Three alerts

Pakistans commandos did not take too long to end the brazen daylight attack and the hostage siege at the Armys General Headquarters in Rawalpindi over the weekend. Pakistan has also apparently captured an attacker one Dr Usman who had once served in the army medical corps and is currently associated with militancy in Pakistan. Despite the shock waves that the attackers sent out by storming the GHQ,it would be premature to conclude that the army and the ISI will end their dalliance with extremist groups. That these attacks were a warning to the military leadership in Rawalpindi is not in doubt; they were in fact promised in recent days by the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban. Direct attacks on the security forces have become a new element of the Taliban strategy,onewe first saw in March with the penetration of a paramilitary force compound in Lahore; and so have bold attacks on such highly visible targets as the Sri Lankan cricket team in the same city.

The storming of the GHQ has come on top of suicide bomber attacks on a United Nations office in Islamabad and a marketplace in Peshawar last week. Their political objective was to undermine the morale of the Pakistan army,which is reportedly ready to launch a major campaign against militant strongholds in the tribal regions straddling its western frontiers with Afghanistan. It took prolonged political pressure and economic incentives from Washington to nudge the Pakistan army towards South Waziristan.

Reports from Pakistan suggest that the latest attacks involve not just elements of the Taliban and other Pashtun groups from the frontier but also militant outfits in Punjab that were directed to launching attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and beyond in India.

Optimists would hope that the latest attacks might compel the Pakistan army to rethink its current deliberate differentiation of various extremist groups based on its soil fight some and feed some.  The army has often acted against Al-Qaeda,under American pressure,and has recently taken on some of the groups affiliated with the local Taliban that challenged the writ of the Pakistani state. But

it has been reluctant to go after either the Afghan Taliban or the Kashmir groups that it sees as strategic assets. If the militant groups are all banding together,one would expect the Pakistan army to act against them all. The pessimists,however,would insist that this latest round of attacks are not strategic enough to compel a change in the armys policy of using extremist groups as instruments of its policy to destabilise Afghanistan and India.