On the morning of Monday, March 7, at least 16 people, including three police personnel, were killed in a suicide bomb attack just outside the premises of a court building in the Shabqadar locality of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Charsadda district. A suicide bomber was attempting to enter the court building but was intercepted by a security guard, after which the bomber blew himself up, causing a huge explosion at the scene in which multiple people lost their lives and many more got injured, with many of the casualties being women and children. The attack is particularly notable for two reasons. For one, this latest attack comes only two months after Charsadda suffered the deadly attack on Bacha Khan University (BKU) in which 22 people were killed by militants, who scaled the walls of the university and set out to repeat the horrific violence first witnessed during the Peshawar Army Public School (APS) massacre. The BKU attack was a warning bell and revealed the complacency that had gripped Pakistan’s security apparatus after apparent decisive victories during the Operation Zarb-e-Azb as well as showed the difficulty inherent in predicting the targets of militants and stopping them at every turn. This attack, in the same region and so soon after that earlier tragedy, however, shows that lessons are still not being learned and that militants continue to survive and thrive in an area that should have been heavily securitised after that earlier lapse. Secondly, the attack has been claimed by Jamatul Ahrar, a splinter group of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), in an email sent out to journalists wherein the attack was justified as a vengeful response to Mumtaz Qadri’s execution. Military success against militants in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas is doubtlessly a major feather in the cap of the state, and ever since the Operation Zarb-e-Azb started we have witnessed a significant downturn in militant activity. However, this should not be taken to mean that the ‘back of the terrorists’ has been broken because they are simply down rather than being out. While taking a beating, they have revised their strategy and the trend of militants post-Zarb-e-Azb is also by now clear. Rather than targeting security establishments or military offices, they now go after so-called ‘soft targets’ that are less likely to attract the full attention of security details. The National Action Plan that was meant to complement military operations in Wazirstan and root out hidden cells and networks of terrorists, as well as target the hateful ideology these terrorists feed off of, has not been very effective due to lack of internal consistency and resolve. In a recent press conference, Director General of Inter Services Public Relations Lt-General Asim Bajwa revealed how different terrorist groups operating within Pakistan were bolstered by relying on a shared nexus of operatives. So while militants have learned to pool resources, the various arms of the state are still streamlined when it comes to combating terrorism. Provincial police forces, the military and civilian intelligence agencies, military and other federal and local law enforcement agencies need to pool their resources and intel about different terrorist networks and operatives together to ensure that no gaps of knowledge are left of which terrorists can take advantage of. While the state’s operational capacity to target terrorists in urban sphere and pre-empt terrorist attacks leaves a lot to be desired, the use of Qadri’s name by Jamatul Ahrar represents an even more dangerous reality. After the APS attack, in which nearly 140 schoolchildren were brutally murdered, the public’s sympathy for the TTP plummeted. Previously, terrorists had relied on presenting themselves as ‘Islamic warriors’ who were only fighting a state that had been in bed with an ‘infidel foreign power’ (i.e. the US), and as such managed to have the sympathies of a significant portion of the population. But the brutal attack on children, and the subsequent decisive pushback by the state, resulted in a near-unanimous will of the people to see the back of this menace. But considering how in the aftermath of Qadri’s execution, there have been hordes of protests led by intolerant but mainstream right-wing parties that have inflamed passions against the state in favour of a dishonourable coward, the TTP may have found a way to tap back into the sympathies of these people. The implications of this eventuality must be realised by the state and the mainstream religious parties, and the dangerous rhetoric being thrown around needs to be curbed before even more damage is made possible. *