Pakistan’s Counterterrorism Strategy during the 4th Regime of Pakistan Peoples Party (2008-2013): A Historical Overview

Abstract

Pakistan has faced significant challenges due to terrorism during the past twenty years. Pakistan needed to implement a successful counterterrorism strategy in order to confront the terrorist threat. Since 9/11 incident, different governments in Pakistan adopted various strategies to combat terrorism in Pakistan. In 2008, Pakistan was middle of war against Al-Qaeda and Taliban. The Musharraf regime adopted mixed policies of operation and peace negotiations for countering terrorism which terribly failed. This paper focuses on the counterterrorism policies of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), one of the major and oldest political parties of Pakistan. PPP emerged on the political scene as governing party for 4^th time as a result of General Elections, 2008 after assassination of its charismatic leader, Benazir Bhutto on November 27, 2007at terrorism activity during a political rally. This paper presented an overview of counterterrorism strategy for Pakistan that adopted by the PPP government during 2008-2013. The main objective of this paper is to review military actions carried out by the Pakistani military and to develop measures and strategies to reduce terrorism in Pakistan during the PPP government (2008-2013).  For this paper data is mostly collected from books, journal articles, reports and reliable newspapers articles. Qualitative method is applied.