The Peshawar Attack: A Paradigm Shift in Pakistan?

Peshawar: If there is hell on earth, that hell today is Peshawar. A city of tiny coffins and funerals, of scars and tears. A city that mourns the merciless killing of over 140 people, 132 of them children, at gunpoint by Taliban terrorists who entered the Army Public School in Peshawar disguised in military uniform. (Pakistan Hangs Four More Terrorists After School Attack)

From some accounts, terrorists disguised in military uniform fooled children into revealing who were from army families and then shot them in the head, when they innocently put up their hands. Those, who tried to hide behind desks and under chairs, were dragged out and gunned down.

Nightly candle-light vigils across Pakistan are uniting ordinary citizens in overwhelming grief, but as the country comes to terms with the brutality of this attack the only question anyone seems to have the clarity to ask is just what belief, what jihad drives them to attack children, to kill teachers in front of their students? ('Our Hearts bursting With Pain' Over Taliban's Peshawar Attack, Says Al Qaeda)

In 2007, the north-west region of Pakistan was labeled the most dangerous place in the world. The epicenter of global terror, where an ungodly jihad is being waged by those claiming to be the keepers of faith.

In spite of being the target of the global war on terror, in the badlands of Af-Pak, as the border regions of Pakistan's western and Afghanistan's eastern provinces is now commonly known; terrorism, led by the local offshoot - the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, has spread like a galloping malignant cancer. A cancer that is bleeding Pakistan in every possible way, and one Islamabad seems to have no strategy to cure or contain. (Peshawar School Attack is 'Pakistan's 9/11', Says National Security Advisor)

Alternately, Pakistani governments and political leaders have either advocated strong military responses against the terrorists or have tried to bring them to the table and conduct dialogue.
But can anyone talk to those who are not willing to listen? (In Pakistan, Parents Prepare to Bury Children in Mass Funerals)

Since 2009, statistics show between five and 6,000 soldiers and civilians meet a bloody fate in this violent war every year. So far, the Taliban has hit several key military installations, including army headquarters in Rawalpindi, a naval base in Karachi, an air base in Kamra, an airport in Peshawar, and the international airport in Karachi.  But nothing that evoked the same sense of outrage as this school attack did in Peshawar on the morning of December 16.

To the rest of the world, watching these events unfold in horror, Pakistan's double speak and blundering strategies so far have been all too apparent. A day after the Taliban gunned down 142 people, mostly children in cold blood, its Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared his government was not going to distinguish between "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban". But will this attack become a turning point in Pakistan's strategy against terror? And more importantly, in a polity where many of its leaders either still see justification in the rise of this bloody extremism, or are simply afraid to challenge it, will Pakistan be able to evolve a consensus? (Taliban Attack on Pakistan School Draws Global Revulsion)

Imran Khan, whose party is in power in the Khyber Agency,  has consistently pushed for engagement with the Taliban in spite of increasing deadly strikes, is finally attempting to review what his critics call a soft line towards terrorists. His protests have included mass rallies in Islamabad, condemning Pakistan military action against the Taliban and pushing for dialogue with its warlords.

So much so that he was unable to openly name the Taliban as the perpetrators of this attack, merely assuring his people that he would push for "those responsible" to be punished. This even after the group itself had claimed credit for it.

As the army intensifies its operations and strikes Taliban strongholds in retaliation against the attack, Mr Sharif's predecessor and political arch rival, former president General Pervez Musharraf, says it's time Pakistani politicians speak in one voice. (Silent Classes, Bloody Notebooks: Day After the Pakistan School Massacre)

In an exclusive interview to NDTV on the evening of the attack, Musharraf said politicians demanding negotiations "must learn lessons, they must draw conclusions, there is no negotiating... you negotiate with people who are sensible, with people who have logic and are prepared to discuss issues. Can you discuss things with animals?"

Talib means student in Arabic, but there is no doubt at all that the Taliban terrorists who shot little children at point blank range displayed the basest kind of depravity, inverting the very essence of learning and tolerance on its head, inverting fundamental laws of nature as parents buried their children. These children were not the government or army of Pakistan, they were not responsible for drone strikes the Taliban claimed the attack was in retaliation against.

The one thing that is emerging as an indication of Pakistani resolve to tackle the Taliban more firmly now is that the military offensive "Zarb-e-Azb", named after the prophet's sword that began in June in the frontier areas, is now likely to intensify. 57 strikes were carried out within 24 hours of the attack. The army chief General Raheel Shareef flew to Kabul to seek Afghan assistance to capture Mullah Fazlullah - who took over the Pakistani Taliban after Hakimullah Mehsood was killed.

Fazlullah or Mullah Radio, as he was called for his venomous hate sermons on the radio, had been on the run after offensives in the Swat Valley and is believed to have taken shelter in Afghanistan's Khost province bordering Pakistan. As this went to press, unconfirmed reports saying Fazlullah had been killed in air strikes along the Pak-Afghan border flooded social media, but there has yet been no confirmation by the Pakistani government.

Pakistani security analysts feel this attack on the army school in Peshawar is bound to shift the paradigm of Pakistan's security policy. Zahid Hussain, author of Frontline Pakistan and senior journalist, says "Before this actually there was a kind of reluctance on the part of the civilian authorities to go after the militants wholeheartedly. They supported and they approved the North Waziristan operation of the military, but actually there was something lacking. Now it seems both the civilian and military leadership are on the same page."

But in the fabric of terror, Islamabad is separating threads, differentiating between the Taliban they are fighting within and the Afghan Taliban, or worse, from groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its ideologue Hafiz Saeed .Or the Jaish e Mohammed, who wage a proxy war against India from Pakistani soil.  Hafiz Saeed roams freely on the streets of Islamabad and incites mobs of extremists against India on a regular basis under the nose of the Pakistani government, in spite of the Jamat-ud-Dawa ( Lashkar's parent organisation) being banned by the UN as an international terror group.

In a recent editorial, the New York Times said Pakistan is  "Wedded to an outmoded vision of India as the mortal enemy, the army has long played a double-game, taking American aid while supporting and exploiting various Taliban groups as a hedge against India and Afghanistan, and ignoring the peril that the militants have come to pose to Pakistan itself. The extent of cooperation among those groups in the tribal areas has made that game even riskier; the Pakistani military has long provided support for the Afghan-focused Taliban, even while trying to fight the Pakistani Taliban in recent years." After all, Mullah Omar is still believed to be hiding out in Pakistan and the world's collective memory cannot forget how Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in the heart of one of Pakistan's main military garrison towns. (How the Pakistani Taliban Became a Deadly Force)

Two days after the school attack in Peshwar, Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, one of the masterminds of 26/11, was granted bail citing a lack of evidence. As India stood with Pakistan in the wake of this attack, it's a move that doesn't instill confidence in Pakistan's stated resolve to fight terror. India protested immediately and Islamabad detained Lakhvi for another three months under the Maintenance of Public Order Act. But the 26/11 cases still drag on.

When Hilary Clinton was America's Secretary of State, she warned Pakistan against keeping snakes in the backyard and expecting them to bite only neighbours. Today that snake has turned within. For a country accustomed to sectarian violence, where its city's streets have been washed with the blood of religious or ethnic minorities, where liberal advocates of peace or fundamental rights have been gunned down, the only hope now is that this attack will shake the collective conscience of its military and political rulers into rethinking a security policy that has for long centered around spawning monsters to serve perceived national interests, now that the monster has turned on its own.