WITH more than a dozen killed and scores injured, the suicide attack in Darra Adamkhel that apparently was meant to target an anti-Taliban lashkar leadership but ended up killing and injuring ordinary civilians is yet another grim reminder that all is far from well in the tribal areas and adjoining districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. But grim reminder after grim reminder has come and gone and still the state is struggling to contain, let alone eliminate, the threat from militancy. Few areas have truly been stabilised despite operations in six of the seven agencies of Fata and in Swat and other parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Today, the Tirah valley nestled between the Khyber and Kurram agencies and North Waziristan are the areas in which the state has virtually no control and yet this intolerable state of affairs is somehow tolerated on various grounds. While some concerns cannot be entirely dismissed, there is a sense in more independent quarters outside the army-led security establishment that the factors cited in delaying action are neither as serious nor as unresolvable as sometimes argued.

Undoubtedly, given the peculiar political history of this country and the near-total control over security policy that the army-led establishment has, the resolve to stamp out militancy will have to come from the military. But that argument, while true, has had the unfortunate effect of deflecting attention from the civilian leadership’s culpability in the present state of affairs. While a military strategy is the fundamental plank of recovering parts of Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from the grip of militancy, by itself it can never be an adequate strategy. Development, governance, education, jobs — all of those are central elements of any winning long-term strategy against militancy. And none of those elements can be provided by the armed forces because that is simply not what they are meant for or capable of. So without the civilians stepping up and doing what they are by definition expected to do — to devise and implement policy in a range of areas — the fiendishly complex riddle of militancy will never be solved.

There is also another element that the civilians have fallen terribly short of: putting pressure on and working with the establishment to establish a zero-tolerance policy towards militancy. At the moment, it seems that the job of making the establishment recognise the folly of its ways has been left to the media, to civil society and to individual voices. The politicians can and must do better.