Why do we need our own 'ring of steel', and soon?

We are currently facing a security situation which is nothing short of a crisis: Forces of terrorism and crime are strong and organised; and Pakistan shows up on virtually every "most dangerous countries of the world" list. And more often than not, Pakistan shows up on those lists at number one. Is this a situation where a local resident feels that his or her life and property is safe? Or is this an environment where a foreign investor feels confident that his investment is safe?
When faced with a similar situation over a decade ago, the United Kingdom responded by enacting the 'ring of steel,' an extensive network of surveillance cameras all around London's intersections and neighbourhoods - for providing license plate numbers, images of suspects, and other important clues in investigations. A volume of evidence has accumulated over the past decade to show that such an infrastructure is extremely effective in combating crime and terrorism. So, what we need now is to move forward with our own 'ring of steel,' the Safe City initiative for Islamabad. But why is our progress with such an important program so slow?This is alarming because the cost of inaction may well be comparable with the cost of the entire programme.
The interesting thing is that, unlike the London 'ring of steel,' the safe city programme is not just a "public good" - the programme, is likely to be self-financing due to its ability to detect and deter tax evasion on vehicle registration. This alone represents a revenue potential greater than the cost of the programme.
Just to give you a flavour of what we are talking about, let back track to London, 2005. Two weeks after the infamous July 7 attacks, terrorists planned to target three subway trains and a double-decker bus. Four home-made bombs stuffed into backpacks did not fully explode. One person was injured. The next day, photographs of four suspects were already being broadcast on television. Their images had been captured on surveillance cameras near the sites of the attempted attacks.
The remarkable speed of that investigation was repeated two years later when terrorists attempted to detonate car bombs in London. Aided by surveillance cameras, the investigators were able to track the suspects, within a day, all the way to Glasgow. Compare all this with our present state of law enforcement. Our police have to rely on informers, eyewitnesses, and responsibility claims in unreliable sources that give little evidence of where a terrorist had come from, or where a criminal had gone. We have come to this state due to nothing other than inaction and lack of initiative. It is about time that we empowered our law enforcement with a surveillance and response infrastructure to compare with that of London's.
The 'safe city programme' aims to track and monitor movement of people and vehicles within Islamabad. The programme achieves this aim by using surveillance cameras with facial recognition and license plate recognition technologies to automatically identify people and vehicles respectively. To further emphasise vehicle monitoring the program will also deploy radio frequency readers for capturing the movements of vehicles at critical locations throughout Islamabad. This information will be transferred to a central command center where it will be monitored, recorded, and analysed for effective response to security events. The information is further processed through a risk management system at the command center which identifies possible threats based on pre-defined patterns of statistical, audio and video analytics.
Moreover, the programme includes security for critical building and assets using an integrated access control system. The programme also provides a framework for integrating vehicle databases which includes registration of police and fire safety vehicles. A call center for receiving and dispatching emergency calls and a system for locating mobile police and fire safety vehicles are also an integral part of the 'safe city programme'.
The safe city programme has highly sophisticated video analytics for automatic detection of people crowding, traffic congestion and support for future integration of traffic violation and ticket management system which can help improve civil management services like traffic management.
The 'safe city programme' will make it very difficult for terrorists, criminals, and tax evaded vehicles to go about unnoticed. The latter will make it infeasible for people to evade such tax, resulting in substantial revenue directly associated with the programme. The fact that the safe city programme has revenue potential exceeding its total cost means that we should have done all this a long time ago.
And if we didn't do it a long time ago, at least we should do it now... Unless we are okay with the fact that our lives are not safe; or we are all fine with the fact that our neighbours and other countries in the region get preference over us for foreign investment; or we are okay with the fact that our neighbours are home to the World Cup but our own 'home ground' is either UAE or Sri Lanka.