This terror has a name

Written by Khaled Ahmed

December 18, 2014 

The day General Sharif realises Pakistan’s internal dysfunction has been caused by its foreign policy and that only a radical change of this policy can end this dysfunction, he will succeed in ‘normalising’ the state.

On December 16, suicide bombers sent jointly by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and al-Qaeda killed 141 people in an Army Public School branch, 131 of them boys aged between 10 and 20. The school caters to 500 sons of army personnel. The killers were dressed in official paramilitary uniform familiar to the people of Peshawar and, according to the survivors, spoke Arabic, signalling an international dimension. But “international” here meant different things to different people. Predictably, Hafiz Saeed of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), with a $10 million bounty on his head, declared from Lahore that, once again, “India has done it”. He is so powerful that many clerics joined him, slavishly swearing revenge on India, which had repeated the “fall of Dhaka” in Peshawar on its anniversary date of December 16.

TV channels carried the news that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had rung up counterpart Nawaz Sharif to condole with him and condemn the massacre. Indeed, the entire world pitched in to show solidarity with a victim state too psychologically damaged by decades of terrorism to understand what was happening. The BBC noted that Sharif, while condemning the attack, had not named the Taliban. People got on Facebook wondering if Imran Khan, whose government is ruling in Peshawar, would condemn the Taliban by name. Five hours late, Khan came out and condemned the tragic incident. When asked if he would condemn the Taliban, he said the situation was not yet clear.

It was clear enough, though. Taliban spokesman Muhammad Khorasani announced: “The Peshawar school attack was in retaliation for the ongoing Operation Zarb-e-Azb. There were six attackers. They included target-killers and suicide-attackers.”

Commentators on TV channels were too shaken to remember that they had to blame India so that Pakistanis could “stand together as a nation”. They wanted to know if the powerful people — as semi-warlords are known in Pakistan — would condemn the Taliban directly. They noted that Maulana Samiul Haq of Madrassah Haqqaniya in Nowshera, neighbouring Peshawar, had kept mum. Most Taliban leaders were graduates from his seminary, giving validity to Kabul’s charge that the savagery in the Afghan terrorist battlefield was not homegrown, but had come from Pakistan.

Haq had helped the Taliban kill former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2008 by allowing the hit team to stay the night at his madrassa. A book authored by UN Assistant Secretary General Heraldo Munoz, who had led a UN inquiry commission into the Bhutto assassination, expressed strong suspicion that officers answering to then president Pervez Musharraf had got the Taliban to do the job.

The task before the Pakistan army is complex. The violence of the Taliban has been internalised and Pakistanis in general behave abnormally under conditions of stress. Last month, in Kot Radhakishan near Lahore, a mob burned a Christian couple alive on the charge of blasphemy, under a horribly flawed law that Pakistan continues to defend on the basis of national consensus.

Religion has been twisted beyond recognition. The Taliban who killed the children in Peshawar asked the victims to recite religious verse (kalima) before dying, proving once again how religion has been criminalised. Pakistan was much less perturbed when, in September 2013, two suicide bombers blew up the All Saints Church located inside the old walled city of Peshawar after a Sunday service, killing nearly 100 worshippers, leaving 54 orphaned children, 16 widows and seven widowers. The federal government pledged Rs 200 million as aid, but Bishop Humphrey Peters of the Peshawar Diocese is still waiting for the money

Jundallah, a religious party-based terrorist outfit, claimed the church attack, but when it took responsibility for another attack on Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam in Quetta, he blamed America instead. PM Sharif has called an all-party conference to discuss the Peshawar school massacre, but Rehman, still scared of naming the Taliban — he has been attacked by them thrice — demanded that the conference accept the entire range of views presented by attending leaders. He will most probably name the Americans once again, because 80 per cent of Pakistanis will believe him. He lives in Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which is a gateway district to the Taliban of North and South Waziristan, and would be a sitting duck if he spoke his mind.

The only person not scared is the army chief, General Raheel Sharif, who has taken the war to the Taliban’s strongholds after his predecessors resisted international pressure and allowed the terrorist “safe havens” to exist. In fact, the world suspected — the Afghans would swear by it — that the Pakistan army was in cahoots with the Taliban. This change of strategy by General Sharif is too radical after decades of a dubious interface between Pakistan and its tormentors. This is already old hat if you look at what is happening in the victim Muslim states of the Middle East and Africa. He has to take vast swathes of territory back from the killers Pakistan gave safe havens to and then used against its neighbours. The day he realises that Pakistan’s internal dysfunction has been caused by Pakistan’s foreign policy and that only a radical change of this policy can end this dysfunction, he will succeed in “normalising” the state.

By foreign policy, one means relations with India. The irony is, in the bipartisan political system of Pakistan, both the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League have tried by turns to “normalise” relations with India through trade. Each time, however, the army has prevented them from changing the paradigm of confrontation. Pakistan has persisted in its foreign policy at the cost of total regional and global isolation. The time has come to end it.

The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’

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