In the line of fire

The brutal slaying of a police superintendent and his three junior colleagues on Thursday has again shown us how vulnerable a target our law enforcers have become in volatile cities such as Quetta. In the space of four days there have been two attacks on senior policemen in the province. A suicide bombing claimed the lives of a district police chief and his guard in Chaman on Monday. Three weeks earlier a car bombing rattled an area near the office of the inspector general of police in Balochistan. More than a dozen people were killed and 20 others wounded in that attack. Earlier this month a local politician and his guard were also slain.

Like drug cartels in South America and elsewhere, terror groups in Pakistan and the region take extraordinary interest in targeting law-enforcement personnel and the reasons are obvious. They are also increasingly flexible and inventive in their manner of attack. Through their nefarious actions terrorists hope to produce wider psychological effects not just on their victims and their families but also on entire segments of society.

To limit and possibly neutralise the threat posed by terror outfits, policemen must try to turn things around and force militants to pay more attention to their own organisational security. If that can be done, it would reduce their capacity and capability of plotting and carrying out attacks. The fight has to be taken to them: it becomes imperative for law enforcers to preempt and possibly disrupt pre-attack operations.

Thursday’s killings were owned up by both the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan faction Jamaatul Ahrar and the Islamic State. This is hardly unusual — if even one or both of these claims turn out to be false. Terror groups routinely rely on hyberbole to sow the seed of fear in society.

Only a major operation can stop the current spate of attacks.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2017.

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