Terror in Lahore: Pakistan’s Toughest Test: New Age Islam's Selection, 02 April 2016
New Age
Islam Edit Bureau
02 April 2016
• Terror in Lahore: Pakistan’s Toughest Test
By Michael Kugelman
• Spineless In Lahore
By Irfan Husain
• Battle for Hearts, Minds and the State
By Farrukh Khan Pitafi
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Terror In Lahore: Pakistan’s Toughest Test
By Michael Kugelman
April 02, 2016
On March 27, Easter Sunday, militants attacked Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal park, killing at least 72 people — many of them women and children — and wounding several hundred more. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since the December 2014 school massacre in Peshawar. Unlike the Peshawar attack that targeted an educational centre, Easter Sunday’s senseless killing targeted Christians, a long-persecuted minority population in the Muslim-majority country — even as media reports state that most of the victims were Muslims. It left Pakistanis once again struggling to make sense of the senseless terrorist violence that continues to stalk the country, despite aggressive counterterrorism operations in the North Waziristan tribal region over the past several years.
What makes Sunday’s tragedy particularly significant is its location. Lahore is the capital of Punjab province and the political stronghold of Pakistan’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party. In recent years, Punjab has suffered fewer mass casualty terror attacks than Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces. However, a number of assaults in recent years have made clear that Punjab is not immune, from a triple bombing on a Sufi shrine that killed more than 40 people in Lahore in 2010, to the assassination of Shuja Khanzada, a top PML-N politician, near the district of Attock in 2015. The park blast simply amplifies what has long been known: terrorists very much have Punjab and Lahore in particular, in their crosshairs.
The identity of the outfit behind Sunday’s attack, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), underscores the very real terror threat faced by Pakistan’s most affluent and populous province. JuA was the Mohmand tribal agency-based branch of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) until it split from its parent group in 2014. Its star has risen just as the parent TTP’s star has fallen — a consequence of US drone strikes and Pakistani military operations that have degraded the TTP and reduced it to a shadow of its former fearsome self. According to Reuters, JuA has claimed seven major attacks since early 2015. Notably, several of these attacks — including the bombing of a Shiite mosque in Rawalpindi, home to Pakistan’s military headquarters, and twin church bombings in Lahore — were in Punjab.
This is no surprise, given that, according to terrorism researchers, JuA has had a presence in Punjab for nearly two years. Pakistan’s leadership must now confront a conundrum that it has long sought to sweep under the carpet: What to do about terrorist networks and facilities in a province that, for political reasons, it has much preferred not to touch in order to avert bloodshed. Punjab is home not just to Taliban factions like JuA, but also to notorious anti-India groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and sectarian outfits like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
In the hours after the Easter massacre, Pakistani authorities suggested that security forces would launch a major operation in Punjab. No specific groups or locations were named, however. Also missing was clarity about the division of labour between the Pakistani government and the military.
Any major campaign in Punjab would likely be similar to those in the tribal areas. It would target groups that stage attacks in Pakistan, such as JuA, and avoid focusing on the anti-India groups. Pakistan has little incentive to sever ties with useful proxies that can be used against its archenemy.
Adopting such a selective policy toward militancy in Punjab would be as dangerous as it has been in the tribal areas, and perhaps even more so. All terror groups in Pakistan are, by definition, violent organisations, and, therefore, a threat to the country’s tenuous stability. Key members of the groups that Pakistan patronises and leaves alone — particularly the India-focused ones — often turn on their master and join the anti-state groups. One of the most prominent examples is Ilyas Kashmiri, the one-time anti-India fighter who became a top al-Qaeda commander after the 9/11 attacks. More recently, JeM leader, Asmatullah Muawiya, became a Punjab-based TTP commander in 2007, while Mast Gul moved from a Kashmir militant group to the TTP in 2014.
At the same time, it’s folly to assume that if Pakistan simply declared war on all Punjab-based groups, its problems would magically disappear. Blowback would be guaranteed, and the implications for stability would be considerable, and, given that this is Punjab, politically explosive.
If it does nothing in Punjab, JuA (and likeminded anti-state groups) could broaden its network and deepen its presence and capacities — particularly in a region rife with militant facilities and, one can assume, ready-made radicalised recruits. And yet, if Pakistan takes action in Punjab, it faces the prospect of major backlash.
