Pakistan: But where is strategy?

Editorial: The Frontier Post

Not even had our tears dried over the holocaust the vile terrorists had wreaked just the other day in Sibi, Dera Bugti and Orakzai bazaar, the thugs struck fatally a market in Darra Adamkhel with suicide car bombing on Saturday. At least 18 innocent people lay dead on the spot while over 40 others were gored, many critically. But for how long are we to keep receiving death and destruction with abandon at the thuggish hands? How many bleeding Malalas are we to cry over? How many wounded Shazias are we to grieve over? How many injured Kaainats are we to weep for? For how many times are we to mourn the tragic demise of our toddlers, children, women and men in terrorist strikes? After every thuggish assault, the top state functionaries are all tall talk. Crush they would terrorists with an iron hand, they fume and thunder. But where is the strategy? After all, it is doing, not vowing, that really matters and makes all the difference. The one Yousuf Raza Gilani had hammered out at a high-level inter-provincial jamboree is a long forgotten counter-terrorism strategy, apparently consigned to archives to gather dust. Seemingly, none has been chalked out thereafter. Then how would these functionaries do the feat of crushing terrorists? That should be their closely-guarded official secret. There indeed is a strange hiatus to the state act to counter terrorism on their watch. They have clearly not even understood that a triumphant fight against terrorism indispensably entails combining up of the state’s military power and civil power to take on dark merchants of death and destruction in concert. The military fights them on mountains, in caves, in jungles and in deserts. The civil power confronts them on city streets and lanes and in markets and public places. But, visibly, they have shifted the entire burden of combating terrorism on the military’s shoulders, leaving the civilian security apparatus to hibernate. Why indeed are the provincial governments sitting so pretty while their domains are unexceptionably in the throes of an urban terrorism? Why have they not taken out their CID networks from barracks and put in the field to track down terrorists and their sleeper cells, lairs and hideouts? Why have they not formed up exclusive anti-terrorism squads to confront terrorism thugs? Why have they not pulled the battalions of police deployed on VIP protection duties and put them on beat patrolling that would detect any suspicious stranger’s presence in an urban neighbourhood at once? Why has it only to be ISI or MI to look for terrorists? Why not IB too? Is political monitoring more important than security monitoring even at this point in time? Is the job of civilian security apparatus only to weigh the explosives used in a terrorist attack after its perpetration and not to prevent that thuggish assault? Or, is this apparatus meant only to cordon off the struck area and go in search of perpetrators? Who is that sage that has told this apparatus after their strike the thugs keep loitering in the area for window shopping? Who has told it that once a suicide attack has occurred, the attacker’s masterminds and handlers stay put on the scene to count the casualties? The time indeed has come for all and sundry to imbibe fully the enormity of the vicious multifaceted terrorism that we are caught up in so irretrievably and act wisely, rationally and realistically to face up to this monstrosity. Even the self-styled liberals and puritanical clerical orders must get out of their conceits. One knows not wherefrom have these ‘liberals” got their bogey of good Taliban and bad Taliban to beat the military with. But has the military got its over 5,000 officers and soldiers killed and many more injured in fighting militants for this distinction? And how do these so-called liberals square up their pretentious opposition to a supposed military’s employment in quelling insurgency in Balochistan but want this very military to launch into an operation in North Waziristan? And if the liberals are being so hypocritical in their take on the military, aren’t the holy clans of clerical orders being so likewise? Don’t they contrive appalling justifications for the wickedness the vile terrorists are indulging in so horribly? If those wicked characters are angry at drone attacks and America’s Afghanistan adventurism, do they have to take out their anger by slaughtering our own children, women and men? There have to be some limits to conceits and hypocrisies; those can’t be unlimited. If, all must know, some harm comes to this country all will be hurt unsparingly. Hence, all must pull together to unitedly confront this terrorism monstrosity, irrefutably posing the biggest internal existential threat to the country.