How Pakistan's Energy Crisis Fuels Terrorism

Michael Hughes 

In light of the recent terrorist attack that killed 45 people in Pakistan, some find it hard to believe that energy scarcity might be the country's greatest security threat. Yet electricity shortages have directly fed the extremist cause while undermining the legitimacy of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government, potentially more than any other factor.

Pakistan's national power grid has an "installed" capacity of over 20,000 megawatts (MW) but because of poor infrastructure and the government's inability to pay energy providers, shortages can run as high as 7,000MW during peak demand in the summer. Pakistan's high population growth rate, to make matters worse, is expected to push demand to 100,000MW by 2030.

According to Pakistan's Ministry of Water and Power, load-shedding, or rolling blackouts, have led to power outages that can reach 12 to 16 hours per day. During these periods up to 70 percent of the population lives on less than 300 units of electricity, enough to power a fan, two light bulbs and an electronic charger. Constant blackouts have sparked riots, a commonplace occurrence in Pakistan since 2008, that comprise of road blocks, strikes, attacks on utility offices and even the homes of politicians.

The root causes of the energy crisis can be found in Pakistan's fuel mix, which is skewed towards expensive, imported fuels and the government's policy to charge consumers less for electricity than it costs to produce.

Power companies rarely collect in full outstanding balances from customers, including the government, which means they can't pay their own bills, thereby creating a "circular debt" crisis. Cash-strapped power generators lack funds to procure the fuel needed to run plants at full capacity, leading to perpetual outages.

Environmental stressors like water scarcity have exacerbated Pakistan's energy shortfall. Pakistani officials predict that within 7 years the country will be water-starved, a foreboding prospect for a country that derives 30 percent of its energy from hydropower. The situation has grown so desperate that, at times, the government relies on monsoonal rains to increase inflow volumes and ease power shortages.

The severe black outs that ignite near term rioting only tell part of the story, however, because energy shortages have hurt economic productivity and cost Pakistan millions of jobs. In fact, the energy crisis shaves off up to 4 percent, or $9.2 billion, from Pakistan's GDP on an annual basis.

Electricity shortages have led to factory shutdowns, rising unemployment and increases in poverty levels. Dislocated workers in Pakistan have grown alienated over the past decade because of the government's failure to literally keep the lights on and businesses running.

Pakistan's energy crisis, one former economic advisor argued, has provided a "fertile breeding ground for extremism and insurgency against the state." Government failure to provide basic services like electricity and employment have allowed extremists to fill the void.

Disaffected young men are not only susceptible to ideology, they join insurgent movements because the militants can actually provide them with jobs. According to one survey, 75 percent of households in Pakistan said family members signed up with militant groups for the sake of employment.

Sharif, who came to power in 2013 on promises to resolve the energy crisis, has failed to implement fundamental policy shifts to effectively alleviate the problem. Predicted shortages this summer could provoke societal unrest that may pose an existential threat to Sharif's government, which is already in jeopardy of being overthrown by the military, according to Wilson Center scholar Michael Kugelman.

Sharif has turned to Beijing to save the day, although some claim his recent moves are more about political show and geopolitical designs than they are about filling the electricity gap.

China will reportedly invest $45 billion in Pakistan, a large bulk of which is dedicated to doubling the country's electricity output. This includes a 900MW solar power plant, two nuclear power plants that could add another 2,200MW to the national grid, in addition to a 720MW hydropower project targeted to go online by 2020.

But skeptics are fair to question the efficacy of these supposed solutions, considering that by 2022 Pakistan is expected to run out of water, a considerable amount of which is needed to operate hydropower as well as nuclear power plants.

To be sure, factors like U.S. drone strikes and Islamabad's history of grooming terrorist groups to achieve regional security objectives have played a major role in the spread of extremism within Pakistan. However, there is little doubt that unemployed youth, dislocated as the result of electricity shortages, provide insurgents with a deep vulnerable pool from which to recruit.

If Pakistan fails to address the energy sector's circular debt dilemma, irrational electricity tariffs, water scarcity and reliance on expensive fuel inputs, China alone will be unable to solve Pakistan's energy crisis or save Sharif from a restless population weary of being left in the dark.

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Pakistan - PTI has failed to resolve KP's issues: Asif Ali Zardari

A meeting of Pakistan Peoples Party’s (PPP’s) leaders was held in Peshawar to discuss the ongoing condition of the province today (Tuesday), Dunya News reported.

