In the first six weeks of 2015 alone, there have been 104 deaths as a direct result of sectarian violence. The most devastating of these attacks was on an imambargah in the Lakhi Dar areas of Shikarpur district in Sindh, on January 20, 2015, which left 61 dead and another 50 injured. Smaller attacks, such as the one on the Chittian Hattian imambargah in Rawalpindi on January 9, 2015 resulted in 8 deaths, and 25 injuries, whereas another imambargah in Peshawar was bombed on February 13, 2015, killing 24 and injuring another 50. Isolated incidents in Orakzai Agency, Rawalpindi and Karachi have contributed to this sudden surge in sectarian violence. As may be evident from the graph on this page, sectarian violence seemed to be on the decline in Pakistan in the latter half of the year, with November and December seeing the lowest respective number of sectarian violence related deaths. This spiked sharply in January 2015, which is also a 32% increase from the same month in the previous year. This is especially troubling because in 2014, sectarian violence claimed the lives of 440 victims over the course of 52 weeks, while in 2015, the numbers, comparatively, are substantially higher. It is also worth noting that in 2014, 51% of all sectarian killings were against Shias, with the remaining targets were Sunnis (32%) and other minorities. The scale of violence has climbed drastically in 2015, and the Shia community continues to be the primary target Taha Siddiqui, an investigative journalist focusing on terrorism, minority rights and politics in Pakistan, believes this is because the state response has traditionally been weak against sectarian violence. “The state will not feel the same level of public or media pressure as it does when the media gets attacked. So in a way the Pakistani Taliban can carry on with such calibrated attacks and stay relevant while also avoid state crackdown.” “The public is being engineered to believe the Iranians are trying to overthrow the...

As expected, Indian Foreign Secretary Subramanyam Jaishankar and his host Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhary discussed “all issues, including India’s alleged involvement in Balochistan and Fata, the investigation of Samjhota Express incident and the simmering ceasefire violations across the LoC.” If taken on the face value, Chaudhry’s post-meeting interaction with the media implies that that both chief diplomats exchanged their respective complaints against each other, and promised to maintain contacts. “It was decided to reflect on these issues, and then determine on how to proceed further,” national newspapers quoted Chaudhry as saying. Both, he said, reaffirmed their commitment to eradicate terrorism, and that they should work towards promotion of greater people-to-people contact and eradication of terrorism. “I conveyed that Pakistan attached great importance to Saarc… It is an important vehicle to increase regional cooperation.” On this leg of “Saarc yaatra”, Jaishankar also brought a letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, following up on the phone talk the two prime ministers had two days before the India-Pakistan cricket world cup match. Viewed in the context of talks cancellation and the ensuing shelling and firing along the Working Boundary and the Line of Control, Jaishankar’s visit was clearly an attempt to “extinguish the fire” that had engulfed both countries since August last year. Cloaked in the “Saarc yaatra”, this endeavor to resume contacts after months of belligerence and brinkmanship reflected a departure – within weeks – from “give u a damn” posturing to “why not talk peace with neighbours” overtures. Secondly, the resumption of contacts reflected the Indian pragmatism in the context of the unfolding regional situation, particularly with regard to Afghanistan. Obama’s phone calls to Modi and Sharif may have brought about the turnaround Thirdly, the reversal in the Indian attitude towards Pakistan also underscores the...

In Pakistan, the term ‘ruling elite’ is nearly synonymous with impunity in words and actions. Our elite do not pay taxes but blatantly flaunt their wealth to appear kind-hearted. They advocate the rule of law but themselves flout the law for personal motives. Coincidentally, a number of lawmakers are often found either directly involved, or operating through a nexus, with organised crime. Wasi Zafar, former law minister under General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, slapped a waiter at a restaurant in Islamabad. He behaved in the same manner at the VIP lounge of the Islamabad Airport with an official of the Civil Aviation Authority. Last year in July, a parliamentarian from the ruling party, Rana Shoaib Idrees, along with 40 armed accomplices, raided a police station in Faisalabad and took away four people who had been accused of complicity in a murder. In fact, one of them, Rana Zulfiqar, carried a bounty of Rs100,000 on him. They also beat some police officials, including Sub-Inspector Riyasat Ali, and vandalised the station — all actions caught on CCTV cameras. Anjum Aqeel, who is a member and a financier of the PML-N, did more or less the same when his goons attacked a police station in a bid to enable him to flee from the police. He had been arrested in connection with a fraud case. A couple of days later, several newspapers carried pictures of Aqeel raising the victory sign outside Adiala Jail. What was the victory sign about? Was he pretending to be innocent after admitting before the apex Court that he was involved in a Rs6 billion fraud? Or was he conveying to his supporters that soon his colleagues in parliament would collude to lessen the burden of crime on him. All this represents a malaise, i.e., abuse of power and authority with impunity. This also reflects another bitter fact of life: the existence of a nexus between politics, organised crime and the bureaucracy. An incident on February 21 highlighted the helplessness of the people at large. A residential...

