Pakistan:The cost of terrorism

It could not have been different. That terrorism will pull the country down was written on the walls, which we had chosen to ignore all along. We never prepared ourselves to face the music as a result. We had been refusing to accept the responsibility of the mess our intervention created in Afghanistan until the fire reached our doorstep. Even then our response was inadequate. Our security policies did little to protect the country or maintain the writ of the state. Currently, the surface peace owes more to the policy of retaliation than eliminating the terrorists altogether. We cannot ignore the Taliban’s reach into the urban areas of the country, especially Karachi. There they have made the city hostage to terrorism. Twelve years is a long period. Estimation of war-related costs, an exercise the economic team of the country does every year, is in fact a reminder that we had not been doing much to control the demons we reared and nurtured. Would that we had refrained from interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, Pakistan may have been spared its present and continuing agony.

Having turned the country into a national security state in the early years and after adopting jihadi proxies as a foreign policy tool in the neighbourhood, we could not have expected to escape the blowback that has taken such a high toll in lives and economically.

According to the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2014, every economic and financial indicator, be it exports, foreign direct and domestic investment, inflation, tax collection, etc, has been affected ruinously by terrorism. In the last 13 years the country has lost $ 102.51 billion in the war on terror. This does not include the loss the country incurred from the killing of thousands of innocent Pakistanis and its able soldiers. Over the years terrorism in Pakistan has morphed into sectarian conflict, making things more complicated for the government, again for lack of preparedness. Intelligence on most of the terrorist attacks, the bigger ones especially, such as the Bannu jailbreak, had been conveyed to the relevant governments, with no result. The government has done little to date to revamp its law enforcement and intelligence agencies to face the challenges it confronts. The police is inadequate. Its traditional modus operandi does not make it capable of fighting the war. A complete renewal of the commitment to fight terrorism is required whereby our house is set in order not through the policy of appeasement but through a combination of force and dialogue as and when required.