When Taliban are said to be on the run in Malakand and under intense military pressure in Bannu FR their suspected ability to devastate the Peshawar city's most prestigious and the only five-star hotel is a measure of the enormity of the challenge Pakistan faces in its ongoing war on terror.
Undoubtedly the Pearl Continental hotel must have been the best protected non-government establishment in the provincial capital, especially when it hosted a number of foreign guests. And no wonder its security must have been beefed up and upgraded in the light of lessons learnt from attacks on the Islamabad's Marriott Hotel last year and on the Rescue-15 office in Lahore last month.
Yet nothing could stop the determined bombers from reaching deep into the hotel compound and detonate 500-plus kilogram explosives which killed some 19 persons including three foreigners and wounded many more. Of course there is the debate as to how the bombers made their way into the hotel. Did they force their way or 'bought' it we don't know yet.
But we must acknowledge, realistically, that the Taliban is a huge monster with capacity and staying power to spawn mayhem all over Pakistan. Its potential to unleash severe backlash should be neither underestimated nor trivialised. That said, we need to comprehend the nature of the challenge of Taliban-centred militancy especially in terms of its size and the wherewithal the government has put in place to fight back. What was said to be a 'handful' of miscreants the Taliban appear to be in thousands.
Till early this week, 1305 Taliban had been killed only in Malakand division. Since that region is still not fully cleared and the Taliban keep coming up here and there it would be naïve to think that all of them have been eliminated. Then there is the ISPR report that about 800 Taliban have rushed to the Bannu FR from other areas to join their comrades who are facing the music for their adventure of kidnapping the Razmak College cadets.
We have talked of only two of about a dozen 'safe havens' that are available to the Taliban only in the restive north-west. Add to this the whole host of extremists that are available for Talibanisation in the rest of the country and one would have a force of tens of thousands potential militants. If that number is not small their capacity to wreak havoc is not small either.
They are well-equipped and well-trained; believed to be dollar-financed and their supply lines from across the borders always open. The kinds of weapons the Taliban carry have the unmistakable marks of their foreign origin. Obviously they are proxies fighting the war of Pakistan's eternal adversaries.
As against this overwhelming challenge Pakistani authorities suffer from a number of serious shortages: its security forces have no worthwhile training and experience of fighting insurgency of the type now raging in the north-west; its intelligence outfits seem to have had very limited information on the size and potential of Taliban threat; political leadership clearly lacks vision and determination to confront this threat; and above all there is no comprehensive workable strategy to deal with it.
All in all, the government nurtures a tactical approach, its actions ranging from local jirga-arranged cease-fires to Nizam-i-Adl type agreements to fire-fighting military operation. The political leaderships are confused if not clashing on ways and means to counter the threat of insurgency - the ruling coalition partners are more sharply divided. The will and determination to squarely confront the challenge of terrorism is conspicuous by its absence as frivolous politicking presently spawns the national politics.
We have great respect for the parliament but we would be failing in our duty if we do not say that the elected leadership has not yet come to grips with the reality of terrorist threat Pakistan faces today. There have been a few debates and some parliamentary resolutions but the kind of engagement the political leaders should get into and come up with a hard copy of a comprehensive strategy to fight growing menace of Talibanisation is not yet there.
What we face today is more dangerous than a foreign invasion or conventional war. We are in for an implosion of deadly proportions and as it is happening the time is not our side. It is good we have secured the so-called national consensus on military action in Malakand but that is not enough. We need to evolve expertise to take care of various dimensions of the threat.
Effective diplomacy and intelligence upgrades are as important as military action to pull the plug on foreign interference and degrade the unity of the Taliban's united front. This is need of the hour, as the Peshawar carnage once again brings to the fore the imperative of being realistic and practical about the looming threat of Talibanisation.