Pakistan Faces Resurgance of Terrorism

Asia Pacific|Terrorism Roars Back in Pakistan, 10 Years After a Campaign to End It

Ten years have passed since Ajoon Khan’s son died in a ghastly attack by the Pakistani Taliban that killed about 150 people, mostly children, at a military-run school in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan.

But the pain of loss is unrelenting — it grows only deeper with time. Mr. Khan, a lawyer, said he could never forget the parents sobbing and pleading outside the school gates, the soldiers storming the building, the children and the teachers fleeing in terror.

“It has been nearly a decade, but it feels like nothing has changed,” said Mr. Khan, speaking last week, just before the Dec. 16 anniversary of the death of his son, Asfand, who had been in the 10th grade. “If you look at the security situation in the country, it feels that our children’s sacrifices were in vain.”

The brutal assault on the school in Peshawar led to rare political unity in support of a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy for Pakistan and a vast military operation in the country’s former tribal areas near Afghanistan. The efforts forced militants to retreat across the border and brought a degree of relative peace to Pakistan. Large-scale terrorist attacks were significantly reduced, with fatalities dropping from 2,451 across 1,717 attacks in 2013 to 220 in 146 attacks in 2020.

But the hard-won gains from Pakistan’s counterinsurgency offensive — a costly endeavor in money and lives — are now in jeopardy.

Over the past few years, violence by the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist militant groups has surged in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, in northwestern Pakistan. Experts attribute the increase to the Afghan Taliban’s seizure of power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021.