A Historical Recount of Terrorism in Pakistan: From Partition in 1947 to the Army Public School Massacre in 2014

Abstract

The issue of terrorism is as old as the country itself. To begin with, there were infrequent low intensity periodic incidents of terrorism. However, state UN-willingness or UN-preparedness, in the beginning, allowed the issue to grow in strength. Furthermore, the disturbance in Afghanistan and ultimately the incident of 9/11 proved instrumental in providing the terrorists an opportunity to bounce back by inflicting serious to the state in total in terms of human deaths and economic losses. But among them all, the APS incident on December 14 2014, proved to be the worst in terms of human loss and exposed the terrorists as the ones who deserved no mercy. This paper reviews the historical accounts and tries to fix where the state and its institutions committed a mistake. It suggests that had Pakistan not been soft to individual incidents of terrorism, and had it not involved itself so much in Afghan affairs, the issue may not have worsened to cause so much damage and loss.