Understanding the nature of Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan – By Ayesha Siddiqa
The nature of the beast
By Ayesha Siddiqa
The series of recent terrorist attacks call for a close analysis of the militant threat and the formulation of a strategy to ward off such tragedies. At the moment, we seem to be jumping from one target to another, fighting some enemies and denying the existence of others. Hence the plan lacks strategic depth as the state appears to pursue one type of enemy leaving out others.
It will help to explain that the state of Pakistan is confronted with three enemies that are closely intertwined. Firstly, there is Al Qaeda, which comprises Arabs, Uzbeks and a select group of Pakistanis. Then there is the Taliban who consist of different branches including the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan. The latter are ideologically connected to the group known as the Pakistani Taliban who, although they consider Mullah Omar their ameer-ul-momineen, are engaged in fighting a battle inside Pakistan to capture the state.
This is considered essential to establish a system that could then be taken to the rest of the world. A glance through Farzana Sheikh’s recent book Making Sense of Pakistan demonstrates that some modern Muslim thinkers such as Abul Ala Maududi and Allama Iqbal also considered the state as a forum. However, this is not to suggest that these two thinkers advocated using violence in the same way as the Taliban.
Then there are the Punjab-based Salafi-jihadi groups wrongly termed as the Punjabi Taliban. Actually, Taliban is a term that has a certain historical context and can only be used in the case of the Afghan Taliban. Nevertheless, the Punjabi jihadis are ideologically-driven and keen to take on the state.
The various Punjab-based groups or those connected with Punjab assist others in Waziristan and Swat. They even use the tribal areas as a hideout. For example ‘Commander’ Ilyas Kashmiri, who heads the 313 Brigade of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-ul-Islami (Huji), took refuge in Waziristan in 2005 after he developed problems with Pakistan’s military. Then there is the Amjad Farooqi group, which was also involved in the assassination attempt on Pervez Musharraf.
The above description is meant to demonstrate that since the enemy is diverse, it cannot just be seen through the single lens of the Taliban. Unfortunately, the state has buried its head in the sand by arguing that while there is a problem in Waziristan, there is hardly anything to worry about in Punjab. The Punjab government in particular seems to deny the fact that there are Punjabis involved in religious militancy. The Punjabi jihadis, in fact, are crucial because they mingle easily with the crowd in places where the attack is to be carried out.
The attackers must reconnoitre the target in advance before chalking out a plan. An outsider can be spotted easily. Thus the dependence on Punjab-based militants to carry out attacks in the capital or Lahore. Recently, it was claimed that the mastermind of the Marriott bombing and the GHQ attack was caught from Bahawalpur.
Reading such reports one wonders why the Punjab government is going on the defensive, withholding information about the presence of militants in Punjab, especially southern Punjab. Naming southern Punjab as a possible place for jihadi recruitment does not mean that youth from other places such as Faisalabad, Gujranwala or Lahore are not involved. However, the concentration of religious militants is in this region.
This fact is logical because of the link between three major militant outfits in southern Punjab. One could argue that the government might not want people to concentrate on this region because of the presence of outfits which do not fight the state, such as Jaish-i-Mohammad or Lashkar-i-Taiba, and that the problem is only with the breakaway factions, as ISPR spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas recently argued. But the fact is that no one can control individuals or groups breaking away from the mother organisation and linking up with the Taliban or Al Qaeda.
It is amazing the extent to which the government can go to withhold information about the seemingly ‘friendly’ groups. For instance, recently during a television programme Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah went out of his way to suggest that the Jaish-controlled madressah, which is also the outfit’s headquarters, is not a no-go area. He even tried to make a lame excuse when informed that a team from a local channel was attacked when they tried to take shots of the area from the outside.
More interestingly, the minister immediately accused me of using a western lens to look at the situation, an accusation also made by Jaish-i-Mohammad in its weekly magazine Al Qalam. The article was written with the specific purpose to incite people against me. The writer had twisted words and facts from one of my previous articles and presented them in a way that made me appear as an enemy. This was immediately brought to the knowledge of the interior ministry, which promised to provide help. Intriguingly, it took the Bahawalpur DPO more than three hours to make the first contact. The lapse might have been at either end but considering that I could survive for three hours I declined their help.
In any case, one does not expect sympathy from a district administration that has lately been going out of its way to hide the activities of an outfit. The game is that you are not allowed an opportunity to prove anything because the evidence suddenly disappears once you raise a hue and cry.
The Punjab government’s attitude reflects political expediency. A lot of big traders in southern Punjab and other parts of the province who are constituents of the different factions of the Muslim League are believed to finance the outfits both directly and indirectly. This is not to suggest that other political parties are any better.
However, the bottom line is that while as an individual one feels unprotected by the state, it is sad to think that the authorities believe they can deal with religious militancy on a piecemeal basis. A holistic strategy is necessary, not to protect western interests but to safeguard the state and its citizens.
The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst. [email protected]
Source: Friday, 30 Oct, 2009 – Dawn
And an obvious corollary: how can we expect to win this war if we aren’t fighting all the pieces in the militancy jigsaw? Have a look at the names and domiciles of the militants blamed for the current wave of violence in the country. At least half, if not a majority, of them are Punjabi, not tribal.
