South Asia Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Claude Rakisits writes for Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel on terrorism in Pakistan:
Terrorism is alive and well in Pakistan, despite sustained military operations against the militants in the tribal areas.
This Sunday’s suicide attack at the Wagah crossing on the Indo-Pakistan border, which killed well over 60 people, confirms yet again that terrorists’ potency has not diminished. Three separate groups claimed responsibility for the attack: Jundallah, an al-Qaeda off-shoot, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Jamaatul Ahrar (TTPJA), a break-away faction of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP), and the Hakimullah Mehsud faction, another TTP splinter group. A spokesman for the TTPJA claims that it was carried out in retaliation for the on-going military operation in North Waziristan and the killing of innocent civilians.
The four-month old military operation in North Waziristan — Operation Zarb-e-Azb — and the smaller, more recent one in the Khyber Agency — Operation Khyber-I — against the various militant groups holed up in those areas have been successful, but only in a limited way. While the military capability of the Tereek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the umbrella grouping for a large number of Pakistan-based militant organizations, has undoubtedly been degraded, many of the fighters have either fled across the border into Afghanistan, or they have found refuge in Pakistan’s urban centers, particularly in Karachi. So, while in the short-term, terrorism may have been held at bay (at least until this latest attack), in the long-term Pakistan’s terrorism problem is far from being resolved.