Just hours later, and a stone’s throw from the setting of the President’s address at Parliament, a truck-full of explosives was driven into the Mariott Hotel, a popular landmark in the heart of Islamabad’s most exclusive – and securitized – neighbourhood. On last count, at least 53 persons – including the Czech Ambassador to Islamabad – had been killed, and 266 injured (a significant number of people remain ‘unaccounted for’ and the death toll is expected to rise). The six-wheel truck was variously estimated to be carrying 1300 pounds of a cocktail of TNT, RDX, mortar shells and aluminium powder, and left behind a 25-foot deep crater. The Mariott was completely gutted in the explosion and the raging conflagration that followed.
No group has, yet, claimed the attack, but Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, pinned the blame on the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been responsible for a succession of terrorist attacks across Pakistan after the Army operation since late 2007, including, most recently, the suicide bombing at the Pakistan Ordnance Factory in the cantonment town of Wah, some 30 kilometres from Islamabad, which killed at least 70 persons in what has been described as the deadliest attack on a military installation in the country’s history. The TTP has also led a campaign of attrition against the Army and paramilitaries in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region and parts of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), particularly Swat.
The Mariott bombing is also being seen as a retaliatory attack in the wake of ongoing military operations in the Bajaur Agency, which have killed at least 778 militants since the launch of the campaign on August 6, 2008 [in addition to 49 civilians and 27 Security Force (SF) personnel; data compiled by the South Asia Terrorism Portal]. A total of 865 militants, 114 civilians and 45 SF personnel have been killed across the FATA region over this period, even as another 576 persons have been killed in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP, 300 militants, 228 civilians and 48 SF personnel). Total fatalities in on-and-off military campaigns and terrorist operations in the NWFP and FATA areas through 2008 amount to 3,356 (till September 21), including 516 civilians, 144 SFs and 553 militants in NWFP, and 445 civilians, 158 SFs and 1,540 militants in FATA. A bulk of ‘militant’ fatalities have been inflicted through air operations, and there are widespread apprehensions that a large proportion of the ‘terrorist fatalities’ would, in fact, comprise civilians. [Total fatalities may also be higher, given the limited access the Press has to the regions of conflict and the Government’s proclivity to suppress information].
On August 5 – a day before the latest military operations in the Bajaur Agency were launched – the TTP had warned that it had prepared highly motivated ‘boys and girls’ who were ‘eager’ to mount suicide attacks all over the country, targeting high-profile Government functionaries and establishments, if the SFs did not immediately halt operations in Swat, and the Government did not reverse its decision to launch military operations in other tribal areas. At this stage, TTP cadres were also threatening Khaar, the regional headquarters of the Bajaur agency, which appeared to be confronting imminent collapse.
Worse, the virtual meltdown in the FATA and NWFP regions is part of a widening crisis across the country. According to one media estimate, as many as 354 explosions have been engineered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan in year 2008 alone (till September) with at least 781 persons killed in these attacks. Of these, 33 were suicide attacks, with the three worst hitting the national capital, Islamabad.
The new dispensation at Islamabad has little to offer as solution or relief in this context and, as Ahmed Rashid notes, "the radical threat is now beyond easy military solution". In his address to Parliament, President Zardari once again trotted out the ‘comprehensive three-pronged strategy’ that has been the stock in trade for several years now, has been inherited from the predecessor Musharraf dictatorship, and has demonstrably and repeatedly failed in the past. Neverthelesss, Zardari outlines this ‘strategy’: