A barbaric massacre of children in Pak

As Pakistan reels from the senseless, utterly barbaric massacre of 132 innocents mostly children in an Army school in the western city of Peshawar on a day that will be seared into the memory of a city and a country already scarred by years of terror and violence, there is little question that the Pakistani Taliban are seeking more than just revenge.

The Tehreek-i-Taliban, in accepting responsibility for the worst terror attack in the history of Pakistan since the 2008 Karachi port bomb attack that killed 150 people, say they want the Army to feel the pain of their “families and females” being killed. Except, most of the students in this Army school were civilians.

While questions remain about whether the TTP’s school attack is the proverbial red rag to the Army bull, an invitation for a full-blown confrontation or a sign that this was the last strike by the crippled militants, the fact that it has taken six months for the TTP to mount their retaliation lulled the Nawaz Sharif government, the pro-Taliban Imran Khan-led Tehreek-i-Insaf government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and the all-powerful Army, into a false sense of complacency.

The Pakistan Army in particular, trying to worm its way back into the good books of the Barack Obama administration by offering up one Al Qaeda or Taliban kill while attempting to derail the Nawaz government, will now have to weigh the consequences of challenging the Taliban given that Pakistan’s economy is already at a tipping point after street protests by Imran Khan’s party brought the country to a standstill. A war within can only split the country down the middle.

The establishment’s proverbial doublespeak, where it has run with the Taliban hares and hunted with the US hounds while using the Taliban as proxies to destabilise Afghanistan and India, must end.

It must know that the TTP’s avowed goal has always been an all-out war against the government of Pakistan as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state that straddles the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Peshawar can only be the first of attacks to come on Pakistan’s other, and equally vulnerable, cities and schools.

Thus far, the Army and the civilian elected government have worked at cross-purposes. But with this one act of cruel cowardice, the Taliban may have brought the government, the Opposition and the Army together.

Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel peace laureate, survived a Taliban attack in 2012. Today, 132 schoolchildren have not. Pakistan’s home-grown terror, which threatens to spill over into India as much as China and Afghanistan, cannot be allowed to come home to roost.