Operation ‘Fox-Hunt’

by Siddhartha Thorat

  He tied up the Colonel’s legs with a piece of wire he found. Then he grabbed both the guns and jogged down the stairs to find that more of his men had rushed in and were clearing the rooms below. They had housed the guard billets, kitchen and the armoury. His men had cornered two Pakistani troopers at the armoury and it seemed the soldiers were giving as well as they got. Looking at his watch, he realised they didn’t have much time now, but the stuff in the armoury was important to Buguti’s movement. He called back a young fighter, gave him the MP5 and asked him to give him his grenades.

  “But, Sahib, the grenades will destroy the weapons in the armoury too,” the youngster protested.

  Samsher smiled and shook his head. “Once I throw in the grenades, you and your friends must rush in quickly and finish them. The soldiers are in a confined area with little light. We wouldn’t remove the pins, you see.”

  The fighter smiled and then passed on the message down the line to the two fighters trading shots with the soldiers inside. The two fighters stopped shooting and stepped back smartly. The lull in the fire confused the two soldiers and then a loud yell, “grenade” followed by two grenades rolling in sent them diving behind the desk. Almost immediately the three fighters rushed in and attacked the confused men. A volley of shots and muzzle flashes ended the battle. Two men rushed in to loot the weapons and equipment while he asked a young Baloch with the ‘new’ MP5 and another fighter to bring his prisoner down. He went along with them and collected the documents and put them in a suitcase he found in the office. The colonel had come to and was struggling in his flexi-cuffs. A gag silenced his obscene rants.

  In ten minutes they were out. Apparently Buguti and the Seargent had also achieved their targets. The ISI Colonel was a prisoner, so were the four other officers who were in the other buildings. Mohammed Ali Wali was sitting along with three other ragged prisoners. They had been the victims of torture, known in Pakistan as the ‘disappeared’ ones.

  Colonel Buguti and Ali joined Samsher as he did a quick field interrogation of the five Pakistani officers who had surrendered. He asked the ISI Colonel to be detained as the rebels dragged away the other four to be executed.

  The entire action had taken less than thirty minutes. Samsher and Colonel Buguti moved through the rooms quickly, collecting documents and codes. The rebels looted whatever valuables they could find, including weapons and radio equipment in the other structures too. Then they proceeded to rig the structures with captured explosives. They moved out to the motor pool and stole the two trucks and an armoured jeep.

  “Colonel Saab, the local Pakistani troops would have heard the gunfire. They will be on their way. Shouldn’t we leave quickly?”

  “Let them try. Another group of my men has setup an ambush on the only approach road to this place. They will rush to their own deaths. The Pakistani army taught me well.” He smirked as he sipped water from his canister. In the background, the first explosion destroyed the main house.

  They commandeered a Pakistani army truck and a Turkish manufactured armoured jeep and drove through the night towards the Durand Line. The feared logo of the Field Intelligence Unit52 on the vehicles discouraged any check points from detaining the vehicles. They dismounted a couple of kilometres from the border and booby-trapped the vehicles. Colonel Buguti received a radio signal from the rebels who had setup the ambush that a 15-men platoon of the Pakistani army, coming to investigate, had been wiped out. It was around 0530 hours as the first light of dawn lit up the sky in the east and the assault force crossed the Durand Line. The Tajik Major and his vehicles were waiting. The ISI Colonel was put in one of the vehicles with two hefty-looking Afghan guards. Also waiting was a Mitsubishi Pajero with diplomatic licence plates. There were two Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) commandos besides the RAW officer in the SUV. Samsher handed the suitcase with the documents over to the ITBP commandos. An ANA armoured car and pickup with soldiers took positions to escort them to Kandahar.

  Kabul, Afghanistan: Few hours later

  “Well done, Sanjay! Our friendly ISI Colonel has been singing like a canary on steroids. The Afghans have captured almost all the members of the cell involved in the attack. And the documents will keep us busy for weeks to come.” The station chief congratulated Sanjay alias Samsher. He was at an Indian safe house in Kabul; the safe house was an apartment in a guest house frequented by international aid workers. Sanjay had arrived earlier in the day from Kandahar in a helicopter chartered by an Indian aid agency.

