Taliban stage media event massacre at Pakistan army headquarters

NY Times:

In one of the most brazen attacks here in recent years, gunmen dressed in military fatigues on Saturday stormed the Pakistani Army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi and took more than a dozen security officers hostage, producing a standoff that continued into the evening.

The attack, the third major attack by militants here in less than a week, unnerved the army and the security forces for the choice of target, the heart of the nation’s army planning and operations apparatus.

By Saturday evening, four attackers had been killed and at least two gunmen were holding more than a dozen security officials hostage, military and intelligence officials said.

Maj. Gen Athar Abbas, the army spokesman, said the gunmen were holed up in a guard station just outside the sprawling army headquarters compound. However an intelligence official said the hostages were being held in a security building inside the headquarters.

Col. Attiqur Rehman, deputy director of Inter-Services Public Relations, said it was not clear how many hostages had been taken.

A military official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the army was trying to capture the gunmen alive.

General Abbas said two senior officers, a brigadier and a lieutenant colonel, and four soldiers were killed in the attack.

The attack, coming after bombings last week on United Nations offices in the capital, Islamabad, and a crowded market in Peshawar, seemed to herald a new offensive by the Taliban to bring the battle to the government before the government begins a planned offensive in the frontier region of South Waziristan.

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Since the Taliban does not have the capacity to defeat the army in battle, it needs to stage media events like this to suggest army vulnerability. What the army needs to do is quit dithering and get on with wiping out these guys. Just like the attack on the UN base, this was another media event by the Taliban. The army needs to treat it as such and reaffirm it commitment to attack the Taliban in their base area.

While the Taliban has the capacity to inflict casualties, it cannot sustain an attack and its attackers know they will not survive the attack.

CNN has more on the hostage media event.

One of the mistakes the Pakistan government has made this week is make a git of time to the Taliban before launching an attack on their base in Waziristan. Announcing the planned attack without moving provided the Taliban with the opportunity to stage these media events to distract from the coming effort.