Daily Times

Peshawar has been hit by a bomb blast once again. As a bus carrying families of the Civil Secretariat’s junior employees was travelling from Peshawar to Charsadda, a bomb planted in the bus exploded, killing 20 people, including a little girl and seven women. Thirty were injured. There seems to be no respite in the killings in a province that is targeted regularly, primarily because of its government’s unapologetic battle against the extremists. As the war in Afghanistan continues to take its toll of innumerable innocents as collateral damage, its spillover in Pakistan is bloodily tangible. President Zardari’s statement in Beijing denying the existence of ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan’s tribal areas for jihadi militants, and highlighting the loss of more than 40,000 Pakistani civilians and 5,000 soldiers does not diminish the glaring anomalies in our policy vis-à-vis our war-torn neighbour. The US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta, who during his visit to Afghanistan reiterated that as long as anti-US militants had a sanctuary in Pakistan, all attempts at stabilisation would be difficult, underlines the increasing glare of scrutiny Pakistan’s ‘strategic depth’ approach of attempting to control Afghanistan through jihadi proxies is being subjected to internationally. In the light of Pakistan’s refusal so far to open the NATO supply routes, and its ‘tacit’ support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Panetta’s statement about the US “reaching the limits of its patience” has ominous portents. The foreign ministry’s rebuttal calling Panetta’s statement an oversimplification of a very complex situation only underscores our ‘covert’, decades old intervention in Afghanistan. For the last 40 years, Pakistan’s ‘deep state’ has been instrumental in the continuation of the conflict in that country. To conquer an ‘unconquerable’ country, harbouring of jihadi militants, first in the guise of the Mujahideen and later the Taliban, has wreaked havoc. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) came into existence as ‘avengers’ after General Musharraf’s misadventure of Lal Masjid in 2007. Under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud, and later Hakeemullah Mehsud, the TTP has unleashed a wave of terror in Pakistan, sparing no part of the country. It will not abate until concrete steps are taken to scotch the snake. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain’s desire to settle matters with the terrorists will remain wishful thinking so long as the TTP and their ilk refuse to come to the negotiating table. His statement about the importance of Pakistan opening the NATO routes may have been the trigger for this latest tragedy.

Until Pakistan’s deep state understands that the desire to conquer Afghanistan will only bring more bloodshed, without the end result necessarily being to our security establishment’s satisfaction, the killing in both Pakistan and Afghanistan will not end. Until the eradication of the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban from our soil, people will continue to die, Pakistan will continue to feign innocence, and the US will incrementally become more hostile. The cost of ‘strategic depth’ may well be approaching unaffordability. *