At the same time, Pakistan faces pressure from other quarters. The Lahore park blast occurred against the backdrop of rising anti-government sentiment from religious extremists. According to the BBC, 25,000 of them descended on Islamabad on Sunday to protest, at times violently, Pakistan’s recent execution of Mumtaz Qadri, a former police officer who assassinated the then Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer, for his outspoken opposition to the country’s blasphemy laws.
One can assume that if Pakistan were to broaden its campaign against militancy in Punjab, these types of people would be up in arms. Despite these risks, intensifying such a campaign is critical. The TTP may be degraded and decimated, but its offshoots — like JuA — are ferocious and formidable forces, including in the prized province of Punjab.
Pakistan may have reached an inflection point. How it responds to the events of recent days could go a long way toward determining the country’s trajectory.
Michael Kugelman is the senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/02-Apr-2016/terror-in-lahore-pakistan-s-toughest-test
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Spineless in Lahore
By Irfan Husain
April 2nd, 2016
URDU is a marvellous language for vaulting flights of fancy. So when Nawaz Sharif promised an accounting for every drop of innocent blood spilled by Jihadi terrorists, we almost believed him.
Almost, but not quite. Rewind to a couple of years ago, before the massacre of schoolchildren at the Army Public School in Peshawar, and we see a Nawaz Sharif in full foot-dragging mode. Restraining a military that was champing at the bit, he dragged out a doomed negotiation process that went nowhere. Its only function was to give the Taliban time to regroup.
And in his recent speech following the Lahore bloodbath, our prime minister seemed more sad than angry. In fact, he came across as a headmaster disappointed by a promising student. At times, he appeared to be delivering a lecture on Islamiat rather than issuing a rousing call to arms.
There has been little action on the NAP items.
Not a word about the army action that was in full swing in Punjab even as he spoke to the nation. Indeed, there was nothing specific about what precisely his government was going to do in response to the atrocity. In short, he delivered the kind of vague, woolly speech he has been giving for much of his political career.
Actually, we could have done with a progress report on the National Action Plan to combat terrorism hammered out with a wide consensus after the December 2014 terror attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar. This plan called for the government to undertake a number of measures ranging from madrasa reforms to cleansing our curricula of all their extremist content.
Needless to say, little action has been taken on most of the agreed items. The only institution that has made significant progress has been the military, although at the cost of many lives. And it has been Nawaz Sharif who, together with his brother Shahbaz, has blocked robust action against the Punjabi Taliban holed out in southern Punjab.
The reason for this reluctance is obvious: thus far, a policy of live and let live has governed the provincial and central governments’ attitude towards the Punjabi Taliban. But if you keep vipers as pets in your garden, don’t be surprised when they bite you.
Even after the Lahore carnage, Rana Sanaullah, a senior figure in the Punjab government, declared that there were no Taliban hideouts in his province. This flies in the face of intelligence reports and investigative stories filed by journalists. We remember all too well the sight of Sanaullah accompanying an extremist candidate on his election campaign a few years ago.
The point here is that until we can clearly identify the enemy, and go after him, his sense of immunity will only embolden him further. And as so many people have been saying here and in other media outlets, we need to drain the swamp of its poison if we are to destroy the nasty creatures infesting its depths.
This means a root-and-branch change in school and college curricula, and a clampdown on hate speech in mosques and TV chat shows. The financing of madrasas and so-called Islamic charities needs to be scrutinised, and the hate-filled ideology taught in most of our seminaries has to be removed.
This is a pretty tall order. Even Musharraf at the height of his considerable power flinched from taking on our clerics and our religious parties. But as Ayaz Amir reminded us in a recent column in The News, Benazir Bhutto showed more spine than her male successors when she authorised Gen Babar to crack down on the MQM terror machine in the mid-1990s.
This was when dozens of tortured bodies were found in sacks, and Altaf Hussain’s hit-men held the city in an iron grip. Those of us who lived in Karachi then recall those dark days with a shudder. The operation took a lot of political will, especially when the military establishment was hostile towards the PPP government at the time.
This only shows that what is lacking in Nawaz Sharif’s approach is conviction. He genuinely believes that the Taliban will leave Punjab alone provided they are allowed to carry out their activities without interference. But as we have seen in the Islamabad and Karachi dharnas, give our clerics and their followers an inch and they’ll take a mile.
