Brazen terror attacks at Bannu, Akora Khattak and the Jaffar Express have jolted an enervated nation and the Pakistani state. What the bloodbath at Police Line Peshawar two years ago and the four concerted attacks in Balochistan this past August could not clarify is now clear. Terrorism is rampaging across western Pakistan and, left unchecked, will consume the rest of the country. This is a terrifying, blood-stained deja vu.
There is deja vu in the western districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), where Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) marauds once again, and in most of Balochistan where the state never had much writ to begin with. There is deja vu in politics also. After a post-2018 hiatus, PMLN has returned to power in the centre and the Punjab. There are also two continuities: Pakistan People's Party has ruled Sind continuously since 2008 and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has started its 12th year ruling KP.
Events of the past week have confirmed Santayana’s wisdom that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Twenty years ago the seeds of jihadism sowed during America’s First Afghan War started bearing bloody fruit. Pakistan reaped the most lethal whirlwind of terrorism in its history, perhaps all history. Brown University’s Watson Institute has assessed that 67,000 Pakistanis — security personnel and civilians — died during 2001-24, most of them during 2007-17.
There are lessons to learn from those blood-drenched years. We have not even begun. Most Pakistanis, including academia and the media, would rather forget the dark years when each day brought on average a half dozen incidents of terrorism across the land; electricity blackouts of eighteen hours; dozens of target killings in the economic hub of Karachi; and rising double-digit inflation and a stagnant economy. Pakistanis’ unimaginable suffering in economy and lives remains un-documented, un-itemised, and under-analysed.
The massacre at Army Public School Peshawar opened our eyes that the murderers of our children were not our misguided brothers. They were not deluded anti-American jihadis. They were merchants of terror, agents of our enemies, and hostile destroyers of our republic. The nation came together. The government and opposition united under Nawaz Sharif’s leadership to approve the National Action Plan (NAP). Operation Zarb-e-Azb restored Pakistan’s sovereignty over its western border, followed by the intelligence-based Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad that weeded out terrorists across the country.
The result was a largely peaceful Pakistan by the beginning of 2017. Instead of consolidating this national triumph, however, the state plunged recidivistic into the swamp of civil-military tension and political machinations. The former prevented effective coordination of national intelligence at the federal level. The latter allowed the provincial governments, with the marginal exception of Shehbaz Sharif-led Punjab, to be delinquent in their responsibilities for province-wide anti-terror policing.
The Imran Khan-led federal government facilitated the US-Taliban agreement by releasing Afghan Taliban leaders in the autumn of 2018. Once the US left Afghanistan in 2021, the civil-military leadership of the time wasted no time in appeasing the terrorists by bringing back tens of thousands of TTP members who had fled Pakistan. The result of this appeasement is grisly. With at least 685 members of security forces losing their lives amid a total of 444 terror attacks, 2024 turned out to be the deadliest year for the civil and military security forces of Pakistan in a decade. Most of the Pakistanis martyred were in KP and Balochistan, although Punjab also witnessed a rising number of terrorist incidents last year.
Pakistan has been bleeding evermore since the fatal autumn of 2021. The simplest questions are the most relevant: who and why. We assume that the ‘who’ is the TTP and an assemblage of terrorist outfits in Balochistan. We avert our eyes to the ‘why’ question. But the TTP has announced its political intentions repeatedly. Its principal demand is the reversal of the merger of former Fata with KP, with the eventual intention of separating Fata into an autonomous region ruled by the TTP.
The Baloch insurgents have demanded the release of their members and made noises about separation, but act essentially as instruments of India and other anti-China forces to keep Balochistan destabilised and thereby block the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The rise in killings of Chinese nationals across the country is another alarming aspect of the new terrorism.
Less than eight years after concluding Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the necessity stares us in the face again. There is no lack of experience. Pakistan’s armed forces have the deepest experience of any force in the world in eradicating terrorism from its home soil. A generation of Pakistani soldiers has grown up fighting terrorism. And a new generation is sacrificing itself daily.
A clear expression of political resolve is necessary; political consensus is not. We have the same political leadership team at the helm that led the country during the last anti-terror operations. And there is no lack of knowledge. America’s Second Afghan War (2001-21) was a fiasco, but it generated a library’s worth of thinking, research, and publications on counterterrorism and all aspects of counterinsurgency. Remember ‘clear, hold, build’?
We are at war again. What is new this time? Terrorists neither have the cloak of religion nor anti-American jihad to hide their true intentions. The only remaining cloak is ‘deprivation of rights’, which is the first challenge to overcome for the state.
Emile Simpson’s ‘War From the Ground Up’ offers guidance to overcome this challenge. The book’s subtitle is expressive: ‘Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics’. Simpson’s principle insight is that there are “actors within, outside, and above the state and the enemy, most of whom are not subject to the use of force but who nonetheless impact the situation.” While the state and its enemy are in dialogue via combat, “there are also sub-state actors, third party nations, non-state actors, and trans-state actors engaged in dialogue of a different sort, in which force is not the sole language.”
It is an old, if not ancient, insight that communication is a critical part of warfare. What is different in the twenty-first century is the ubiquity and vulnerability of communication to endless outside influences. The strategic narrative has to communicate the military operation in a manner best 'digested' by multiple audiences. David Kilcullen surmises that security, politics and economics must come together in parallel within the 'conflict ecosystem' for victory. It is a massive, unceasing challenge.
It is time for the federal and provincial governments to embark abidingly upon the unfinished business of NAP: to coordinate national intelligence and, respectively, to prosecute and penalise hate speech, violence-inducing speech and literature, and conduct persistent province-wide anti-terror policing through Counter-terrorism Departments (CTD).
The elected institutions and the armed forces have to come together to simultaneously conduct kinetic operations, strengthen civilian law enforcement, and practise unceasing strategic communication across all media platforms and parliament. We have not done this before. We need to demonstrate what the US could not do in Afghanistan: show that we have learned the lessons from the recent past, will bury or banish terrorism from our soil, and ensure this republic will endure.
The writer has served as Pakistan’s minister for foreign affairs, defence, commerce, and energy. He tweets/posts kdastgirkhan. These are his personal views.