Despite attacks, Pak in denial over terror

The shocking attack by terrorists at the Balochistan Police Training College near Quetta on Tuesday took more than 60 lives. Two months earlier, terrorists had killed over 70 lawyers in the same city. These mass murders were tragedies of the same variety as the attack on the Army school in December 2014, in which dozens of innocent children and teachers were mowed down, an episode that had drawn gasps of sympathy in this country and elsewhere.

It is a great pity that Islamabad sees it fit to exploit terrible events of this nature to build a geo-political narrative that it is a victim of terror, and remains in cold-blooded denial about having unleashed criminal forces, that it consciously continues to nourish as a matter of state policy. These have made mass killings for political ends a fine art.

In some cases, these ends may be autonomous of the Pakistan government, but quite frequently they are the same as Islamabad’s. Just ask Indians and Afghans who are at the receiving end of ISI-backed terrorism around the year. So long as proxy warriors are nurtured by the government, Pakistan’s claims will ring hollow that it does what it can to fight terrorism, and has made great sacrifices in that cause.

Regrettably — for geopolitical reasons — the United States, and more recently China, have begun to sing the same opportunist tune. They seek to get Pakistan off the hook as they think they badly need this country.

Washington has sunk dozens of billions of dollars to build up Pakistan’s capabilities to combat terrorism. But that end has no chance of being met. This frustrates the US sometimes and it makes occasional threatening noises. But there the matter ends. America is by now afraid that if it doesn’t continue to be solicitous of Islamabad, the generals will become wholesale surrogates of Beijing. For its part, China panders to Pakistan as it needs the latter’s territory through Balochistan to build Gwadar port and possibly a naval base.

As for India, Islamabad tries to sound virtuous and denies — and asks for proof — that its nationals are involved in major terrorist incidents in this country. It was the same after the September 18 Uri strike. But the cat is now out. The Lashkar-e-Tayyaba put up posters across Gujranwala in Pakistan’s Punjab announcing funeral rituals in absentia of “martyrs” who died in Uri, killing “Hindu” soldiers. The involvement of Pakistanis in the 2008 Mumbai attack was also denied to begin with.

Pakistan’s interior minister Chaudhry Nissar said after the Tuesday attack that the war against terror wasn’t over yet. In truth, it hasn’t even begun. That’ll be the sorry reality so long as outfits like LeT and the Haqqani group are cosseted by the ISI.