IN my reckoning, two big things happened in Pakistan this past week. Everyone is talking about one and largely glossing over the other. It might be a stretch to make a link between the audacious attack on Karachi airport and the passing of the ‘Balochi Lenin’ Khair Bakhsh Marri, but then it is only by truly stretching the imagination that one can make sense of this country’s very opaque structure of power.

There are two wars going on simultaneously in Pakistan today. The one that garners most of our attention is centred in the northwest, predominantly Pakhtun regions, but spills over regularly into major urban centres. The other war is largely hidden to all but the protagonists because its major battlegrounds are in that vast, unknown expanse that is Balochistan.

Events in Karachi set off yet another round of accusations and counter-accusations relating to the question of how to ‘solve’ the problem of ‘terrorism’. The truth is that we are no closer to finding this solution than we were 12 years ago when ‘terrorism’ became the biggest public concern in the country.

Meanwhile the death of arguably the biggest icon of the Baloch national movement did not, sadly, precipitate any meaningful debate about the ongoing mini-civil war in Balochistan. In short, we do not seem to crave a solution to the Baloch ‘problem’ nearly as badly as the ‘terrorism’ one.

Two wars are going on at the same time.

I am hard-pressed to understand exactly how it is possible to end one brutal conflict and let the other be. After all, the Pakistani state — its security apparatus specifically — is directly implicated in both. The position that this same state should, via military operations or whatever else, cleanse society of ‘terrorism’ and also stop terrorising the Baloch people, is simply untenable.

The straightforward reality is that there is no short-term solution to ‘terrorism’, just as there is no chance that the Pakistani military will stop brutalising Balochistan just because our progressive sensibilities demand it.

One need only read the regular reports printed in this newspaper about shifting alignments between religious militants, and ‘peace agreements’ between certain factions and the Pakistani state, to recognise that there is no consistent state policy in this regard. On the one hand, ‘pro-government’ militants are implicitly acknowledged ‘freedom fighters’ because they supposedly focus their energies on fighting infidels in Afghanistan and on the other hand ‘anti-government’ militants are dismissed as ‘terrorists’.

So presumably the military bombardments to have taken place in parts of Waziristan and Tirah valley in recent weeks targeted the ‘anti-government’ militants who repaid the favour with the Karachi airport attack. If we assume for a minute that this profound state policy of distinguishing the proverbial ‘good Taliban’ from the ‘bad Taliban’ is successful and the latter are (magically) subdued or chased out of the country, will ‘terrorism’ be definitively defeated?

The utter futility of this dualistic policy proves, for some, that we should just take them all on. Herein lies the rub. For at least three decades prior to 2001, every functionary of the security apparatus had been convinced of the inherent righteousness of jihad. It is staggering that so many of us just expect that George W. Bush’s ‘you are either with us or against us’ ultimatum would force comprehensive change in the way that this security apparatus thought and functioned.

Yes, Musharraf and his generals may have said what Washington wanted to hear at the time, but even if the top brass was convinced that change had to come — which is doubtful — it takes time to dismantle structures that have been so meticulously built over such a long period.

There is growing evidence that the security apparatus is at war with itself as much as with the ‘terrorists’. And it is still unclear that the will to transform itself really exists. How, for example, is it possible to ignore the fact that the Jamaatud-Dawa chief of ‘hate India’ fame waltzed through the federal capital on the anniversary of the nuclear tests with a full security escort?

This brings me back to Balochistan. Khair Bakhsh Marri was a man privy to Pakistani corridors of power, elected to the National Assembly in 1970, and part of the National Awami Party government to rule Balochistan for 18 months after that election. Yet later he became the spiritual father of what many consider a legitimate war of national liberation against the state. Is there any evidence today that the Pakistani security apparatus has changed its colonial attitude and policy towards the Baloch, which drove Khair Bakhsh towards militancy?

If there is a problem that needs solving, it is the state; ‘terrorism’ is not something we can understand or tackle without a politics that seeks to transform the state. Where does that leave us? With no short cuts, and an urgent need of exactly such a politics.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.