Someone means business
Once again – by the looks of things, especially the new Punjab Operation – PML-N has let events overtake itself. Unless Shahbaz Sharif and Ch Nisar met the army chief recently to endorse the push into Punjab (despite party leaders’ assurances that there were no terrorist safe havens in the province) the Operation wasn’t exactly what the ruling party was aiming for, to say the least. Now Rana Sanaullah, and so many like him who resisted this ‘cleansing’ despite the Lahore attack, are left with a fair amount of explaining to do.
Not only, it turns out, does Punjab continue to house its fair share of militants, but there are also integrated networks of criminals, robbers, etc, contrary to the law minister’s claim. They, along with TTP elements on the run from Zarb-e-Azb, are apparently littered across jungles around the Indus, stretching all the way to interior Sindh in cases. And it’s not likely that the government had no clue about their presence. Therefore, either Rana Sanaullah deliberately misrepresented facts to keep the Operation from Punjab – as his party leaders no doubt wanted – or he was really unaware of what was happening under his watch and still felt confident enough to make a bold statement at a sensitive time. Either way, the Operation has left some egg on the minister’s face.
Yet now that the Operation is finally underway, the uncertainty regarding civ-mil cooperation is finally over. And like Zarb-e-Azb, the government will naturally own this one too. But, as reminded often enough in this space, to really be in the lead PML-N will have to be seen taking the lead. So far it has resisted taking hard decisions and invariably the military has felt obliged to nudge things through. The Punjab Operation shows that someone, finally, means business. It is not completely clear, though, that it is the ruling party.
