A nation mourns again

Once again Pakistan grieves at the death and injury resulting from a terrorist attack. The target was the New Sariab Police Training College near Quetta and at the time of writing there are reportedly 61 dead and 165 injured, which is said to include the three attackers two of whom blew themselves up. There are at least three claims for the atrocity — one by a sub-franchise of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi controlled from Afghanistan, less credibly a group claiming to have TTP connections in Karachi and the Islamic State (IS).

The facts speak for themselves. The war against terrorism is far from over no matter the successes of Operation Zarb-e-Azb. The Quetta attack is an intelligence and security failure. Why was the facility not better guarded? It is in an exposed position in a part of the country known for terrorist presence and activity. These young men never stood a chance and died by the dozen. The standoff with the attackers lasted four hours and it reportedly took almost half an hour for a military response to reach the location once the attack was underway.



What is also blindingly obvious to all but the government is that the imperfect implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) formulated after the APS massacre in 2014, leaves any number of loopholes through which terrorist groups are more than happy to march their troops. The internecine warfare between government ministries and agencies as well as tardy provincial implementation of some of the grittier aspects of the NAP, has led to it being a three-wheeled cart. There are no ‘good terrorists’ or ‘bad terrorists’ and the Quetta attack is a fundamental policy failure in large part caused by the inability of the Establishment and assorted politicians to read off the same page. Or even work to the same playbook.

It is that failure at the deepest levels of governance that highlights not only the complexity of fighting a war in which the enemy is a shape-changer of surpassing skill, but equally the ambivalence with which that elusive enemy is being fought at a national level. There has been no attempt to create a countervailing narrative. The National Counterterrorism Authority (NACTA) remains largely inactive and although NACTA is no universal panacea it could at least serve as a national focus for all things counter-terrorism. Fierce resistance within the clerical community to madrassah registration or the tracing of funding channels has rendered this a largely pointless exercise. Any administration can tick the mosque-registration box, finding out how they are funded and what is taught behind their doors is another matter altogether.

The deaths of over 60 people, most of them young police recruits aged between 15 and 25 ought to produce an overwhelming response by the state, targeting known and suspected terrorist and extremist organisations and aimed clearly and unequivocally and disabling them to the point at which they are no longer able to mount complex operations, starving them of cash, taking down their bases and exposing their activities to public scrutiny. It is not enough for senior politicians and military figures to show up at the scene of the crime, offer prayers and platitudes and then fade into the background.

Within 24 hours the dead will be buried and the process of unlearning lessons and the wiping of memories will swing into gear. The families of the dead and injured know the lessons and will remember forever, the government will riffle through its box of fig leaves kept for such events and before long the next incident, the next pile of bodies, will briefly dominate the headlines. Pakistan either fights terrorism, all terrorism, or it does not. No half measures. No favourites. Possible? At best we would give that a ‘definite maybe.’ Terrorism is never going to be entirely eradicated, but it can be tackled far more comprehensively and effectively than it is currently being addressed in Pakistan. Will the Quetta outrage be a turning point? Definitely. Maybe.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 26^th, 2016.

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