WAS it an intelligence failure? Mehmood Khan Achakzai believes it is and has demanded that heads roll.

Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan believes it is not and has argued that it is a national duty to support the country’s armed forces and intelligence apparatus.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took to the floor of parliament and insisted that not only are the country’s political and military on the same page, but that the intelligence agencies are working tirelessly to defeat our enemies.

For its part, the military leadership has ordered a redoubling of effort by the security and intelligence apparatus it heads in the wake of the Quetta carnage.

What is undeniable is that the country has once again been convulsed by terrorism that remains undefeated. Furthermore, the vows by high officials to defeat terrorism have not addressed the basic question at an operational level: what happened in Quetta this week and why did it succeed?

It is a cornerstone of intelligence and counterterrorism that the enemy has to succeed only once for the state to appear to have failed.

An IRA claim of responsibility after a failed assassination attempt against then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher perhaps most famously encapsulates the state’s conundrum: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always.”

Yet, there are two aspects worth considering of the reaction to the Quetta bombing, and, indeed, generally to virtually every major attack.

Contrast first the reaction of Chaudhry Nisar to the Quetta bombing with his reaction to personnel allegedly involved in granting entry to a ‘blacklisted’ American citizen, Matthew Barrett.

Without waiting for a thorough investigation and acting swiftly, the interior minister ordered legal action against several individuals and bluntly claimed that crimes had been committed.

Yet, when it comes to the intelligence apparatus, especially that led by the military, Chaudhry Nisar appears to automatically believe that no wrong could have been committed, no lapse ever allowed. Why?

The focus is the city where the attack took place and the area within that city where the bomber struck.

After more than a decade of near-total control of security policy and a dominant hand in the security arrangements of the province, why is Balochistan’s intelligence apparatus unable to detect a plan as sophisticated as the one that unfolded in Quetta on Monday?

At the very least, some coordination was required to first kill a senior lawyer and then strike the hospital where his colleagues had gathered to receive his body.

Coordination means vulnerability to interception as does the fact that the first killing should have heightened security immediately in the vicinity of the hospital. Surely, it is not unpatriotic to ask if everything possible is being done before deaths occur, and not after.

Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2016