Rising graph of militancy.

PAKISTAN seems poised on a knife-edge, and not only on account of the issues consuming much of the oxygen on the national stage - political polarisation and the army chief's appointment. The grim reality is that we are at a point where militancy could once again start raging out of control, if not tackled immediately.

Combined with the domestic challenges confronting us - a divided polity and an economy in crisis - that would pitch us into a predicament extremely difficult to manage. In the latest episode of an intensifying series of militant attacks, eight law-enforcement officials were martyred on Wednesday in two separate incidents in KP.

In Lakki Marwat, gunmen opened fire on a police van, killing six personnel who were on their way to perform security duty at a weekly cattle market.

The attack was claimed by the banned TTP. On the same day, two soldiers lost their lives in an exchange of gunfire with militants near the Pak-Afghan border in Bajaur district.

The term 'strategic depth', one of the buzzwords of our regional foreign policy in the last few decades, has come to haunt us. As soon as the Afghan Taliban took power in Kabul, militant attacks in Pakistan registered an uptick. Certainly, law-enforcement agencies have seen some successes in anti-terrorism operations, but the last few months have made it quite apparent that the militants are in the ascendant.

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