One, two, three - from Mumbai to
Pathankot to Uri, the future is being written for us. CYRIL ALMEIDA
ULTIMATELY, they’re
going to have to do it. They know it, we know it and the targets do too:
decommission the favourites; defang the good ones.
Get rid of
militancy.
Think of it as an
arc: from Musharraf to Kayani to Raheel to the next chief, a progressive
clampdown against groups that had to be taken on.
With Musharraf, it
was Al Qaeda — 9/11 changed the world and the world changed how we did
business.
From Kayani to
Raheel, a second purge — the anti-Pakistan lot. They came after us, so we had
to go after them.
And soon the next
chief — confronted with the spectre of a roiling Kashmir and the long-term
presence of a right-winger in Delhi causing the last line standing to go into
agitated motion.
Something will have
to be done before they do us in.
One, two, three —
is there an arc of inevitability to it? Each successive chief having to go
incrementally further than the last, not necessarily because he wanted to, but
because he had to.
Lost in the warfare
of the last month was an important consensus: the civilians said something
needed to be done and the boys agreed — though, tellingly, the civilians
resisted other actions in Punjab.
But the path to
recognising that something has to be done about the anti-India lot has begun to
be trodden.
It is the logic of
utility, institutional self-preservation and the mechanism of jihad: if the
groups exist, they occasionally have to go into action; and when they do, the
outside world has a reaction.
Uri was perhaps the
least significant and so the reaction the most telling. Pathankot was really
the bigger deal, but it came a week after Modi’s Christmas Day Lahore surprise.
He couldn’t react
as angrily because he had just pushed open the door to normalisation. So India
swallowed its rage and the world kept quiet.
When Uri happened,
there was no such luck. India went into a rage and the world sympathised, even
before the facts were known.
On India, we don’t
have the advantage we have with the Afghan-centric lot. There we can always
nudge them across the border — go home to where you belong, we can tell them
when the time comes.
With the anti-India
lot, this is home. They’re from here and this is where the fallout will be
suffered.
And so this is
where they’ll have to be dealt with.
The past offers
some clues about what the future could look like. With Al Qaeda there was an
opening wallop followed by sustained action.
The wallop came
because 9/11 was momentous. It is how history will be measured, time before
9/11 and time after.
The sustained,
years-long pursuit of Al Qaeda, in Fata and the cities, came because America
insisted and America had the resources to make sure we listened.
But then came the
Osama anomaly — what the hell was he doing here for those long years in plain
sight?
The lesson: we’re
like the kid who hates homework. We’ll make a show of it in the beginning and
then find reason to go slow or switch off.
Phase three, the
push against the anti-India lot, will be a root canal — when we get around to
it, we sure won’t like it and will find plenty of reason not to until it
threatens to kill us.
From the push
against the anti-Pakistan lot, a different lesson: the need to create a
national narrative first, the fabled public consensus that the boys demand as
the starting point.
The boys have
already hinted at it in private: telling the civilians to get a parliamentary
resolution; arguing that public opinion needs to be kept onside; cautioning
against moving too fast and under a perception of Indian pressure.
It can seem a ruse
and a delaying mechanism, but the experience of getting to the point of saying
no more on the anti-Pakistan lot is mirroring the talking points on the
anti-India lot — the boys won’t do it until they’re sure they have the public
onside.
But let’s not kid
ourselves — the anti-India lot are fundamentally a different challenge.
It’s not like that
they’re hard to find — their power is derived from the ability to thrive in
plain sight. When we do decide to go after them, the core networks can be shut
down relatively quickly.
The challenge,
then, is something else: separating them from the anti-India narrative.
We’ll have to find
a way to shut down the anti-India lot without tampering with the story of India
being Enemy No 1.
Because, as has
become evident, India being Enemy No 1 is an unalterable truth, an inalienable
position that the boys will never give up.
The logic of
utility, institutional self-preservation and the mechanism of jihad means the
boys can and will turn on the anti-India lot. What the boys will never do is
give up on India being the enemy.
So how to do it?
And can it happen as soon as the next chief?
It won’t happen
when India is demanding furiously — this much we can see. And it won’t happen
when the civilians try to make themselves look good.
But it can if — if
— someone can figure out how to get the boys to do it without making it look
like it was someone else’s idea and without the boys looking bad.
One, two, three —
at least the logic is in place.
The writer is a
member of staff.
Twitter: @cyalm
Published in Dawn,
November 6th, 2016
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