Arun Joshi

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, September 18

Uri attack in which 17 soldiers were killed by four fidayeen on Sunday has served a lot of uninspiring messages to the country, and Kashmir in particular.The fidayeen who come with a high degree of commitment to die, deeply motivated, are not easy to neutralise. Invariably, they have inflicted more casualties than suffered. It happened on Sunday too.It is no secret that the attack had the familiar soundtrack of Pakistan’s deep involvement in this attack, for it is keen to mount as much pressure on India on Kashmir, internally and externally as it can. The state and the so-called non-state actors work in tandem. Uri was the reconfirmation of Pakistan using such audacious attacks as its foreign policy tool to achieve its targets.Since 1999, it is at predawn hour when attacks are mounted with grenades and gunfire from assault rifles on the bleary-eyed guards and soldiers. The necessary lessons, how to foil such attacks, are forgotten immediately after the alarm bells fade into the background.With the infiltration having gone up, and Pakistan committing more support to Kashmiris in their resistance against India and its non-state actors announcing mayhem, this attack was not unexpected. Militants had rehearsed it in Poonch just a few days ago. Poonch and Uri are border areas close to the Line of Control that divides Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan.The loud noises that there was a full preparation to face any eventuality, despite the recurring images of the wreath-laying ceremonies of soldiers and paramilitaries presented a false sense of everything being hunky-dory.There are severe lapses, both in the intelligence network, counter-infiltration grid and the lack of response to the sudden assaults. That the infiltration was peaking and Uri has been a traditional route of infiltrators since the late 80s, the alert level appeared to be wanting.There are suggestions of the timings and the sabotage, which cannot be ruled out because in all the previous fidayeen attacks, there were more concertina wires on the front and the rear, more height was added to the boundary walls, but till date the human failures were not detected nor an attempt was made to find out what went wrong and how. The attack on the Pathankot airbase in January is just one example. The stress was on rituals rather than in zeroing in on the lapses.Militants were determined to strike in a big way after the big noises were made about the deployment of more troops in south Kashmir, reckoned as the nerve centre of the over two-month-long unrest which has consumed 80 lives and left thousands more injured. The virtue of secrecy was subjugated to the sound bites.The fallout of this attack would be that the agitators who have kept the unrest alive in Kashmir would get emboldened. Militants used guns, the protesters will use stones with furious intensity.The Uri attack, one of the deadliest, targeting the Army in recent decades, will also be a test to how New Delhi deals with this situation. Will its reaction be restricted to issuing usual statements, or will it go for an offensive — diplomatic or otherwise.