Pakistan removes base commander after Taliban attack

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KARACHI: Pakistan on Wednesday removed the commander of a naval air base that took 17 hours to quell a Taliban attack that killed 10 security personnel and destroyed two US-made aircraft.

Although a navy spokesman insisted the transfer was pre-planned and unconnected to the gun, grenade and rocket assault, Pakistan’s military is under increasing domestic pressure to be held accountable over security lapses.

“Commodore Khalid Pervez is taking over as the base commander and his predecessor Raja Tahir will be assigned new responsibilities,” Commander Salman Ali, a navy spokesman, told AFP. He did not say what new job the outgoing commander will hold.

“It is a routine and scheduled transfer. The base commander was scheduled to be replaced, even if there was no attack on the facility,” he said.

The assault was the worst on a military base since the army headquarters was besieged in October 2009, and the fourth on the navy after three bombings in late April killed nine people.

The siege has forced authorities to consider relocating the navy’s main air base in Karachi away from its current populated area, near the international airport, and fanned debate about the safety of the country’s nuclear weapons.

After the attack took an entire night and most of the day to repel, Admiral Noman Bashir, the chief of naval staff, conceded that relocation was possible.

Before the attack, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar, who went to China last week, said Islamabad has asked Beijing for help in building a naval base at its deep-sea port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea west of Karachi.

“When the Mehran base was established 36 years ago it was far from the population. But now it is surrounded by civilian populations on all sides, thus the security risks have multiplied,” said Commander Ali.

He said it would be impossible to relocate each of the more than a dozen navy bases in Karachi, but that serious thought was going into Mehran, the only navy air base in the sprawling city of 16 million.

“Relocation is a highly technical and cumbersome task. It is not a matter of days. The authorities are thinking about all possibilities and requirements before shifting Mehran elsewhere,” said Ali.

He insisted that other installations in the port city were “safe and satisfactorily secure.” The New York Times said that a mere 24 kilometres from Mehran, Pakistan was believed to keep a large depot for nuclear weapons that can be delivered from the air.

On Tuesday, Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was confident Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were safe, but admitted it was a matter of concern, when pressed by a journalist the day after the Karachi attack.