Terrorism is alive and thriving

If any politician or government representative comes on any media platform to tell the nation that terrorism in Pakistan is fading into the past, they should be made to sit beside the mangled corpses of a census team and their guards in Lahore. At least five died on the morning of 5th April and another dozen are severely injured. The false sense of security that was engendered by the drop in the numbers of terrorist incidents of all types in 2016 lies in bloodied rags and tatters. It should by now be clear to all concerned that the terrorists far from being defeated have merely regrouped and re-armed, cut their losses — which have been considerable — and they now return to the fray. The interval between attacks is narrowing, and the Lahore bombing of the census team appears to have been a first and is claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). There is no reason to doubt the claim but as the TTP acts as an umbrella organisation for a range of groups it is difficult to say with any certainty who the actual culprits are.

What it is possible to say with certainty is that whoever carried out the attack was resourced from within a community be it Lahore or elsewhere - but most likely Lahore. They will have had contact with a bomb-maker and found a place to sleep in the night before the attack. Somebody will have given them food and drink. They were not acting alone, and there will be a chain of command that planned and authorised the attack.

There is no expectation of an early arrest or indeed any arrest ever for this crime. It is exceedingly rare for there to be arrests of those that are the logistical support base for the bombers, equally rare for an identified command structure to be taken down and vanishingly rare for the law-enforcement agencies to move against groups, most of them already banned, that are the likely safe haven and source of funding for terrorists. Terrorism is alive and well in Pakistan because it is allowed to be.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 6^th, 2017.

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