According to details, co-chairman of PPP Asif Ali Zardari also participated in the ceremony and stated that Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has failed to resolve the issues of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). 

He said that PPP is ardently strengthening the ties with KP people.

Former president stated that we have not only served Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) but have also aware the people of JP to stand for their rights.

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Canada urged to press Saudi Arabia on alleged cluster bomb use in Yemen

Mike Blanchfield

Canada has an obligation to publicly warn Saudi Arabia, its military partner in an ongoing bombing campaign in Syria, to refrain from using banned cluster bombs, say advocates who campaigned against the weapon.

The issue has come to light because of a report earlier this month by the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch that said a Saudi-led coalition may have used the banned weapons while bombing Shiite rebels in Yemen.

Canada and Saudi Arabia, along with the United States, are among the half-dozen countries in another coalition that is currently engaged in bombing missions against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Syria.

Regardless of Canada's activities in Syria, it has an international legal obligation to speak out because it ratified the United Nations treaty to ban cluster bombs, said Steve Goose, the head of the arms division of Human Rights Watch.

"They could have done a demarche or something," said Goose, referring to the use of a standard, behind-the-scenes diplomatic notice. But that would not have been enough, he added.

"Publicly speaking out is the best way to do this because that's how you stigmatize the weapon. That's how you generate outrage against it, and that's the best way to discourage any use."

An emailed statement from the Foreign Affairs department on Monday said Canada would pursue opportunities "to discourage the use of cluster munitions by states not party to the convention."

The statement did not directly answer a question about whether Canada had raised the Human Rights Watch report with Saudi officials.

"We will continue to engage with Saudi Arabia on a range of issues including regional security and human rights," it said.

Goose said other countries have publicly called out the Saudis on the report, including Costa Rica, which holds the rotating chair of the cluster bomb convention, and Norway, which took the lead in creating it.

Paul Hannon, the executive director of Mines Action Canada, said the government has an obligation to tell its coalition partners that it won't use cluster munitions and that they shouldn't either.

"Historically, use of cluster munitions has resulted in at least 94 per cent of the casualties being civilians," said Hannon.

"If we want to create stability in this region, no one should ever use cluster munitions because of the deadly legacy they leave behind."

A single cluster bomb contains hundreds of brightly coloured, baseball-size submunitions that often fail to explode and can sit dormant for decades. They pose an ongoing hazard to civilians, especially children, in dozens of post-war countries.

The Harper government faced widespread international criticism for undermining the cluster bomb treaty, which it took more than six years to ratify.

The government was broadly condemned because the legislation that it used to ratify the treaty contained a loophole that would allow the Canadian Forces to be involved in the use of cluster bombs in joint operations with the United States, which has opted out of the convention.

Its critics included the usually neutral International Committee of the Red Cross.

The government eventually agreed to remove the word "using" from the bill, which prohibits Canadian military personnel from directly using the weapons, but doesn't entirely bar their indirect involvement in combined operations.

Goose said anti-cluster bomb advocates are happy Canada finally ratified the convention, and there is hope it will be a good partner in preventing the weapons from being used.

But he added one caveat.

"We will closely monitor Canada's implementation because of the extreme weakness of its legislation implementing the convention," said Goose.

"We don't think Canada will ever utilize those loopholes -- it certainly never should, which would potentially put it in violation of the convention."

Saudi Arabia 'could buy Pakistani nuclear weapon'

ALEXANDER SEHMER

Saudi Arabia intends to buy an "off the shelf" nuclear weapon from Pakistan, according to US officials quoted in The Sunday Times.

The report comes amid ongoing negotiations between Iran and other world powers over its nuclear programme, and a potential thawing of relations between the US and Iran.

Saudi Arabia is wary of a potential deal on Iran's nuclear programme and Prince Turki bin Faisal, the former Saudi intelligence chief, has warned that it could pave the way for nuclear proliferation in the region.

The Sunday Times report suggests that Saudi Arabia has already taken the decision to acquire a nuclear device from its ally Pakistan.

The report quotes an anonymous US defence official as saying: “There has been a longstanding agreement in place with the Pakistanis [over nuclear weapons] and the House of Saud has now made the strategic decision to move forward.”

Saudi Arabia is believed to have helped fund Pakistan's nuclear programme, which began back in the 1970s. Pakistan tested its first nuclear device in 1998.

