Wednesday, the sixteenth of November was a tragic day. In one day, we witnessed two separate terrorist attacks in Lakki Marwat and Bajaur districts, near the Afghan border, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The first incident occurred in the Kurrum Par area of Lakki Marwat in the morning when militants opened fire on a police van, killing six personnel. The second incident took place in the Charmang region of Bajaur district, where two soldiers were martyred and a militant killed in a clash near the Pak-Afghan border area.

The outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for both incidents. TTP has tried to justify the clashes by stating that they were targeted by a drone before a raid. However, that in no way and in any jurisdiction explains why the TTP targeted police officers, who may not even be combatants as per international humanitarian law, for their ire. Nor does it justify why the TTP has targeted and carried out attacks on civilians in the past. In September, for example, claimed responsibility for an attack that took the lives of many civilians and locals on the pretext that one of the victims had been on their hit list for nearly 13 years.

These incidents need to be taken extremely seriously. The outlawed group cannot continue to claim these attacks as defence tactics. The government can no longer afford to allow civilians’ blood as collateral as it waits for TTP to respond to negotiations. The locals near the border area particularly have a legitimate reason to be concerned over the resurgence of militancy. The target and method show that the militants will easily slip back into old ways against the state and its people if not countered effectively. There must be a red line drawn by the government and security forces. Talking as an option is fine, but not when it results in the loss of lives. There should be no tolerance for such attacks and such brazen ways of spreading terror and alarm across the country.