EDITORIAL: Clashes between the security forces and the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) militants have intensified since the latter called off the ceasefire agreement with the government last November.
According to a statement issued by the military’s media wing, the ISPR, in an incident in Dera Ismael Khan on the night of March 20-21, three terrorists were killed when they opened fire on a police check post; three soldiers also embraced martyrdom.
Later, in another encounter in South Waziristan a senior army officer, Brig Mustafa Kamal Barki of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), on his way from Angoor Ada to Wana came under attack in Kharang area, close to the Afghan border. While leading the fight from the front, he was martyred along with his driver, and seven soldiers were wounded, two of them critically.
Unlike the previous military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, carried out in the violent extremist-infested erstwhile tribal areas, the present counter-terrorism strategy is focused on intelligence-based action. Determined to eliminate the menace of terrorism, the brave soldiers have eliminated many TTP militants and their commanders.
At least 142 militants were killed during the last three months, and 1,007 of them arrested in as many as 6,921 intelligence-based operations (IBOs) across the country. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially in its tribal districts where the militants — allowed to return from Afghanistan under a dubious deal to reintegrate into society — have converged, the security forces killed 97 TTP terrorists and apprehended 540 others.
Given the nature of the problem, achievement of success will take time. Complicating the situation is the ability of the TTP combatants to move across the Pak-Afghan border, where a fence has been erected, complete with a hundreds of forts, watchtowers, cameras and drones surveying the barrier. It is rather bewildering that it can still be breached.
It is possible that they come in through the regular entry points and find refuge with local sympathisers, reactivating their sleeper cells to attack the security forces and the police as well as civilians in different parts of the country.
The security threat these terrorists pose will not completely go away as long as they have sanctuaries in Afghanistan. The interim Taliban government claims that the TTP leaders and their fighters are in Pakistan not in Afghanistan.
Yet, last month when in his address to an international security conference in Munich, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said the risks of armed fighting stemming from Afghan soil could affect the world, the Taliban foreign ministry spokesman, apprehending a wider retaliation, had promptly reacted by saying, among other things, that Pakistan should raise issue of its concern in private, not at public forums, thus indirectly acknowledging their territory is being used for cross-border attacks against this country.
Soon afterwards, a high-level delegation led by Defence Minister Khawaja Asif and including ISI chief, Lt-Gen Nadeem Anjum, visited Kabul to persuade the Kabul government to rein in TTP militants. It is unclear if the Afghan Taliban are willing to withdraw support from their ideological brothers.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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