The tide of the Taliban militancy has subsided in Pakistan, though sporadic attacks still take place. Unofficially, the country has suffered tens of thousands of casualties in terrorist attacks since 2002, but an official tally is nowhere near the figures cited unofficially.
As many as 3,667 Pakistanis have been killed and 9,180 wounded in 179 major terror attacks during the last 14 years, according to a database of the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (Nacta). The figures, however, do not include small terror attacks.
The first attack catalogued in the Nacta database took place on February 26, 2002 at a Church in Islamabad’s Diplomatic Enclave in which five people were killed and 42 injured.
Similarly, the last entry in the database is October 24, 2016 when gunmen rampaged through the police training academy in Quetta, killing 61 cadets and injuring many more. Initially, Nacta was set up in 2009, but its powers and mandate was spelled out in March 2013 under an act of parliament.
The authority was toothless until the government revised the national counterterrorism strategy following the methodical killing of 150 students and staff by terrorists at Peshawar’s Army Public School on December 16, 2014. Subsequently, the government decided to implement a 20-point National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorism.
The military, on the other hand, not only intensified Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan Agency, the erstwhile nucleus of terrorism, but also decided to expand it to dismantle sleeper cells of terrorists, their abettors and financers in the urban centres of the country. There have been 39 major reprisal attacks from terrorists since the announcement of NAP.
