The Pakistan army is taking a beating for its summer offensive in Swat and the drone attack which killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Not only is Baitullah's successor Hakimullah very much alive (the army claimed he had been killed in a shoot-out with a rival over the succession) but his organisation has shown in the last 11 days that it can orchestrate mayhem throughout the Punjab. Yesterday saw a first – a Mumbai-style series of co-ordinated attacks on three high-profile targets in Lahore, as well as a suicide bombing in the North-West Frontier province. At least 38 people died, but this was, by the militants' standards, a failure. What they had in mind was a series of mass hostage-takings. Two of the three targets in Lahore, the Federal Investigation Agency and the Manawan police training centre, were hit for the second time in a year.
The implications of the last 11 days are profound: they represent a major intelligence failure by an army that cannot even protect its own headquarters; the attacks could not have been planned without militant sleepers or sympathisers at some level, however lowly, within the ranks of the army itself; and obviously Tehrik-i-Taliban are not the only players. Penetration of this sort throughout the Punjab would have to involve Punjabi gunmen and suicide bombers as well. Militant attacks of this sophistication and scale represent more than just a pre-emptive strike against a long-heralded army offensive in South Waziristan, where Hakimullah is based. A new front has been opened. It is a battle that the army cannot afford to lose, because it is being fought in the Punjab itself, the very heart of the Pakistani state.
The west has zeroed in on the argument that some elements in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are still feeding the jihadist monster, because India remains in their eyes the strategic threat. The less stable Afghanistan becomes, the more the ISI needs to think ahead. And it is true that not everyone sees militant groups as an internal threat. Hafiz Saeed, a cleric whom India accuses of playing a major part in the Mumbai attacks, walked free from court because a prosecutor said the charity he heads, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, had not been banned. The madrasas remain unreformed.
But if the army should now go after the militants wherever they are based – in Waziristan or in Bahawalpur, the centre of the hardline madrasas – then the wildfire could spread, because it is from Punjab that the army is raised. Its in no one's interests to see two dysfunctional armies, a Pakistani as well as an Afghani one. An increasingly interventionist US military could merely be making problems worse for the one relatively functional army in the region.
