Chickens come home to roost

Pakistan gives the impression of imploding, even as its nationals are ‘exported’ to fight in distant Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. With each passing day, violence by its non-State actors is targeting the very State that has co-opted them for its strategic designs, unleashed at home and in the neighbourhood. The chicken has come home to roost.

The explosion that killed over 60 at Wagah, on the border with India on Sunday evening was in retaliation to the Pakistan Army’s military operation against the Islamist militants.

The biggest attack yet planned and executed by the outlawed Tehrik Taliban Pakistan and its splinter group Jundullah that has claimed credit, is touching new depths of depravity. Its latest victims are unsuspecting civilians watching their soldiers conduct an aggressive closing ceremony vis a vis the Indians each evening at the border check post. The patriotic exuberance a few minutes back turned into dance of death and destruction. Victims include 10 women and seven children, while more than 110 people have been injured.

Most such incidents involve civilian passers-by. But Sunday’s suicide attack raises the possibility of those who had come to watch the ceremony being deliberately targeted because of their perceived support for the security forces. Clearly, and sadly, Pakistan has far too many groups with options when it comes to killing Pakistanis.

The responsibility for all this does not start or end with the two Sharifs – Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Army Chief, General Raheel Sharif. Policies of successive governments, both civilian and military-run, are responsible. The army’s operation Zarb-e-Azb against the militants in the tribal no-man’s land, North Waziristan Agency, now into its fourth month, has not worked. Hard core militants have fled to neighbouring Afghanistan, while a million civilians have been displaced from their homes. The Nawaz Government that pussy-footed on terrorism for long, now treats it as the panacea for all things good and bad. There is no accompanying action against militants in rest of the country. Indeed, politicians, including Nawaz, who electorally benefitted from the militants targeting relatively liberal parties in last year’s polls, are still in cahoots with them on the ground. Be it Nawaz in power or Imran Khan in the opposition -- particularly Khan who has been the Taliban’s greatest apologist -- militancy is used to play political charade. Its use, past, current and the one intended as the United States withdraws its troops from Afghanistan, remains worth investing by Pakistan’s ‘miltablishment’, the military and civilian elite that runs the country. Unsurprisingly, the country continues to be stalked by a complex, overlapping and dizzyingly varied militant threat.

That threat can and has often crossed the border. People on the Indian side initially reacted in panic to the Wagah explosion. India has had to suspend all movement, of people and trade, across the only land route. The sufferers are people on both sides of the border, traders and families divided by the Partition. While dealing with such neighbourhood, India must draw its own lessons and put them to effect.