THE inherent tension in the dual-track approach of the government pursuing dialogue with the outlawed TTP while the military is allowed to retaliate when the security forces are targeted means that problems will bubble up every little while or so. Current events suggest that the tension is increasing and problems are mounting: a military-lite type of action is taking place in parts of North Waziristan while in Islamabad the dialogue process being run by Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan appears to be stuck in limbo, with neither the military nor the government really looking to up the ante. So talk of dialogue will continue while the military will hit back against militants without publicly clarifying what exactly is the nature of its kinetic activities in North Waziristan. This, once again, seems to be the age-old fallback option when a policy itself is confused and contradictory: do just enough to be seen to be doing something and hope that is enough to buy just enough time for events to change for the better. If that looks closer to a non-strategy than a strategy, it is. But in reality, it tends to happen quite frequently.

Perhaps though there comes a time where internal contradictions need to be sorted out firmly and decisively. The dialogue process that the interior minister is running was, in the words of the prime minister and the interior minister themselves, never meant to be the open-ended process it appears to have become. What was meant to be weeks has turned into months with no end in sight. Perhaps the PML-N was never honest with the public to begin with, that its goal was always to bring violence down in the short- and medium-term rather than to find a long-term solution to militancy. But for a government elected for five years, why put so much on the line for a few weeks or months of relative quiet? The government would like to cast its efforts on the dialogue front as determination, but to many analysts and observers of militancy is looks like desperation. Dialogue can always be brought back on the agenda – once the militants are under enough pressure to see no alternative other than to push for some kind of deal themselves.

Yet, if the government’s approach is flawed, the military’s piecemeal, ad hoc retaliation framework makes even less sense. The best that can be said about retaliation is that it raises the costs on the militants when they attack the security forces, but, from a national perspective, that just encourages the militants to hit soft, civilian targets. And that of course would further undermine the government’s push for dialogue. Unhappily, neither the government nor the military appears willing to genuinely resolve the contradictions in the approach to tamp militancy down nationally.

Published in Dawn, May 26th, 2014