THE juxtaposition between Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan’s words uttered to a think tank audience in Washington D.C. and events in his hometown of Rawalpindi on Wednesday demonstrated just how far the state still has to go before the militancy threat can be defeated.

After yet another attack on an imambargah this week a pattern is now undeniable: sectarian strife is being deliberately stoked by militant elements.

Quite why that is so can only be debated at this point. What is well-known is that the militants have a menu of opponents that they wish to attack and, depending on the circumstances, they tend to concentrate on certain categories at any given time.

Also read: Need to work overtime to end sectarian attacks: Nisar

After the Peshawar school massacre, security has been stepped up around core military and governmental targets, perhaps putting them out of the militants’ reach for now.

Or it could be that the wave of arrests, detentions and killings of militants after the Peshawar school attack has shaken the militants and left them unable to mount immediate attacks on anything other than relatively soft targets, such as places of worship, which must remain open to the public and so are always vulnerable to breach by suicide bombers and armed gunmen.

Finally, there could an international element to the rise in sectarian attacks here, with sectarian battles growing in various parts of the Middle East — the so-called IS effect, whether real or virtual.

Whatever the case — and it could well be a combination of the above reasons in addition to several others — the basic question remains the same: what is the state doing to combat such forms of terrorism and the extremist environments that help create new militants?

Going by the words of the interior minister in Washington D.C., the answer seems to remain: not much.

In his comments on Wednesday, the interior minister seems to have stuck to a familiar script: glossing over his government’s — and his own personal — culpability in long pursuing talks with the people who follow their “animal instinct”, ie the banned TTP; claiming that the December Peshawar school attack was a turning point; and suggesting that the government is serious in pursuing a full-spectrum approach to fighting terrorism — but then failing to really develop or deploy that full-spectrum approach.

Consider the issue of sectarianism. Capturing or killing sectarian militants is a way to bring down the intensity of attacks, but no more.

To truly roll back sectarianism and to do so methodically, the state needs to work on the engines of hate: the preachers, the literature, the extremist mosque-madressah-social welfare network that urges citizens to consider each other enemies and provides new recruits for the armed groups.

But none of that is happening and it cannot happen until the state is forthright about which groups are involved and names the leadership of these groups directly.

How can an enemy that a state is unwilling to meaningfully define be defeated?

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play