The
Pakistani Military Must Drop Jihad as a Tool of National Security, by Aqil Shah
Life and Death in Lahore
On Sunday, March 27, a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowded
public park in Lahore, Pakistan, killing 72 people and injuring over 350 others, most of them
women and children. The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a vicious splinter group of the
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), claimed responsibility for the attack, saying
it was meant to target Christians celebrating Easter. It also sent the signal
that it is capable of striking at will in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s
largest province, Punjab, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s hometown. In
response, the military reportedly launched a province-wide counterterror
operation and authorities detained over
300 suspected militants.
Pakistan has
been here many, many times before. Every major terrorist attack reproduces a
sickeningly familiar pattern. With robotic consistency, the generals vow to
fight terrorism of all forms, while blaming it all on foreign powers (mostly
India) and civilian incompetence. In reality, the fundamental cause of
mayhem on Pakistani streets is not a malicious foreign power or inept
civilians, but blowback from the military’s own long history of
using jihad as an instrument of national security.
Even as terrorists have exploded bomb after bomb in Pakistan for almost
a decade, Pakistan’s military has doggedly stuck to a false, self-serving
dichotomy between “good” and “bad” terrorists. As it has fought hostile
factions of the TTP, it has continued to use other militant groups as proxies
against archrival India. These include the Haqqani network and the Afghan
Taliban, which help maintain Pakistan’s influence over Afghanistan, and the
Lashkar-e-Taiba (reincarnated as Jamaat-ud-Dawa or JUD), which is mainly
focused on India.
FAYAZ
AZIZ / REUTERS
Special
combat police conducting an exercise to repel militant attacks enter Elizabeth
High School in Peshawar, Pakistan, January 28, 2016.
The military’s black-and-white view assumes that these groups can be
neatly separated, when the actual lines between them are blurred. For instance, the
TTP pledged allegiance to the Afghan Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar until
the announcement of his death in 2015. The groups also offer each other
operational assistance, and there is a revolving door of “good” terrorists
turning into “bad” ones. For example, in December of last year, police in
Punjab Province busted an alleged Islamic State (ISIS) cell in Sialkot City,
whose members were all former JUD militants. And the TTP itself is a loosely
organized conglomerate of jihadi groups that were created or sponsored by the
military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to fight in Indian Kashmir and
Afghanistan but are now, apparently, more interested in killing Pakistanis.
In the past two years, the military has taken the fight to the TTP and
its allied militant groups based in North Waziristan. But its much-delayed
offensive, named Zarb-e-Azb, which was launched as a reaction to a terrorist
attack on Karachi airport in June 2014, has been a partial success at best. The
army seems to have deprived the Pakistani Taliban of its local sanctuaries and
degraded their operational capacity to carry out terror operations from
Waziristan. In 2015, terrorist attacks were down by 48 percent compared to
2014.
But the military’s gains might be illusory. The army has yet to
capture or kill a senior TTP commander, and the operation has reportedly
driven the Taliban leadership to sanctuaries across the border in Afghanistan,
where they continue to plan terrorist attacks inside Pakistan. At any rate,
there is not even any way of accurately assessing the operation’s effectiveness
since news media are barred from the area and the only source of information is
the army, which has an obvious interest in inflating the losses suffered by
militants while underreporting its own.
In a perverse way, terrorism has aggrandized Pakistan’s army. For
example, in response to the TTP attack on an army school in Peshawar in
December 2014 that killed over 130 students, the army, under Chief of Staff
General Raheel Sharif, took full charge of the state’s response to that
horrific act. The generals pressed the government to create military courts for
delivering “speedy justice” to terrorists. Subsequently, parliament amended the
country’s constitution in January 2015 to authorize military courts to try
civilians accused of terrorism. The proceedings of the courts remain secret,
convicts do not have the right of appeal, and the impact on terrorism is less
than impressive despite the execution of three dozen “hardened” terrorists.
For its part, the government adopted a National Action Plan (NAP)
immediately after the army school attack. The NAP lifted the moratorium on the
death penalty, in place since 2008, to execute terrorists on death row. It also
committed the government to preventing armed militias from operating in the
country, strengthening the civilian-led National Counter Terrorism Authority
(NACTA), tackling terrorist financing, regulating madrassas (religious
seminaries), cracking down on hate speech and extremist materials, creating a
special counterterrorism force, and reforming the criminal justice system.
But the plan remains poorly implemented, partially because of the government’s
lackluster follow-through but mainly due to resistance from the military, which
wants to lead the counterterror effort without civilian interference.
For example, NACTA remains a shell organization in considerable measure
because the military’s intelligence agencies refuse to work under its
authority. With the exception of the government’s prosecution of several
clerics for hate speech and the police’s extrajudicial killings of key Sunni
militants in Punjab, there is as yet no concerted strategy or plan for
dismantling the country’s vast militant infrastructure, nor have any serious efforts
been made to reform the criminal justice system or bring the madrassas that
typically spawn terrorists under meaningful scrutiny.
FAISAL
MAHMOOD / REUTERS
Leaders
of Islamist activists talk to their supporters as they announced the end of
their sit in protest against the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, a policeman turned
criminal, after negotiations with the government outside the Parliament
building in Islamabad, Pakistan, March 30, 2016.
Civilian intelligence and police officials, meanwhile, complain that the
ISI routinely blocks or intervenes in their investigations when they involve
“good” terrorists. Even the anti-terror campaign against “bad” terrorists is hampered by
the military’s desire to steal the limelight and appear resolute to the
Pakistani public. Following the Lahore attack, the army and its intelligence
services carried out raids against suspected militants in five major cities
across the province, which were duly advertised on Twitter by the military’s
social media-savvy official spokesman, Asim Bajwa, as an exclusively military
operation. The military’s PR offensive forced an embarrassed provincial
government to claim that the counterterror operation was actually a joint
venture between civilian and military security forces.
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