Last year, the Taliban launched the deadliest attack in the history of Pakistan on December 16, killing at least 148 people, including 132 schoolchildren, at the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the home province of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest ever Nobel Prize laureate. She was reportedly singled out and shot in the face on October 9, 2012 by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as she rode to school in a van with other schoolgirls; she luckily survived.
The attack on the APS was unequivocally condemned nationally and internationally. What was ironic was the Afghan Taliban also condemning the attack, terming the attack on schoolchildren “un-Islamic”. Hafiz Saeed, the chief of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), whom India accuses of masterminding the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, described in a statement the murder of children as “cowardly behaviour” saying that Islam “never taught us to kill innocent children and women even in war”. On the other hand, Mohammad Khorasani, who is also known as Omer Khorasan of the Jamatul Ahrar, a faction of the TTP led by Maulana Fazllula, quickly accepted responsibility for the attack. The spokesman of the aforementioned organisation also said the assault was in retaliation for the ongoing Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan. That is why the spokesman further claimed that APS had been targeted because “almost all students were the children of army personnel”.
For the first time “I could not control my tears. I cannot explain but I wept. I know it was against the rules of our profession but it was the moment to break the rules,” one of the gravediggers, Mr Taj Muhammad, at Peshawar’s largest graveyard was quoted as saying by Associated Press (AP), further adding, “I have buried bodies of the deceased of different ages, sizes and weights. Those small bodies I have been burying since yesterday felt much heavier than any of the big ones I have buried before.”
In the 2013 general elections, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which is led by Imran Khan, won the majority of seats in the militancy hit province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Due to Mr Khan’s pro-Taliban stance, analysts say, militancy further increased. In 2014, it was reported that 39 militant outfits were operating in the province while 20 other groups were functioning in the garb of the Pakistani Taliban. As for Imran Khan, his critics still say he has not changed his pro-Taliban stance and they cite three reasons for that: first, he did not condemn the Taliban when they attacked the All Saints Church in Peshawar in 2013, killing 81 Christian worshippers. Second, he condemned the Peshawar school incident but he neither named the Taliban nor did he condemn them. Thirdly, he was quoted by a national newspaper in 2014 as saying: “The Taliban did not want to enforce sharia in the country at gunpoint but wanted to liberate it from the US war.” On the other hand, the PTI vehemently deny the charges, calling them propaganda against their party leader.
“The APC Peshawar massacre led to a supposed shift in the country’s security paradigm,” Umer Ali, who is a journalist based in Rawalpindi, points out, “Progress against the TTP militants is commendable, but the likes of JuD still remain at large, not to forget Maulana Abdul Aziz, the cleric of Lal Masjid, who vows to resume his venomous campaign as the Islamic State (IS) threat looms over our heads.” He further adds that dark times are ahead unless the security establishment quits patronising non-state actors.
After coming to power, Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan also urged peace talks with the TTP. However, soon after the attack on the APC, PM Nawaz Sharif said in a televised address said, “The Peshawar atrocity has changed Pakistan. We need to eradicate the mindset of terrorism to defeat extremism and sectarianism. This horrendous attack has shaken the nation as the terrorists attacked the future of this country.”
Moreover, the Peshawar tragedy also united both the civilian and military leaderships of the country to make the National Action Plan (NAP) in order to eradicate terrorism. Subsequently, the government presented the 21st Constitutional Amendment Bill 2015 and the Pakistan Army (Amendment) Bill 2015 for the purpose of executing NAP. Thereafter, both bills were passed. They also allowed the establishment of military courts for two years to speedily take to trial the terrorists.
In recent months, The Washington Post reported that after years of terrorist attacks, military coups and political upheaval, Pakistan for now had settled into a period of relative calm. Over the past nine months, government statistics show major terrorist attacks have declined by 70 percent and Pakistanis are flocking back to shopping malls, resorts and restaurants. But, Marvi Sirmed, a columnist for a Pakistani English daily, writes, “One important factor in NAP’s ineffectiveness has been the continuous problem of ownership and responsibility among various tiers of the state. Whereas military institutions have been eager to claim the credit for successes, the blame of failures and inaction has been invariably put on civilian security machinery. The civilian leadership and institutions on the other hand have largely been appearing as lame ducks always waiting for a nod from the mentors of former strategic assets. The reason? No one is sure which of the assets have become ‘former’.
In the Punjab province of Pakistan, Punjab Home Minister Shuja Khanzada was at the forefront in cracking down on banned outfits under NAP. Therefore, according to some media reports, he was killed in a suicide attack along with 19 other people when he was at his political office in Shadi Khan village of the Attock district. One of the Taliban-affiliated militant groups, Lashkar-e-Islam, claimed responsibility for the attack while saying it was in retaliation for military operations against them.
A Lahore based journalist told this scribe on the condition of anonymity that counterterrorism efforts had been directed towards the tribal areas and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while the government had shut its eyes on Punjab, where sectarian and religious extremist groups are based, making it now a source of terrorism. But he, on the other hand, also agrees that since December 16, 2014, when the Pakistani Taliban attacked the APS in Peshawar, the government had been leading the way for a terror free Pakistan.
Lastly, it should, however, be noted that the government must implement the NAP completely to root out extremism, which has engulfed the whole country. By doing so, children — who are builders and future of the nation — should not face such horrendous attacks in the future. The fight against war mongering elements must be carried out.
The author is a freelance journalist and researcher based in Quetta. He blogs at http://www.akbarnotezai.wordpress.com and tweets @Akbar_notezai