Daily Times

It was hoped that the advent of the new year would signal something different for Pakistan but we appear to be stuck in the same old quagmire. Earlier this month, the TTP slid into a tightly-patrolled area in Peshawar, killing more than 100 people and leaving countless others injured. More recently, four people were killed and another 14 injured when terrorists stormed police headquarters in the country’s biggest city, Karachi.

Just recently, PTM leader Ali Wazir, an avid critic of the government’s complacent counterterrorism, was released from jail after two years in prison for an alleged ‘criminal conspiracy’ against the state. Within 24 hours of his release, PTM activist Gulalai Ismail’s parents were acquitted in a case of treason by the Peshawar ATC. While some have characterised these events as a seismic shift, it might be too soon to draw any definitive conclusions. What is clear however is that instead of placing our faith in the TTP, we should be taking notes from the PTM and its calls for a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy.

Any progress made during counterterrorism operations in the past quickly went down the drain the second the Taliban set up a house right next door in Afghanistan. Our myopic policies are largely to blame. It wasn’t too long ago that former prime minister Imran Khan likened the Taliban to “ordinary civilians”, empowering the group to claw its way back into power. We midwifed the 2020 Doha Agreement between the Taliban and Washington, hoping that the regime in Afghanistan would use its influence over the TTP to stop its cross-border attacks in Pakistan. This did not happen. Instead, the TTP simply changed its ideological narrative ahead of the American withdrawal from Kabul to justify its military campaign in Pakistan.

Islamabad’s attempts at reconciling its differences with the TTP have not only failed at achieving their intended objective but cemented the TTP as a political stakeholder that can be reasoned with. We seem to have forgotten the hard-won national consensus enshrined in the National Action Plan that was drawn up after the TTP massacred 122 children in Peshawar. Our selective approach to counterterrorism has backfired too many times for us to repeat those mistakes. *