JUST as the army finally swung into action in Buner and Dir, yet another front has opened, this time in Karachi. With the Baloch insurgency assuming ever more serious proportions, Pakistan is now under threat from three different directions. The recent eruption of ethnic violence in Karachi hardly came as a surprise. For weeks, tension had been building up, and there was much talk of a civil war between Karachi’s Pakhtuns and the MQM. The trouble first started nearly two years ago when a number of political party workers, including those of the ANP, were killed on May 12 — in what appeared to be ethnically motivated clashes — when the movement to restore the chief justice was at its height.

So predictable were the current clashes that one would have thought Zardari or Gilani would have come to the city to try and defuse tensions. This is what leadership is about. Pity there’s not much of it around to anticipate problems. Our preferred management style is to wait for crises to assume critical mass before we even notice. Meanwhile, what of the most serious threat Pakistan faces today? From news reports, it seems the Frontier Corps has achieved some initial success against the Taliban. However, this needs to be backed up by political action. Unfortunately, the ANP-led coalition government in the NWFP seems unable to come to grips with the insurgency, preferring retreat to resolve.

But finally, the government and the army seem to be united on the need to face the militant threat. After weeks of drift and dither, the state is trying to claw back the space it had ceded to the Taliban without a fight. The odd thing is that our soldiers are not being backed with the kind of public support they need and deserve. Continued here....