Ten years after the deadly 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, Pakistan remains a recalcitrant actor that it was a decade ago. Pakistan’s body politic has internalised the infection of terrorism even as this infection threatens its very survival. While saner Pakistanis have realised the danger and abandoning their homeland in search of safety and prosperity overseas, the Pakistani Army and the government continue to demonstrate remarkable affinity towards terrorism in their eternal battle to maintain a strategic parity with India.

 

If one looks at Pakistan’s treacherous record over the last decade, it is evident that the Pakistani state has no willingness or even the capacity to take on the forces of extremism and terrorism. 

 

Take for instance, the thriving terrorist training camps of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), some of them in the densely populated urban centres of Punjab province. While the LeT and JeM have utilised their locale as the ultimate shield to protect themselves and cadres, even the Pakistani state has used the same logic for its inability to take on these groups. In other cases, where Pakistan found the going difficult, as in the cases of training camps in and around Muzaffarabad in the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, it put up a façade of crackdown. The international community will not forget the cover up of the Pakistani Army in the immediate aftermath of the 26/11, when it took over some of the LeT camps in Shawai and other areas. But as this report pointed out, only a few days later, a few kilometres away new training facilities came up like the one in Dulai, using advanced technologies and some cadres practicing even deadlier tactics for future attacks.[i">

 

The group meanwhile has undergone multiple metamorphoses – to guise itself as a charity organisation or a social movement. But the group continues to enjoy a free hand and plot more attacks and enlist support more and more causes- the latest being the Rohingya refugee crisis.[ii">

                                

Another dimension that proves Pakistan’s non-seriousness is the status of the 26/11 trial which remains a joke, with different excuses being propped up by the defendants to delay the case proceedings. What’s more the key accused, Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, the LeT head of operations remains out on bail since 2015.[iii"> The mastermind of the 26/11 attacks, Hafiz Saeed meanwhile has transformed himself from a terrorist to a politician, setting up a political party, Milli Muslim League (MML). While the MML may have not fared well in the recent national elections, the message from the Pakistani establishment is crystal clear: it doesn’t consider Saeed and his network of organisations as terrorists, and that they will be given a free hand to canvas their cause across Pakistan. 

 

All this continues, even as the country’s leadership continues to spout usual rhetoric of it being the victim of terrorism and sacrifices it has made in fighting the United States’ ‘War on Terror’. It has also regularly tom-tommed its counter-terrorism operations in Khyber Pakthunkhwa province as its commitment to fight terrorism.

 

However, what has definitely changed in the last ten years is that Pakistan is now effectively a pariah state in the international system, barring China, for whom the country remains a steadfast ally and a horse to push its Belt and Road Initiative agenda. The United States has more or less withdrawn the military aid that Islamabad used to receive for its contribution to the War on Terror. The country has also been grey-listed by the Financial Action Task Force, for its failure to effectively tackle the issue of terrorist financing.

 

Despite this international isolation Pakistan has not learnt its lessons and it continues to widen the role of terrorist and extremist groups in its pursuit of strategic interests.