CRSS Research Associate Dr. Farhan Zahid outlines the rise of a new kind of militant in Pakistan, and the causes and effects of splintering terror groups. THE Peshawar school massacre points to the surfacing of a new generation of Islamist militants in Pakistan. The country, in the last 13 years, has suffered more than 13,721 terrorist incidents (as per the National Counter Terrorism Authority) which left 56,156 dead and more than 200,000 critically wounded. Yet by far, the Peshawar school bloodbath left the deepest scar on the hearts of Pakistanis. The gloves are now off. Pakistan’s plethora of Islamist terrorist groups can broadly be classified under two broad categories: the ‘old’ groups; and the new and nascent outfits. The old groups were established during the Afghan war (1979-89). Almost all of them are the products of Operation Cyclone — the biggest-ever covert operation in the history of the American CIA — and remained involved against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The Punjab-based Afghan Mujahideen-turned-Kashmiri Islamist groups such as Harkatul Mujahideen (HuM), and Harkatul Jihad-i-Islami (HuJI), as well as sectarian outfits such as Lashkar-i-Jhangvi (LJ), known for its anti-Shia activities, can be placed under this category. Other groups like Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Harkatul Mujahideen al-Alami broke off from HuM, the 313 Brigade came out of HuJI, and Al Qanun and Al Mansur came out of the largely anti-India and hitherto ‘peaceful’ Lashkar-e-Taiba after the commencement of the ‘global war on terror’. The splintering has continued within these breakaway groups also; for example, numerous splinter groups have split from LJ during the last 10 years, making the law-enforcement agencies’ job even more difficult. The younger generation of jihadis is more ruthless. The case of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is unique. Unlike its predecessor urban-based jihadi organisations (HuM, HuJI, JeM and LJ), the TTP was formed in the tribal areas of...

Islamabad must build on the unusual goodwill in Kabul to prove it is sincere in cooperating against terrorism. Our governments – past or present – possess a remarkable propensity to embarrass us every now and then with their reckless statements. Often, they open their mouth on critical issues to the total disregard of possible consequences for the interests and the image of their country. The latest bravado came from the commando General Pervez Musharraf when he admitted (AFP, February 13) that “in President Karzai’s times, yes, indeed, he was damaging Pakistan and therefore we were working against his interest. Obviously we had to protect our own interest”. In saying that, he only proved what the Americans, Indians and Afghans had so far alleged. In fact, in their public hearings and press appearances, most Congressmen in Washington said the same. The ISI and Pakistan Army have defeated us in Afghanistan, a number of officials at Pentagon used to insist, and they are responsible for the killing of our boys. Amrullah Saleh has a point when he criticizes the duplicitous role of the Pakistani security establishment  That is why, on February 14, a day after Musharraf went public with his admission on ties with Afghan Taliban, former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh threw Musharraf’s statement in our faces at a counter-terrorism conference in Geneva, to counter my response to his argument that “Pakistan is the source of all ills in Afghanistan.” “Your own president has made the confession of having cultivated and supported Taliban,” Saleh retorted when I requested him through an intervention not to mislead foreigners with his one-sided Pakistan-bashing. The Taliban are terrorists for you, but it is not just Pakistan, China and the United States who are trying to reach out to those terrorists. Your own president Hamid Karzai kept asking them for dialogue, I pointed out. During his speech, Saleh even decried China for “pushing us to talk to Taliban terrorists.”...

The ongoing War on Terror, militancy, operation Zarb-e-Azb, and now sectarian terrorist attacks; it seems as if Pakistan's terrorism woes are still far from over. In the past three weeks, the country has witnessed many major terror attacks in Shikarpur, Lahore, and Peshawar. Although the attack in Lahore, killing 8, targeted the Pakistani Police, the other two, killing 81, specifically targeted Shiite Muslim places of worship. Pakistan had witnessed a sharp fall in terror attacks on places of worship and public spaces since the initiation of military operation Zarb-e-Azb in 2014 in the lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the country's border with Afghanistan. But this long lull presumably was just the calm before a backlash for which terror outfits were apparently preparing. Since the onset of US War on Terror in Afghanistan, more than 40,000 people have lost their lives in Pakistan - a majority of which were militants from major terror outfits. Sectarian terrorism - a two-decade-long nuisance - spiked post-2001 in Pakistan. Since 1989, close to 5,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives in various incidents of sectarianism, 3,500 of whom have died since 2001 alone. These numbers not only indicate a serious security dilemma, but also speak to the complexity of the country's terrorism and extremism problems. Sectarian violence in the past was merely confined to a handful of regions, but the recent spate has expanded as far as Sindh Province, along Pakistan's southeastern border with India. In order to tackle this challenge, the government must pay special attention to law enforcement agencies, especially police, who could effectively tackle and counter various militant outfits based in rural areas of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In such a dire situation, Pakistanis are looking forward to December 2014's National Action Plan (NAP) put forward by the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif-led government. The NAP, presented in the wake of a deadly extremist attack on...