Peshawar blasts

Yet another weapon in the vile arsenal

 It is the art of darkness. In a macabre course of challenge and response, the terrorists have been constantly moving from crude methods to sophisticated ones, remaining a step ahead of the state. When the latter works on developing a defence against one particular modus operandi, the terrorists move on to the next. In the suicide bomber, the terrorists had found the perfect weapon. There was – is – limited defence against it. Still, there had to be some proactivity in trying to deal with what appeared to be an impossible challenge. That this is no factory-made weapon but an individual indoctrinated over a period of time, requiring the involvement of many other individuals trained specifically for said indoctrination are all factors favourable to the gathering of intelligence.

From all of that intelligence, the law enforcement agencies could swoop in on leads, investigating suspicious individuals. Many a would-be suicide bomber has been apprehended like this. Perhaps, it is this relative success that has prompted the terrorists to use female suicide bombers, two of whom were behind the blasts in Peshawar the other day that claimed the lives of 8 people and wounded 38 more. With women suicide bombers, an already intricate matter becomes further complicated. Cultural sensitivities demand certain protocols for dealing with women; they cannot be scrutinised the way males can be. In the event of a lead of a bomber expected at a particular venue, there would be a very anxious little that could be done.

In addition to beefing up our intelligence apparatus, there should be a greater quantum of recruitment in the women’s police. Counter intuitively, there is no shortage of brave women – even in the supposedly conservative KP and Balochistan – who would willingly enlist in the police for gainful employment, a fact attested to by the fairly reasonable numbers that apply for these jobs whenever they are advertised.

The blasts’ interruption of the lull in violence is, incidentally, a defeat of the rather silly argument presented earlier by a senior FATA secretariat official, who had claimed that strictness with visas for Westerners could be attributed to the lessening of the number of incidents. If we were to get down to dealing with the militants in a logical manner instead of peddling in voodoo connections between all variables, we’d be all the better for it.