WHEN terrorists strike in India, Pakistan usually gets the blame with accusations that it backs militants. But Thursday’s deadly suicide bomb attack on an arms factory in the cantonment of Wah near Taxila shows that Pakistan is as much a victim of terror as anyone else. More so. It was the second murderous onslaught in as many days. On Tuesday, the Taleban, which have claimed responsibility for the Wah bombing, killed 35 people in a suicide bombing at a hospital in the North-West Frontier Province town of Dera Ismail Khan. A week earlier, a bomb attack on a Pakistan Air Force bus in Peshawar killed 13 people. The next day nine Pakistanis were killed by a suicide bomber at Independence Day celebrations in Lahore. Pakistan is being submerged in a wave of terrorist violence — and the Taleban threaten more.
Meanwhile, the country’s civilian politicians fiddle while the country burns. Their petty squabbling as they try to steal advantage over each other has been scandalous in the months since the general elections. It has been worse in the past few days with the battle over who replaces Pervez Musharraf as president. Why, one asks, has the military taken over so many times in Pakistan’s history? Because of the incompetence and irresponsibility of civilian politicians driven by greed and self-interest. And so it continues — or did until a couple of days ago.
There is just a glimmer of a chance that, finally, the message has got through to the political elite in Pakistan — especially the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (N) — that the country cannot continue bleeding indefinitely and that the priority has to be dealing with the terrorists, not who gets the presidency or whether judges sacked by Musharraf should be reinstated.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani certainly sees the need to crack down on the Taleban as the priority. His analysis that Pakistan is at war against an enemy that “lurks silently within” is spot on, as is his view that it is a war that “cannot be won on the defensive” and that the battle will have to be taken “to the doorsteps of the extremists”. It seems that Nawaz Sharif agrees on the priorities. Certainly his decision yesterday to withdraw his threat to pull his PML (N) out of the coalition unless the sacked judges are immediately reinstated indicates that he realizes the towering importance at the moment of stable, focused government in Pakistan. At least, that must be the hope. If he and others continue to put party and self-interest above those of the country, the public will not forgive them.
Prime Minister Gilani has issued a resounding call for war against the Taleban. Not before time. There can and must be dialogue with tribal leaders but not with fiends who bomb hospital emergency rooms or target unarmed civilian workers as they change shifts at a factory. Giving in to the Taleban’s demands that the army stop its operations against it in Bajaur and the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province is politically impossible. It would send a highly dangerous message that the Pakistani state is incapable of defending itself. That would make the Taleban all the stronger. The only solution is to defeat it. But no one should have any illusion that there will not be more atrocities in the meantime. The Taleban threaten to attack Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and other places. They have the means. They will go for the soft targets — innocent civilians. All the more reason why they have to be crushed.
