NEARLY 30 people killed by a suicide bomber in Bajaur Agency on Friday — the news from that troubled part of Pakistan has revived memories of a couple of years ago. Bajaur, the stamping ground of Faqir Mohammad, was the site of two military operations in 2008 and 2009 that led to claims by the army that the area had been cleared and secured. So have the army’s claims turned out to be hollow? While reports from the tribal areas are difficult to verify and independent access to Fata has been severely curtailed, there is reason to believe that the security situation in Bajaur has improved substantially since the lows of the late 2000s. However, as the bombing on Friday and two other attacks in the days before it have demonstrated, the militants retain the capacity to strike in Bajaur. Part of the problem is that neighbouring Mohmand Agency still has pockets of resistance where Commander Omer Afridi’s forces are present and they do radiate instability into adjacent Bajaur. The other part of the problem is that Faqir Mohammad is still at large, hiding in either Kunar, Afghanistan, or underground in some part of Bajaur itself. Privately, officials accept that true peace is yet to come to Bajaur despite the substantial military successes and categorise the situation as a tenuous balance.

Zooming out from the specifics of Bajaur and the latest attack, stability in the tribal areas post-military operations has proved hard to establish for two reasons. One, few of the senior commanders leading the insurgency have been captured or eliminated. While the militants’ structures have been disrupted and regrouping has been hard in the face of alert forces — North Waziristan being a notable exception — senior commanders still at large will continue to plot attacks to demonstrate the reach of the militants. Two, the civilian administration has failed to rise to the challenges of a post-military operation environment. After the clear and hold phases that the military necessarily had to lead, the build phase has not really taken off. Moreover, localised operations — such as going after senior commanders in hideouts — would require broader input from local law-enforcement forces. Not everything can be left to the blunt instrument that is an army.

Nevertheless, for all the deficiencies on the ground in the bid to truly stabilise Fata, there remains a broader policy commitment that has yet to materialise: a zero-tolerance approach to militancy. It may be futile to hope for a commitment to eradicate militancy in all its forms to materialise this late in the day but the fact remains that without it Pakistan will be fire-fighting in perpetuity.