EDITORIAL: The Panjgur attack that left five workers dead at a dam construction site, less than a month after five labourers from Multan were gunned down in the same area, confirms how deeply anti-state threats — terrorists, secessionists, fanatic xenophobes, etc. — have combined to sabotage the country’s progress and deepen ethnic/sectarian cleavages. It also shows, all over again, that the state is still very much behind the curve in dealing with all these problems.
Despite the large presence of all sorts of security and intelligence services in the province, such incidents continue to grow. Since the TTP reactivated its insurgency following the Afghan Taliban’s return to Kabul, especially, terrorist attacks in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan have once again become a recurring feature; a grim, uncomfortable reminder of those terrible days when TTP’s first insurgency cost the country upwards of 80,000 precious lives, not to mention the billions of dollars of losses that the economy suffered.
Nobody needs to be reminded of how fragile the country’s situation is right now. Worsening security will not only suck in resources that the treasury cannot spare, it will also spook foreign investment just when we are desperately in need of it. And while there is no doubt that both the civilian administration and the military establishment have this issue at the top of the agenda, it cannot be denied that results so far leave a little to be desired. Clearly a lot more needs to be done.
Let there be no doubt, the slightest tumble in the economy risks derailing the IMF (International Monetary Fund) programme and throwing the country head first into sovereign default and all the chaos such things bring. Then ensuring security will become a much more difficult, and much more expensive, proposition as well. Already, there are reports that the finance ministry is struggling to meet the Fund’s conditions right at the beginning of the programme. If the security situation gets worse and harms the economy, then we might have even bigger problems than bombs going off and people getting killed every few days.
It would help if all political parties and state institutions got together, despite their many differences, and treated terrorism as another national emergency that must be dealt with before anything else. The last such congregation produced the national action plan (NAP) that provided the blueprint for the victory in the previous insurgency. A similar show of unity is needed again.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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