Arif Rafiq
On Nov. 8, the Pakistani government and the violent jihadist group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, announced a preliminary one-month cease-fire. While the development was shrouded in secrecy, it has potentially major implications for the future of jihadism in South Asia.
The agreement—brokered by the Haqqani Network, a group of militants that are designated as terrorists by the United States—gave the Pakistani state respite from a campaign of violence waged by the resurgent, reconsolidated TTP, which maintains loose ties with the Afghan Taliban but is a separate entity. The group’s attacks on security forces along the border with Afghanistan have intensified since 2019.
Both sides stood to gain from the deal. Islamabad got some breathing space as it adjusts to heightened uncertainty in neighboring Afghanistan, which faces a potential economic collapse after the Taliban took power in August. Likewise, the TTP had an opportunity to regroup. Like previous cease-fires between Islamabad and the TTP, this one could simply allow the militant group to grow.
However, if the truce holds and is extended into a broader peace agreement that is enforced by the Afghan Taliban while offering only limited concessions to the TTP, then it could effectively mark the end of over two decades of anti-state violence in Pakistan driven by extremist adherents of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam.
Yet such a peace would not be without costs. These could include the further radicalization of Pakistan’s domestic politics, as more firebrand religious zealots enter the political fray.
The Problem of Deobandi Militancy
For more than two decades, the primary domestic terrorist threat to the Pakistani state has been from Sunni Deobandi militancy. The Deobandis—who, along with the Barelvis, make up Pakistan’s two main Sunni subsects—have been disproportionately represented in Pakistan’s militant landscape since the 1990s.
Deobandi militant groups—such as the network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, the Afghan militant commander who died in 2018—first gained prominence during the campaign to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. They assumed a predominant role in the regional militant landscape in the 1990s, principally due to the patronage of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, known as the Inter-Services Intelligence. In Indian-held Kashmir, Deobandi groups such as Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HuJI) and Jaish-e Muhammad (JeM) were among the primary agents of the ISI’s forward strategy. And in Afghanistan, the ISI shifted its support from mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to the Deobandi Taliban in 1994.
Taliban-ruled Afghanistan served as a safe haven for Muslim militants the world over. In this environment, ISI-backed jihadists comingled with al-Qaida, sowing the seeds of the insurgency that would haunt Pakistan in the years after 9/11. Pakistan’s support for the U.S.-led war on terror triggered the defection of JeM and HuJI commanders, including Amjad Farooqi and Ilyas Kashmiri, to al-Qaida’s sphere of influence. And Taliban-style groups proliferated in the predominantly ethnic Pashtun border regions with Afghanistan, where al-Qaida also gained refuge. Fighters from these groups eventually united as the anti-state TTP in 2007.
For years, the TTP, in conjunction with al-Qaida as well as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and former HuJI and JeM militants, waged a brutal insurgency and terrorist campaign in Pakistan that took the lives of tens of thousands of civilians and security personnel.
Eventually, after years of dithering, the Pakistani army got its act together. From 2009 to 2014, its counterinsurgency operations largely defeated the TTP as an insurgent threat. The group fractured but continued to serve as a low-level terror threat from safe havens in Afghanistan, while some TTP militants continued to fight against U.S. forces alongside the Afghan Taliban. Others were supported by the intelligence service of the previous Afghan government. And some defected and joined the “Khorasan Province” of the so-called Islamic State group, known as ISIS-K.
In 2014, as the TTP fell into disarray, other anti-state Deobandi jihadist actors formalized their relationship with al-Qaida, forming its South Asia affiliate, known as al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent. After a few initial high-profile attacks, AQIS has seen little success in Pakistan. While supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, AQIS networks in Pakistan’s most populous Punjab and Sindh provinces have been relentlessly targeted by the Pakistani state. The ISI also managed to co-opt other so-called Punjabi Taliban forces, including the al-Qaida-linked militant leader Asmatullah Muawiya.
Today, Pakistan’s most dangerous unreconciled jihadists are from the Afghanistan-based, predominantly Pashtun TTP. And it is this TTP that, beginning in 2018, has reorganized and reconsolidated under the leadership of Noor Wali Mehsud. The group has largely abandoned indiscriminate violence. Its rhetoric and stated goals are also more targeted. And it has stepped away from the rhetoric of seeking to overthrow the government in Islamabad, focusing instead on Pakistan’s former tribal areas. The TTP’s reference to the “national interest” as justification for the cease-fire gives indication that it is restraining its ideological and territorial ambitions.
Is an End Game in Sight?
Pakistan entered this new cease-fire with the TTP from a position of strength, especially when compared to past truces. While the TTP has shown resilience in North and South Waziristan, along the Afghan border, it is no longer the insurgent threat that once held territory across Pakistan’s Pashtun belt.
However, Pakistani politicians and commentators—including those sympathetic to the army—fear that the government may have conceded too much to the TTP in the talks that led to the cease-fire, as well as follow-on negotiations conducted since then. These concerns are compounded by the secrecy surrounding the talks and the ISI’s track record of using religious extremist groups to counter mainstream political parties that challenge its power.
Local media reports have also cited contradictory claims by unnamed Pakistani security officials, generating uncertainty about the red lines of the Pakistani army, which is leading the talks with the TTP. One point of contention concerns the release of TTP prisoners as a precondition for the truce. Some Pakistani officials say only the group’s “foot soldiers” have been released, while others have named senior TTP commanders. The army could simply be testing the waters in these talks with the TTP, trying to see how much it can gain. But some observers suspect it may eventually concede a TTP quasi-emirate along the border with Afghanistan.
The ultimate outcome of these talks may be determined by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban’s interior minister and current leader of the Haqqani Network. Sirajuddin’s group operates as a “nexus player” in the region, maintaining ties with competing local tribes as well as local and international jihadi groups, including al-Qaida, and Pakistan’s ISI. Is Sirajuddin truly playing the role of an impartial mediator between the ISI and TTP? Or is he tilting toward the ISI and imposing some of its terms on the TTP? And is he willing to compel the TTP to adhere not only to the cease-fire, but also to a potential future long-term peace agreement? By playing the role of mediator, Sirajuddin potentially gains leverage over the ISI and Pakistan, upon whom his group and the broader Taliban are dependent, and thereby secures a degree of support from the international community.
Even a successful peace agreement with the TTP is likely to be a double-edged sword for Islamabad. On the positive side, it may decisively take the wind out of anti-state Sunni Deobandi jihadism, diminish or strip away its transnational character, and weaken the influence of international groups like al-Qaida and ISIS-K. Talibanism in Afghanistan and Pakistan may ultimately become a territorially confined movement for the imposition of shariah, or Islamic law, de-linked from global jihad.
But political concessions to the TTP, even if confined to a certain territorial space, could further radicalize Pakistani politics, with Deobandi extremists entering the fray as Pakistan faces the growing challenge of muscular Barelvism, in the form of the militant Tehreek-e-Labbaik Party, which the country banned as a terrorist organization in April, only to lift that measure this month as part of a deal with the party.
A truly strategic victory over all extremist interpretations of Islam in Pakistan requires Islamabad to espouse and defend an Islam that promotes equity, free inquiry, pluralism and tolerance. But that is a tall order for the leadership of a country in which Islam is regularly weaponized against opponents in elite power games down to local, petty interpersonal disputes. Until Pakistan’s power elite changes its ways, measures like the cease-fire with the TTP will only yield tactical victories at best.
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