Foreign Policy: Since the Dec. 16, 2014, school massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan, the government in Islamabad has taken robust steps to crack down on internal militancy. As Sameer Lalwani recently explained, these steps go well beyond merely targeting anti-state terror outfits such as the Pakistani Taliban. With terrorist violence down significantly in 2015, even Pakistan’s harshest critics must acknowledge the country’s very real counterterrorism successes over the last year.

Unfortunately, there’s another side to the story. Pakistan may be killing terrorists on the battlefield, but it has not defeated the ideology that sustains them. The country continues to provide an enabling environment for extremism. For all the militants killed today, the resilience of radical ideologies within Pakistani society ensures that more will be mobilized tomorrow.

To be sure, Pakistan has made efforts to curb hate speech and other hardline sentiment. But it faces a long road. After police in Lahore recently tore downshopfront posters critical of the Ahmadis, a harshly persecuted religious minority, droves of marchers took to the streets to protest the move.

Meanwhile, schools, clerics, and some media outlets continue to churn outhardline narratives that Islam in Pakistan is under siege and that the United States and India are responsible for the ongoing terrorism challenge. Instead of combating these narratives, the Pakistani state — and particularly the security establishment — often parrots them. There are few state-driven counter-narratives, only conspiracy theories and crackdowns against vociferous critics of state-centered narratives. There is also, predictably, confusion. Consider the much-cited Pew finding that a staggering 62 percent of Pakistanis don’t have an opinion about the Islamic State (IS).

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