The five deadly gun and bomb attacks that killed a number of people on ‘Black Thursday’ (Oct 15) in Lahore, Kohat and Peshawar should not have come as a surprise.

As the talk of launching a military offensive (now under way) in South Waziristan reached a crescendo, the pressure mounted, and the government machinery could do little in the face of this bloodshed. The people are now looking to the armed forces for saving them from this chaos.

Many including PPP supporters blame the military and the intelligence agencies for the present mess, and say that they should be clearing it. The critics fail to acknowledge that civilian regimes and politicians are equally to blame for this growing menace.

The Taliban began to establish themselves during Benazir Bhutto’s first government. In the 1990s, the civilians remained in power but it has been observed that the export of terrorism both to Afghanistan and territory under India continued from our soil. We always denied it, saying that our support to the Kashmiri fighters was limited to diplomatic, political and moral support.

One is fairly sure that the global community was not convinced of this claim, but it kept quiet either because it was disinterested in this part of the world, or because of its long-term strategic goals.

As we know, 9/11 changed everything. The irony is that despite Pakistan’s joining the war on terror and calling itself a frontline state, it has failed to crush terrorists on its own soil. This failure may be partly attributable to Pakistan’s poor counter-terrorism apparatus but is mainly due to a lack of political will.

Even at present, all our energies are devoted to handling the problem of terrorism only on an administrative basis. We are launching operations against the terrorists in various regions, erecting innumerable check posts throughout the country and arresting and killing people. But there is no sign yet that this war is being fought at an ideological level. In other words, we are treating the symptoms rather than the disease. This approach is not going to solve the problem. It only goes to show our shortsightedness.

The nation should be asking itself why it has such a muddle on its hands as opposed to the other Muslim countries. Where else in this world can one so easily acquire explosives, guns, grenades, rocket launchers and even anti-aircraft guns? There may be far more committed Muslim fundamentalists in some of the other countries, but their access to arms and ammunition is limited.

Almost every other citizen in this country knows about a terrorist base except for the concerned authorities who always deny its existence. For how long can we keep blaming Gen Ziaul Haq who died two decades ago and the Americans who stopped supporting the Afghan Mujahideen after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan? What have we done to manage the fundamentalists?

It is about time the state, the government and the people of Pakistan realised that the threat from the fundamentalists cannot be eliminated through operations. We keep telling the Indians that the problem of resistance in Kashmir will never end with military operations but forget to heed this advice in our own case.

The state has to reorient itself ideologically and introduce secular approaches. A uniform system of education is a must in this regard as the presence of thousands of madressahs will ensure that thousands of Taliban come out of them each year, regardless of what we do to fight them.

Students coming out of madressahs are ill-suited and ill-trained to plug into the system, and are left with little option but to start a struggle for the adoption of a system based on religion. This is what they have been taught from their childhood, and they do not know anything else; they are hardly exposed to the outside world.

Eight years have passed since 9/11, and Americans alone have given us more than $15bn in civil and military aid during this period but the number of madressahs has increased and not decreased. Isn’t this enough to realise that there is some fault with our strategy?

It is not a coincidence that madressahs flourish in regions of the country where there is acute poverty and unemployment. It is nothing short of an irony that these regions require our maximum attention but we continue to ignore them. In fact, the state of poverty and unemployment worsens after military operations.

An offer of a million rupees for becoming a suicide bomber is an attractive proposition for a young man who cannot expect to earn this kind of money even after decades of hard work. Shahadat or no shahadat, the offer in itself is sufficient to drive an unemployed youth to opt for such a catastrophic option for the sake of his family.

The pity is that the authorities at the helm of affairs in the country inspire little confidence. They appear to have no vision, and are seemingly more interested in business deals than bailing out Pakistan from its present predicament. This is not something that we can blame on other forces. It has been fostered by our internal politics and strategy. Terrorism is unlikely to fade away anytime soon. We have forgotten one important lesson of the past three decades: treachery is always cautious at first but betrays itself in the end.

aJ@Jillani.org