Pakistan post Peshawar: What will we actually do

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi in The Dawn

WE have an unmatched instinct for farce especially when we adopt our most grave and serious postures.

Another all-parties conference; a dash to Kabul; a rage of hangings; a 20-point National Action Plan to succeed the still-born Nacta and NISP; a committee for every point of the NAP; subcommittees for every committee; an overall oversight committee led by the prime minister who proclaims zero tolerance; a defining moment; a do-or-die challenge; an unending jihad against jihadis; eternal cooperation with the military which is invited to discharge his responsibilities; military courts of dubious value and still more dubious constitutionality; warrants of arrest against facilitated ‘fararis’ (absconders), etc.

‘Democratic’ political leaders who until recently were locked in mortal combat are now united in complicit support for a ‘soft coup’ and a resurrection of the doctrine of necessity.

The Supreme Court judges realising the gravity of the situation met under the chairmanship of the chief justice to assess how the prosecution of those accused of terrorism could be prioritised and completed expeditiously.

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The credibility of our counterterrorism commitment will need to manifest itself in our foreign policy

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They have, accordingly, agreed on an eight-point plan. Their plan has been summarily shoved aside by the 20-point plan. So much for the rule of law! Will the Supreme Court now accept amendments to the Constitution that are against its ‘basic structure’ and clear intent and purpose? The superior judiciary is not incompetent. It has been impeded by those who would now supersede it.

There has been no collective and public (civil and military) leadership apology to the bereaved families and the nation. No acknowledgement of responsibility — indeed guilt — for bringing about a state of affairs in the country that directly and indirectly made the atrocity possible, if not likely. How can anyone say ‘this is a watershed moment’ or ‘we have at last turned the corner’? Our 9/11, no less, have been so many self-inflicted tragedies in our short history including the fall of Dhaka, military surrender and the break-up of the country. There has been the loss of the Siachen Glacier and the fiasco of Kargil. There has been the intermittent war in Balochistan over decades. There were unprincipled deals ceding control in a number of Fata areas to dangerous militants.

These militants have become today’s monsters responsible for the school atrocity and murder and mayhem of every kind in Pakistan. There has been Abbottabad leading to national humiliation and isolation abroad.

Have we responded to all this criminal impunity with a greater concern for national security, governance and leadership? Why, or rather how will it be any different this time? Well, because enough is enough! Our cup of patience runneth over! The leopard will at last change its spots. Inshallah! Indeed, we have a plan for it. Mashallah!

We know the history of inquiry commissions in Pakistan. Even so, why has our suddenly ‘united’ civil and military leadership not immediately sought to ‘break the mould’ by establishing a genuinely independent, repeat independent, and competent commission to inquire into all aspects of how Dec 16 came to pass?

Such an inquiry should, needless to say, seek to ascertain who bore the greatest responsibility for the political and security milieu, as well as the specific lead-up circumstances including lapses, that resulted in the tragedy. It should make a meaningful and comprehensive set of concise, relevant and mutually reinforcing policy recommendations that are continuously monitored and reported upon to the nation on a weekly basis by our ‘born-again’ leadership.

Counterterrorism in Pakistan has to be part and parcel of a comprehensive state and, indeed, societal transformation process. Yes, this is a longer term effort. But given our truly rotten circumstances, unless our action plan is embedded in a simultaneous commencement of this longer-term and much bigger project, it will lose direction, momentum and credibility very rapidly.

Solemn assurances to the contrary are rhetorical and meaningless because outside this broader transformation context they cannot be credible. This credibility of our counterterrorism commitment will also need to manifest itself in our foreign policy.

Take Afghanistan. Unless we deny the Afghan Taliban and their various cohorts and networks safe havens, sanctuaries and cross-border supply routes on our territory, how do we expect our commitments to President Ashraf Ghani and his government to be taken seriously? How would we play an acceptable role in a peacemaking and political reconciliation process in Afghanistan if the government in Kabul has grave reservations about our reliability as a partner?

If the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan are viable inside Afghanistan without our assistance we can still play a constructive role in facilitating reconciliation without seeking to use them as a check on India’s influence. If a terror-prone Afghan Taliban once again takes over Afghanistan, with or without our deniable assistance, it will be the TTP and not us who will gain ‘strategic depth’.

Take India. We need to have a predictable working relationship with it despite our continuing and significant differences on Kashmir and other issues. We will need to develop and implement modalities for managing our differences on Kashmir and building essential bilateral and regional cooperation to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

A state of ‘no war, no peace’ with a neighbour several times our size provides no context in which to pursue counterterrorism policies against organisations we have been prone to use as ‘proxies’, and which have done us no end of harm diplomatically and domestically.

Unless we radically rethink our external policy strategies how will we develop a credible counterterrorism policy and transform our economy and society? There is no indication of any of this in the national action plan. Will we finally do what we say and dismantle the whole infrastructure of terror inside Pakistan? Will we begin to rationalise our India and Afghanistan policies and come across as credible to ourselves and the international community?

