This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Pakistan is being put on a "war footing" to counter a surge in terrorism, according to a senior leader in the ruling party who promised military strikes against the Taliban and brushed aside human rights fears about draconian new anti-terror laws.

Rana Sanaullah, the law minister of Punjab province and one of the prime minister's closest confidants, told the Guardian the time had finally come to "smash" militant safe havens.

A spike in Taliban-led violence has prompted a dramatic rethink in policy from a government long determined to avoid a confrontation with the country's militant groups.

Expectations are growing of a long-delayed military push against al-Qaida-linked groups operating from North Waziristan, a semi-autonomous tribal area on the Afghan border.

In a meeting on Monday evening of assembly members of the governing Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), a majority voted to support a military operation against militants.

"Without eliminating terrorism and extremism we cannot place Pakistan on fast track of development," the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, told the gathering of parliamentarians.

The government has not announced exactly what it plans to do, leading some sceptics to doubt their resolve.

Sanaullah said a decision had been made to launch military operations but the army would be left to decide exactly what form any operation would take.

Opposition politicians have warned a draconian new anti-terror law promulgated without parliamentary approval last week could turn the country into a "police state". Among the provisions of the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance (PPO) are secret courts, greater shoot-to-kill freedoms for the police, house raids without warrants and the detention of terror suspects without charge for three months.

Sanaullah said: "This should have been done 10 years ago. Even if it is 5% misused, then we must support it anyway because without it there is no chance that you can fight terrorists."

Pakistan's law enforcement agencies have long been accused of illegally detaining "missing persons" for years on end and abusing prisoners in their custody.

"I think what will be done will be no worse than what has happened in Guantánamo Bay," Sanaullah said when asked about the risk of terror suspects being tortured.

Multiple accusations of abuse of detainees at Guantánamo have been made against the US.

Sanaullah's strikingly tough language comes after a year of studied inaction on terrorism by the PML-N, the governing party that won a landslide victory in general elections in May.

Ever since then, the government has resisted pressure to unleash the army on a bewildering range of militant groups responsible for near-daily attacks on civilians, religious minorities, journalists, polio vaccinators and the security forces.

Sharif has held firm to a policy of trying to negotiate with militants, who last year were declared to be "stakeholders" in a potential peace process.

But a spate of deadly attacks in recent weeks on military targets by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has prompted the government to dramatically toughen its rhetoric.

Last week the armed forces used jets and helicopter gunships to assault targets in North Waziristan that the army claimed were militant hideouts.

In a sign of the government's newfound pugnaciousness, Sanaullah even offered a qualified defence of drones, the CIA's unmanned attack aircraft, which Pakistan's politicians have publicly railed against for years.

"We believe that drone attacks damage the terrorists, very much," he said, admitting much of the outrage over drones was contrived. "Inside, everyone believes that drone attacks are good; but outside, everyone condemn because the drones are American."

Mustafa Qadri, a Pakistan expert from Amnesty International, said with the PPO the government was "creating some of the most repressive security laws in Pakistan's history".

"Rather than making Pakistan safe, these laws risk inflaming an already volatile situation and creating an environment of widespread abuse," he said.

Sanaullah heaped scorn on such misgivings, saying rights groups were "serving the cause of the Taliban". "This has to be enforced on war footing," he said. "The NGOs and human rights forces will come in, and they can delay these things."

Many analysts have long doubted that the PML-N will ever order a comprehensive campaign against militancy and extremism, arguing that the party was purely concerned to shield from violence wealthy Punjab province, the party's political heartland.

PML-N bosses, including Sanaullah, have been accused of striking secret non-aggression pacts with militant groups in the past, to keep Punjab relatively secure.

But Sanaullah said the government's new stance on militancy had to wait for the retirement of three critical figures late last year: that of the former president Asif Ali Zardari, the former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who became infamous for interfering in government business, and the former army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

"If Chief Justice Chaudhry was in office now, he would have struck down the PPO the next day," he said. He also claimed Kayani, who served as head of Pakistan's powerful army for six years, had been unwilling to tackle the TTP, despite persistent claims by military sources that the former army chief was frustrated by the lack of action.

To protect Punjab, "operations" will be mounted in 174 areas of the province where communities of Pashtuns, from the country's more volatile north-west, have settled, Sanaullah said. "We feel apprehension that they will retaliate in Punjab."