he re-emergence in strength of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Pakistani soil after being pushed by military offensives against them following the Army Public School (APS) Peshawar massacre in December 2014 into Afghanistan, where they found safe havens thanks to the Afghan Taliban, represents the most serious threat in years to the leaders and workers of secular parties, in particular the Awami National Party (ANP), Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). The threat was explicitly delineated by the TTP in its message on January 3, when it warned these parties and their leaders of “concrete action” for “declaring war” on it. The context of this message was the decision by the National Security Council meeting on January 1, to show “zero tolerance for terrorism” in the wake of the Peshawar Police Lines suicide bombing that killed over 100 people.

Not that these parties have been immune from attacks by the terrorist TTP since its formation in 2007 in reaction to the Lal Masjid episode. The ANP, in particular, was picked out and targeted consistently by the TTP. Even a brief and incomplete rundown of the ANP leaders and workers killed or wounded since the TTP embarked on its bloody campaign indicates the slaughter of a party representing secular Pashtun nationalism that was in power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) from 2008-2013. ANP leader Iftikhar Hussain’s 28-year-old son Rashid Hussain was killed by the TTP in July 2010. Local ANP leader Mukarram Shah was killed and Masoom Shah wounded in TTP attacks in April 2013. The famous Bilour family suffered the assassinations by the TTP of Bashir Bilour in 2012 and his son, Haroon Bilour, in 2018, along with scores of their workers. In 2013, they wounded Ghulam Ahmed Bilour in an attack on an ANP rally in Peshawar in which 15 people were killed. Hundreds of ANP leaders and supporters were killed by the TTP around the 2013 general election. In June 2019, Sartaj Khan, president of ANP’s Peshawar city chapter was shot dead in Peshawar literally in front of a police station. The TTP, time and again, threatened secular parties like the ANP for supporting military actions in the tribal areas and the ‘war on terror’. The ANP has lost more than a thousand leaders and workers in targeted suicide attacks.

One instance of PML-N losses at the hands of the TTP is the killing of the party’s Peshawar president Haji Sardar Khan Mohmand in 2013. Needless to say, the assassination of PPP’s leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007 pointed to the TTP’s terrorist credentials. The episode has remained clouded in controversy, in part on account of the unconcluded case against (late) Gen Pervez Musharraf, pointing to the TTP’s alleged links with the security forces.

The TTP demands revolve around a reversal of the merger of the erstwhile FATA with the KP and the imposition of a shariah system according to its interpretation of Islam. When these demands were rejected and the TTP asked to lay down their arms, they unilaterally ended an Afghan Taliban-brokered ceasefire in November 2022 and declared a ‘jihad’ against the ruling Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) coalition accusing it of working at the behest of the US, which lately has reiterated repeatedly its support for Pakistan’s anti-terrorism efforts. Washington has also underlined that the Afghan Taliban appear to be violating their commitment in the Doha Accords that ended the US war in Afghanistan not to allow their soil to be used for terrorist activities in neighbouring countries.

Our current troubles with the TTP, its suicide attack on the Karachi Police Office being the latest terrorist atrocity, of course, have their roots in our involvement in the Afghan wars since the early 1970s. The APS massacre evoked massive military operations against the TTP but they retreated into Afghan territory under battlefield pressure, where they were provided safe havens by the Afghan Taliban, especially the Haqqani Network. It should have been obvious that the coming to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021 represented a fresh threat of the TTP once again taking up arms against Pakistan. The inadequacy of follow through of the National Action Plan drawn up with across-the-board political and military consensus left the sleeper cells of the retreating TTP largely intact. That has opened the door to facilitate terrorist actions all over the country (Peshawar and Karachi at opposite ends already).

Thanks to the pro-Taliban sympathies of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) government, the TTP were ‘invited’ to return to Pakistani soil in 2021, fully armed and ready to go rather than seek peaceful resettlement. This evoked alarm throughout the KP, whose people have not forgotten the nightmare of the TTP’s past ‘tender’ ministrations. The ruling coalition’s leadership, particularly its secular-leaning parties like the PML-N, the PPP and the ANP, will have to confront the existential threat of the TTP head-on. But the struggle against terrorism in this new phase (with arguably Afghan Taliban help, support and continuing safe havens on the Afghan soil for the TTP) will probably involve a protracted, intelligence-based campaign to unearth and take out the TTP network rather than the military offensives of the past.

The writer, a veteran journalist, has held senior editorial positions in several newspapers