NEW DELHI : An embattled Pakistan Army has put its troops along the
Line of Control (LoC) on a high state of alert as it scrambles to
emerge from the embarrassment of having been caught unawares by the US
troops, who raided the cantonment town of Abbottabad to take out Osama
bin Laden.
According to authoritative sources, all units of
Pakistani Army along the entire 740-kilometer LoC and the 110-km Actual
Ground Position Line in Siachen were on Friday put on a "higher state
of alert".
According to Times of India, accordingly, "active
deployment" has been beefed up along forward posts, said a senior
official of Indian Army. The officer said Indian Army has been careful
not to respond to the high state of alert by Pakistan and "would not
respond to it." Traditionally, the two sides are used to tit-for-tat
responses to military actions.
The statement was meant to be
retaliation for remarks of Indian Army and Air Force chiefs that India
has the capability to carry out an operation like the one executed by
the US Seals in Pakistan. The Pakistan Army top brass said in a
statement on Thursday, "The forum, taking serious note of the
assertions made by Indian military leadership about conducting similar
operations, made it very clear that any misadventure of this kind will
be responded to very strongly.
There should be no doubt about
it." According to Indian military sources, ever since the last Monday
raid by US troops to kill Bin Laden, there has been panic,
embarrassment and disbelief in the Pakistan military over the way US
helicopters travelled through their airspace, carried out the Special
Forces Operation in Abbottabad, and went away with bin Laden’s body All
the way through, the Pakistani air defence did not pick up any signals
of the ’intrusion’. Worse, the first Pakistani fighters were scrambled
almost a full hour after the American helicopters entered the Pakistan
aerospace, shows Indian assessment.
Indian security
establishment has been getting a stream of inputs showing the state of
confusion and disbelief in the military. One senior officer pointed out
that Pakistan Army’s decision to put its units on high alert is
reflective of the frustration of the strategic vulnerability exposed by
the US operation. Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta, the nerve
centre of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, isn’t very far from Abbottabad,
meaning even strategic assets of Pakistan suffer from similar
vulnerability, sources point out. As more clarity emerge about the US
operations, Indian military sources are now beginning to suspect that
Americans may have deployed electronic counter-measures to jam
Pakistan’s radars from picking up the movement of the helicopters to
Abbottabad and back, thus mocking normalcy.
There are
contradictory reports emerging from within Pakistan about what really
happened to the radar network. While its foreign secretary hinted at
the possibility of radars being jammed, the air force maintains that
its radars were inactive on the particular day. Online
