The recently launched military operation in Bara may have been overshadowed by the bigger, months-old campaign in North Waziristan, but it is an important piece in the overall fight against militancy in the country for two reasons.

One, Bara tehsil’s proximity to Peshawar allows militants based in that part of the tribal areas to have an outsize effect on the security and stability of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s capital and largest city.

Read: 21 militants killed in Khyber air strikes

Two, the Mangal Bagh-led Lashkar-i-Islam had established a comprehensive fiefdom that had removed the region under its control for many years from nearly any semblance of being under the authority, or even influence, of the Pakistani state.

Unhappily, neither the army nor the civilian government has tried to explain much to the public about what the state is trying to achieve in Khyber Agency.

Contrast the publicity blitz — though often devoid of facts — that has characterised the North Waziristan operation.

Yet, piecing together what officials have said publicly — as during the Khyber political agent’s press conference on Monday — and military officials are claiming privately, it does appear that, unlike other mini operations in the past when the state has declared victory only to launch another mini operation a year or even a few months later, this time the army does mean business.

More resources have been deployed this time round and more thought appears to have gone into planning the operation.

It appears that the plan is to begin by retaking the Bara plains before moving on to the mountainous Tirah region. But it will not be easy, as the loss of over a dozen security personnel in the first days of the operation demonstrated.

While Mangal Bagh’s organisation has been weakened by defections and other losses, the TTP breakaway faction, Jamaatul Ahrar, has established a threatening presence in the agency.

Read: New TTP group 'Jamatul Ahrar' breaks away from Mullah Fazlullah

Moreover, with Mangal Bagh himself believed to be hiding out somewhere along the Pak-Afghan border, perhaps even on the Afghan side, the military has a hardened group of militant leaders to contend with — even after the elimination of Abu Jandal of the Ahrar faction.

As with all such operations, two related issues are worth highlighting.

One, Bara underlines, as though further emphasis was needed, the failed strategy of seeking to use criminals masquerading as Islamist militants as a buffer against militants fighting the Pakistani state.

While his relationship with the Pakistani security establishment has hardly been a friendly one, Mangal Bagh was certainly seen at various points as a better alternative to the banned TTP.

But such explicit or sometimes tacit deals only allowed for the expansion of militancy in Fata — because the so-called good Taliban or friendly militants always ended up creating more space for the TTP-type, anti-state militants, sometimes even opportunistically aligning with them. Second, there are a quarter of a million IDPs from Khyber — how much is the state doing to help them?