Two years later

All aged under 16, all with bright futures ahead of them, they should have been attending school on Friday. Instead, the country mourned the death of the 134 boys who died in the horrendous attack by terrorists on the Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, 2014. For their families, and the families of countless others who have been killed by the militant plague, there is nothing that can fill the void in their lives. On the rest of the country rests the grave responsibility of ensuring that those whose lives were so cruelly taken away from them are never forgotten and that their murders are avenged. The tributes to the victims of the most sickening militant attack in our history poured in on the second anniversary of the APS attack. All political leaders spoke of the sacrifices the nation and its children have had to make and the new army chief Qamar Bajwa vowed that the operation against terrorism would indeed be won and would not be allowed to linger on for too long. Words of solidarity are always welcome but they must also be accompanied by action and it is there that our track record has been mixed. Certainly, we have significantly disrupted militant networks and made it harder for them to carry out such attacks. But our track record in implementing the National Action Plan, devised in the aftermath of the APS attack, has been decidedly mixed.

There have been other attacks, with other young lives lost. One of the worst such attacks came in October this year at the Police Cadet College in Quetta where 61 persons, most of them young cadets, were killed by militants who broke through the weakly guarded gates. And an inquiry into the twin attacks in Quetta last August, conducted by a Supreme Court judge, has been scathing in its criticism of how the government has gone about tackling the extremist threat. It noted that most of the points of NAP are still unenforced. Many militant groups operate unimpeded. They still openly hold rallies and are able to propagate hatred on social media. Investigations into attacks are shoddy and there is little cooperation between intelligence agencies. For all the success of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the only way to defeat the militant menace is by combining battlefield victories with the unglamorous daily work of ensuring security throughout the country, eliminating all sources of revenue for militant groups and preventing attacks by gathering intelligence on these groups. NAP was supposed to finally ensure that the National Counter Terrorism Authority was made functional but that has not happened as various state agencies prefer to fight turf battles rather than working together. Madressahs were going to be reformed but that too remains to be done. For NAP to be fully implemented, we need to present a united front. That means all differences within the government or between the civilian and military leadership must be put aside in pursuit of a common goal. The promises made to the families of those who lost their children on December 16 two years – and the promises made to the hundreds of thousands who have been devastated by violence in the last decade and a half – must be kept. Otherwise, no matter how many candles we light, how many prayers we recite or how many touching comments we post on our social media accounts, we will not have a safe country.