Yes, Pakistanis are united against terrorism. But not on terrorists

Militants who target India will always be good Taliban. So an alleged architect of the Mumbai attack can be released two days after Peshawar

• 
• • Cyril Almeida
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 18 December 2014 20.10 GMT

Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, one of the alleged architects of the 2008 Mumbai attack, has been granted bail days after the horror of Peshawar. Photograph: Reuters

On this Pakistan is united: the men who killed 132 children in a Peshawar school are terrorists. On this too Pakistan is – temporarily – united: terrorism must be defeated. After that the trouble begins. With something as seemingly innocuous as who, exactly, is a terrorist. Pakistanis can’t seem to agree.

Neither can the media. A day after the Peshawar carnage, after the Pakistan army had announced that the slaughter in the school had been operationally coordinated by Afghan-based Pakistani militants, an outraged analyst on local TV asked what the world’s response would have been had India been attacked by militants from Pakistan.

India, the analyst claimed indignantly, would be contemplating bombing Pakistan and the Indian army would already have been mobilised on the Pak-India border. The world at large, the analyst continued, would have pounced on Pakistan for its terrible behaviour. But, the analyst lamented, because Pakistan is weak, it could do no more than send its army chief to Afghanistan and politely seek the Afghan government’s cooperation.

For many in Pakistan, the analyst’s anger would have resonated. His fulminations against the international community’s perceived discrimination against Pakistan would have garnered much sympathy. To much of the outside world, the analyst’s comparison would have triggered incredulity.

For exactly that scenario – Pakistanis slipping into India to mercilessly kill civilians in a major city – had infamously already occurred. In Mumbai. In 2008. Had the TV analyst simply forgotten? Surely not.

But there the analyst was, on one of Pakistan’s most popular news channels, suggesting that the world does not share Pakistan’s pain. Unsaid, though not uncommunicated, was a darker theory: Pakistan is a victim of an international conspiracy, an innocent victim of geopolitics, alone and vulnerable in a Hobbesian world full of militant proxies.

Ultimately, Pakistan’s problem with militancy is not denial. It is not even ignorance. It is something quite different. Simply, it is the widespread belief that militants fighting the Indian state, militants fighting to free “Indian-held Kashmir”, militants fighting the Afghan government and militants fighting to “free” Afghanistan are not militants. They are the good guys. The righteous ones brave enough to take on the world in the name of the one true God.

The problem was never denial. The problem is the paradigm. The Afghan Taliban are not militants. Lashkar-e-Taiba – LeT –are not terrorists. And, even more insidiously, there are those within Pakistan who do not believe that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan is in the wrong.

Instead, the belief is that the Pakistani state itself is on the wrong path. A democratic path. A path that keeps it in thrall to American, godless, anti-Islam interests. A path that takes Pakistan far from that of the religion in the name of which it was ostensibly created.

That’s really why it’s possible for Pakistan to stun the outside world – two days after the horror of Peshawar – by granting bail to one of the alleged architects of the Mumbai attack, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi of the officially banned LeT. That’s why it’s possible for Pakistan to confound the world by rejecting global sympathy over the Peshawar attack and embracing LeT instead.

The Lakhvi bail is not a surprise. In truth, it is the inexorable outcome of recent events in Pakistan. Consider just what happened in Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab and the heart of political power in Pakistan, on 4 December.

Imran Khan, the leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), had been trying to oust the government of Nawaz Sharif via street protests since August, and threatened to shut down Lahore that day. But within hours of Khan’s announcement on 30 November, the PTI appeared to realise it had made a mistake: the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, a hardline Islamist organisation, was holding its annual congress in Lahore on 4 and 5 December. And so the PTI quickly postponed its protest.

Pause on that for a moment. The business of toppling a national, elected government had to take a back seat to the annual Lahore pilgrimage of Hafiz Saeed, the chief of Jamaat-ud-Dawa. It was perhaps inevitable. With the Narendra Modi government in India taking a hawkish line on Pakistan, pro-Kashmir, anti-India jihadis in Pakistan were always going to take centre stage.

There is though at least one thing that Pakistan remains wilfully blind to. Every single one of the militant groups fighting the Pakistani state today was once at some point in recent history considered to be a good militant/good Taliban. Just like Hafiz Saeed is today.

Pakistan must live in Peshawar

Reem Wasay in The Hindu

Time and again, the country has moved on and forgotten about the dead. But not this time

For the last decade or so, Pakistanis seemed to have lost the ability to be easily moved by news of tragedy and misfortune — so frequent have been the numbers of dead, injured and displaced. However, what transpired on Tuesday, December 16, in Peshawar has shaken this country more than any earthquake, attack or battle ever could. The massacre of 132 children, who must have thought they were safe in the impenetrability of their school, by Taliban militants, has left a gaping wound that continues to splutter the rancid blood of our collective failure to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Storming the Army Public School (APS) and Degree College premises in a hail of gunfire and explosives-laden suicide vests, the militants did not enter to take hostages and negotiate with power brokers and members of the government; they came to kill and strike a fatal blow to the last remaining vestiges of humanity left in this Pakistan, and they succeeded. Every passing minute, with the death toll rising and red tickers on television screens changing their statistics, left onlookers gasping for air, parents wailing for their trapped angels, newscasters fighting back tears and Special Services Group (SSG) commandos at the ready wondering how things could have gone so horribly, bloodily wrong.

