What makes Sunday's tragedy in Lahore particularly significant is its location. Lahore is the capital of Punjab province and the political stronghold of Pakistan's ruling PML-N party.

In recent years, Punjab has suffered fewer mass casualty terror attacks than Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.

However, a number of assaults in recent years have made clear that Punjab is not immune, from a triple bombing on a Sufi shrine that killed more than 40 people in Lahore in 2010, to the assassination of Shuja Khanzada, a top PML-N politician, near the district of Attock in 2015.

The park blast simply amplifies what has long been known: terrorists very much have Punjab, and Lahore in particular, in their crosshairs.

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