In both pro-Qadri protests, these extremists sought to provoke the authorities into violent reaction, thereby causing casualties that would further inflame the mobs. But by adopting this softly-softly approach, the federal, Sindh and Punjab governments have signalled a weakness that will be exploited in the future.
This style of sit-in politics was pioneered by Imran Khan and Tahir ul Qadri when they dragged out their protests before parliament for weeks. Despite the destruction of public property, the government showed great restraint, setting the stage for the recent round of dharnas.
Perhaps Nawaz Sharif should just abdicate the fight against terror to the army chief.
Source: dawn.com/news/1249415/spineless-in-lahore
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Battle for Hearts, Minds and the State
By Farrukh Khan Pitafi
April 1, 2016
Three developments in quick succession. Arrest of a RAW agent. A bomb blast in Lahore killing dozens. And the march of pro-Mumtaz Qadri protestors to an agitator’s dream picnic spot — the Constitution Avenue. A state that has the knack of processing a daily dose of extraordinary disasters was further overstretched.
The first development is a breakthrough. Pakistani state has for long complained that India is constantly trying to destabilise it despite the need for the country to single mindedly pursue the fight against terrorists. So here is the smoking gun, at last. An alive, walking, talking enemy spy with a video testimony recorded ostensibly under no duress. India’s official response was pathetic. It owned the man as its national and ex-serviceman but distanced itself from the charges of being a spy. In spy speak that is the closest you get to owning an asset.
Domestic response? Bedlam. It was natural for the obscurantist apologists of terror to further obfuscate the already dim boundaries separating different shades of terror. If Indian hand is visible in one or two conflict zones it means it is involved in all. Then there is the constant campaign to get the government. People who have to take great pains to prove incumbent prime minister works for every other country except his own. Some emotionally displaced fans of Musharraf, a banned business group with a failed attempt to launch a media house, minions of disgruntled property tycoon, a party that failed to effect a 1977 like coup less than two years ago. All committed to strike where it hurts the government the most. Compared to this onslaught a ragtag band of liberal/moderate cousins whose first instinct is of disbelief and cynicism. So the result? An army of men pretending it is only India that can ever hurt Pakistan battling a small but loud minority of keyboard warriors exclaiming India can do no wrong. Truth lost somewhere in the pandemonium of conspiracy theories on both sides of the divide. The fact that with this smoking gun the Pakistani state has Indians by the short and curlies and can expose their role without undermining the fight against the TTP and affiliates long forgotten. Such is the state of our intelligentsia that the egos of men always have to come first. A great opportunity to bolster your state and win it over all but lost.
The terror attack in Lahore, an altogether different ball game. It was Easter. The cowards struck the softest target of all. The lower strata of the society and the country’s already marginalised Christians. Somehow what passes for media and intelligentsia did not miss this occasion to display immaturity. In indecent haste to break the story an ID card of a slain man was shown on live television as the most likely suicide bomber without censoring the particulars. After the family of the slain man was thoroughly harassed it eventually dawned on us that poor soul was just another victim. But battle lines had already been drawn. Somehow the RAW story and this one were of competing values. That a country can have multiple enemies was conveniently overlooked. Every story needs closure but evidently, we are incapable of doing justice to even one of them. Meanwhile, as these geniuses spar over minutiae, human lives are lost every single day. Forget about winning hearts and minds then. Keep massaging your egos and bullying people.
And amidst all this, the bizarre march of Mumtaz Qadri’s fans. That is where you realise that all we are good at is pulling faces, talk, talk and talk. No action. The crowd made it to the country’s seat of power and on its way managed to set ablaze public property and the spine of the liberals. We, the moderates, usually lose most of our voice on such occasions and keep stammering until the threat has settled down. And even after that, what came out of our television sets was more sectarian than moderate. The voices of kill kill coming from all around. Those who sympathise with the marchers defied the state’s directives. Those who did not wanted them all dead. But what about a bold counter-narrative? Thanks but no thanks.
Now that the last ordeal is over one can only praise the Lord for the petty-mindedness of our right wing that thoroughly missed the bigger picture. And complain about the petty-mindedness of our liberals who missed it too. On such occasions I fish out my favourite Gulliver’s Travels and read it again. Jonathan Swift and our television; our intelligentsia, Blefuscu and Lilliput, what’s the difference?
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1077197/battle-for-hearts-minds-and-the-state/
URL: https://newageislam.com/pakistan-press/terror-lahore-pakistan’s-toughest-test/d/106839