More operations needed
First of all, take a bow, Peshawar police. The city’s embattled police force, acting upon intelligence reports, raided an under-construction building in the area where the militants responsible for the deadly attack on the airport from the day before were hiding. The plan, as Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said, is always to capture them alive. But, given that they were wearing suicide jackets, the militants necessarily had to be killed in the operation. All five militants were killed.
The recent spate of terror attacks in the city underlines many important issues, the greatest of which is the need for effective operations in the areas adjoining the provincial capital. True, militants can travel great distances, but the status of contiguous areas can make the situation in any city precarious. The areas around Peshawar are anything but calm. There are two restive adjoining tribal areas, the Khyber and Mohmand Agencies. Darra Adamkhel is also not too far away. The military claimed that the operations in Mohmand were successful; they weren’t. And about the Khyber operations, the military doesn’t even make that pretence. But the problem with militancy in Peshawar is that, far from the adjoining tribal agencies and Frontier Regions, the badlands of the Matani area, a once peaceful area that has now become a den of criminals, proves to be an area where the militants can hide. The Matani area miscreants are not ideologically militant Islamists, but for a price, they can provide great cover. First and foremost, an operation is needed in the Matani area to clear it of all ne’er-do-wells, be they Taliban or not.
Then we can move on to other aspects of the issue. The air force base and airport are adjacent in Peshawar. The times have changed since such arrangements weren’t inconvenient. This holds true for almost all cities. When the Lahore cantonment, for instance, was set up by the British, it was outside the city. Now it is prime property and the security protocols are making life difficult for the civilian residents of the surrounding areas. The situation is much worse in other garrison cities. A rethink there as well?