One reason terrorists have been able to make an easy comeback is that the state didn’t finish them off once they were defeated and beat a hasty retreat across the Durand Line into Afghanistan. Yet now that the return of the Afghan Taliban to Kabul has emboldened TTP (Tehreek e Taliban Pakistan) and, despite assurances to the contrary, they’ve been allowed to use Afghan soil to attack Pakistan, the security forces have had to wake up all over again. Little surprise, then, that the prime minister wants to revisit the National Action Program (NAP) that was hammered out after the Peshawar school atrocity and laid down the security blueprint that ultimately won us that war.
Still, it was never fully implemented because nobody bothered with it once the fight had been won. But now, shocking details about what the enemy has been up to all this time are forcing the government to go right back to the drawing board. TTP has formed alliances with local outfits like Baloch Liberation Army, and they’re definitely providing each other logistical and material support. The profile of the female suicide bomber involved in the Karachi University attack must have sent shivers down the spines of security personnel. Here’s a decently well-off mother of two, with no known reason for discontent against the state, willingly blowing herself up in broad daylight to prove a point and hurt the country’s fragile economy by targeting the Chinese.
It seems the state is beginning to realise that it has been caught behind the curve a little on the matter of internal security. The armed forces did an admirable job when successive military operations broke TTP’s back and their orgy of death and destruction was finally brought to an end. Nobody can forget that the country paid in blood and tears for a job well done; losing more than 80,000 people to TTP’s attempt to take over the country.
Now, with TTP attempting to resuscitate its insurgency, the state must make sure that every point in NAP is followed to the letter and that the enemy is crushed completely; once and for all. *