Taliban tumult

FOR years Pakistan’s government and army put off confronting the Pakistani Taliban and their allied fanatics who had set up what was almost a state of their own in North Waziristan, the wildest of several tribal agencies on the country’s north-west frontier with Afghanistan. The reason for such reluctance was a belief that any attack on the militants would trigger savage reprisals. Imran Khan, a populist politician perhaps most responsible for discouraging military action, has countless times predicted a big “blowback” in the cities.

Yet since the army launched a belated offensive against the militants in North Waziristan on June 15th, the number of terrorist attacks across the rest of Pakistan has fallen by nearly 30%, according to a database maintained by the Pak Institute for Peace Studies in Islamabad, the capital. Deaths from terrorism are down by more than half compared with the same period in 2013.