Pattern of terrorism and our response

Pakistan is losing the battle in the mind. This includes minds of ministers, political figures who.

There is no doubt that the Taliban had prepared a more elaborate plan of terrorist action during Ashura this year than in the past. They had given a warning about it and the Pakistani state was amply forewarned and to some extent, better prepared. It needs to be stated, however, that the Taliban’s strength shows no sign of abating despite rumours of their internal fragmentation.

On November 22, a bomb stashed in a vegetable vehicle near an imambargah in Karachi was defused successfully. Another concealed in a can was more amateurish and its five-kilogramme load was without a timer or any other detonation device. Karachi, despite adverse publicity from the probing media, seemed somewhat better prepared. For the Ninth and Tenth of Muharram, the city will have 40,000 officials of the police, Rangers and FC deployed with CCTV cameras and restricted traffic in critical areas.

In the rest of the country, the Taliban had devised more organised destruction: the suicide bombing of a Muharram procession in Rawalpindi killed 23 but a closer look at how the mayhem unfolded tells us that the bombing did not go as planned after the bomber was stopped from entering the main body of the procession. Telltale hand grenades told the story of the attackers’ original plan. Suicide bombers were caught in Peshawar and a planted bomb defused.

The D-Day is the climax of Ashura, the Ninth and Tenth of Muharram. The government is losing the media battle and has lost trust of the people but is nonetheless facing up to the challenge despite paucity of funds and untrained police manpower. It is relying on the people themselves to take precautionary measures, which are not popular: suspending cellular services and banning pillion riding in cities where people have to go to their jobs or starve in a collapsing economy.



Punjab, better off on record than the other provinces in countering terrorism, is also worried this time because of a number of daring acts carried out on its territory earlier, including the killing of military personnel near Gujrat. The inspector general of the Punjab police has made elaborate antiterrorism plan and is strengthened in his confidence by the capture of two Taliban-linked terrorists who had killed our soldiers.

As for the rest of the country, the situation seems bleak as ever, with every passing day of the month of Muharram, causing either high anxiety or bringing reports of an actual attack. In the past few days, several attacks have taken place, causing scores of deaths, suggesting that the assault on the country’s Shias, by highly misguided bigoted groups is, unfortunately, continuing and instead of coming with any long-term strategy, the state is left with little choice but to respond to it — for now — on a day-to-day basis.

Every Muharram, the Taliban and their allied sectarian and militant outfits make a show of their strength. It is psychological war against the state and it is succeeding every time the victim after escaping death says the Americans had tried to kill him. This is humiliating because this pathology of fear comes after the Taliban have claimed that they mounted the attack. And it will, unfortunately, continue to happen until the state is united and mounts a wholesale offensive – military and non-military – against those involved in perpetrating violence on its citizens on the basis of their sect.

Where Pakistan is losing the battle is the mind. And that includes the minds of our ministers and political figures who take great pains to ‘explain’ terrorism as ‘foreign hand’, carefully ignoring the claims of strikes made by Hakeemullah Mehsud’s spokesmen in North Waziristan. Psychologically, it can only be explained as defeatism because the ‘foreign hand’ posited by them includes countries Pakistan can do nothing against. If America, India and Israel are involved in terrorism here, then we should say goodbye to Pakistan because we are not in a position to attack them except that we should reactivate our non-state actors who have brought only shame to us.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2012.