Pakistani officials deny allowing Saudi Arabia access to the country's nuclear technology.

Negotiators have yet to reach a deal on Iran's nuclear programme, but if they do it could leave Iran's 5,000 centrifuges and much of its research programme in place.

The Gulf States warn that any deal that leaves open the possibility Iran could eventually enrich uranium to weapons grade would promote a nuclear arms race in the region.

Barack Obama, the US president, has attempted to ally those fears, holding discussions with the US's Gulf allies at Camp David last week.

Arrested for reporting on Qatar's World Cup labourers

By Mark Lobel
We were invited to Qatar by the prime minister's office to see new flagship accommodation for low-paid migrant workers in early May - but while gathering additional material for our report, we ended up being thrown into prison for doing our jobs.

Our arrest was dramatic.

We were on a quiet stretch of road in the capital, Doha, on our way to film a group of workers from Nepal.

The working and housing conditions of migrant workers constructing new buildings in Qatar ahead of the World Cup have been heavily criticised and we wanted to see them for ourselves.

Suddenly, eight white cars surrounded our vehicle and directed us on to a side road at speed.

A dozen security officers frisked us in the street, shouting at us when we tried to talk. They took away our equipment and hard drives and drove us to their headquarters.

Later, in the city's main police station, the cameraman, translator, driver and I were interrogated separately by intelligence officers. The questioning was hostile.

We were never accused of anything directly, instead they asked over and over what we had done and who we had met.

Qatar has been criticised over abuse of migrant workers

During a pause in proceedings, one officer whispered that I couldn't make a phone call to let people know where we were. He explained that our detention was being dealt with as a matter of national security.

An hour into my grilling, one of the interrogators brought out a paper folder of photographs which proved they had been trailing me in cars and on foot for two days since the moment I'd arrived.

I was shown pictures of myself and the team standing in the street, at a coffee shop, on board a bus and even lying next to a swimming pool with friends. It was a shock. I had never suspected I was being tailed.

At 01:00, we were taken to the local prison.

'Not Disneyland'

It was meant to be the first day of our PR tour but instead we were later handcuffed and taken to be questioned for a second time, at the department of public prosecutions.

Thirteen hours of waiting around and questioning later, one of the interrogators snapped. "This is not Disneyland," he barked. "You can't stick your camera anywhere."

It was as if he felt we were treating his country like something to be gawped at, suggesting we thought of trips to see controversial housing and working conditions as a form of entertainment.

Qatari government statement, 18 May:

"The Government Communications Office invited a dozen reporters to see - first-hand - some sub-standard labour accommodation as well as some of the newer labour villages. We gave the reporters free rein to interview whomever they chose and to roam unaccompanied in the labour villages.

"Perhaps anticipating that the government would not provide this sort of access, the BBC crew decided to do their own site visits and interviews in the days leading up to the planned tour. In doing so, they trespassed on private property, which is against the law in Qatar just as it is in most countries. Security forces were called and the BBC crew was detained."

BBC response:

"We are pleased that the BBC team has been released but we deplore the fact that they were detained in the first place. Their presence in Qatar was no secret and they were engaged in a perfectly proper piece of journalism.

"The Qatari authorities have made a series of conflicting allegations to justify the detention, all of which the team rejects. We are pressing the Qatari authorities for a full explanation and for the return of the confiscated equipment."

In perfect English and with more than a touch of malice, he threatened us with another four days in prison - to teach us a lesson.

I began my second night in prison on a disgusting soiled mattress. At least we did not go hungry, as we had the previous day. One of the guards took pity on us and sent out for roast chicken with rice.

In the early hours of the next morning, just as suddenly as we were arrested, we were released.

Qatar has seen an influx of migrants to build facilities for the 2022 tournament

Bizarrely, we were allowed to join the organised press trip for which we had come.

It was as if nothing had happened, despite the fact that our kit was still impounded, and we were banned from leaving the country.

I can only report on what has happened now that our travel ban has been lifted.

No charges were brought, but our belongings have still not been returned.

So why does Qatar welcome members of the international media while at the same time imprisoning them?

Is it a case of the left arm not knowing what the right arm is doing, or is it an internal struggle for control between modernisers and conservatives?

PR effort

Whatever the explanation, Qatar's Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to journalism has been exposed by the spotlight that has been thrown on it after winning the World Cup bid.

Other journalists and activists, including a German TV crew, have also recently been detained.

