Terror in Karachi

The menace is far from over

That terrorism still has teeth was shown in Karachi in the attack on Rangers headquarters there, which though foiled by the alertness and professionalism of the Rangers personnel, also threw into relief how terrorism, though checked, has not been eliminated. The incident showed once again that Karachi is a favoured destination for terrorists, with incidents ranging from the 2002 murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl to the 2011 attack on the Naval Air Base in which two P3C Orions were destroyed, to the 2022 attack killing three Confucius Institute teachers of Chinese.

One reason for this is that many terrorists have moved from the stronghold of South Waziristan into what is the largest Pashtun city in the world. The problem with that information is that it leads to racial profiling, and the local police have in the past extracted bribes from the families of innocent Pashtuns picked up to terrorism charges, for their release. The latest outrage should not lead down that rabbit hole. Apart from the existence of a pool of recruits, there is the possibility of a single organization carrying out these attacks, which is additionally dangerous, for it means that the group develops collective memory and thus a knowledge of best practices, thus making them that much harder to trace and to combat. The real vulnerability of such outfits is to human intelligence. If the intelligence agencies, both civilian and military, were doing their job properly, these groups would be so deeply penetrated that they could not carry out an operation on the scale of Saturday evening’s attack.

The government must consider whether the Rangers have become too much part of the city landscape, and are considered just another law-enforcing agency, like the police. After all, they have been operating in Karachi since 1989. It must also redouble the intelligence effort, not with a view to hounding anyone, or even punishing the other culprits (especially any facilitators), but of preventing any such future attacks. The number of attacks is too small to draw any firm conclusions, but that being said, it does seem that there is a slight uptick in frequency. That means that trying to prevent further attacks is worthwhile. Terrorism is a hydra-headed monster, and even as the Karachi attack took place, there were operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The terrorists have to be eliminated, not just brought under pressure.