Existential war continues
This war is clearly far from over. It seems, increasingly, that the relative calm that came after Zarb-e-Azb will be disturbed more frequently now. Friday’s attack is just another reminder that the enemy is fast getting its act together, and the official machinery remains behind the curve in certain crucial areas. For one thing, this attack has yet again posed serious questions with regard to the intelligence machinery. Suicide bomb equipment, we have been repeatedly told, has to be brought piece by piece to the target city/area. And it is in the putting-together process that intelligence usually picks up chatter and preempts such attacks.
That TTP can still fit one of their so-called jihadists with the usual suicide jacket and march him undetected into Friday prayers in the tribal area means intel sharing, at least, remains broken down despite the dictates of NAP. Also, the tribal agencies are among the most militarised areas of the country presently owing to the war. They are in many ways, therefore, the litmus test for this war effort. Only once they have been properly and thoroughly cleansed can combing operations and intel-based missions succeed in urban centres.
The government, too, can no longer drag its feet over implementing NAP in letter and spirit. Popular reaction to the usual official line after such attacks, that ‘this will not deter us from fighting to the last terrorist’, etc, is no longer as accommodating as not too long ago. The military has already made its feelings, about the civilians lagging on NAP on their turf, amply clear. Yet there is still no national narrative, no attempts to integrate the dozens of agencies that litter the security landscape, and no concrete effort to streamline seminaries; to name just a few. Since this is an existential war, it will indeed take fighting to the last terrorist. But the government, in so many ways, will first have to pull its socks up.
