Editorial:The Frontier Post
As 26 unfortunate Iran-bound pilgrims lay slaughtered in terrorist attack on their bus in Mastung and another three murdered in an ambulance targeted thuggishly while rushing to the holocaust spot to transport the injured to hospital, lying prostrate flatly was the official counterterrorism act, if any. The terrible carnage followed in close heel the deadly terrorist strike on a senior counterterrorism police officer’s residence in Karachi that snuffed out as many as eight lives, including six policemen’s, and a murderous blast in Peshawar that killed at least five innocent people and left many more injured just a day earlier. Those too were no solitary or sporadic terrorist assaults. Lately, the thugs who have never shut down their murder shop have gone on a stepped-up slaughter spree. They evidently are on the offensive. And, more worryingly, the state is palpably in retreat. Appallingly, over there no nerves are perceptibly even in jitters. And this official unconcern is unsettlingly astonishing, to say the least. One indeed gets the troubling sense that the officialdom doesn’t even appear to realise that what the vile phenomenon the nation is confronted with is a hydra-headed monstrosity that cannot be grappled with and beheaded by condemnatory messages and brave talk. It needs no-nonsense meticulous strategies, imaginative plans and robust actions to prostrate. But the ruling echelons are yet to demonstrate if they have even an inclination for this kind of activity, leave alone the extraordinary capability that the tough fight against this stubborn blood-thirst monstrosity necessarily entails.It is a multifaceted evil and accordingly calls for a multidimensional campaign to curb. And about two yeas ago the prime minister chaired a top-level inter-provincial security conclave that did hammer out an all-embracing counterterrorism strategy. It indeed was a comprehensive charter, laying down elaborate systems and mechanism for collaboration and cooperation among the federal and provincial security and intelligence agencies as well as spelled out far-reaching administrative, security, political and reformatory initiatives to weed out militancy and extremism from the country. But, bluntly, the ruling echelons have not given even a passing shot to this strategy, which apparently has been pushed into some obscure official shelf to gather dust. Had the strategy been donned the apparels of execution, the nation in all probability would have not been so pathetically placed as is it now. But so insouciant have been the ruling hierarchies that a draft bill to amend the anti-terrorism law to rid it off some debilitating lacunas and toughen it up has been left to cool in some parliamentary chamber for over a year because of the clerical orders whose religiosity come to them first and foremost. And yet the officialdom cries that for those holes in the law terrorism suspects walk out free from courts without being punished. And more than a year has passed since the bill for the establishment of a national counterterrorism authority is idling on the federal cabinet’s table for a mere footling if the authority should be headed by the prime minister or the interior minister. And yet the authority is contemplated to be the nodal point for the whole of the counterterrorism effort all over the country. Indeed had these draft enactments not been left to official stealth and secrecy and had been exposed to public light, the public pressure would have acted like a cudgel on the recalcitrant and broken the pockets of resistance for their quick passage by the lawmakers. It is this cudgel that the ruling hierarchies, say in Britain and the United States, have employed for enactment of terrorism-related laws. Even though very contentious and divisive, the heat of public pressure forced the partisans to soften up their hard positions, smoothen their ruffles and reach compromises for the passage of those enactments within days, not even months. But such promptness comes where the ruling clans are moved intensely by the concerns for public safety and weal. The tardiness swaying our officialdom is a tell-tale of its lack of concern on that score.Had indeed the officialdom been any alert, it would have not left the pilgrims’ bus all unescorted, especially when the sectarian thugs are waging a bloody war in parts of Balochistan and are prowling the province for quarries of their thuggery. An unsecured bus was just a sitting duck for them, which the vile souls made of it actually. Had the provincial security apparatus been an agile and vigilant, it could have certainly averted this massacre at the vile hands. The rulers must understand that the military can fight the organised militancy. Fighting urban terrorism, in whose lap we are so bloodily, is essentially the civil security apparatus’s job. And they have to shake it up to do this job. Even now, the shelved counterterrorism strategy may be dusted off and put to implementation. Otherwise, the urban terrorism is getting increasingly entrenched; and once it gets dug in, it would be hard to dislodge. And the nation may eventually then hit a rock, whose consequences one shudders even to think of.
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