Decisive moment of the war
Recent high profile terror attacks – Shikarpur, Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi – mark a serious turning point in the war against terrorism, especially since they are the first escalation in the insurgency since the National Action Plan (NAP) was hashed out. Seeing how the enemy is clearly still on the loose, it seems NAP’s first bottlenecks have already started appearing. Deciding a plan of action is one thing, but ensuring its implementation is quite another. Lengthy exercises are no doubt required to erect a force – intelligence and operational – that is capable of pre-empting hits, at least when prior intelligence is available. Senior police officers do not inspire confidence when they accept, after attacks of course, that they were informed about chances of just such attacks, but did not have the capacity to prevent them.
Far more important, though, is the matter of political will and how the leadership postures in such circumstances. On this count, especially, the N-league has appeared pretty tame. These attacks were a serious blow, not only to the government’s decision of carrying out executions, but also to the momentum generated after Dec16. As such, the government should immediately have taken control, at least of the narrative. The political leadership should have been seen taking steps to expedite implementation of NAP. Rather, all that came out of the PM’s meetings was more empty rhetoric like ‘this war must be won’, etc, while it was again the military brass that was in the news; at least appearing concerned.
The government must realise that this is a now or never moment in this long and costly war. If the post-Peshawar unanimity is not translated into an actionable force strong enough to wipe out terrorism from the country, the moment will be lost and the state will simply continue tearing at the seams till it is gone. When political opposition was rolled back after the school tragedy, Nawaz Sharif was warned not to sit easy, since a far bigger test of leadership now awaited him. Going by what has transpired over the last two months, it seems he has already started losing the script
