A SPATE of publicity surrounding militant cells linked to extremist groups being broken up in recent weeks, and some kind of violent reprisal was near inevitable. It seems to have come in Sukkur on Wednesday evening with the ISI offices bearing the brunt of a well-coordinated and sophisticated attack. After each such attack, part of a seemingly endless and utterly vicious cat-and-mouse game, the usual points are belaboured: there is no coherent strategy in the war against militancy; operational lessons are never truly absorbed; the enemy is cannier and more sophisticated and adaptive than given credit for; and a root-and-branch overhaul of state and society is needed if the threat of terrorism, militancy and extremism is ever to be defeated.

Yet, in the aftermath of Wednesday’s attack, there are at least two points that are worth dwelling on some more. First, the problem of security being fatally compromised in Ramazan around the time the daily fast is broken has not been addressed. The Marriott bombing in 2008 demonstrated just how deadly a breakdown of discipline among security personnel can be. Five years on, the need for extra vigilance and alertness around iftar time has clearly not been hammered into even those tasked with protecting the most likely of targets. The problem sits at the crossroads of societal trends and the decline of institutional discipline. The primacy of breaking the daily fast in a particular manner appears to have trumped even the individual’s instinct to protect his own life — and even the armed forces appear unable to drill home the message that guards must stand guard and everyone in certain high-risk locations must be extra vigilant in the minutes before and after the fast is broken. Quite how the problem can be fixed is truly a vexing question.

Second, the ISI’s lead role in not just the intelligence side of counterterrorism but also at the operational end needs to be rethought. Tracking down militants is an intelligence agency’s job; taking out militants and physically dismantling militant organisations is a job for law-enforcement agencies, particularly the police, and within the police, specialised teams handling counterterrorism responsibilities. An intelligence agency, even a military-run intelligence agency, is best shielded from a front-line role in the operational parts of counterterrorism: because it distracts from the core of the intelligence mission; because it involves too many ancillary skills; and because it makes the agency itself a core target of the militants. An overarching role for the ISI in counterterrorism is boomeranging on the organisation itself.