Pakistan: The crisis of Punjab

From The Guardian's Editorial,

The attack on the Data Ganj Baksh shrine in central Lahore was the second assault against a religious group in just over a month, after the Ahmadi sect was targeted in late May, when 94 people were killed. Popular reaction yesterday blamed America for stirring up the jihadis with drone attacks in the tribal belt. But suicide attacks against Sufis have more to do with the sheer intolerance which the Wahhabi and Deobandi sects have for expressions of Islam they consider heretical. These puritans have found willing agents in the emergence of so-called "Punjabi Taliban" who co-ordinate their attacks with their counterparts in Waziristan and are formed from the same groups that Pakistan's army cultivated in the 1990s to attack Indian troops in Kashmir. Thursday night's attack was the second on Sufis, and will enrage ordinary Pakistanis, the majority of whom identify with that tradition of Islam.

No one in Pakistan, let alone Nawaz Sharif, who hopes one day to return to national power, can tolerate a policy of accommodating jihadis, or keep them as backroom allies in the mistaken belief that this is the best way of containing them. After the last two attacks, his brother Shahbaz cannot claim to have the situation under control in the Punjab. It is not and it needs a concerted police and intelligence operation (the army, too, needs to get off the fence) against all jihadis to settle the point of who runs the country's most populous province.