EDITORIAL: The leadership of the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan that is based in Afghanistan and intelligence agencies hostile to Pakistan were behind the suicide attack in Bisham in which 5 Chinese engineers and their Pakistani driver were killed according to the federal interior minister Mohsin Naqvi in a presser the he held in Islamabad.
He also stressed that the Afghan government must hand over the plotters of the attack and the TTP Pakistan chief who is in Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Earlier, the latest statement from the military, about a “surge in terrorism orchestrated from Afghanistan”, only confirmed, however late, what everybody has already known for a long time. Indeed, security forces have been braving and neutralising cross-border hits since TTP went active again not long after the Taliban regime came back to Kabul a couple of years ago. The ISPR statement mentioned, for example, that they have taken care of 29 terrorists in the last one month in the Sambaza area of Zhob district alone.
Yet, ready as the army is, this strategy of meeting the attacks whenever they come and then waiting for the next one is not viable in the long term. If anything, it will only ensure a steady depletion of the defence force. That is why it is extremely important for this statement to be followed by a political plan of action by the federal government. Everybody also knows that the diplomatic outreach to the interim Taliban government in Kabul so far has proved useless. They kept denying facilitating TTP even as the enemy continued using its sanctuary across the Durand Line to renew its insurgency against the Pakistani state; to the point that Islamabad was forced to threaten “decisive action” inside Afghanistan if the attacks continued.
However, the attacks continued and that “decisive action” never came. And that makes the government of Pakistan look very weak. Perhaps, with China and Russia also engaging more with Kabul, a united front can be leveraged to pressure the Taliban into finally finishing off groups like TTP that are still operating out of their country. They naturally worry that pockets of the so-called Islamic State (IS) are still active there and pressuring TTP and the like might result in a greater threat to their rule. So, regional powers will have to play a role in balancing their concerns with the rest of the neighbourhood’s; with the bottom line being that no more terror must come out of Afghanistan.
This should also be a moment of self-reflection for Pakistan. Let us never forget that we also allowed the enemy to trick us and become strong enough to attack us once again; even after losing more than 80,000 people to their first insurgency. Instead of crushing TTP as soon as it raised its head for the second time, we sent bus- and plane-loads of clerics to talk peace with them, treating them as equals, even as they fooled us with peace talks and continued killing our men, women and children. The political government of the time even released their hardcore criminals, murderers of our people, and began a process of repatriating those murderers back in the tribal area.
The result, as so many of us warned at the time, was that the Pakistani state played into the hands of a bunch of terrorists and lost precious time, material and men. Now, with nobody in any doubt about how to handle TTP, it is the federal government that needs to come up with a clear plan of action about the way forward.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024