In a grisly reminder that our security worries are far from over, the Taliban have released a video showing the heads of the 17 Pakistani soldiers they ruthlessly slaughtered following a cross-border attack in the upper Dir region on Sunday. The video was released on Wednesday with the Taliban proudly claiming responsibility for this latest act of brutality. The Taliban have said that they will continue targeting the Pakistani security establishment in such vicious ways until the nation stops allying with the US and declares Islamic law throughout the country. This is the usual rhetoric one is accustomed to hearing from these cold-blooded monsters but what is not usual — and ought to serve as an eye-opener — is the fact that the Pakistani Taliban are now no longer a definable group and a clearly distinguishable enemy as the security establishment once believed. Our military and intelligence agencies have liked to think of the Taliban as being clearly divided into two types: the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ Taliban, with the good ones being the establishment’s proxies, the Afghan Taliban, including the Jalaluddin Haqqani network, recruited to wage a proxy war inside Afghanistan as a counter to US/NATO efforts in the region, and the bad Taliban being home-grown extremists, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, who rose up in arms after the army’s Lal Masjid raid that killed scores of madrassah students in July 2007. This distinction has led to the army choosing sides but now, it seems, both sets of Taliban have become two sides of the same coin. A conniving nexus seems to have been established between the Afghan Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan after the Pakistan army stormed Swat to liberate it from Taliban control. The offensive in Swat pushed the militants out of the valley and the army operations in South Waziristan, due to the US’s pressure, pushed them into North Waziristan. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan militants now, it seems, have found sanctuary in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, which, ironically, are under the Haqqani network’s control. All along, our establishment, to the detriment of the nation, has been giving safe havens to its proxies and now these same proxies seem to be returning the favour by giving shelter to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the enemies of the Pakistani state. It seems like our policy of waging proxy war by using these jihadi murderers has boomeranged to hit us hard. The very fact that attacks are now being carried out in the Dir region is an indication of how desperately the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan wants to regain its foothold in Swat, its original staging ground for warfare all over the country. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has blatantly crossed every limit of humanity with this latest act; their brutally beheading 17 of our own soldiers should be enough to cast a long shadow of doubt over our so-called ‘friendly’ proxies. It doesn’t matter now that it was the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan holding the butcher’s knife in this particular incident, what matters is that our militant proxies are providing them with cover, making them all a common enemy. These cross-border attacks are becoming a regular occurrence, a complete stain on the sovereignty we loudly declare. The beheading of our men in uniform is an act of barbarism and should be treated as nothing less. The military establishment in Pakistan must wake up to the very real dangers of courting these cold-blooded killers, whether so-called ‘good’ or ‘bad’, before the entire country is swept up in a river of blood due to misplaced concreteness in our policy. *