Until May 2009, Sri Lanka was one of the worst-affected countries by terrorism. The island nation struggled against the scourge for more than three decades. Formed in 1975,the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) wrought havoc across Sri Lanka before it was finally smashed in a three-pronged attack in 2009. The nationalist-separatist movement was striving for the creation of an independent homeland ‘Elam’ for the Tamils of northern Sri Lanka. During the thirty year terror campaign of LTTE,  70,000 people lost their lives in 2,953 terrorist incidents (Global Terrorism Database, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism). The LTTE was formed to the backdrop of ethnic violence with roots in the Sinhala-Tamil language riots of 1958, more than 300 people, mostly minority Tamils, lost their lives in the riots. The deep rooted hatred between the two communities paved the way for the emergence of several Tamil terror groups in Sri Lanka by the mid-1970s. The Velupillai Prabhakaren-led LTTE managed to wipe out all other Tamil violent groups, claiming to be the sole representative for the rights of the Tamil community. Though initially the LTTE restricted itself to acts of terrorism, it gradually managed to carve out large swaths of territories in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, with capital of the de facto state at Kilinochi. At its peak the LTTE had a force of 25,000 men and women, with about $300 million annual revenues. The LTTE had its own training facilities, a small navy comprising of few customized gun boats and an air force with two light Cessna aircrafts, which were occasionally used for manually dropping bombs in aid of ground troops.The LTTE Special Forces called Black Tigers reported directly to Prabhakaran and were the primary force behind its suicide attacks. By early 1980s and 1990s the LTTE was sending waves of suicide bombers to hit military and civilian targets in the Sri Lankan cities. The Black Tigers were successful in...

Is there another financial fraud in the making around the Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM)? This question flows straight from the recommendations of the financial advisers appointed by the government on the transaction structure for the PSM sale. The advisers say that an initial investment of $289 million, uninterrupted power supply and a new management could turn around the PSM’s fortunes and it could become a profitable enterprise before its eventual privatisation. The advisers have proposed a mouth-watering three-phase development and expansion plan, with a capital investment of $885 million in three phases, a fantastically construed plan that palpably aims at minting money from a company that is currently reeling under losses and liabilities running into billions. “The way for the PSM to achieve three-phased transformation and revitalisation is through privatisation, formation of a new management team and overall optimisation of the supply chain,” said the advisers. Interestingly, back in August 2013, the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) was informed that the PSM could be turned around with Rs28.5 billion to fetch a better price for its privatisation or else it would “close by the end of September”. At the time it was running at 11 per cent capacity. Ever since then, the steel mill has not run beyond 20 per cent of its actual 2.2 million tonnes/year capacity. Today, its entire working capital stock is gone, with no hope of revival. Reportedly, as of July 31, 2015, the cumulative losses and debt liabilities have reached a staggering Rs325 billion. Successive chairmen, their cronies, contractors and suppliers have all prospered, but the PSM itself has continued to bleed. Strangely, the latest recommendations by the advisers run contrary to a recent summary from the ECC. “The present state of PSM was due to unchecked corruption, inefficiency, over-employment and government’s lukewarm attitude towards its revival,” the summary had said. A black, bottomless pit...

The emotional outbursts following the canceled meeting between the Indian and Pakistani national security advisers have given way to a more rational assessment of what went wrong. It has probably dawned on the hawks in Delhi that they had associated unrealistic expectations with the Ufa declaration. Some Indian analysts, such as Siddharth Varadarajan and Venod Sharma, agree that while India pulled a coup in Russia by making Pakistan agree to discuss terrorism “only”, it was grossly naive on their part to assume that Islamabad would skip the issue altogether. Rather than being restricted to a one-point agenda, the Ufa declaration should have been a package – the way such agreements have been in the past, they say. Some were apprehensive much before the talks were scheduled. The Indian establishment “erred in plugging it as a Pakistani capitulation of sorts by saying things like Kashmir wasn’t mentioned”, Shekhar Gupta wrote in India Today on July 16. He went on to recall what leading BJP leaders have been saying about dealing with Pakistan. “Will it be ten heads for a head, as Sushma Swaraj said once, or kill five for one, as Rajnath Singh says to his BSF troops now? Or will it be to bring Pakistan to the negotiating table? That’s a call Narendra Modi has to make. And if his call is the latter, he has to press on, ignoring tactical distractions and keeping his political capital for the big decision.” India and Pakistan ignored their sociopolitical conditions in the Ufa declaration Gupta cited President Barack Obama’s deals with Iran and Cuba as examples of big decisions. “Obama chose his big objectives early enough: settling the nuclear disputes with Iran, normalising relations with Cuba, and on the domestic front, Obama-care. Once this course was set, he started pulling out of existing distractions, Iraq and Afghanistan included, stayed generally out of Ukraine, whatever the provocation, and left the North Koreans in their not-so-splendid, self-imposed isolation.”...

Flanked by tribal areas from three sides, the Peshawar region experienced death, destruction and trauma between 2009 and 2013. During this turbulent period, terrorists, militants and criminals piled misery on the city as state security institutions were in retreat. Recurring violence forced most senior police officials to give up their designated areas of duty and retreat into the police lines in the heart of Peshawar — more or less the way paramilitary forces had opted to give up control of many of their installations in Waziristan in those traumatic years. But the last 18 months have seen a remarkable turnaround as themilitary pounded and degraded the TTP-affiliated groups spread all over Fata and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), and the police in K-P regained considerable ground it had lost to the TTP and the dubious Lashkar-e-Islam. Terrorist incidents in the first eight months of 2015, for instance, have gone down from a total of 383 in 2014 to 153. Casualties as a result of terrorist violence in K-P stand at about 75 compared to the 145 in 2014. This marks a decline of 60 per cent and 70 per cent, respectively. Similarly, abductions for ransom have decreased by 45 per cent. The combination of surgical military operations in Fata as part of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, and a proactive police force led by an autonomous police chief — Nasir Durrani — appears to have considerably dented the ability of terrorist and criminal gangs. A combination of defensive and offensive measures has helped the authorities preempt, prevent and discourage non-state actors who once operated without much fear. This may be the proverbial lull before the storm but residents of Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan, the second largest city in K-P, acknowledge the improved policing. Both the military and the police in K-P also suffered because of HajiMangal Bagh, the head of the double-gaming Lashkar-e-Islam nestled in the Khyber Agency. But the anvil and hammer — the military acting as the latter — strategy...