It has been a disturbing week in the capital. Following the announcement by the Punjab government to shut down educational institutions in the wake of a sudden cold wave across the province, private schools in Islamabad hastily followed suit as unconfirmed reports suggested that the shutdown was prompted not only by the winter chill, but also by the threat of further large-scale terror attacks across the country.
A terrorist video threat targeting educational institutions went viral on social media, the Islamabad police was placed on high alert and security around prominent educational institutions like the Quaid-e-Azam University was tightened.
Unconfirmed reports that six suicide bombers had entered the capital and were in hiding did much to raise the sense of alarm. With the police, security and intelligence agencies choosing as always to remain silent, the management of most private schools responded with confusion, at first reopening and then suddenly closing schools mid-week, a move both supported and criticised by alarmed parents.
To add to the muddle, public schools remained open. Meanwhile, electronic, print and social media were flooded with statements from official quarters, admonishing the public for giving in to groundless panic, and providing an unnecessary psychological victory to the agents of terror.
But the fear and nervousness among the residents of the capital is not unfounded. What was a quiet and organised small city till the 1980s now has a burgeoning population of nearly two million residents. While the number of people has increased six-fold in the last three decades, civic infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with this increase. The road network connecting the north and south ends of the city is insufficient and thus incapable of handling traffic during peak office and school hours. Traffic jams are common, and traffic police – usually at a loss of how to control the flow during these hours – routinely surrenders and waits for the gridlock to ebb at its own pace.
To meet the increased demands of new housing, the city continues to spread in all directions with the newer sectors shrouded in darkness, unpatrolled and providing open access into and out of the city. Add to this is the constant presence of uniformed rangers scattered across the city, particularly in market places, outside shopping malls and around all tourist attractions. And in the wake of APS Peshawar almost all private schools, on the instruction of civic authorities, have been converted into mini fortresses, some with pill boxes, others with guard towers, almost all with higher walls and barricades.
Rather than lending a sense of comfort to the local populace, this state of constant armed alert is instead disturbing, when one considers that despite it all, entry and exit points in the twin cities remain porous and our intelligence faulty, always a step behind the machinations of terrorist groups, who appear to infiltrate the capital with ease and disappear into their safe havens.
Add to this is the knowledge that some 450 seminaries in Islamabad city remain unregistered and outside official control. Should any group of armed militants decide to engage in a coordinated terror attack across the city, the capital would be paralysed in a few hours, with all the city’s aforementioned characteristics contributing to the chaos.
If Operation Zarb-e-Azb has been a success – indeed 2015 saw a drastic reduction in terror events across the country – both Pathankot and Charsadda are chilling reminders that the enemy is hydra-like with the capacity to regroup and strike back, and with an equal, if not firmer, resolve to attack the very foundations of civil society. So even as we celebrate the speedy justice of military courts, the lifting of the moratorium on the death penalty, the hangings of terrorists, the manifold intelligence operations across the country, the blocking of unregistered SIM cards, the crackdown on proscribed militant groups and the shutdown of many religious seminaries, the balance of what demands immediate attention in the National Action Plan outweighs what has been declared as concrete progress.
We are yet to learn of the sources of foreign funding to local seminaries and their militias that have been identified and successfully blocked. Incidents of sectarian violence continue unabated across the country and are greeted with mute indifference by the authorities. The number of unregistered religious seminaries exceeds the registered by more than a margin – on a national level some 23,000 are deemed registered with the number of the unregistered easily doubling this.
With most religious parties refusing to join hands with the government to endorse radical madressah reforms, control over these madressahs remains a controversial political moot point. Measures to ban hate speech and publications by extremist groups appear impalpable, limited as they are to isolated and uncoordinated action across the country. And finally the much needed reform to the criminal justice system, which will require an overhaul of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the functioning of courts of law is yet to commence.
As I write this, it appears this week will follow the pattern of the last. There is no word on when the alert level will be lowered and how. There is no official statement on what is going on. And amidst all this uncertainty, in the aftermath of Charsadda, the only assurances to come from the establishment and the government in the last week concern the COAS’s term, which it appears will end at the appointed time, and the Karachi operation, which is to continue unabated and with fresh resolve.
How either of these decisions will contribute to the national objective to uproot terrorists and eliminate terrorism from Pakistan remains equally unclear. What is clear, however, is that one year into the implementation of the National Action Plan much remains to be done. We can only hope and pray that 2016 is a safer year for our children.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email: kmushir@hotmail.com
Twitter: @kmushir
