It may, rather will, drop out of the news cycle quickly enough, but the claim that the attack on a naval facility in Karachi last weekend was facilitated by insider information and/or help has profoundly troubling implications for the armed forces.

To wit, the problem is neither new nor unheard of: for years, perhaps even more than a decade, the problem of militant ideology penetrating the ranks of the armed forces — often but not only the smaller forces, the navy and the air force — and terrorist recruitment taking place time and again has bubbled up, only to be quickly taken out of the public arena by a military that zealously suppresses its less savoury secrets.

Only a thorough and honest reckoning with the problem will ensure that the armed forces are able to put their own house in order.

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Unhappily though, that would require more transparency and scrutiny than the military leadership is perhaps willing to allow.

Sunlight can be a disinfectant, but it also makes clear where blame must lie and which heads must roll — something most institutions reflexively oppose.

Mostly what is reported in the public arena is that infiltration of the armed forces are isolated incidents that are quickly and emphatically dealt with.

But tracing the origins of the problem suggests that the military is either in denial of the true scope of the problem or is unable to do much about it.

Two phases are of critical importance: the Zia era, when Islamisation of state, society and the armed forces was official policy and vigorously pursued; and the Musharraf era, when an about-turn was attempted, sparking much anger and fury over the alleged betrayal of the now-established ideological roots of the armed forces.

In addition, the profound changes in Pakistani society, from which the armed forces are drawn, made it more difficult to sell to the forces the theory of a professional military with non-religious, non-ideological roots devoted to the protection of the country’s territorial boundaries.

Instead, increasingly, the forces were seen by military personnel as the first and foremost defenders of an ideological, religion-based version of what Pakistan ought to be.

The road from there to active support for militancy within sections of the armed forces may not have been a straight line, but it was short enough.

If the confusion is to be done away with, both the Zia and Musharraf eras need to be re-examined unflinchingly.

The alternative — the inadequate alternative — is what Gen Musharraf’s successors have hit upon: label anyone attacking the Pakistani state and its security apparatus as anti-state — without doing anything to explain why the Zia Islamisation was misguided and the Musharraf policy was clumsy.

The latter choice will cause insider attacks to continue, and the corpus with its head buried in the sand may eventually be decimated from the inside out.

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2014