How the country handles the media, as it prepares to host one of the world's most watched sporting events, is now also becoming a concern.

Mustafa Qadri, Amnesty International's Gulf migrant rights researcher, told us the detentions of journalists and activists could be attempts "to intimidate those who seek to expose labour abuse in Qatar".

Qatar, the world's richest country for its population size of little more than two million people, is pouring money into trying to improve its reputation for allowing poor living standards for low-skilled workers to persist.

Government inspectors have said some accommodation is substandard

Inside Qatar's squalid labour camps

A highly respected London-based PR firm, Portland Communications, now courts international journalists. On the day we left prison, it showed us spacious and comfortable villas for construction workers, with swimming pools, gyms and welfare officers.

This was part of the showcase tour of workers' accommodation, and it was organised by the prime minister's office.

Qatar's World Cup organising committee, which answers to Fifa, was helping to run the tour.

Fifa says it is now investigating what happened to us. It has issued the following statement: "Any instance relating to an apparent restriction of press freedom is of concern to Fifa and will be looked into with the seriousness it deserves."

'Open country'

Following our detention, the minister of labour agreed to talk to us on camera about how the media can cover what human rights campaigners have identified as "forced labour" within his country.

"Qatar is an open country forever, since ever," Abdullah al-Khulaifi said.

"The shortcomings that I am facing, the problems I am facing, I cannot hide. Qatar is open and now with the smartphones, everyone is a journalist," he said.

He said the negative coverage of migrant workers' conditions was wildly overblown and that much progress had been made to improve basic conditions for migrant workers.

The government has implemented a wage protection scheme. It says at least 450 companies have been banned from working in the country and more than $6m (£3.8m) of fines have been handed out to firms mistreating workers, and the number of inspectors has been doubled.

Workers are now ferried to and from work in buses, not lorries.

Labourers arriving at their housing after a shift

But change has not come easily in what one security guard privately described to me as a country with surveillance officers everywhere.

Without trade unions or a free media, bosses of large domestic and international companies have little incentive to radically improve conditions for well over a million labourers desperate for money.

Before we were detained, I met an 18-year-old mechanic, one of the 400,000 Nepalese workers there.

He said he wanted to support his older brothers because his father had died and the family was struggling financially.

He paid a recruitment agency in Nepal $600 to arrange his visa to work in Qatar and was told he would earn $300 a month.

When he arrived he was told his salary, as a labour camp cleaner for air conditioning mechanics, was in fact $165 a month. He said he has never been given a copy of the contract he signed. Worse still, he said he could not understand it as it was in English.

It's a very common trick that foreign recruitment agents play before workers even get to Qatar, and very difficult for Qatar itself to police, although it says it is trying.

This young man now finds himself at the mercy of Qatar's restrictive kafala system, which prevents workers from changing jobs for five years. Being tied to an employer in that way can leave migrant workers open to exploitation.

However, with so much money needed for rebuilding decimated parts of Nepal, there will be no shortage of future volunteers.

And as Qatar's World Cup approaches, the focus on migrant labour is only likely to increase.

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Secularism Is Pakistan's Way Out to End Sectarian Violence

Malik Siraj Akbar 

When armed gunmen stopped and shot dead 43 people from the Shia community in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi on Wednesday, it was certainly not the first time that the terrorists had carried out such an atrocious attack. Islamic extremists operate across Pakistan with absolute impunity. The Pakistani Taliban murder unarmed civilians randomly regardless of their sectarian affiliations. The Sunni militants routinely target the members of the Shia community. Similar attacks also take place on the followers of the Ahmadiyya Muslims; the Hindus and the Christens. These attacks are not confined to one city or a province. They occur in places as remote as the provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in relatively modern cosmopolitans like Karachi and Lahore.

Of course the loss of precious human lives is the dark side of these attacks but the worst part is that these attacks take place so regularly that they just become a statistic for the government, media and the researchers. The government condemns these attacks, suspends a few policemen, makes some void promises to the people to take action against the terrorists sand then life goes. A few weeks or months later, the same terrorists strike in a different city in a newly crafted style. In this process, hundreds of Pakistanis lose their lives every year. Terrorists get strong and stronger by the day. They keep expanding their networks and invent new techniques to kill more and more people from the opposite religion and sect. In the recent times, the terrorists have found it convenient to wear police and army uniforms to gain immediate and unquestionable access to their targets.

