The civil-military leadership finally appears to be on the same page, with greater cooperation between the Rangers, the Punjab Police and the Counter-Terrorism Department on Wednesday. Raids were conducted to flush out notable criminal gangs to end crime sprees in the province. Alongside this, if reports are to believed, the government looks set to do what it had neglected to do diligently in the fight against terrorists so far; clamp down on their facilitators.
Tracking and arresting facilitators is the only real way to stop the attacks on home soil, considering the government has been unable to stop the inflow of militants to various provinces through Waziristan. The gains made through Zarb-e-Azb are of no use if the same people are just going to set up shop elsewhere. Facilitators are openly operating in Punjab and beyond, and indeed, many ambulances seen in the provincial capital and beyond, belong to umbrella organisations that have no respect for the life of citizens, and are responsible for funding terrorists and granting them shelter. It is these groups that enable terrorism to thrive even after the security forces continue to battle militants in the tribal areas.
The Punjab government and PML-N in general need to move past their biases regarding the country’s most populous province and face the facts that confront them. The attack in Lahore is no isolated incident in Punjab, but is far more noticeable because it happened in the provincial capital. Extremist ideology is painted all over walls in the south of the province, and the government should remember that the group behind the bombing, Jamaat-ul-Ahraar, was also responsible for the attack that killed Shuja Khanzada, the provincial Home Minister. Weapons, ammunition and money repeatedly finds its way to the terrorists which have now started attacking women and children with increasing frequency.