Brave teachers evacuated panicked students and were pumped full of bullets and the principal was burned alive in front of the children to instil maximum terror. Dressed as paramilitary personnel, the militants duped the children to reveal who among them were from army families; they naively shot up their little hands, thinking they were going to be rescued, but were instead shot between the eyes. Others played dead and cowered under desks and behind chairs only to be dragged out and gunned down. More than a dozen explosives rang out during the eight- hour-long siege — say that to yourself again: eight hours of defenceless children ambushed without the protective cover of a mother or father’s undying love, shielding their darlings from any and all harm. There is no greater human tragedy.

Not a ‘blowback’ attack

Running parallel to this calamity was the gloating statement from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claiming responsibility for the carnage, justifying it as revenge for army operations against them and their families. They were talking about Operation Zarb-e-Azb, a Pakistan military offensive being waged in North Waziristan since June this year, after the same militants attacked Karachi International Airport, killing some 36 people.

Such excuses will simply not do now; this is not a ‘blowback’ attack for the deaths of militants’ families in drone attacks and military operations; it is an ideology that must be realised by the entire nation and eliminated.

Some may argue that Pakistan was created in the name of Islam, and that debate will rage on for many more years to come, but what stands as clear as the pools of unblemished blood in the grounds of APS Peshawar is the fact that Islam is being used to destroy this country corner to corner, person to person. These militants did not fly in here overnight nor did they scale the walls of ironclad fortresses committed to the preservation of the Pakistani nation in a surprise attack. No, they have been allowed to fester and rot at the very core of what should have been a National Security Policy, a policy that only resulted in the limp bodies of this nation.

No effective counterterrorism measures have been taken to root out a terror of our own making: a proxy scourge that has penetrated every city, every mind. It is the mindset in Pakistan that is the problem. From shrinking space for moderate voices on every platform to the public outpouring of sympathy we see for the killers of those accused of blasphemy, from minorities and anyone with secular, liberal leanings to the infantile projections of “my sect is bigger than your sect,” Pakistan is not surprised by the horror that unfolded in Peshawar — it has finally been numbed and struck down by the chilling awareness that this is a monster of our own making, the culmination of our Machiavellian pact with the primitive and the poisonous.

We can lay blame on the TTP all we want, but the real criminals are those who apologise for their ideology by footing the blame on “foreign hands”; who seek excuses when they should have sought retribution; who move on when Ahmedis and Shias are ruthlessly burned, beaten, murdered for their faith; who offer media space to orthodox clerics to air their views for public consumption; and who allow the communal gathering of the likes of Jamaat-ud-Dawa Chief Hafiz Saeed riding in on a white stead, like some sort of repugnant messiah of the people, at a symbol of Pakistan’s newly found hope and pride all those years ago (Minar-e-Pakistan) that are to blame.

For too long now, journalists like me have been urged to self-censor, to throw in the towel lest extremist ire is sparked, to tremble at the mere mention of change, repeal or amendment of the current mindset where sectarian differences cancel out universal convergence on humane notions of good and evil.

Why a school was targeted

The school was targeted because it was one where military officers sent their offspring and because it was a symbol of everything the Taliban are opposed to: enlightenment and freedom. Where their lies and propaganda brainwash ignorant minds, schools liberate future generations from their draconian claws. Malala Yousafzai (you either love her or hate her in Pakistan) was shot in the face by the same mentality in 2012 and many here sneered at her, calling her a U.S. agent. Were all 141 fatalities in Peshawar agents and were they 141 reasons to give up our misguided notion of strategic assets and proxy panhandling?

“The school was targeted because it was a symbol of everything the Taliban are opposed to: enlightenment and freedom.”

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif lifted the moratorium on the death penalty the day after the attack, after widespread public backlash and media frenzy demanded that all terrorists on death row be executed immediately. This is a fragile first step; it is a belated response to a plague that runs woefully deeper. Battered, bruised, bleeding and gone are our children — their hands shown grasping their copies and bags in photographs splashed all over social and other media. It is a harrowing vision, but it is necessary. We have, time and again, moved on and forgotten about the dead, swept away the fragments of their bodies by our own apathy and forgetfulness. Not this time Pakistan; do not forget this time. The pestilence of extremism must be purged, we must say this freely now, we must never think twice. Pakistan must live in Peshawar until this war is won.

(Reem Wasay is Op-ed Editor of Daily Times, Pakistan.)