ABSTRACT
Pakistan’s resilience in the face of terrorism As the events presented in the preceding chapters have conveyed, a great deal of Pakistani state strategy was concocted in reaction to breaking situations, including Pakistani involvement in the conflict in the first place. It has been the contention that these reflex actions have conveyed both the strategic predilections of the state as well as the limitations of its security apparatus. This chapter will assess Pakistani strategies in its war against the Islamist armed groups with reference to the hypotheses that were introduced at the outset of this book. These hypotheses postulated that Pakistani state choice could be boiled down to two fundamental questions: choosing which armed groups to engage, and choosing how to engage them. It has also been postulated that in making these choices, Pakistani strategic calculations tended to be made in reference to two levels of national security – the international and the domestic – and with both state and non-state actors very much in mind.
