A Bloody Start to 2017 in Pakistan

Violence surged again in Pakistan in February 2017, suggesting a potential reversal of a burgeoning trend toward peace that has characterized that country over the course of the last year. After several years of increasing militancy in Pakistan, the army launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb in June 2014, targeting militants in the restive northwestern regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

Until a few weeks ago, it seemed as though Pakistan had made enormous strides in reducing violence throughout the country. According to research by an Islamabad-based think tank, the Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS), the number of deaths from violence in Pakistan decreased from 4,647 people in 2015 to 2,610 people in 2016, a reduction of almost 45 percent.

However, a spate of terrorist attacks in prominent locations – including some in Pakistan’s heartland, in the provinces of Sindh and Punjab – shattered the country’s recent period of relative calm. Within a four-day span from February 13 to February 17 Pakistan suffered half a dozen attacks. At least 125 people were killed and several hundred more injured.

The wave of violence started on Monday, February 13, when a suicide bomber set off a detonation in a crowd of people in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, who had gathered for a protest by chemists and pharmaceutical manufacturers outside the provincial assembly on Mall Road, a prominent street. At least 16 people were killed and 83 wounded.

Then, on February 15, suicide attacks occurred in Mohmand Agency in FATA and the city of Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. However, the deadliest attack of all occurred on February 16 in Sindh province at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, one of the most popular Sufi saints in South Asia, killing 88 people, and wounding more than 250.

The folk song “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar,” about Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, is one of the most widely sung in the region, available in multiple versions in Pakistan and India. Due to the popularity of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and his association with Sufism, the attack was also a major psychological blow against the idea of a more normal, liberal Pakistan finally emerging from decades of violence, coups, and fast-spreading political Islam.

While the attack in Lahore was claimed by the Taliban – specifically the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a splinter group of Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Taliban – the credit for the attack on the Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar was taken by the Islamic State (ISIS). This raises questions about the strength of that transnational group in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it claims to have established the self-proclaimed Khorasan Province of its caliphate.

Does the ISIS threat represent a dangerous new front in militant activity against Pakistan? Or is the violence just a temporary surge caused by local conditions? After all, most of the militants who now consider themselves part the Islamic State are still the same people who used to fight under the Taliban banner; their conditions and aims are mostly divorced from the apocalyptic vision emanating out of the Islamic State headquarters in Syria’s Raqqa. It is more likely, according to Pakistani officials, that local groups have adopted the tactics and name of the Islamic State, rather than acquiring a significant number of new weapons or foreign fighters. Still, this signifies a new level of aggression, even as the Islamic State affiliates in South Asia are hampered by rivalry with the Taliban and tribal groups.

The Pakistani army has so far moved effectively to take out militants along its border with Afghanistan in response to the spate of bombings in early February. Following the attack on the Shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the Pakistani military shut the border with Afghanistan, killed more than 100 militants in the northwest in airstrikes, conducted arrests, and demanded that the government of Afghanistan turn over more than 75 people who allegedly planned, directed, and supported terrorism in Pakistan.

However, it is unclear if the army’s operations will do more than temporarily staunch the problem of militancy, unless it is tackled at its roots. After all, numerous armed militant groups still operate out of Pakistan, sometimes with the tacit approval of elements of the country’s security forces. Furthermore, the toxic ideologies fueling militancy in Pakistan continue to flourish, without comprehensive opposition.

Additionally, Pakistan is unwilling to admit that the Islamic State is now operating within its borders, despite all evidence to the contrary. According to a report in The Diplomat, the Islamic State has had a presence in Pakistan since November 2014, and is especially active in the tribal regions in the northwest. Instead, Pakistan has accused the attackers of ties to neighboring Afghanistan, an attempt to deflect the blame. Although the Afghan government insisted that the attacks demonstrated that Pakistan and Afghanistan had a shared interest in fighting the Islamic State together, Islamabad accused Kabul of harboring the Islamic State and other armed groups behind the bombings.

Pakistan’s inability to treat Afghanistan as a fellow sovereign state worthy of respect and with which it can cooperate for the sake of common security aims severely hampers its ability to stem militancy in the region. After all, its clandestine support of the Afghan Taliban keeps the flames of violence alive in the region, making it inevitable then that this violence will spill over into Pakistan.

The problem is not so much the Islamic State itself, but the ready availability of militants and weapons already present along the Afghan-Pakistani border who can switch allegiance to the Islamic State, or the Taliban, or whatever other group at will and carry out attacks. Therefore, in addition to physically fighting terrorism, Pakistan must also tackle the ideological and geopolitical causes of militancy in the region in order to fully stem and roll back the problem of terrorism.

Ultimately, this means deciding whether its security interests are served by having a functioning and peaceful neighbor in Afghanistan or an unstable state riddled with militants, generating blowback into Pakistan – all in the name of the abstract geopolitical need to control Afghanistan in order to counter India.