The million-dollar question is why do these attacks take place again and again? Why doesn't Pakistan have a strategy to address this challenge? As a matter of fact, there are no administrative and technical fixes to this problem. Violence in the name of religion does not specifically target people from one gender, race or ethnic group. The Pakistani state has been lucky that most of its citizens are not educated enough to hold it accountable for its failures to defend the lives of the citizens. The relationship between the state and the citizens should be based on mutual trust and benefits. In Pakistan, the state has excessively benefited from its relationship to a docile public. The state has imposed an Islamic identity and a jingoistic narrative on its population and kept the public emotionally blackmailed that questioning the role of Islam in every day lives would amount to committing blasphemy. Religion has become such an integral part of the State's identity that people are unable to look at the world beyond religious frameworks. Given that context, people find it more comforting to trade conspiracy theories with the reality insisting that the Muslim extremists cannot be Muslims in reality. When the population does not blame the oppressor, this helps in exempting the government from accountability.

Recently, I attended a talk at Harvard Kennedy School of Government by a young Pakistani activist Jibran Nasir who has been struggling against religious extremists in Pakistan. Mr. Nasir, 28, just like many other activists, diagnoses Pakistan's problem wrongly. According to him, Pakistanis have to "reclaim their mosques". What does that mean? Nasir believes that religious obscurantists have taken hold of the mosques in Pakistan and they use these crucial platforms for preaching hatred and violence. Therefore, the Pakistanis have to reclaim their mosques. Well, this is not going to help Pakistan in getting rid of its existing problems with radical Islam. Pakistan has to renegotiate its relationship with all its citizens regardless of the faith they believe. Mosques should not be the place to decide the future of Pakistan. The Pakistanis should instead reclaim their constitution, parliament and democratic institutions and keep the mosque only as a place of worship without giving it any powers to decide the affairs of the state or individuals' personal lives.

After all, why should the fate of a Pakistani Christen, Hindu or any other religious minority be decided inside a mosque? In spite of recurrent attacks on innocent citizens in the name of religion, there is surprisingly not enough protest in Pakistan from the people telling the state directly that they can no longer carry its burden of Islam. People believe in religions because they want to be connected with some spiritual or divine force that comforts them not to be manipulated as tool in the hands of a state for its own political ambitions.

States are supposed to treat all their citizens equally and respectfully instead of discriminating them because of their religion. In Pakistan, religion is certain to become a cause of bloodshed given the overwhelming emphasis on Islamic identity. Religion is a dangerous recipe for a society like Pakistan where millions of children do not go to school and another millions of women do not get out of their homes because men decide their fate. In a society where dozens of television channels and radio stations regularly preach one version of religion, it is too naïve to expect respect and tolerance for other religions and appreciation for difference of opinion.

The way forward for Pakistan is detaching the state from religion. Official patronage of religion at school or any other level should stop and there should be more emphasis on civic education. The State should have no business with religion. People should be allowed to practice whatever religion they believe in. But when the State advocates and defends only one religion, it ends up offering too much tolerance for those who kill fellow citizens for the same reasons. In a way, it helps the state to promote its idealogical mission but it is simply wrong and unaccetapble to have tolerance for extremist groups because they are on the side of the state's narrative.

Senior Pakistani Politician Blames Saudi Arabia for Massacre of Shiites in Karachi

A senior member of Pakistan’s Majlis-e-Wehdatul Muslimeen (MWM) Political Party blamed Saudi Arabia for the massacre of innocent people of Pakistan.

“The massacre of a group of Ismailia Shiite Muslims exposed the plots of the Saudi ambassador and Mecca prayers leader to hold secret meetings with heads of the Takfiri groups,” Ahmed Iqbal Razavi said on Sunday.

Razavi’s remarks came after the Takfiri terrorists exploded a bus carrying a group of Ismailia Shiite pilgrims in the port city of Karachi on Wednesday.

“Saudi Arabia’s support for Takfiri terrorists in Pakistan is evident to everyone,” he added.

Several Pakistani political parties, including Majlis-e-Wehdatul Muslimeen, held rallies in Karachi to condemn the massacre of Shiites, and they called on the Pakistani army to follow up attack on the passenger bus.

At least 43 people were killed and 20 more injured in a gun attack on a bus carrying Ismailia Shiite Muslims in the Pakistani city of Karachi on Wednesday, police said.

A police official said six gunmen on motorcycles, appearing to be from a banned extremist group, stopped the bus and fired indiscriminately.

