Government Immobility of Mind and Indecisiveness
By N Khan
Recent incident in Islamabad during which presumably a mentally unstable armed person with no past record of any violence or criminal act held the capital city hostage for five hours. Event has exposed the inefficacy, mental immobility and indecisiveness of government besides lack of professionalism of LEAs and ineptness as well as immaturity of predominant media.
In this advance age when information can be communicated with in seconds , coordination could be carried out amongst various government agencies within minutes, plan of handling the situation could be formulated and passed to concerned agencies within an hour and could have been made effective within two to three hours. But unfortunately, drama continued for more than five hours and concluded abruptly with daring but inappropriate act of patriotic Zamurd Khan. Government appeared to be mentally paralyzed and stunned with no thinking ability to swiftly and effectively respond to the situation.
It took almost more than twenty four hours to Interior Minister to appear in the media to narrate the incident and blame the Zamurd Khan as well as LEAs without realizing that he was the overall In charge of LEAs and any failure or slackness on their part is his failure as well. It appears that he is still in the frame of mind of an opposition leader and instead of taking the responsibilities he is rottenly found pointing fingers towards others especially LEAs and Intelligence Agencies. He being the Interior Minister should have acted as the pivot while authorizing full liberty of action to LEAs and extending all out support and assistance including availability of professional negotiators and high tech gadgets like stunned guns. He could have immediately taken the leading role in contemplating the plan and supervising its implementation, however he appeared to be following his subordinates. LEAs should have cleared the area from masses as well as media followed by cordoning off the area. Subsequently efforts could have been made to extricate the children and family of Sikandar. Further LEAs should have established the two or three layers perimeter around the incident site, using fencing wire duly manned by police to prevent the entry of any person except LEAs inside the premises.
However, it could have been done only if any thinking mind had been at the helm of affairs but unfortunately those in the driving seat lacked mobility of mind, and inability to aptly as well as quickly react to such kind of situation.
