On June 24, personnel of the Bomb Disposal Unit and police in Upper South Waziristan successfully defused an improvised explosive device in the Partogai area of Sararogha tehsil. They then got into their vehicle and began the six-kilometre drive back to the police station. They never reached it. Armed men intercepted the vehicle and abducted eight personnel, including the Station House Officer.

The hostages were recovered the following morning through the mediation of tribal elders. Not through a court order, not through a police operation. Through elders, because in these districts, that remains the only mechanism that reliably works. The same day, June 24, gunmen walked into Government High School Sardad Khan in Bannu and took headmaster Nisar Ahmed out in front of surveillance cameras, in the middle of the school day.

Neither incident was extraordinary. In much of the former FATA and the southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, they have become distressingly familiar.

May opened without mercy. A vehicle-borne suicide bomber packed with more than a ton of explosives struck a police post in Bannu, killing 14 police personnel and forcing hospitals to declare emergencies. Three days later, an IED planted on a motorcycle detonated in Sarai Naurang market in Lakki Marwat, killing nine people, two of them traffic police officers, in a crowded market on a Tuesday afternoon.

Weeks before that, PTCL employees installing surveillance cameras for the Bannu Safe City Project had been abducted while laying the very infrastructure intended to improve security. June continued in the same register. A vehicle-borne suicide bomber struck a military post in North Waziristan on June 2. Militants attacked a Federal........

© The Friday Times