Because of land area and resource extraction -
Although Karachi’s budget is a case of center neglect and PPPP ethnic threats and corruption.
You cannot kill any head of snakes because the land is too vast to effectively police it unlike FATA.
It depends on how big of an area needs to be covered. Sure it will be expensive, but catching enough of the miscreants and mapping their human networks, financial channels, and logistical networks should be worth it to secure cities, and demonstrate to the militants that they will be found.
One approach can be that laborers can wear a panic button at all times. Should an attack take place, they can press a secret code into it to signal it is them and that they are under attack.
A blimp thousands of feet up with a hundreds of camera can watch over a city, and track movements of people and vehicles. It can watch the attackers and trace them to their accomplices and hiding places.
Once a nearby army post is notified, a QRF can be dispatched to find the assailants, and catch them for interrogation. Assailants can be properly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law with blimp video evidence. Targeting those involved and sparing those not involved.
All this may seem wildly expensive, but with tech costs coming down, this could probably be done for a few million dollars per city.
The value of securing a city will have many benefits, especially demonstrating the writ of the state and its ability to control territory.
Work with China to build blimps or long endurance drones to cover the worst affected areas.
From this kind of persistent surveillance, a pattern can sometimes be found of how these miscreants operate leading up to an attack, and the AI in the system can alert the army to a group of people potentially about to launch an attack. Then the army can bring in troops to near where they may strike and be ready to ambush the would be attackers.
Coordinate this with watching cell towers in the area and who is near it as ways to find suspects (not active participants as we all learned on may 9th) and tracking radio traffic for non-cell comms. Add in “Shot-Spotters” (monitored by nearby army units to confirm and triangulate any gunfire), and you may be able to get a good visual and audio on the miscreants.