  “It was a pleasure, boss,” Sanjay was dressed in half sleeve shirt and khaki chinos, a combination favoured by aid workers. “You are going back to Delhi tonight, Sanjay. You have done a great job and you deserve a home posting and a promotion.” Sanjay smiled and accepted the glass of Jack Daniels and Coke his boss offered him.

  “Finest, the CIA station chief sent a case over,” the station chief said beaming.

  In a few hours he was airborne on an Indian Air Force communication Embraer jet to Delhi. The other passengers in the plane included a Tajik along with his young family heading to a senior command training course at the Indian Army War College, Mhow, courtesy the Government of India.

  “Thank you, Samsher, I owe you a big one,” the Tajik officer said as he introduced his wife and his young boy.

  “No, you owe me nothing. Afghanistan will require officers like you when the US leaves. It’s my honour… it is Colonel, now I see,” he smiled as he extended his hand to congratulate the Tajik.

  “Lieutenant Colonel, actually,” the Tajik’s eyes twinkled as he accepted Sanjay’s hand.

  1

  ISI Headquarters, Aabpara Junction, Islamabad Present day: 0900 hours PST

  Major General Akhtar Abbas, Assistant Director, Joint Intelligence Bureau, ISI, waited impatiently for the officer heading the Joint Intelligence (North) to finish his briefing. He had something urgent to discuss with the Brigadier who was in charge of the ISI division responsible for the operations in Kashmir. He looked at his watch for the third time, a Rolex, his only indulgence. It was a gift from his son settled in the US and he loved it. What he hated were these long drawn-out ‘briefing’ sessions for sundry civilian officers and politicians. They seemed to understand nothing and all of them wanted the backing of his agency just before elections. He was always amused by the number of politicians who asked for his card or tried to press their contact details into his hands. After all he headed the ISI’s strongest division, the one that took on India every day in the hazy battlefield of espionage and special operations.

  The Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI, as it is commonly known, is the premiere intelligence agency of Pakistan. It is considered by many to be the most powerful secret service organisation in the Indian subcontinent. Over the years ISI has made a reputation for itself by significantly altering the course of conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir. It was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that changed the profile of the agency from a political cloak-and-dagger establishment to a serious international intelligence organisation. As the US joined hands with the Pakistani dictator General Zia Ul Haq to harass the Russians in their new adventure to give the Soviets a taste of Vietnam, overnight the ISI became the frontline ally in a war against communism. All activities related to training and arming the Afghan tribals for Jihad were under the purview of the ISI. In fact a large number of ISI officers were embedded with the jihadis.

  The ISI and the Pakistani establishment claimed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan as their victory. The fact that a communist government continued to control Afghanistan for almost ten more years did not figure in the boast. It was only when key parties like the Uzbek warlord General Dostum decided to part with the communist government that it fell. This part of the story is glossed over both by the western media, looking for ‘reasons’ for the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as the Pakistani establishment. A large amount of money and material destined for the Afghan conflict was siphoned off for the training and arming of
groups which could be used against Indian interests. A large part of the weapons and resources received from the US were deployed against India in Jammu & Kashmir. Besides the Kashmir insurgency, the ISI has used militant groups as its proxies in attacking targets on the Indian ‘mainland’. Some of its significant coups have been the hijacking of IC 814 from Nepal in 1999, the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, the attack on Indian Parliament and the Mumbai attacks over the last two decades. Thus ISI became the sword arm of the Pakistani establishment in its aim to destabilise India and defeat it with ‘Death of Thousand Cuts’.

