New Delhi: The Pulwama attack has stunned the country and fingers are being pointed towards intelligence failure. But officials in the security establishment have stated that there was no specific intelligence input regarding the attack which could have made the forces to exercise caution over and above which they maintain in Kashmir valley.
Sources have hinted that many heads are going to roll for this “massive intelligence failure” across the organisations, mandated to maintain national security and gathering intelligence. “The agencies, responsible for generating actionable inputs which could have prevented the attack, have obviously failed to do their job. The inputs shared with the troops were very general in nature and such information are very common and come very regularly. The youth who carried out the attack had entered the Valley in December last year for carrying out something like this,” an official said.
An actionable intelligence, officials said, would have identified the perpetrators or their modus operandi before the attack was carried out. This would have led to change in the standard operating procedure (SOP) and would have definitely prohibited the movement of such a huge number of troops in one line at the same time. Kashmir has the maximum presence of different agencies which are engaged in intelligence gathering but none of them was able to collect any specific inputt regarding the Pulwama attack. Officials have identified Jaish commander Abdul Rashid Ghazi as the mastermind of the attack. He is stated to be an expert in assembling improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Ghazi too had entered India last December. “This is a massive intelligence failure. An attack of this proportion requires a lot of planning and logistics not limited to arranging the vehicle or the explosives alone which was assembled locally. Everything was missed by our agencies. The ‘success’ of the attack will embolden other groups to start working on something similar. Imagine the damage if this is replicated in a civilian area of any city,” another official posted in the Valley. Sources said the use of such method as suicide car-bombing has opened a totally new chapter for the security agencies as such attacks, once the car, explosives and the bomber are arranged, it becomes virtually impossible to stop the attack then. “The only way to stop such a suicide attack is to nip them in the bud by neutralizing all the three components,” said a security agency official.