COAS Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa was right to point out that the gains made over five years of Operation Radd-ul-Fassad would not have been possible without the ‘blood of martyrs and the resilience of people’, but with terrorism rearing its ugly head yet again, there is a risk that all the lives lost and blood spilt may be in vain. Security personnel are facing an increasingly difficulty environment to dispense their duties as terrorist outfits such as the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan have singled them out as targets with the latest attack claiming the lives of at least four policemen in Peshawar on Monday. Two weeks back, five Pakistani soldiers were killed inBajaur district due to cross-border fire, most likely by the TTP. Last month 10 soldiers lost their lives in a terrorist attack on a checkpost in Balochistan’s Kech district.
The frequency of such attacks is consistently increasing, which is worryingly indicating towards a possible reversion to a state where terrorism had almost become a part of daily life. There had been the expectation that the Taliban takeover in Kabul would lead to a cessation of terrorist attacks at the hands of terrorist groups such as the TTP with the Afghan Taliban reining in their Pakistani wannabes. Clearly that has not happened and it seems unlikelier by the day that any such relief is coming.
A new dimension to this rising terrorism is the upsurge in attacks by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) that is reportedly working as an ally of the TTP. If the two organizations are cooperating and coordinating their attack across the country, that would extend their range to virtually every city in the country, and they could inflict horrible casualties. It is therefore imperative that intelligence agencies focus both attention and resources on gathering the kind of intelligence needed to stop such attacks. Pakistan’s new security policy has been linked to economic prosperity but it must be remembered that the country still faces pressures from the FATF that is likely to review progress made on its final conditions in June. It will become difficult to satisfy the FATF to keep us out of the blacklist if the country continues slipping into a fresh wave of terrorism, leading to very serious additional economic damage.
