The smoke that hung over Islamabad’s G-11 court complex was more than the remnants of a blast. Let’s go through the events again. In the middle of a workday, a bomber tried to force his way inside, failed, and detonated at the gate. Twelve people died. Dozens more were carried out bleeding. The capital, convinced it had left such scenes behind, learned otherwise in a single instant. As if to punctuate the tragedy, it happened on a day when diplomats were in town and Rawalpindi hosted a cricket match when the city was supposed to be at its sharpest. It wasn’t.
Hours earlier and hundreds of kilometres away, gunmen slammed an explosives-packed vehicle into Cadet College Wana, then tried to burrow in and seize children. Security forces fought room to room; civilians-more than five hundred cadets and staff-were pulled out. Officials said the assailants were in touch with handlers across the border throughout the siege.
The parallels with our worst nightmares were deliberate, and the intent was to hold a nation’s children hostage to fear. Islamabad and Wana are two ends of the same thread. One shows the reach of a network that no longer respects boundaries; the other shows the fragility of a frontier we keep misreading. That a war long fought in ravines and border towns has walked back into the city cannot be emphasised enough.
The government’s own language seems to have finally caught up. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif called it plainly “a state of war” and, in the same breath, dismissed hopes that talks with Kabul will magically solve a problem Kabul refuses to confront. “Bringing this war all the way to Islamabad” was, he said, a message we cannot misread.
A country fighting an internal war cannot afford bone-deep polarisation.
The prime minister underscored the same point in Islamabad, saying lasting peace depends on Kabul restraining groups that operate from Afghan soil. It also sets a bar: if the Afghan Taliban won’t deliver on the minimum-denying space to outfits that attack us-then photo-op summits and round-tables are self-deception. Numbers tell the rest of the story.
Last year alone, Pakistan logged 444 militant attacks and at least 1,600 dead–security personnel and civilians together–according to the Centre for Research and Security Studies. This year’s curve is steeper. Reports already claim hundreds of incidents against the TTP and allied factions. Even in Islamabad, civilians had not been targeted at this scale for a decade. The wheel has turned, and it has turned fast. The militants are not fighting out of nostalgia. They are better trained, networked, and equipped. Islamabad has repeatedly warned the world about modern weapons abandoned in Afghanistan, now finding a place in terrorist hands.
Add encrypted comms, cross-border mobility and external financing, and you have a deadlier insurgency than the one we beat back a decade ago. If there is a reckoning to be had, it begins at home. We beat terror once because the state, for a time, decided there would be no alibis and no “good” militants. The National Action Plan was drafted in grief and enforced with grit. Then we got distracted.
Its hardest planks–regulation of seminaries, zero tolerance for hate speech and terror finance, reforms in the merged districts–were left half-built. Bureaucracies lapsed back into routine, budgets shrank, political wars took centre stage, and militants quietly reconstituted. It is not enough to invoke NAP after each atrocity.
It has to be funded, measured and reported, point by point. Parliament should demand a quarterly scorecard on every NAP clause: completed, delayed, or sabotaged-by whom. The capital’s blast exposes operational gaps, too. The attacker loitered, tried to enter, and detonated by a police vehicle. That is a failure of perimeter design, access control, and pattern-of-life monitoring around a known soft target. Islamabad-and every provincial capital-needs a hard reset of “safe city” practices, may they be concentric security rings at courts and hospitals; randomised patrol patterns; layered screening with walk-throughs and canine units; and a single, fused watch floor where civilian and military feeds actually talk to each other.
These are not silver bullets. They are the basics we should have never unlearned. But walls and cameras won’t carry us over the line. Two strategic pivots are overdue. First, policy unity. Counterterrorism cannot ping-pong between maximalist operations and half-baked reconciliations. If the state says there will be no armed non-state actor on our soil, it must mean it-without footnotes, no matter the target or theatre. That principle needs to be codified beyond communiqués: tighten terror-finance laws; give anti-terror courts the resources and witness protection they actually need; bury the temptation to revive opaque, ad-hoc justice. Transparent trials that end in swift, lawful punishment are not softness. To state the opposite, they are strength that endures.
Second, border realism. Pakistan cannot subcontract its security to promises made in Kabul. If Afghan territory continues to be used, we will have to combine diplomacy with calibrated coercion-sanctions designations for facilitators, multilateral pressure through Doha interlocutors, and, when absolutely necessary and defensible under international law, limited, precise actions against imminent threats. We have already seen the cycle: attacks, denials, skirmishes, talks that go nowhere. It is time that the cycle extracted costs from the enablers, not only the victims.
There is also the front we rarely name: the ideological supply chain. Teenagers do not wake up radical. They are primed through the pipeline that runs through classrooms that glorify death, pulpits that launder violence, and online channels that weaponise grievance. The state’s instruments exist: curriculum reform, clergy engagement, and prosecution of speech that incites murder. They are used sporadically, then shelved. Use them. Consistently.
None of this obviates the need for politics. A country fighting an internal war cannot afford bone-deep polarisation. The government would have to convene a multi-party national security committee with real oversight; access to briefings, the power to summon officials, and the duty to face the public every month with facts. Our enemies will test our pledges tomorrow morning. They will look for the gap–the unguarded gate at a hospital, the unshared lead in a file, the political crisis that drags our gaze away. The only answer is competence, consistency and a national compact that says never again will we confuse wishful thinking for strategy. Islamabad’s blast and Wana’s siege were meant to make us feel small. Let them, instead, force the state to grow up.
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. She tweets @DureAkram.