ON a day of deep religious commemoration, murder was committed. Peshawar bled yet again on Friday as a TTP-claimed attack on the Agricultural Training Institute left nine dead and many more injured.
The heroism of the police and security forces who helped prevent a greater tragedy is undeniable. However, the impulse of officialdom to praise an operation as successful for limiting the number of casualties is misguided. While morale must be maintained in the security apparatus and despair not allowed to spread in society, the reality is that the banned TTP was able to organise and execute a sophisticated terror strike.
The militants are surely plotting further strikes and the announcement that a number of arrests were made in and around Peshawar yesterday suggests the existence of a disturbingly active terrorist network inside the country.
The greater threat, however, emanates from the TTP sanctuaries in Afghanistan. It is in Afghanistan that the TTP leadership is believed to be based and without some steps taken to reduce the space the TTP has across the border, it may well be impossible to put an end to attacks inside Pakistan.
Thus far, the Peshawar attack has not stirred up a fresh round of cross-border accusations and recriminations — suggesting that the two states are continuing with efforts to improve bilateral ties that had threatened to fall apart. If that is true, it is welcome news and efforts must be redoubled to improve intelligence-sharing and address threats that jointly and separately affect the two countries.
The pattern has been that intelligence gathered and shared immediately in the wake of an attack can lead to important gains in the fight against militancy and deplete the upper ranks of militant groups. That in turn has the effect of reducing the effectiveness and organisational capacity of militant groups, at least temporarily.
Yet, there remains an inescapable reality: for Pakistan to obtain Afghan cooperation, Pakistan will have to cooperate with Afghanistan to address that country’s security concerns. The common fight against the militant Islamic State group can engender goodwill and reduce tensions in other areas of the bilateral relationship, but at some point the strategic questions will have to be addressed.
Given that the Afghan government recognises that a political settlement with the Afghan Taliban is the only logical end to the war in that country, Pakistan has an opportunity to prepare the ground for an intra-Afghan peace deal by nudging the Afghan Taliban towards the negotiating table and giving Kabul access to potential negotiators the government may want to hold preliminary talks with.
Clearly, that will not be easy — 16 years of war alone tell their own story. But the strategic imperatives are just as clear: peace will not be achieved in the region until the question of sanctuaries is addressed. Courage and enlightened self-interest will be needed on both sides.
Published in Dawn, December 3rd, 2017
