Terrorism returns to Punjab

The chief minister of Punjab, Mr Shehbaz Sharif, was visibly shaken when he acknowledged on TV that terrorists had struck at his province when they killed innocent people consecutively in Dera Ghazi Khan and Mianwali on Thursday and Saturday. After the massacre of 32 people through suicide-bombing in DG Khan, armed men attacked the checkpost of Punjab Patrol in Mianwali’s Qudratabad area and shot dead two Razakars. After that, they booby-trapped the two-storey building containing the checkpost and buried alive six policemen inside. Three days earlier, Mianwali’s Dara Tang locality was also bombed and the police had connected the two attempts and attributed them to the same group.

Terrorism has returned to Punjab, and it is coming both from outside the province as well as from the growing terrorist networks inside it. We got a glimpse of it when in January last year Lahore was targeted during Muharram. A young man blew himself up in front of the High Court building in Lahore minutes before the lawyers’ rally was to pass from the same spot. From all circumstantial evidence, it was an Al Qaeda hit. Twenty-two people were killed, 17 of them policemen. He had been sent to target the police and “exempt” the lawyers. For the Lahore police, the suicide attack was an unusual phenomenon, since the last such incident had taken place in 2004. Unlike Peshawar, DI Khan, Kohat and other cities, Lahore was surprised by the targeting of the police.

The Punjab police was in no doubt. Its men had been targeted because they had caused a spate of arrests related to Al Qaeda in the past week in a number of Punjab cities. The police had gone after and captured a number of suicide-bombers and connected terrorists from Isa Khel, Mianwali, Bhakkar, Sargodha and Lahore, to the South Punjab phenomenon of “conversion” that will finally not exempt anyone ruling Lahore. After these captures, the police “got death threats from someone called Kaleemullah Mehsud who claimed to be an associate of Baitullah Mehsud”, according to the Lahore police.

As the Pakistan army has joined the battle against the terrorists in the Tribal Areas with an increasing number of victim populations giving it their backing, the warlords of Al Qaeda are activating their “sleeping cells” in the madrassa network of South Punjab. So we should expect the wave of killings to come up north and strike central Punjab too, including Lahore, in a major way. The Al Qaeda policy of not targeting Punjab under the PMLN government seems to be on its way out. It is not going to be enough to seek a reprieve from terrorism by saying that the war against terrorism is not Pakistan’s war and that the army should be withdrawn from the tribal Areas.

The PMLN leader, Hamza Shehbaz, son of the Punjab chief minister, said Saturday that “his party will decide whether or not to join the lawyers’ sit-in after the return of party chief Nawaz Sharif and Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif from abroad”. If this is a factual report, there is a chance that the PMLN might realise that the most important issue in Pakistan in the coming days will be Pakistan’s war against terrorism and not the lawyers’ “dharna” in Islamabad aimed at precipitating mid-term elections in the country. The exemptions that the terrorists give are unreliable as they are always subject to change of strategy.

The warlords of Al Qaeda may be veering away from their strategy of divide-and-rule through exemptions. They may have decided that it was time to go to the next phase of distracting the army by causing damage at its back in the big cities of Punjab. In Lahore already a number of instances of “sympathetic” terrorism indicate that new recruits might challenge the PMLN by destroying theatres and other places of entertainment. Like the popularly elected ANP in the NWFP, the popular PMLN in Punjab might find itself tumbling from the political graph. This is the moment when the two mainstream parties should think of a joint strategy and abandon their dangerous game of trying to topple each other. (Daily Times)