Pakistan is 3 times the size of Iraq. That means the threat has that much more population to conceal within and act. Similarly terrorism in India is even more difficult to track and hold back than in Pakistan. Its all a matter of population, potential support etc.
Pakistan is going through a very rough time but such intensity has a peak and it cannot be sustained by the terrorists. Sooner or later their support base will erode, or the population will become too hostile for them to act with freedom.
In Pakistan, the problem is that people confuse Internal Security (IS) by looking at the capability of their conventional forces. This is a wrong way to look at the situation. Army is essentially an entity that can buttress some of the IS efforts, but it on its own cannot take on the threat of militancy across the country by way of only conducting CI operations.
What is well established is that whenever Army is inducted in kinetic operations against the militants, the Army dominates and pushes the militants out. However beyond the kinetic operations, the police, paramilitary, and the law enforcement intelligence have to be brought up to par to take on and sustain pressure on the groups conducting these terrorist attacks.
This is slowly materializing as Pakistan has never had a need for such capability until now. I think we will see that it will take time to put such capability into place and in the course of this, we will see quite a few more lives lost unfortunately, however this is a steep learning curve and Pakistani law enforcement agencies are learning it the hard way. If funding is available to them then I think we will see results sooner, otherwise it will be a challenging task.
