How does SATP collect their statistics? Do they have a media article they source for each terrorist attack? And yes I know not all terrorist attacks have a media article. Nevertheless, I need to know they happened. One can't just say that just because SATP says an attack happened, the attack must have happened.
SATP provides a timeline and datasheets for incidents that it has used for calculations.. You may go thru them and correlate their dates to media articles of that date to verify.. Mostly I have found them fairly accurate.. The only difference could be classifying an attack in terrorism or not.. Mostly I have seen them erring on the side of caution.
Your statistics are vague, and the numbers unsubstantiated. Read from the source I have quoted, it is much more detailed, it breaks down the nature of the attacks, the details of the casualties, the distribution of the casualties, attack tactics used by the terrorists; as well as other details. Much of the violence satp.org is ethnic violence, target killings; domestic violence, not terrorism. There is difference between target killings & sectarian violence, target killings is a result of political rivalries, whereas sectarian violence has a different dimension. I suggest you study the source I have quoted, it addresses the very questions you have posted in your post, & it is much more authentic than satp.org; which is vague and unsubstantiated. The fact of the matter is, it is very obvious that terrorism in most parts of the country has gone down significantly, & most of the terrorist attacks take place on the remote Western regions of Pakistan now, bordering Afghanistan.
Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), Independent Think Tank in Pakistan
Dude, its all about classification. You are only looking at a TTP suicide bomber exploding himself in a crowded market or an attack on Mehran Naval base as a terror strike.. where as some people consider people of a particular sect, taken off a bus and shot in cold blood as terrorism as well(which your site classifies as sectarian violence and not terrorism).. Read my response to sir fatman.. I have tried to explain my POV there
The fact of the matter is, the reason why more number of militants were killed in the previous years was because they had become a threat, & were challenging the writ of the government. Their back has been broken, & their structure dismantled. The attacks in the previous years took all over Pakistan, the attacks are concentrated in the remote Western parts of Pakistan now, bordering the Afghan border. There are only some few thousand militants now (close to 5000-10,000 militants), most of them have been eliminated now.
Quoting from SATP.ORG
Pakistans continuing engagement with the production and export of Islamist extremism and terrorism continued to produce a bloody blowback at home, with a total of at least 6,142 persons, including of 2,797 militants, 2,580 civilians and 765 Security Forces (SFs) personnel killed in 2011. However, even this worrying total constituted an improvement of 17.75 per cent over the preceding year. 7,435 persons, including 5,170 militants, 1,796 civilians and 469 SF personnel, had been killed in 2010.
While civilian and SF fatalities increased by whopping 43.65 and 63.11 percent, respectively, the steep decline (45.89 percent) in fatalities among the militants, primarily due to Islamabads approach of going soft on terror, was the sole reason for the decrease in overall fatalities through 2011.
Meanwhile, Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik on August 2, 2011, informed the National Assembly that the SFs had arrested 3,143 alleged terrorists in the country and recovered 4,240 weapons from them over the preceding three years. However, the Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, on December 24, 2011, expressed dissatisfaction over the slow disposal of cases in Anti-Terrorism Courts (ATC), over delays in submission of charge sheets and frequent adjournments being sought and granted to prosecuting and defence counsel in trial courts.
The country recorded at least 476 major incidents (involving three or more killings) of terrorism in 2011, in which 4,447 persons were killed. The fiercest of these attacks took place on May 13, 2011, when 90 people, including 73 Paramilitary Forces (PMF) personnel and 17 civilians, were killed by twin suicide bombers who attacked troops as they were about to leave a Frontier Corps (FC) Training Centre in the Shabqadar tehsil in the Charsadda District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). After the attack, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan declared, "This was the first revenge for Osama's martyrdom. Wait for bigger attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan." The number of major attacks in 2010 stood at 662, inflicting a total of 6,088 fatalities.
There was, however, a dramatic decline in fatalities inflicted by suicide attacks, though the diminution in the total number of such attacks was not as sharp. 41 suicide attacks, inflicting 628 fatalities, were reported in 2011, as against 49 such attacks inflicting 1,167 fatalities in 2010. Revelations by Umar Fidayee (14), the teenage suicide bomber who was arrested as an accomplice in the suicide attack on the shrine of Sufi saint Ahmed Sultan, popularly known as Sakhi Sarwar, in the Dera Ghazi Khan District of Punjab on April 3, 2011, indicated that up to 400 suicide bombers were being trained in NWA, suggesting that little respite from such attacks was to be expected in the days to come.
The number of terrorist engineered explosions across Pakistan increased from 473 in 2010 to 639 in 2011, resulting in 1,547 and 1,092 fatalities, respectively. Sectarian violence also continued to haunt the troubled country, with at least 30 such incidents reported in 2011 as against 57 in 2010, resulting in 203 and 509 fatalities, respectively.
Target killings a continuous stream of assassinations inspired by sectarian, political or purely criminal motives, and executed by a range of armed non-state actors engulfed the nation. A February 14, 2012, Home Department Report observed, Target killings still continue in most parts of the country and major reasons behind these are sectarian, demographic changes, easy access to illicit weapons, mistrust among ethnic groups, family enimities and business rivalries. Significantly, official documents noted that, over the preceding four years, since the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led coalition came into power in 2008, the Government had issued about 50,000 prohibited-bore arms licenses. The licenses had been issued to applicants from all the Provinces, allowing them to carry sub-machineguns and AK-47s for their personal security.