The US & others working with Pakistan

[omarali50]

After he mayhem in Lahore, .. the Pakistani Army appear to have decided to respond in the Punjab, a province currently dominated by the Prime Minister's party.

This seems to imply that the Prime Minister is less interested than the army or that the army is taking an unusual/leading role in some virtuous action. This is a bit misleading (though understandable, given the fact that people overseas are mostly getting their information from sources that the army has long mastered and manipulated); one aspect of Pakistani internal politics is reliably unchanging: that the army will use any and all crises to further elbow the civilians aside and to undermine their authority, usually in self-defeating and completely unnecessary ways (unnecessary in the sense that the civilians are frequently not resisting "the right thing", though there can be rare exceptions to that). Thus the first thing the army did after the latest horrendous attack is to start sending out press releases and tweets via the ever vigilant and extremely efficient ISPR about how it has started taking action in Punjab and to make sure that their supporters/agents in the media amplify this unilateral action and undermine the credibility of the counter-terrorism department and police (both of which have in fact been active recently against the terrorists) as much as possible. When the hapless (more hapless in PR, than in law enforcement) civilian regime tried to point out that these were joint operations and that they were fully on board, the army chief supposedly stated that the army was NOT doing any joint raids. Every retired air marshal and general has been on TV making sure everyone gets the message.
This would all be fine if the army was as capable in this area as they pretend. But they have a long long history of pushing aside civilians (frequently corrupt and modestly incompetent civilians) and failing to do what even the corrupt civilians were managing to do. Thus everything from the Water and Power authority to the Railways to everyday policing deteriorated under army rule (they have also deteriorated under civilian rule, the story is unpleasant all around, but part of that is also due to how the army has undermined civilian institutions for decades, undermining trust in them and tolerating corrupt politicians who do its bidding while making sure anyone half-effective is cut to size).
In the case of the police and the administration the issue is not just that the army does not really know how to handle stuff even at the British Raj level (which outdated level is about the best the civilian administration could manage), but that the army introduces dual responsibility in administration; everybody knows the real power lies with the army, but the civilian chief or police are still responsible on paper, so both sides have no incentive to take any responsibility. It never works well, but the army will do it anyway.
This is more of the same.
They would do much better if they cooperated with the civilians (pushing, if necessary, from behind the scenes, in the national interest; but then again, who does that?) but that is never job 1. Job 1 is grabbing more power.