Terror in Lahore

We were served a gruesome reminder of the ever-present nature of the terror threat when a suicide bomber killed at least 26 people – including nine police personnel – and injured more than 50 others on Lahore’s Ferozepur Road. The blast took place at a vegetable market near the Arfa Karim IT Tower and it is believed the target were policemen who were providing security for demolition work being done by the Lahore Development Authority in the area. The TTP has already claimed responsibility for the attack but that has not been confirmed by the government. The first emotion after an attack of this magnitude is one of despair. There is very little that can be done to stop such attacks when the target could be virtually any place in the country. Even with police at the scene, stopping a suicide bomber is practically impossible. And it is usually the police who bear the brunt of the attacks or are the target of attacks – as is believed to be in this case. All the law-enforcement officials killed in this, and hundreds of other, attacks deserve our eternal gratitude for daily risking their lives to try and keep us safe.

If militant attacks are to be stopped, it cannot be through purely defensive measures at the scene of the attack. Checkposts, bomb detectors and the like may slow determined suicide bombers but cannot stop them. The work needs to be done before the attacks take place, with good intelligence giving us the opportunity to thwart the attacks. And while we have been successful in foiling attacks, the regularity with which militant groups strike, seemingly at will, shows there is a lot more to be done. From Operation Zarb-e-Azb to the new Operation Khyber-IV, we have seen that winning on the battlefield alone will not be sufficient either. To prevent new militant threats from rising up, it is their hateful ideology which must be discredited – and that must be done not just in the country’s north-western areas but also in mainstream cities across the country. As we have seen with the rise of Islamic State, not just in Pakistan but around the world, when people feel alienated and powerless they end up taking extreme measures. It is all well and good to have military options as one weapon in our arsenal. But as the TTP has shown today in Lahore, that is not enough on its own to militarily defeat a foe that has no regard for the sanctity of life. What we need is a major national narrative regarding extremism and terrorism. Otherwise, we are doomed to relive such horrors again and again.