IT was an attack that was waiting to happen. While few would have thought that the Wagah border, where an aggressive closing ceremony each evening is meant to whip up nationalist fervour, would be the target of the biggest attack yet by militants since the start of the military’s Operation Zarb-i-Azb, it is also true that it is the security forces and installations that are usually singled out by the militants.

However, while ordinary civilians often end up as victims because they happen to be near the venue, yesterday’s suicide attack raises the possibility of those who had come to watch the ceremony being deliberately targeted because of their perceived support for the security forces.

The attack has claimed dozens of lives, and the focus at the moment should be on ensuring the injured survive and that the families of the dead are taken care of. After that though the hard questions will have to be taken up once more — if the state’s security and foreign policy apparatus is willing to reflect on what the Wagah incident could mean for the country going forward.

The country clearly continues to be stalked by a complex, overlapping and dizzyingly varied militant threat. If internal security — peace, stability and the conditions for economic and social progress — is elusive it is because the state — the sum total of the civilian government and army-led security establishment — has an inadequate approach.

Even with the best policies in the world, Pakistan will not overnight become internally stable and secure. Operation Zarb-i-Azb has been treated as some kind of panacea in certain quarters, when, without a supporting anti-militancy narrative, it can only amount to surgery on a limb of a body with many afflictions.

Whoever it is that sent a bomber to kill Pakistani civilians (in these early hours the separate claims of Jundullah and Jamaatul Ahrar cannot be independently verified) the fact of the matter is that Pakistan has far too many groups with options when it comes to killing Pakistanis.

Until those groups are eliminated and until the steady, seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers, fidayeen fighters and sundry other militants is shut down, Pakistanis will not be safe. Unfortunately, there is little to suggest that the state knows how to rid Pakistan of the religious extremism, militancy and terrorism that has blighted this country for decades now.

Finally, insecure, often defenceless, as Pakistanis are inside their own country, the site of yesterday’s attack is also a reminder that Pakistan’s borders — east, west and southwest — are major flashpoints. Peace externally and security internally is the only recipe for a stable Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2014