Security or harassment?

A SUICIDE bomber rammed his motorcycle into a bus carrying employees of the Kahuta Research Laboratories in Rawalpindi on Thursday, mercifully resulting in the death of only the attacker. At least 40 were injured, some critically. Simply yet another horrifying attack to be condemned and blamed on the militants? Not quite. A report in this paper has suggested that the four check-posts on Peshawar Road where the latest suicide attack took place are ineffectual and, worse, a magnet for unscrupulous elements in the police force looking to shake down ordinary civilians. ‘Innocent people are apprehended at one post and released at the other after ‘investigations’ and payment of what some of the police victims called ‘ransom’.’ This is simply outrageous. A suicide attack on March 16 killed 10 people on the same road, and Rawalpindi generally has been attacked repeatedly in recent times. The very point of security check-posts is to make the city safer, not to harass the innocent. And with the threat to the city from militants still at an all-time high, it is doubly damning if inefficiencies and a business-as-usual approach to policing are allowed to reign.
Time and again in these columns we have stressed that the police forces in the cities of Pakistan have to undergo root-and-branch reforms to increase their capacity to handle counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency measures. But while the governments at the centre and in the provinces keep talking of reform, more resources, better training, raising special forces and what not, the situation on the ground appears to have changed little. The police force of Rawalpindi could and should have been a model force by now. Granted change cannot be effected overnight, but we are now looking at a period of several years which appears to have been by and large wasted. There is no doubt that stopping every suicide bomber is an immensely difficult if not impossible task. But if those on the frontlines of the security apparatus are busying themselves with harassing the innocent, there can also be no doubt that they will fail to catch the cleverest and most perseverant of suicide bombers and terrorists. Rawalpindi deserves better from its police.