Outrage Over Pakistan’s Apparent Lack of Strategy

Finally, some genuine outrage over the steady terror strikes that have been bleeding Pakistan for years now - and the unmistakable callousness of the official response. Thank you, Musharraf Zaidi.

"Three years since the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) launched this war into a different, much bloodier dimension, the official response to this mayhem seems only to show Pakistan still has no counter-terrorism strategy. As always, the only certainties in the aftermath of terror in Pakistan were two things. First, Pakistani leaders would fall over themselves to repeat platitudes about terrorism in Pakistan and how very strongly they condemn this kind of thing. Second, this will all happen again, very soon.

"How strongly did the terrorist attack in Darra Adam Khel register within the Pakistani discourse? The customary thing in Pakistan after a terrorist attack is a casual, 'oh-no-not-again.' It's casual because you simply cannot expend all your energy lamenting one terrorist attack, when you know there is another just around the corner. We have to conserve our outrage and our routine condemnations for these events, because, let's face it, there will never be a Pakistani 9/11. We've never built anything quite so magnificent and meaningful as the World Trade Center, or the Pentagon. So we stutter and stumble. From one kind of 9/11 to the next."

The piece, 'All calculus, no answers', contributed to the AfPak Channel is as readable as it is thought-provoking.

PakNatSec shares Zaidi's consternation over the fact that almost a decade into the war on terror and three years since the TTP's open declaration of war on Pakistan, the 'front-line state' is blundering about without any visible counter-terrorism strategy. In fact, the analysis of the 'pattern of attack' is itself missing - unless you take for analysis the wild conspiracy theories doing the rounds of the Internet and the Urdu press.

Consider, for instance, the November 5 attacks targeting two mosques in the northwest. Where is the analysis involving questions like how - if at all - are the two attacks linked together; how do they fit into the overall pattern (or patterns?) - if any - of terror hits; what can we learn from the pattern(s) about the perpetrators, their capacity, their strategy, their aims; and so forth? Or - if any or all of these questions are misplaced - analysis leading us to the right questions to ask?

Any eventual strategy to combat terrorism must be preceded by and based on sound, in-depth, exhaustive, sustained analysis; and much if not all of that analysis must come from, blend into, an filter through to public discourse. For, Pakistan's success in the war on terror will take not just all sorts of Pakistanis - it will take every last one of us.