The bus carrying about 60 was going to an Ismailia Shite place of worship.

No group has yet said it carried out the attack.

Provincial police chief Ghulam Haider Jamali said the attack appeared to be the work of the same group involved in recent drive-by shootings of senior police officials in Karachi.

The bus was on its way to an Ismailia Shiite Muslim place of worship, police said

He said the bus was on its way to an Ismailia Shia Muslim place of worship when gunmen boarded it in the Safoora Goth area of Karachi and fired at those on board.

The attackers are said to have escaped easily.

In the last few months, several mosques belonging to religious minorities have been bombed in Pakistan.

http://en.shiapost.com/2015/05/18/senior-politician-blames-saudi-arabia-for-massacre-of-shiites-in-karachi/

In Pakistan’s War on Terror, Ordinary People Are Increasingly Vulnerable

BY SAM SAEED

Militants, stung by government operations in tribal areas, are refocusing their attacks on citizens.

First witness reports testify that Wednesday (May 13) morning’s attack in Karachi on a Shia Ismaili bus was conducted with precision.

Eight attackers boarded the bus, purportedly dressed in security uniforms. They subdued the driver and instructed the passengers to lower their heads. Then, starting from the back, the attackers shot them in the heads at point blank range with 9mm pistols. In all, they killed 43 people. A security officer told the Dawn newspaper, “One young girl hid and survived. Three or four others who were brought to the hospital have survived…the rest are all dead.”

The attack is hardly unprecedented.

In January, a suicide bomber killed 61 people at a Shia mosque in the nearby town of Shikarpur. Shias across the country—from the shores of Karachi to the mountains of Gilgit—are experiencing sustained, targeted persecution, whether in massive attacks like this, or ritual assassinations by militant groups, many of which are tolerated, if not supported, by the state.

Despite being Muslims (unlike Ahmadis, the state has not declared Shias to be non-Muslims yet), their persecution has implied that Shias, about 20% of Pakistan’s population, fit snugly as “religious minorities” with the Christians, Hindus, and Ahmadis.

Ismailis in Pakistan are an influential, well-knit community known for operating hospitals, universities, schools, charities and infrastructure projects. Their spiritual leader is the Aga Khan, who summarily condemned the attack.

Beyond the immediate barbarity and shock (if not surprise), Wednesday morning’s attack also highlights the increasing limitation of Pakistani militant groups.

Like the school attack in Peshawar last December, the attackers chose a soft target; in this case, an unguarded bus. That’s perhaps because major fortifications and security overhauls have been undertaken in government buildings, cantonment areas, mosques, markets, schools, and other public places.

Coupled with a sustained military operation in Pakistan’s tribal areas and a joint paramilitary and police operation in Karachi, security forces have managed to bring down the number of terrorist attacks and targeted killings, and the resulting fatalities.

Alternatively, it has made the most vulnerable and defenceless—passengers going to work—militants’ preferred targets. These kinds of attacks are more difficult to defend against, and possibly unlikely to stop.

Nonetheless, the attack revealed security lapses on a local and provincial level. The longtime chief minister of Sindh, Qaim Ali Shah, of the Pakistan Peoples Party has come under fire for the spiralling violence and extremism that has markedly increased in his province under his watch.

A spate of kidnappings, threats, vandalism, and killings—including the Shikarpur blast—have all added to the perception that Sindh, historically known for its religious diversity, is slipping into the same radical ideology that has engulfed other parts of the country. Shah suspended local officers of the Sindh Police (another institution under scrutiny) pending an investigation, while the usual rounds of empty condemnation have poured in from other politicians.

But there’s a bigger problem: Both the armed forces and Pakistan’s civilian government are yet to confront the ideology that drives these attacks.

Malik Ishaq, the founder of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, perhaps the deadliest of the anti-Shia militias, oscillates between incarceration and freedom; Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed roams free under government protection. Media commentators still point to India and the US as Pakistan’s biggest threats.

Meanwhile, educationist Bernadette Dean fled after receiving threats to her life. And last month’s murder of Sabeen Mahmud indicates that free expression, diversity, and secular values are still anathema to the particular version of the Pakistani state that militants, and some sections of the government itself, envision.

Both the civilians and the military should know that military action forms only one face of a multifaceted approach that must also include reforms in education, intelligence gathering, foreign policy, and institution building.

Till then, the attacks will continue.