  It was natural that this spy agency would be a military organisation answerable to the Pakistani Army. The Director General, the chief of ISI (DG ISI), is always a serving Lieutenant General of the army and is considered to be the most powerful man after the Army Chief in the de facto hierarchy of the country. Since 1971 all DG ISIs have been Lieutenant Generals. The DG ISI has three deputy directors reporting to him. Each of the deputy directors heads one wing: the Internal wing dealing with counter-intelligence and political issues inside Pakistan; the External wing which handles external threats and operations; and the Analysis and Foreign Relations wing. Major General Akhtar Abbas headed the Joint Intelligence Bureau which is responsible for political intelligence and had a wing dedicated to India operations.

  As the meeting wound down, and the military and civil servants attending the secret briefing walked out, Abbas gestured to Brigadier Mehroon Hasan to stay back.

  “The DG came back from GHQ yesterday,” he drawled as he took a sip of water from the glass on the table, “It’s time to activate Operation Shamshir.”

  The Brigadier grunted. About time, he thought. “Have we got the political approval for the operation?” he asked aloud.

  “That was not discussed in my meeting with the DG. My guess is Rawalpindi is handling the liaison with the politicos. I want you to prepare a briefing for the COAS for Wednesday.”

  As the head of Joint Intelligence (North), Brigadier Hasan had access to all groups operating in Kashmir (whether they took orders from ISI or not) while Abbas headed the India-centric department in the Joint Intelligence Bureau. It was because of their overlapping areas of responsibility that both men worked together. Though Abbas was the senior officer, the operational command was with Hasan. It helped that both belonged to the same parental unit−8th Battalion, Baloch regiment. In fact, Abbas had been Hasan’s Commanding Officer way back in the early 1980s.

  Like its British predecessor, the Pakistani Army infantry regiments were divided on regimental basis. Each of the regiments represented a martial race of the subcontinent. The fraternal feelings and espirit de corps imbibed in the ‘regimental’ atmosphere was responsible for the secret ‘old boys’ clubs’ existing across commonwealth nations.

  In the tense days after the Abbottabad incident, the army had realised that in case of another humiliation, they needed to have a plan to divert the attention of the media and the Pakistani people towards another threat, a threat the Pakistani Army could protect against India. The ISI and the army had set-up a joint team to plan the operation which would invite strong and belligerent response from India. Under the command of Brigadier Mehroon Hasan, a special team had worked on and come out with Operation Shamshir. The name of the operation was a random phrase chosen by the computer in the ISI HQ.

  Last week, after a US drone attack had mistakenly killed 27 troops, and a bomb attack by Pakistani Taliban had claimed 93 lives during a Shia funeral procession, the media was baying for blood and needed to be distracted. It was also the year when the new Army Chief of Pakistan was to be anointed. Understanding the gravity of the situation in which an army on the defensive could be further put on back foot by scheming politicians foisting upon it a politically malleable chief, Rawalpindi had given the go ahead for Shamshir.

  Operation Shamshir called for an audacious operation inside the borders of India; an attack which would force India into an aggressive posture. This would end up forcing the Pakistani people to unite behind their beloved army, thus outflanking some aggressive politicians from reducing the army’s powers.

  GHQ, Rawalpindi

  One week later: 1100 hours PST

  Unlike most militaries, the Pakistani Army is not headquartered out of the national capital, Islamabad, but from the nearby town of Rawalpindi, a sleepy pre-partition town adopted by the army as its home. In a way it represents geographically the dichotomy that exists politically in the power structures of the country. The Chief of Army Staff or COAS, a four-star General, is the most powerful man in Pakistan. For most people who are familiar with the country, he is the de facto ruler and for a large part of its history, the institution of the army has directly ruled Pakistan. Its budget and that of its sister services, consumes 30 percent of the poor country’s budget. Its officers and its affiliate organisations like the Fauji foundations deal in everything from real estate to nuclear weapons, the last being the ones sold to North Korea and offered to Libya. It is Pakistan’s largest political party and its largest business corporation. The army has more than 600,000 serving personnel and is divided into three commands, each headed by a Lieutenant General. These Generals and the corps commanders reporting to them are the real decision-makers on the military and international policies of the country. Sometimes the interests of the Pakistani people and the Pakistani army clash; in every one of those cases, the army has always won. Uncharitable commentators have been known to comment saucily that Pakistan is an army with a country rather than a country with an army. Incidentally, the headquarters of its sister services are based out of Islamabad.

