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| Imran Khan and Sami-ul-Haq. |
After losing tens of thousands of lives to terror attacks
during the last decade, an across-the-board consensus has developed among
Pakistan’s mainstream political forces that the policy of nurturing militants
against regional adversaries has backfired on Pakistan and it risks facing
international isolation due to belligerent policies of Pakistan’s security
establishment.
Not only Washington, but Pakistan’s “all-weather ally”
China, which plans to invest $62 billion in Pakistan via its China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, has also made its reservations public
regarding Pakistan’s continued support to jihadist groups.
Thus, excluding a handful of far-right Islamist political
parties that are funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and historically garner
less than 10% votes of Pakistan’s electorate, all the civilian political forces
are in favor of turning a new leaf in Pakistan’s checkered political history by
endorsing the policy of an indiscriminate crackdown on militant outfits
operating in Pakistan. But Pakistan’s security establishment jealously guards
its traditional domain, the security and foreign policy of Pakistan, and still
maintains a distinction between the so-called “good and bad Taliban.”
Regarding Pakistan’s duplicitous stance on terrorism, it’s
worth noting that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in
Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused
Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab
militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement
(ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants,
the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence
inconsequential.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised
of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus.
The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like
to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of
ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are
willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state
apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large
remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.
Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing
to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are
regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, as far as the
Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including
the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because
such militant groups are regarded as “strategic assets” by Pakistan’s security
agencies.
Regarding the question does Pakistan have the capability to
eliminate terrorism from its soil, Pakistan is evidently a police state whose
civic and political life is completely dominated by military and affiliated
security agencies. In order to bring home the military’s absolute control over
Pakistan’s politics, an eye-opening incident that occurred last November is
worth noting.
On the evening of November 2, Maulana Sami-ul-Haq was found
dead in his Rawalpindi residence. The assassination was as gruesome as the
murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul a
month earlier on October 2. He was stabbed multiple times in chest, stomach and
forehead.
Sami-ul-Haq was widely known as the “Godfather of the
Taliban” because he was a renowned religious cleric who used to administer a
sprawling religious seminary, Darul Uloom Haqqania, in Akora Khattak in
northwestern Pakistan.
During the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s, the seminary was
used for training and arming the Afghan jihadists, though it is now used
exclusively for imparting religious education. Many of the well-known Taliban
militant commanders received their education in the seminary.
In order to understand the motive of the assassination, we
need to keep the backdrop in mind. On October 31, Pakistan’s apex court acquitted
a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who was accused of blasphemy and had been
languishing in prison since 2010. Pakistan’s religious political parties were
holding street protests against her acquittal for several days before
Sami-ul-Haq’s murder and had paralyzed the whole country.
But as soon as the news of Sami-ul-Haq’s murder broke and
the pictures of the badly mutilated corpse were released to the media, the
religious political parties promptly reached an agreement with the government
and called off the protests within few hours of the assassination.
Evidently, it was a shot across the bow by Pakistan’s
security establishment to the religious right that evokes a scene from Francis
Ford Coppola’s epic movie The Godfather, in which an expensive racehorse’s
severed head was placed into a Hollywood director’s bed on Don Corleone’s
orders that frightened the director out of his wits and he agreed to give a
lead role in a movie to the Don’s protégé.
The entire leadership of the religious political parties
that spearheaded the campaign against the release of Asia Bibi and hundreds of
their political workers have been put behind the bars on the charge of
“disturbing the public order” since the assassination.
In the manner thousands of religious protesters who had been
demonstrating against her acquittal were treated by the security agencies
brings to the fore the fact that Pakistan’s military wields absolute control
over its jihadist proxies. Thus, cracking down on terrorist outfits operating
in Pakistan, particularly on Kashmir-focused Punjabi militant groups, is not a
question of capacity but of will.
What further lends credence to the conclusion that
Pakistan’s security establishment was behind the murder of Sami-ul-Haq is the
fact that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close associate of the Taliban’s founder
Mullah Omar, was released by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies in October and
was allowed to join his family in Afghanistan.
Baradar was captured in a joint US-Pakistan intelligence-based
operation in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010. His release was a longstanding
demand of the US-backed Kabul government because he is regarded as a
comparatively moderate Taliban leader who could play a role in the peace
process between the Afghan government and the Taliban. He is currently leading
the Taliban delegation in the negotiations with the US Special Representative
Zalmay Khalilzad in the capital of Qatar, Doha.
Furthermore, Washington has been arm-twisting Islamabad
through the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to do more to
curtail the activities of militants operating from its soil to destabilize the
US-backed government in Afghanistan and to pressure the Taliban to initiate a
peace process with the government. Under such circumstances, a religious cleric
like Sami-ul-Haq, who was widely known as the “Godfather of the Taliban,”
becomes a liability rather than an asset.
