ON a day when the TTP struck yet again against the military, the government finally appeared to stutter into some kind of action. On Sunday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced he would cancel his upcoming visit to Switzerland to stay back in Pakistan and deal with a security crisis that has gone from long brewing to slowly exploding. Then yesterday, the federal cabinet convened to consider Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan`s much-touted and long-awaited internal security policy. At last, some kind of seriousness seemed to be on display and not just in talking somberly about the overall dynamics and present situation of dialogue with the TTP. This is precisely what is expected of a government faced with a monumental challenge that has only grown on its watch so far.

So much for the good news. The less welcome news is that seriousness of purpose has not yet translated into serious policy. The interior minister hasmuch to say about his plan to combat terrorism, but the details known so far either leaked to the media or whose contours can be made out from public statements of various government officials suggest that the simplistic approach of taking on militants who have taken up arms against the state continues to dominate official thinking.

Surely, the outlawed TTP needs to be to borrow a phrase made fashionable by American officials disrupted, dismantled and defeated. But that is only to try and address a problem that has already exploded and is impossible to ignore anymore. The roots of militancy and terrorism are deep and complex and any long-term policy to defeat terrorism must attack those roots too. That means a gamut of measures beyond the strictly kinetic that run from socio-economic reforms to strengthening governance and state regulation in problem areas.

Nevertheless, sitting down and taking stock and trying to formulatesome kind of national policy against militancy is the desperate need of the day and the government should be encouraged to continue down this path.

The politics of it aside the PML-N worried about the blowback in Punjab and the pressure that Imran Khan and the political right can bring to bear on the government it is perhaps as important as the other aspect: a civilmilitary understanding on what is the best path to pursue. That the TTP has refocused its attacks on security targets after a spell of attacks against soft targets will have surely added some tension to civil-military ties when one side wants to try dialogue first and the other side is absorbing bloody blow after bloody blow. While the antimilitancy policy must be of the civilians` own creation at least from the democratic, constitutional perspective no policy will succeed if one of the main instruments necessary to defeat the TTP is not in sync with the military.