Soon after the details of the investigation into the attack on the Pakistan Naval Station (PNS) Dockyard that took place last month were revealed, the first name among the assailants to be disclosed was Owais Jakhrani, a former navy personnel. The remarks of Defence Minister Khawaja Asif that the attack could not have taken place without some inside help turned out to be true. A total of 11 navy personnel, former and serving, were taken into custody on suspicious or after confirmation of being involved in the attack. Three of them were arrested in Quetta as they were trying to flee to Afghanistan. The incident surely caused many to raise their eyebrows as despite the fact that the militants’ attempt to take over PNS Zulfikar, a warship, was foiled by the security forces, the question of our armed forces being infiltrated by radical people and views surfaced again. Al Qaeda accepted responsibility and later reports suggest that the militants’ plan was to take over the ship and attack a US fuel supply ship, thereby disrupting Pak-US relations. The audacity of these militants to even think of such attacks is highly alarming because similar other assaults in the past targeting airports and airbases indicate their well-orchestrated approach to isolate Pakistan internationally. The most alarming part however, is that each time there had been inside help. Whether it be the PNS Mehran attack, GHQ or Kamra airbase attack, all of them took place with the help of someone from inside. Not to mention the jailbreaks of Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan, where the militants succeeded to free hundreds of prisoners, all because of such infiltration. The only question that comes to mind is that if military bases and institutions, which are supposed to be the best guarded and protected in this country, get attacked due to security lapses and failures, what would become of the rest of the country, which is much more vulnerable than these enclosed fortresses. It is the intelligence agencies’ job to stave off and pre-empt such dangers. In the case of PNS Dockyard, intelligence did warn of an imminent threat but failed to put ex-navy personnel Jakhrani under surveillance, who was sacked because of his radical views and who turned out to be the mastermind behind it. Jakhrani not only travelled to Afghanistan after being dismissed from the navy but took combat training and met the militant leaders there. The intelligence agencies, especially ISI, needs to be more vigilant because as a result of such weak surveillance, the probability of such assaults being replicated remains high and the damage they do to the image of Pakistan internationally will eventually isolate us in the world community. *