A sudden bang broke the silence during Friday prayers at a mosque in my neighborhood, F-11 in Islamabad. For a moment, the congregation froze. Nothing had happened, but the reaction said everything. When even a harmless noise can disrupt worship, terrorism has changed how we live. We have almost normalized the abnormal: armed policemen outside mosques, barriers around everyday life. Yet the fear remains just beneath the surface.

That fear is not new to me. I have seen how quickly a terrorist attack can change not only a society’s sense of security but also how its institutions respond. I was at the Baton Rouge Police Academy in Louisiana on 9/11. Pakistan was then under US sanctions, and our course in critical incident management was part of a tentative reopening of professional contact. Ironically, we were preparing for a crisis exercise when a program assistant burst into the session: America had been attacked. Then came the names and identities of the attackers. We hoped the trail would spare our region. It did not.

Terrorism is not defeated by adjectives.

— Dr Syed Kaleem Imam

I returned to my post as senior superintendent of police in Rawalpindi, but to a different world. A choice had been made: “We are with America.” Pakistan became a frontline ally and, soon, the frontline itself. Yesterday’s fighters became today’s militants; some drifted into crime, others into terrorism. The serpent we had nurtured with the West during the Afghan war had turned on us.

Twenty-five years later, Pakistan ranks first on the Global Terrorism Index 2026. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan accounted for more than 74 percent of the country’s terrorist attacks and 67 percent of its terrorism deaths in 2025. After decades of fighting, we need to ask harder questions. Who are we still fighting? What keeps producing new militants, and what draws them to violence? Perhaps the question is no longer simply how to fight terrorism, but what all these years have taught us about how not to.

Terrorists can be pushed back. After the 2014 Army Public School attack in Peshawar, the national response changed the trajectory. But winning battles is not the same as winning the war. Terrorism returns when the conditions that sustain it remain. If doing more of the same were the answer, we would have solved this long ago. It is time to ask what we should stop doing. Three things stand out.

First, stop creating tomorrow’s militants while eliminating today’s. Force is sometimes necessary. Overkill is not. Collective punishment, collateral damage, arbitrary detention and humiliation alienate the very communities whose trust we need. Bad policing and heavy-handed security operations may eliminate one militant, only to help create the next.

Second, stop selective and politicized counterterrorism. There can be no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ militants depending on convenience. Pakistan has paid dearly for such distinctions. Nor should counterterrorism become a tool of political engineering. Police cannot be drawn into partisan battles one day and expected to earn the public trust needed to fight terrorism the next.

Third, stop taking shortcuts around the law. Extrajudicial methods may look tough, but they expose institutional weakness. When investigations fail, witnesses are intimidated, prosecutions are weak and cases collapse, the next operation merely restarts the cycle. That is not strategy. It is recycling failure.

It is high time to look beyond the gun. Militancy feeds on exclusion, weak governance, injustice, extremist narratives and a lack of opportunity. Removing the militant while leaving the grievance untouched merely resets the clock. Nor should we measure success by how many terrorists we kill. We hear of hundreds, sometimes thousands, eliminated. Yet an uncomfortable question remains: if killing terrorists were enough, why does terrorism keep returning?

We need the same rethink about martyrdom. We rightly honor our fallen police officers and soldiers, but good command also means bringing officers home alive once the mission is accomplished. After every major attack, there must be an unsparing review: what failed, who will fix it, and by when? If we do not learn from failure, we prepare the ground for its repetition.

External sanctuaries matter, but they cannot explain everything. We must also ask what keeps failing at home. When civilian capacity is overwhelmed, the military must act, but the end state must remain police-led and anchored in law. Terrorism is defeated not by press conferences and social media but by intelligence, professional policing, credible justice and citizens who trust the state.

We should also retire some of our favorite vocabulary. We have been told that the terrorists’ “back has been broken,” that “the tide has turned,” that networks have been “dismantled” and that the menace will be “crushed decisively.” The recent attack in Kohat, which killed 23 people at a police mosque during Friday prayers, is a grim reminder that terrorism is far from over. The lesson is simple: terrorism is not defeated by adjectives.

Pakistan does not lack courage or plans. What it lacks is the discipline to stay the course through the rule of law, professional institutions and good governance. Too often, we declare victory early. The consequences come later: in lives lost, broken communities and cases that never reach conviction.

I recently read Ben Gazur’s “A Short History of the World in 50 Failures.” Its lesson is that failure has value only if we learn from it. Or, as a line often mizattributed to Charles Darwin puts it, survival belongs not to the strongest or the smartest but to those most responsive to change.

Counterterrorism demands humility: learn, adapt or fail again. For Pakistan, the real test is not how hard we strike, but whether we change the conditions that allow terrorism to return. Otherwise, we will fight the same war, in the same way, all over again.

The writer is a former federal secretary, inspector general of police and UN police commissioner, and teaches law and philosophy at universities. X: @KaleemImam