The worst fears of the security establishment seem to be coming true because the Afghan war endgame, if it can at all be called that, is having a very profound and pronounced effect on the situation in Pakistan. And once again, just like before, the province of Balochistan is where the trouble is starting. Incidents like the one on Sunday in Quetta, when a motorcycle bomb blast killed two policemen and injured at least 21 other people, seem like isolated hits but if experience has taught us anything it is that they are part of a very-well coordinated anti-state assault. No doubt remnants of the Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who were holed up on the Afghan side of the Durand Line ever since Operations Zarb e Azb and Rudd ul Fasaad cleansed the motherland of their presence, have found a new lease of life after the departure of American forces and a return of lawlessness and civil war to the unfortunate country. The Taliban’s gains, which have snowballed since the occupying forces left, have also created a very dangerous security vacuum, especially in the border regions, and Afghanistan’s security breakdown is now spilling over into Pakistan. There’s also very little doubt that the Indian intelligence lobby, active in Afghanistan since at least the Karzai days, has gone into overdrive in terms of financing and arming anti-Pakistan rebels. Yet our own security apparatus had factored all this into its calculations, of course, and now it must crush this budding insurgency before it can make any more trouble. The right way to go about it would be to implement the same National Action Plan (NAP) in letter and spirit that won us the war against TTP militant just a few years ago. And one of the chief components of the Plan was streamlining intelligence sharing between the dozens of agencies that litter our security landscape. Smuggling bomb parts into a city is apparently a very tedious process and all sorts of components have to be slipped into a particular place piece by piece. It is during this process that some agencies are able to pick up chatter which, if shared with others in a timely manner, can help offset even the best laid plans of the enemy. Since the situation in Afghanistan is now worsening by the day, the need for our military and police to be on their toes has hardly ever been greater. They learned precious, though painful, lessons last time. Surely they will not let thousands of innocent lives be lost to this fight ever again. *