Leniency Towards TTP Will Cost Pakistan Dearly
Growing
Influence Of TTP Has Become An Existential Threat To Pakistan
Main
Points:
1. Increasing
influence of TTP and religious extremists had led Pakistan to the edge of a
civil war.
2. Successive
Pakistani governments have compromised with the religious organizations at the
cost of the countries already shaky democratic values
3. Extremist
outfits, from ISIS to Al Qaida and then the TTP may wage a protracted war
against the ‘Kafir’ Pakistani secular government
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New
Age Islam Edit Desk
19 January
2022
Chaman Border Gate between Afghanistan
and Pakistan (file photo) | Commons
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The
increasing influence of TTP and religious extremists had led Pakistan to the
edge of a civil war. For the last few decades, the successive Pakistani
governments have compromised with the religious organizations at the cost of
the countries already shaky democratic values. The current Imran Khan
government had made many concessions to the extremist organizations especially
the TTP giving them an upper hand in political matters. The rise of the TTP in
Pakistan and its increased strength post the ascent of Taliban in Afghan has
become the cause of increased extremist violence in Pakistan as there were
about 300 terrorist attacks in Pakistan in 2021 killing about 400 hundred
people half of them being security personnel.
Though the
Afghan Taliban has officially denied any links with TTP, in practice, the TTP
has gained strength only after the rise of Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2014, the
army crackdown on the TTP had driven it to Afghanistan but after last year’s
victory of Taliban, the TTP have come back in Pakistan and have been calling
the shots since then. The situation has come to this passé because the
Pakistani government and the military have always banked upon these extremist
forces for political benefits especially in elections to defeat their political
opponents. As a result, these extremist outfits demand their pound of flesh to
further their religious agenda. In 2018 elections, TTP drove out ANP from the
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by assassinating key political leaders.
Gradually Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa has become a hotbed of religious extremism. Last year, the state
government had issued an order asking all educational institutions to make it Abayas
mandatory for girls causing strong criticism from secular and liberal quarters.
The government had to withdraw its order for the time being. Now it is learnt
that the TTP is demanding the imposing Shariah in the state. Once it happens,
the state will go the Taliban way where women will be harassed and persecuted
and kept from social and political arena. Moreover, the state may become a safe
haven for extremist outfits, from ISIS to Al Qaida and then the TTP may wage a
protracted war against the ‘Kafir’ Pakistani secular government.
Praveen
Swami’s article gives a deep insight into Pakistan’s speedy advance towards a
civil war, a war that could push Pakistan in a situation similar to that of the
Iraq-Syria situation in 2014. The choice is with the Pakistani political
leadership and the army generals who have been ensconced in their comfort
zones. Hobnobbing with religious extremists will cost Pakistan and the entire
region dear.
------
Pakistani State Won’t Collapse.
Choice Is Between Civil War And Short-Term Rise In Violence
Islamabad's new national security doctrine,
calling for peace and trade, is good news for neighbours like India. But it
doesn't address a critical question
By
16 January,
2022
“For
fourteen years, they raised every part of Afghanistan against me,” lamented the country’s Emir, Abdur Rahman
Khan, in an 1897 letter to the imperial commissioner in Peshawar, about the
network of the mullah of Hadda village, Najmuddin Akhundzada, “both in the
plains country and in the hills, till thousands of men perished on both sides.”
“What
calamities are there that they have not suffered, and what blood have they not
shed, by his senseless commands?” Khan asked.
Two
centuries on, the sentiment may seem familiar to the generals in Islamabad who
are grappling with their own ‘Hadda Mullah’ — Noor Wali Mehsud, the charismatic
cleric who has rebuilt the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) jihadi group from
the ashes of defeat into a resurgent force that has shown the resolve to take
on the Pakistan Army.
Even as the
generals were still gloating about installing a proxy regime in Kabul, expert
Daud Khattak reported that the TTP had brought about a sharp increase in jihadi
violence in Pakistan. Last year, there were 294 attacks, up 56 per cent from
2020, of which 45 were in December alone. Three hundred and ninety-five people,
half of them security force personnel, were killed — numbers much higher than
Kashmir. The ‘forever war’ that America has extricated itself from is, clearly,
far from done.
This week,
Islamabad released a new, measured national security doctrine, calling for,
among other things, peace and trade with neighbours. This is good news for
countries like India, but offers little guidance on the real national security
question: should Pakistan go to war against its Jihadis, as it did in 2014, or
buy peace, as it tried in 2018?
A
Gathering Storm
Like an
onion, the answer to the question of Pakistan’s next move has many layers. The
first of these is proximate. In the build-up to the Taliban’s victory, the
scholar Antonio Guistozzi had written that Pakistan’s Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) tried, ineffectually, to rein in its jihadist clients in
Afghanistan. “The Pakistani military severely curtailed support — both in
funding and supplies — to the Haqqanis, who resisted the United States-Taliban
agreement and were widely seen as trying to sabotage it,” he wrote.
