Pakistan fights back after wave of terrorist attacks

After nearly two years of considerable calm following the successful Zarb-e-Azb military operation to fight terrorism and extremism, Pakistanis wonder if the slew of attacks last week is pushing the country back to Square One.Raheel Sharif, the recently retired army chief, who commanded the operation, gave his compatriots to believe that the end was nigh for terrorists and even set himself a high-octane goal when he claimed 2016 would be the year when the evil is nipped in the bud.However, this past week has shown that Pakistan is some distance in an existential fight from decimating the evil that is taking new forms from across its borders in a highly complex theatre of strategic warfare. Suicide attacks in all of the country’s provinces, one after the other, against a different set of targets, with a different set of claimants suggest there is a certain organisational streak to it at the back-end. The inference is that it would be extremely difficult for militant group/s to take on the might of the state given that Zarb-e-Azb appeared to have rendered them incapable of creating cataclysmic chaos. The run of suicide attacks may have had the desired effect; making the country look like a ‘no-go’ area, and therefore, marked out as a ‘terror fount’ at a time when the global order is undergoing reorientation with the like of Donald Trump becoming the commander-in-chief of the world’s sole superpower.It began with a bomb blast in Chaman (Balochistan province) on February 7 that killed two and continued with one fatality in an IED blast in Bajaur Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (Fata) on February 11; three, in a similar attack in South Waziristan in northwest Pakistan on February 12; two, in a grenade blast in Buner (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province) the same day; also two, in an IED explosion in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, on February 13; another 13 in a suicide attack in Lahore, provincial capital of Punjab province, the same day; one in Peshawar, the provincial capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, in a suicide blast on February 15; and 72 (the toll now is 88) on February 19 in another suicide attack in Sehwan in Sindh province.The attack in Lahore’s famous Charing Cross on the Mall Road was claimed by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, an offshoot of Tehrik-e-Taleban based in Afghanistan; the Quetta explosion by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Al Alami faction; the Mohmand attack by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar; the Peshawar blast by Tehrik-e-Taleban Pakistan; the Sehwan attack by ISIL (also known as ISIS); while there is no claimant yet for the South Waziristan killing.The attack on the shrine of Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan town in Sindh province also plays into the idea of a country riven by religious/sectarian strife. Typically, the foreign narrative appears to project this as some sort of attack by an ultra-conservative sectarian group on the faithful of another, but this isn’t the case. In fact, the shrine of Lal Shahbaz – real name Syed Usman Marwandi – with the title of Qalandar (an honorific denoting a highly gifted spiritual rank) draws devotees in their thousands every Thursday beyond the classification of religion, what to speak of sect. It became a soft target precisely because it can create the kind of impact the enemies deigned.It is a measure of the spiritual connect seen at the shrine of the saint that the regular dhamaal – a form of devotional percussion and ecstatic Sufi dance – resumed as devotees flocked to the rendezvous where 24 hours earlier more than 80 people had lost their lives, including 24 children in the ages 4-8, when a suicide attacker blew up!A place where the rich and the poor, the formal and the informal, the orthodox and the heterodox, the worldly and the spiritual, the young and the old, the women and the children converge without a care for class, creed, colour and gender – a massive emblem in a society deemed conservative – could not have left a more profound impact. Intriguingly, the Sehwan attack was claimed by ISIL. A similar claim was also made when 52 people were killed in another suicide attack on another shrine in Balochistan last November. During the recent attacks in the province, sources in the Pakistani law enforcement agencies intercepted WhatsApp communications that found one local group messaging another for a related Middle East-based group to own up responsibility for one such attack. The idea was to confound the Pakistani authorities, who suspect such claims to be a part of a grand design to build a narrative about the presence of ISIS on Pakistani soil. Meanwhile, eschewing the longstanding policy of restraint, Afghan diplomats were first summoned to the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi by the Army following the Sehwan attack and handed over a list of 76 most wanted terrorists with a demand to take immediate action against them or to hand them over to Pakistan. Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa also called US General John Nicholson, Resolute Support Mission commander in Afghanistan, to seek his assistance in the matter.However, with no response coming forth from Kabul, Pakistan closed the Afghan border and its army blitzed the terror camps of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and four other hideouts in Afghanistan on Friday night, and then again Saturday, carrying forward the pledge – “No more restraint for anyone” – made by General Bajwa following the Sehwan tragedy.* The writer is Community Editor.