Now for plan ‘B’

There was always going to come a point when Operation Zarb-e-Azb rolled to a conclusion. It has been long; and a lot of blood has been shed, a lot of treasure expended. On March 14, at the Corps Commanders’ meeting in Rawalpindi Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif emphasised the need, now that the operation was in its final stages, to consolidate the gains made, if the north-west region is to have any return to peace and stability. He also emphasised the need to increase intelligence-based operations across the rest of the country if the infrastructure that supports terrorism is ever to be dismantled and terrorism itself defeated.

The reality is that terrorism is never going to be entirely defeated. It never has been anywhere else in the world, and there is no more reason to believe it is going ever to be wholly eradicated in Pakistan as any other nation-state. It can, however, be effectively fought and mitigated, reduced to the occasional horrific incident rather than a daily backdrop made of a bloody curtain.

The terrorist groups operating in Pakistan are heavily dependent on support in the civilian population — and General Sharif is well aware of this. He knows that unless the civilian government follows up military success with equal success in de-radicalising entire swathes of the population, and snatching the narrative, the initiative, from those that would see the state brought down — then his efforts and those of our men that fought and died will have been in vain.In that sense, the state is at a crux. The repatriation of the temporarily displaced persons (TDP’s) is the vital next step to accomplish successfully. They are the sea in which militancy swam and prospered. It is true that there was coercion but there was also willingness to provide succour, a willingness fostered by decades of neglect and indifference to say nothing of a benighted colonial administration that remains inept and corrupt. It is a shift in that paradigm that will ultimately determine the success or otherwise of Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Time to energise plan ‘B’. Today.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 16^th, 2016.

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