Daily Times

The army chief was right when he said that whether it was the APS attack or the Peshawar madrassa bombing, the enemy was the same. The tragedy in Peshawar also proved that the enemy is still active and plotting against our interests. Also that there is no line that it wouldn’t cross in trying to inflict harm upon Pakistan. That is not to say that the country, especially the military, hasn’t made substantial progress in the fight that came to our shores so suddenly. Just that the fight isn’t completely won yet and there are still small windows that the enemy can and does exploit to its advantage.

The logical thing to do is to go back to the National Action Plan (NAP) that was agreed upon in the immediate aftermath of the APS tragedy. One of the fundamental features of that Plan was ensuring information sharing between the dozens of security and intelligence agencies that operate within and outside the umbrella of the military. That is because carrying out an attack at a particular place involves complicated procedures and often one or a few agencies tend to pick up specific types of chatter which, if communicated with other agencies in time, can make all the difference between getting caughts unaware and controlling a potentially very dangerous situation.

It should help that the war in Afghanistan is almost at an end. All that remains is for the intra-Afghan dialogue to work out and since Islamabad has lent all the help that it could it expects Kabul to play an active part in wiping out anti-Pakistan terrorists from its border areas. The only reason the enemy was able to regroup was the presence of an easy safe haven across a very porous border. Once that advantage is removed, it should not take too long to round up all the bad guys and then deal with them according to the law. Pakistanis have suffered the fallout from this war for far too long. It is time for incidents like the Peshawar attack to stop once and for all. *