Estimated
to make millions of dollars from trafficking narcotics and protection rackets
targeting everything from mining to trucking, the Haqqanis simply deepened
their relationship with Al-Qaeda to make good their military skills-set.
Late last
year, in an extraordinary closed-door briefing, Pakistan Army chief Qamar Javed
Bajwa and former ISI chief Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed warned the political
leadership of the gathering storm. As victory neared, they said, the Taliban
just wasn’t listening to the Pakistan Army; worse, the TTP was growing in force
and influence.
From
experience, the generals knew what would come next. In 2004, as the CIA had
begun drone strikes against Al-Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan, retaliatory
terrorism escalated. The Army responded by making deals with the TTP, ceding
de-facto control of territory. In April 2004, Noor Wali Mehsud’s predecessor,
Nek Muhammad Wazir had even shared the stage with XI Corps commander
Lieutenant-General Syed Safdar Husain, promising that in a war with India, he
would be “Pakistan’s atomic bomb”.
In 2014,
the Pakistan Army finally gave up on deal-making and went to war. Thousands of
civilians were killed in the bitter fighting that followed before the Army
finally succeeded in driving the TTP into Afghanistan.
Friends
With Benefits
Soon after,
though, the ISI again began reaching out to the Jihadis, in a bid designed to
wean them away from the Islamic State, thus becoming a perpetual terrorist
threat to the Pakistani State. Through the Haqqanis, ISI agents succeeded in
securing several deals with TTP commanders like Aslam Farooqi — who returned
the favour by staging
suicide attacks against
Indian interests in the region.
The TTP
also proved to be a ‘friend-with-benefits’ to the Pakistani generals for their
domestic agenda. In the summer of 2018, it coerced the secular-nationalist
Awami National Party (ANP) out of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province’s political
landscape, assassinating key leaders Haroon Bilour and
Ikramullah Gandapur.
Like
military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1970s, the generals believed
in shutting down politicians striving for democratisation and federal autonomy.
The Islamists were a logical ally in that cause — even if there was a ‘bill’
for their services.
Yet, things
haven’t gone according to the generals’ battle-plan. A much-hyped ceasefire
with the TTP, respected mainly in the breach by the Jihadis, collapsed in
December last year. The Taliban, moreover, flatly refused to rein in the TTP.
Negotiations between the government and Noor Wali Mehsud, announced soon after
the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, have gone nowhere and violence has steadily
inched upwards.
Inside
The ‘Onion’
The core
answer to why the TTP has again turned on its patrons, and why the Taliban
isn’t willing to bail the generals out, is embedded deep in history. From the
1820s, what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa witnessed an extraordinary clerical revival,
which led, among other things, to Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi’s famous, if failed, war
against the Sikh Empire — the work of the eminent historian Sana Haroon teaches us.
Sayyid
Ahmed’s last stand was at Balakote — an inspiration to the Jaish-e-Mohammed
chief Masood Azhar Alvi, and many other South Asian Jihadis.
Expansion
of clerical power was enabled by generous cash subsidies from the regimes of
Emir Dost Mohammad Khan and Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, as well as the British, all
of whom competed to cajole compliance, purchase tactical leverage, or split
adversaries. In the absence of competitive politics, the clerics also emerged
as the sole mode of opposition to the often tyrannical rule of the maliks, or
tribal chieftains.
Imperial
Britain was in a state of almost constant war with the border tribes, as it
sought to secure its northern flank against Russian expansion. Independent
Pakistan inherited its desire to subject the Pashtun to a central authority;
indeed, the mess at the headquarters of the Waziristan Scouts in Wana still
displays a portrait of its founder, Lieutenant-Colonel R.H. Harman, who was
killed by a Mehsud tribesman in 1905.
The lesson
for clerical networks in the borderlands has been simple: War-making is a means
of extracting concessions and revenue from both Islamabad and Kabul. The TTP
and Taliban have now shown they understand this dynamic well. The TTP is,
moreover, driven not just by ideology, but the products of three generations of
conflict: Young men with little traditional tribal status but some limited
education and, most importantly, a gun.
For the
generals, the moment of decision is fast approaching. Noor Wali Khan is now
seeking a Shari’a-governed mini-State in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a demand that
could be granted — but only at the risk of providing safe-havens for future
existential threats to the country. The Pakistani State is unlikely to
collapse, but a protracted civil war could lie ahead. The other option is to
crack down on the jihadists and open the way to democratic political forces,
like the ANP or Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. This decision, though, could lead to
a sharp, short-term escalation in violence.
Either way,
the decision will guide Pakistan’s destiny.
Source: Pakistani State Won’t Collapse.
Choice Is Between Civil War And Short-Term Rise In Violence
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/existential-threat-pakistan-ttp/d/126186
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