion of the complex and gunfight in which at least eight soldier including a lieutenant general and four gunmen were killed. There are reports that lodged in the HQ compound is the secret department in charge of securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

As the Taliban dressed as soldiers burst into the army HQ in Islamabad, Pakistani paramilitary forces battled a second group of insurgents to recover control of a road tunnel which connects the towns of Darra Adam Khel and Kohat in the North West Frontier Province.

Pakistan special forces assaulted the building killing the assailants losing two of their own and two hostages, and capturing what is reportedly a terrorist ring leader.

On May 15, DEBKA-Net-Weekly exclusively named Kohat and the Wah Cantonment Pakistani Ordnance Complex in the city of Kamra, both in the NWFP, as keys to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile arsenals.

Military sources stressed at the time that Kohat’s fall to the Taliban would cut off Islamabad and the Pakistani high command from Kamra and its nuclear arsenal. This appeared to be the object of the Taliban push on the tunnel-road coupled with the assault on military headquarters.

In a rare news conference, Khalid Kidwai, chief of Pakistan’s strategic planning division which controls its nuclear program, rejected international fears that Pakistan’s weapons could fall into the wrong hands and warned against any foreign intervention over the issue. “‘The state of alertness has gone up,” he admitted without going into details, but stressed: “There is no conceivable scenario, political or violent, in which Pakistan will fall to the extremists of the al Qaeda or Taliban types.”

He spoke the day after the chief of Pakistan’s army, General Ashfaq Kiyani, dismissed as “unrealistic” fears that al Qaeda could seize the country’s nuclear weapons.

As reported earlier: The Islamabad attack occurred at a defining moment in Washington for the Afghan/Pakistan conflict. Obama is completing a military review of US military strategy in the two arenas with his “was council.” The conference is tilting toward shifting the US military focus away from the Taliban to al Qaeda. Obama has even said there maybe a role for the Taliban in Afghaniostan despite three factors now illustrated in blood Saturday:

·         Just as Taliban and al Qaeda are inseparable, so too are the Afghan and Pakistan warfronts.

·          Those two organizations hold the initiative, not the American army. They are capable of answering the White House’s decisions on strategy in unexpected places and ways.

·         Pakistan, America’s chosen senior ally in the war against Taliban and al Qaeda, is a broken reed in military terms and too vulnerable to lean on.

Saturday, Pakistan’s president, Ali Zardari, saw those adversaries striking inside the headquarters of his armed forces in the capital, demonstrating their ability to reach into any part of his government, including the presidential palace, and topple his regime. This is exactly the same tactic the two partners in terror are pursuing in Kabul. Insurgents or al Qaeda were also admitted to be within range of key locations for Pakistan’s nuclear and missile arsenals.

For some weeks, the Pakistani army has been concentrating a large force of more than 100,000 men for a big offensive against Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in the lawless tribal territories of Waziristan bordering on Afghanistan. The attack on its headquarters in Islamabad carried a message: If this offensive goes forward, Pakistan’s major cities will pay the price.

On Oct. 8, a car bombing later claimed by Taliban killed 49 people in the Khyber Bazaar of Peshawar.

Monday, five people died in the bombing of a United Nations aid agency in Islamabad.

Zardari’s army chiefs are flatly opposed to the understanding he is developing with the Obama administration for $1.5 billion in US aid in return for launching a major Pakistani military offensive against Taliban and al Qaeda. They accuse the US of interfering in relations between civil government and the military.

The attack on the army’s headquarters Saturday would have been taken as a gesture of support for the opponents of a US-Pakistan alliance. It was also a warning that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal may not be entirely safe from terrorist control.