Daily Times

There’s only so far that the state can go to ensure peace. Whether or not anybody agreed with the government’s decision to initiate peace talks with TTP, it can’t be called out for not going all the way to completely rule out any more terrorism in the country. The offer of amnesty was never meant for the hardened core of TTP, only for its foot soldiers whose future could still be salvaged by offering them something better before they caused more damage than could be forgiven. The government even freed TTP prisoners who had completed the deradicalization process.

Yet, TTP still suddenly ended the truce. Its reason is that the government did not release all the prisoners that it asked for. That shows that it completely misread the peace offer. Surely it’s absurd to think that there was ever such a deal on the table. The government only ever agreed to releasing prisoners that hadn’t committed hard terrorism, and that too when they had completed the long and thorough process of deradicalization. And in this regard at least, it was true to its word. But now that the whole thing has fallen through security agencies should be on their guard just in case these terrorists decide to make a statement, so to speak, with a hit inside Pakistan.

The Taliban regime, which proposed and facilitated these talks, must also be told of the arrangement’s failure and also that we’d like a tight watch on TTP in future. Of late, there has been a tendency on the part of other parties to take Pakistan’s peace gestures as a sign of its weakness. This is what happened with India, as the prime minister himself pointed out the other day, and this is what seemed to have happened here again.

It’s a shame, at the end of the day, that more bombs will most likely go off, more people will be targeted, and there will be more military action before everybody is made to understand the value of lasting peace. *