In the wake of the deadly suicide bombing at a mosque in Peshawar, experts say Pakistan’s decades-old tolerance – or even encouragement – of Islamic terrorism is once more exacting a grim price at home.
The bombing inside a police compound on 30 January was the deadliest in a decade to hit Peshawar, the capital of the north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province near the Afghan border and a city prone to Islamist militant violence since the 1980s.
All but a few of the 84 killed were law enforcement officials, making it the worst attack on Pakistani security forces in recent history, and the most lethal in a recent surge of violence that has targeted security officials across the country, but especially in the frontier.
The attack was initially claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, which has links to the Taliban, the Afghan extremists that Pakistan has quietly helped for years.
In December 2014, the TTP stormed the Army Public School in Peshawar, killing at least 150 people, including 131 students.
Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, described the latest outrage as “an attack on Pakistan”. He added: “I have no doubt terrorism is our foremost national security challenge.”
But the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said the attack could have been avoided if the authorities had “heeded earlier warnings from civil society about extremist outfits in the province”.
Many experts have warned that the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan would embolden the TTP.
Dr Farzana Shaikh, an associate fellow at Chatham House, and a consultant on South Asia for the Emergency and Security Services of the UNHCR, went further. She told i that Islamabad’s support for terror groups was largely to blame for the Peshawar outrage – and numerous attacks going back decades.
“There has been this view in Pakistan that there’s a good Taliban – the jihadis who help in fighting its regional conflict against India, and a bad Taliban – the jihadis who wage war against Pakistan,” she said. “Of course, this is a false dichotomy; there is no such thing as good and bad Taliban. And the bombing in Peshawar is another example of Pakistan’s chickens coming home to roost.”
She said there had been a feeling in Islamabad that if the Taliban were helped to take back Afghanistan then they would help the authorities in Pakistan combat extremist groups.
Some senior officials in Pakistan now believe, however, that despite covertly agreeing to assist the Taliban in reclaiming Afghanistan by granting refuge to their fighters, the Afghan militants, rather than thanking the Pakistani authorities, are now harbouring militants groups intent on launching attacks in Pakistan.
Dr Shaikh notes that the claims and subsequent denials over responsibility for the Peshawar bombing highlight the murky identity and motives of militant groups operating in Pakistan – and how difficult it is for the authorities to exercise control over Islamic terrorism that they sporadically encourage or even fund.
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Soon after the attack, in a post on Twitter, TTP commander Sarbakaf Mohmand claimed responsibility for the outrage. But 10 hours later, TTP spokesperson Mohammad Khurasani distanced the group from the bombing,
Provincial police have said they suspect a breakaway faction of the TTP called Jamaat-ul-Ahrar was involved.
On Tuesday night there were reports that heavily militants opened fire at a police station in Mianwali in Pakistan’s Punjab province, far from the Afghan border but a militancy-prone region nevertheless, leading to fears that local jihadist groups are co-ordinating attacks with TTP. In December, terrorists took control of a counter-terrorism police station in Bannu, a district adjoining the former tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and held hostages, before a raid by the army’s special forces ended the siege.
The TTP is believed to be today an umbrella group of several militant outfits, with close links to al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban. It has been blamed for several deadly attacks across Pakistan, including the 2008 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.
This story was updated to revise the death toll