What the Taliban want
By Irfan Husain
Saturday, 23 Jan, 2010
Although they use Islamic rhetoric and rationalisations, their true goal is to seize and wield absolute power.
Often, I am asked by readers or friends abroad what the Taliban want. Why, they ask, are they slaughtering hundreds of innocent people wherever they can? What is their purpose? What is their agenda?
The short answer is power. Other excuses for their murderous excesses are a fig-leaf: demands for the Sharia and the expulsion of foreign forces from the region are no more than window-dressing.
These terrorists realise that they cannot achieve power through peaceful, democratic means as they have no support. Even relatively moderate Islamic parties have been repeatedly trounced at the polls in Pakistan. So extremists reject democracy as it does not give them access to power.
Established religious parties in Pakistan have exploited the repeated bouts of army rule to further their agenda. So far, they have been remarkably successful. But while jihadi groups might cut secret deals with intelligence agencies, even our army is reluctant to enter into open, formal agreements with them.
This leaves only the path of terrorism open to them. Pakistani extremists watched enviously as the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar were propelled to power with help from our army. Seeking to replicate this success, they have mounted a sustained campaign of destabilisation against the government.
Another thing Islamic extremists oppose vehemently wherever they are operating is modern, scientific education. Educated only in the scriptures, they have little understanding of the physical and social sciences. While they may have many operatives who are highly educated, the top ideologues are seminary-trained zealots. Although they use Islamic rhetoric and rationalisations, their true goal is to seize and wield absolute power.
In Nigeria, an obscure Muslim sect recently launched a deadly campaign under the banner of ‘Boko Haram’, meaning that modern education was haram, or sinful. Hundreds died as they went on a rampage before being ruthlessly crushed. Nevertheless, their primitive credo lives on.
In Pakistan, the Taliban and their murderous partners have destroyed hundreds of schools. They have focused on girls’ schools, issuing threats to those they haven’t yet demolished. Underneath their theocratic justifications for their violent opposition to rational education lies the knowledge that they are not equipped to compete in the modern world. They are thus locked in a battle to tear down a system that marginalises them, and to force everybody else to obey their diktat since, according to them, only they are qualified to interpret the scriptures.
Their apologists — and they are legion in our ruling classes as well as our media — demand that we must negotiate with them. What they do not say is how this should be done. How do you talk to ruthless killers who saw off their victims’ heads and gleefully post the videos of their acts on the Internet? Or force young boys to gun down tied and blindfolded prisoners? Or flog young girls screaming for mercy?
Hakeemullah Mehsud of the Pakistani Taliban and his cohorts want nothing short of absolute power. The only thing they are willing to discuss are the terms of surrender of the Pakistan government. If we cede territory to them — as we did earlier in Swat — we are consigning our citizens to the kind of nightmare the people of Swat had to undergo.
The first thing Fazlullah did when he was handed Swat was to shut down the schools that had not been blown up earlier. Barber shops and video shops were ordered to follow suit. All forms of entertainment were effectively banned. Is this the kind of life we wish to condemn our countrymen to?
Remember that we have a model of this kind of barbaric society: under the Afghan Taliban, our neighbour was rapidly pushed back to the dark ages. Women were flogged for the crime of showing an inch of their ankles as they walked wearing all-enveloping shrouds. Male doctors could not attend to them, even in life-threatening cases. They were not allowed to leave their homes to work, and girls were forbidden from going to school.
Those urging the government to negotiate with the Pakistani Taliban need to be clear whether they want their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters to lead the lives their Afghan counterparts had to not so long ago. To the Taliban, these are non-negotiable conditions to their stated desire to impose their version of the Sharia on the rest of us.
Largely due to the shrill voices that have crowded out reason from media debate, there is a lot of confusion and ambiguity about what the Taliban want, and how far the government should go in meeting their demands. Some argue that their excesses are the result of the western presence in Afghanistan, and our government’s military anti-Taliban operations in the tribal areas. How the extremists hold school-going children responsible for these policies, and destroy schools is something their apologists in the media have failed to explain.
What sustains this mindset is the steady inroads madressahs have made in Pakistan during and since the Zia era. The decades since the 1980s have witnessed a rapid erosion of modern, secular values. The voices of reason have been muted, and we are caught in the grip of a mindless anti-West hysteria that pushes even moderates into the Taliban camp.
As the threat of the Taliban looms larger over Pakistan, schools in Karachi and Lahore have come to resemble armed camps. The fear of terrorist attacks unsettles children and parents alike. Ever the enemies of education, the Taliban will stop at nothing in their quest for power.
How should the government respond to this deadly threat? The voices of appeasement clamour for concessions. But the Taliban have repeatedly said they will halt their campaign of terror only when their version of the Sharia has been imposed, the army withdraws from the tribal areas, and the Americans cease their drone attacks.
