GHQ attack highlights Punjab threat

The attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters has highlighted the threat not just from militants in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, but from those based in the country’s Punjab province.Security officials said some of the militants involved in the attack in the city of Rawalpindi, next door to the capital, Islamabad, appeared to have links to Punjab. The attack came as the army prepared an offensive in South Waziristan, the stronghold of the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, in the tribal areas of Pakistan. ‘All roads lead to South Waziristan,’ Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, after a week of violence which included an attack on a UN office in Islamabad and a suspected suicide bombing which killed 49 people in Peshawar. ‘Now the government has no other option but to launch an offensive,’ he said. But even if the military manages to pin down Pakistani Taliban fighters in South Waziristan, the country remains vulnerable to attacks by Punjab-based militants acting either in concert with the TTP or alone. ‘South Punjab has become the hub of jihadism,’ Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa wrote in a magazine article last month. ‘Yet, somehow, there are still many people in Pakistan who refuse to acknowledge this threat,’ she wrote. Security officials said a militant arrested after the 22-hour-long attack and hostage-taking at army headquarters was believed be a member of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an al-Qaeda-linked Punjab-based group. Some hostage takers’ phone calls were intercepted and they were speaking Punjabi, another security official said. Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, however, it was too early to say whether Punjab-based groups were involved. North West Frontier Province Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain called on Saturday for the elimination of militant bases in Punjab. Even if a South Waziristan offensive was successful militants would still get help from Punjab, he told reporters. But targeting all the militants at once could create an even more dangerous coalition by driving disparate groups closer together to make common cause with the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in fighting the state, analysts say. The army also draws many of its recruits from Punjab, making any efforts to root out militants there all the harder. ‘Deploying the military is not an option. In the Punjab this will create a division within the powerful army because of regional loyalty,’ wrote Siddiqa. Confronting militant organisations directly could make them more dangerous by driving them underground, and creating splinter groups that would be even harder to control, diplomats and analysts say. Defence analyst Brian Cloughley said the attack on the army’s headquarters showed how little support militants had in the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). ‘The ISI is hardly going to support militants – even ‘selected’ militants – when it is obvious that main targets are their own people,’ he said.