The relationship between a modern state and society is underpinned by the notion of a ‘social compact’: a tacit arrangement by virtue of which individuals accept certain limits on individual liberties in return for protection.

Since counterterrorism/counterinsurgency efforts by any state are — or at least should be — ultimately about protection of its citizens, a strong social compact is directly linked to a state’s resolve to fight the menace.

The Pakistani state’s outlook in terms of its duty to prioritise such protection has been nothing short of criminal neglect. Pakistani lives seem to matter much less than they should in any civilised society with a functional compact.

Let me explain this by examining the so-called watershed moments in our fight against terrorism.

The state has not prioritised its citizens’ protection.

The most recent is the announcement of the Punjab operation. The Easter Sunday terrorist attack in Lahore led the state to proclaim that the red line had been crossed. But as the media pundits got busy to laud what is undoubtedly a courageous decision, no one asked the more troubling question: why did it have to take yet another attack and the loss of another 75 lives for the state to spring into action?

Why didn’t we do this after the 2014 attack at Wagah that killed almost the same number? Why not after the many other incidents where casualties were lower? Or better yet, why must the state’s commitment always be a knee jerk reaction to a shock? Why allow things to deteriorate to the point where massive use of force, with the attendant risk of collateral damage, becomes a necessity?

Editorial: Punjab operation

Apologists would tell you that you have to wait for the timing to be right. True. But it doesn’t hold for Punjab. There is not a single thing that the state did not know or have in its toolkit two years ago that it does today in terms of being able to operate in Punjab.

And it isn’t about Punjab alone.

The state procrastinated in Swat till the district fell to the Pakistani Taliban even though analysts had been publicly warning about Fazlullah’s designs at least two years prior. Of course, once the Taliban had taken control, nothing short of a full-scale military operation could have reclaimed the area.

Thankfully, the state succeeded, but success now had to come at the cost of the largest internal displacement of people since Rwanda. No one bothered to ask the state how it justified this or the hundreds of residents who were killed and tortured by the Taliban in the months they were allowed to reign supreme in the district.

North Waziristan was no different. For five years, Gen Ashfaq Kayani kept saying he was not going to bow to American pressure and would only go in ‘when the time is right’.

Within days of Gen Raheel Sharif taking over, voices from within the army suggested that it was always clear that the operation was needed.

So while the state demanded that its citizens back the operations, and they did, the social compact question was ignored: who is responsible for the hundreds of Pakistanis killed, maimed, kidnapped, and traumatised during the five-year limbo? The state itself acknowledged that the costs were huge but only used them to suggest how deeply entrenched the terrorists were in the area and how difficult the operation would be. It never explained why it allowed things to get to this point.

Since the state was never challenged on these counts and it has never had a tradition of being accountable on its own, the pattern has continued. At APS in Peshawar, it again took 144 innocent children’s lives for Pakistan to come up with a National Action Plan.

The state maintains an abnormally high pain threshold when it comes to the lives of average Pakistanis. For the longest period, the state apparatus has remained in a purely reactive mindset — things are only done when the shock is so big that it can’t be ignored any longer. The even more troubling part is that none of these shocks were unpredictable.

The laissez-faire attitude isn’t about not being able to read the script right; it is often about dubious political interests, civil-military tussles, the primacy of self-perceived geostrategic interests over individual protection, and the lack of accountability of the state to its people.

This is a prototypical example of the social contract gone wrong.

Unless we start asking the right questions and the state feels compelled to keep the social compact front and centre of its approach to countering terrorism, we’ll be forced to ‘celebrate’ the moments when the state shows its muscle — without acknowledging that too much that is avoidable has been lost by then. And that it should never get to this point in the first place.

The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington, DC.

Published in Dawn, April 19th, 2016