Even if the first two demands are conceded, it is unlikely the Americans will stop using the only weapon that is proving effective in this conflict. Should our army actually pull out, it is more than probable that American troops will partially replace them in fighting the Taliban on our side of the border. There is no way they will allow the jihadis in Fata to target them without retaliating.
So much as I wish it were otherwise, I fear a military solution is the only one currently available. Negotiating from a position of weakness is a sure recipe for disaster.
[email protected]
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/14-what-the-taliban-want-310-zj-07
There are four linked conflicts going on at the moment. For one, there is the poorly named ‘war against terror’, mounted by former US President George W Bush against the al Qaeda organisation of Osama bin Laden. This comprises, on the one hand, highly successful civilian anti-terror measures within the US and other countries, which have prevented a recurrence of the spectacular earlier al Qaeda attacks in the US, Indonesia, Spain and Britain. On the other hand, having militarily driven al Qaeda from its Afghanistan base, piecemeal destruction of the organisation’s leadership proceeds with the use of deadly accurate hellfire missiles fired from unmanned drones.
The connection of the anti-al Qaeda war to Pakistan lies in that al Qaeda is now located on Pakistani soil in the North Waziristan and Kurram agencies.
The second conflict is in process within Afghanistan, where the government of that country, with the help of ISAF, is fighting an insurgency by the Afghan Taliban (originally spawned in Pakistan by Generals Aslam Beg and Hamid Gul, among others, in pursuit of what they called ‘strategic depth’). This war is a continuation of the 30 years of conflict in this region that has assumed different forms and engaged different countries at various times. The connection of Pakistan to this second war lies in, first, that these Afghan Taliban are said to operate out of ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan and, second, that their leader Mullah Omar and his ‘shura’ are said to be headquartered in or near Quetta. The comparative lack of success of NATO forces and the Afghan government against the Taliban is attributed to this Pakistan connection.
And this brings us to the third conflict. This is the insurgency by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) against the people and the state of Pakistan. This third conflict threatens our most fundamental values and our very existence on the world map. It is unquestionably and solely Pakistan’s war. And those who say otherwise are either themselves culpable in this highest of treason or else stupid beyond belief. To their lasting credit, the post-Musharraf armed forces have mounted a spirited counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign against the TTP and have retaken much of the high ground earlier surrendered in the name of ‘dialogue’.
The point to be noted is that this counter-insurgency was undertaken by the Pakistan military largely on its own initiative, support by civilian politicians being ex post facto and still largely left-handed. Moreover, despite the appalling savagery and insensate cruelty demonstrated by the TTP in the areas under their control, neither did the government, locked in its Islamabad ivory tower, nor the political parties, preoccupied with their power games, seek to educate public opinion about this menace or attempt to win the hearts and minds of the people away from the monstrous ‘ideology’ of the insurgents. This task was performed, with extraordinary skill and effectiveness, by the ISPR and the Army’s Psy-Ops department.
The fourth conflict in which we are enmeshed is not a COIN, or counter-insurgency, campaign. It is a counter-terrorism operation. The numerous ‘Lashkars’ and ‘Jaishes’ that are not-so-clandestine fellow-travellers of the TTP have mounted a highly effective series of bombings, arson and other terror activities in Pakistan’s cities, from Peshawar to Karachi, and have even struck out as far away as Mumbai in India. This systematic campaign of successful terror attacks has succeeded in creating a fog of fear that is catching in the public throat. It has destroyed confidence and generated an atmosphere of generalised fear that is wearing down the will of the people to resist these mass-murderers and strike back at them with effective counter-terror measures. Into this atmosphere step the unwitting conscious purveyors of doubt and fear, to spread their poison of war weariness.
And here, again, one must fault our government and other political leaders and functionaries of the state. Instead of rallying the spirit of the people, the government, along with its political rivals, is engaged in senseless internecine infighting. The army, however belatedly, is pursuing its military responsibilities by initiating and conducting a systematic COIN campaign. It cannot, nor is it meant to, conduct counter-terror operations in the cities.
Counter-terror measures are not military in nature. They are a police matter — an issue of effective law enforcement. In his book, The Idea of Pakistan, Stephen Cohen remarked that while Pakistan was not, in his view, a failed or failing state, the corruption and incompetence of its police apparatus could well drag the country toward that direction. We have seen for example that, again and again, massive quantities of high explosives have been procured, processed, mobilised and utilised in one terrorist act after another; but no intelligence or investigation has been able to penetrate the elaborate financial, logistical and human trails involved. We have seen that even a political figure of the eminence of Benazir Bhutto could not be protected from attack on two separate occasions. We have seen, as during the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore and the Ashura procession in Karachi, how the members of the law enforcement agencies simply melted away at the first sign of trouble.
Let the military fight its counter-insurgency campaign. Counter-terrorist operations are a matter for the law enforcement agencies that come under the Ministries of the Interior at the federal and provincial levels. Law enforcement, let it be clearly understood, comes under civilian governments, which are responsible to civilian parliaments and assemblies, and which are called to task for shortcomings by civilian political parties, courts of law and media commentators.
Salman Tarik Kureshi
http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\01\23\story_23-1-2010_pg3_3