Saturday night unfolded in fragments — gunmen and a suicide bomber hit the Sindh Rangers camp in Gulistan-e-Jauhar, ramming the gate before opening fire. Three Rangers were martyred, several wounded. But the Rangers didn’t fail: their jawans fought back inside their own compound, killed the attackers, and captured one militant alive. That’s exactly what a force under sudden assault is supposed to do.
So why did it ever reach that gate? Stopping an attack before it reaches a Rangers compound was never the Rangers’ job — it belongs to Sindh Police and the CTD. On that count, they failed.
The arrested suspect’s own confession says his group entered Pakistan about a week before the attack, stayed the whole time in an under-construction building in Karachi, and sourced their weapons from Waziristan. That’s days of travel across districts, into a city of twenty million, carrying weapons meant for a paramilitary headquarters. At what checkpoint was that vehicle searched? At what point did intelligence flag strangers settling into an unfinished building for a week? If nowhere and never, this is a policing and intelligence failure — not a Rangers failure.
It isn’t a funding problem either. Sindh’s law-and-order budget runs close to Rs180 billion, with over a hundred billion going to police alone, plus dedicated funds for an intelligence fusion centre and highway patrols meant to watch the roads into Karachi. CTD Sindh has even disrupted real plots before — a 2,000kg truck bomb, a railway sabotage cell. The capability exists. That makes it harder to accept that a cell sat undetected in the city for a week and still reached a Rangers’ gate.
And this is a pattern. In 2018, gunmen breached a checkpoint and killed two policemen before attacking the Chinese consulate. In 2023, gunmen stormed the Karachi Police Office itself, fighting for hours and leaving five dead. In 2024, the Sindh High Court ordered the IGP to remove “corrupt” officers, noting the Special Security Unit — built for counterterrorism — was mostly being used to escort VVIPs. In January 2025, the CTD’s Karachi in-charge and officers were removed over an alleged role in a kidnapping tied to a $340 million crypto theft. And just this March, a Karachi police constable — already blacklisted once — was caught running a multi-million-dollar fraud for the second time while still in uniform.
Checkpoints overrun, headquarters breached, a court ordering corrupt officers removed, a CTD leadership scandal, a twice-caught fraudster on the payroll — all before Saturday night. Karachi also recorded over 64,000 street crimes last year. If the same department can’t keep daily snatching off the streets, what confidence should anyone have in its ability to track a four-man cell moving weapons across provinces?
The Rangers buried three of their own this week for a gap that wasn’t theirs to close. Until Sindh Police and CTD are stripped of complacency, staffed on merit, and held accountable every time a plot slips through, soldiers will keep bleeding for failures that were never theirs to fix.
