On Sunday, a suicide bombing in northwestern Pakistan—likely carried out by an Islamic State affiliate—struck a convention of an Islamist party belonging to the country’s governing coalition. The attack killed more than 50 people and wounded almost 200. Husain Haqqani places the incident in the context of the surge of jihadist violence Islamabad now faces:
Terror attacks have surged in Pakistan since the Taliban’s return to power in neighboring Afghanistan; in the current year, at least 682 people have been killed in 232 attacks so far. . . . Pakistan has faced terror attacks from one group or another since the late 1990s, when local veterans of the U.S.-backed mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s turned their attention to other issues and causes closer to home. The government’s approach has ever since then been to work with some jihadists but to spurn others.
As Hillary Clinton famously warned Pakistani leaders thirteen years ago, “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors.” Even after ostensibly becoming an American ally in the Global War on Terror in the aftermath of 9/11, Pakistan never seriously disarmed all jihadist groups operating from its territory. The human toll of Pakistan’s approach has been immense. Some 16,225 terror attacks have been reported in Pakistan since 2000, resulting in 66,601 deaths, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a website that tracks terror attacks across the region.
Groups such as the Afghan Taliban have enjoyed active Pakistani government support over the years, notwithstanding the militants’ longstanding ties with al-Qaeda. That’s because the country’s all-powerful military saw them as allies in ensuring that Pakistan maintained greater influence than India—which many Pakistanis see as their [primary] enemy and rival—in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.
Pakistani officials might make distinctions among various categories of jihadists, but the militants do not always see things through the same lens.
Read more on Time: https://time.com/6300243/pakistan-bajaur-counterterrorism-failures/