No doubt relevant civil and military agencies keep a sharp eye on security at all times, yet as Monday’s IED attack on security personnel in Quetta that injured four showed – the second such attack within a week in the same city – militants need only the smallest window not just to kill and maim but also to record their presence. Now, yet again, the whole world will talk about bombs going off in Pakistan just when the country is desperate to project a sense of calm and attract foreign investment. Keeping the peace in Balochistan is also central to the success of CPEC, since that is precisely where most of the mega project’s production centres are going to be concentrated. Already the project needed some life breathed into it; which is why Prime Minister Imran Khan himself led a mission to Beijing recently. PTI may have inherited a number of unnecessary problems from its predecessors, but nobody can say that it didn’t walk into a far more comfortable security situation. It is, therefore, now in a much better position to appreciate what magnitude of problems both PML-N and PPP governments must have faced with regard to keeping and attracting both foreign and local investment. Perhaps such facts should also be factored into PTI arguments when it laments the foreign debt having risen so drastically in those ten years. And that, most importantly, is why the gains of the last few years must not be wasted. It takes very little, as we know all too well, for an incident here or there to snowball pretty much up and down the country. We are, mercifully, far removed from such dark days. But if they cast even a small shadow once again we would be thrown into the wilderness all over again. Worsening security, in short, could well push us towards financial default. The solution, still, lies in properly implementing the National Action Plan (NAP). Sadly it took the great tragedy of the Peshawar school carnage for all politicians to unite and hammer out the Plan, but then the implementation always left a little something to be desired. Intel-sharing among the various agencies that litter the security landscape, for example, was never really up to the mark. That is why militants are able to smuggle components that they use to strike with IEDs with such deadly effect. If, while this government corrects all that is wrong with the country, it can also ensure proper implementation of NAP, it will not only save the people but also the economy. *