  In a conference room at the GHQ, Abbas and Hasan waited patiently for the COAS and the corps commanders to file in along with their boss, DG ISI. It was strictly a khaki affair, with the only non-khaki person being a squadron leader of a special unit in Air Force HQ, Islamabad. He would take up a small part of the presentation.

  The DG ISI got up on the podium and set the context for the presentation by his team. “Gentlemen, considering the political situation due to repeated American and militant attacks on our civilians, the COAS asked us to explore the feasibility of activating Operation Shamshir. The presentation on key aspects and the basic modus operandi will be presented today by the General and the Brigadier who have travelled especially from Islamabad for this. At the end of this meeting, we expect to get the green light from the COAS for setting in motion the first phase of the operation.”

  With the brass around the table, Brigadier Mehroon Hasan began his presentation.

  “Gentlemen, the objective of Operation Shamshir is to deal a strategic blow as well as hurt the prestige of India to a point where it is forced to act belligerently. The armed forces of Pakistan and international diplomatic pressure will force India to refrain from direct military confrontation.”

  “We scouted a target which will be of strategic importance to India and also command shock value in terms of the news bites. This will force Indians to issue their empty threats and ratchet up the tension with the government and people of Pakistan. The target of the attack is the Pune airport, which is also a military airfield. We have chosen this location as it fits both the strategic and shock value profile. The Indian Air Force uses the same runway as the civilian aircrafts and uses the same base for its primary air superiority fighter, the SU30MKI. It’s also the headquarters of the southern command of the Indian Army. The airport is small and the distance between terminal entry and the airside is less than 500 metres at key points. The barrier consists of a screen of armed paramilitary force, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF). The plan calls for a team of seven to ten Fedayeen to attack the passenger airport and enter the airside and attack IAF assets on the military side. While one team will fight rearguard action against the airport security, the other team will split into two teams and attack the civilian and military aircrafts. Squadron Leader Gillani, Pakistan Air Force Special Service Wing (PAF SSW), will take you through the asset l
ist and details of the target.”

  Asfaq Gillani took the meeting through the assets at the airbase. He had a clipped tone and didn’t waste words. “Pune is the home of the National Defence Academy and a host of military facilities. The Lohegaon airbase, as the military airbase, is known for its location and has three fighter squadrons−No. 20, No. 30 and No. 31 which include 36 SU 30MKIs. As per our intelligence there is a unit of Quick Reaction Team (QRT) of CISF and local city police besides the airport security CISF contingent on the civilian side. On the Air Force side there is a unit of paramilitary Defense Service Guards (DSG), elements of the Air Force Police (AFP); and possibly a QRT of the Air Force commandos is based in a point near the airfield. Our assessment evaluates that a quick strike would damage assets within thirty minutes while an organised response from trained military and police unit would at least take an hour. Needless to say, this will be a Fedayeen attack as it will be very difficult for the attackers to escape alive,” he completed tersely. In his presentation Gillani also took the forum through the Air Force component of the plan. “We have created a detailed mock-up of the Pune airfield on the Sargodha airbase. A team of SSW commandos have prepared a training module for aircraft recognition and other aspects related to successful termination of enemy assets. Already a team of Lashkar-E-Toiba (LET) militants and our friends from Afghanistan have gone through the course.” Post his presentation, the Air Force officer left the briefing room.

  Hasan then asked Colonel Khan to take the meeting through the operational details which included number of men, logistics, etc. Colonel Khan, the only man in the room dressed in military fatigues with no brass decorating his uniform, was from the SS directorate of the ISI. The SS directorate had personnel on deputation from the Pakistani army, SSG, SSW and a host of other specialised military units. The directorate was responsible for covert operations and paramilitary actions in Pakistan and neighbouring countries. It was what the insiders called the sword arm of the ISI. It was this team that had carried out the liaison with the operational team in the Mumbai attacks.