Mohammad Taqi - Bacha Khan University and Pathankot: Pakistan has no desire to discontinue its disastrous jihadism
The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan may be down but it certainly
is not out. Various factions of the terrorist group have launched and claimed
several deadly attacks in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa province in the past
months. And January was no exception. On two consecutive days, the TTP factions
struck twice. First against a paramilitary border force and then targeting the
Bacha Khan University in Charsadda in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa’s agricultural
heartland where Pushkalavati (the Lotus City), the capital of the ancient
Gandhara empire, once stood.
The attack on the ragtag paramilitary border patrol barely
registered on the Pakistani media’s radar but the university assault drew in
political and military leadership to Ground Zero. Twenty-two students and
faculty died in the assault on the institution that is named after one of the
foremost torchbearers of non-violence in the 20th century, Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan aka Bacha Khan.
The university’s guards and at least one student and a
teacher Hamid Hussain put up armed resistance to stymie the terrorist attack or
the losses could have been much worse. Pakistani military eventually
neutralised the four attackers. While the TTP’s main spokesman denied
involvement in the ghastly attack, the outfit’s splinter group led by Khalifa
Umar Mansoor claimed the attack in a detailed video message.
The Director General Inter-Services Public Relations, Lt Gen
Asim Saleem Bajwa, has held two press conferences since the attack, alleging
that the attack was masterminded from Afghanistan and the attackers crossed
through the Torkhum checkpoint on the Durand Line, apparently after duping the
Pakistani security detail there. The military spokesman said the attackers were
receiving phone calls from an Afghan mobile number during the attack. General
Bajwa later played an audio recording of a phone call where a terrorist leader
is ostensibly calling a Pakistani reporter to claim the attack. As he did not
share the details of which cellular towers the number was using during the
call, it is hard to comment on the veracity of his claims, especially since
Afghan-origin cellular SIM cards are used in tribal and some settled areas of
Pakistan rather commonly.
Creating a false equivalence
Nonetheless, the Pakistani military seems to have laid the
blame for the Charsadda attack squarely on Afghanistan’s doorstep as it has
done on multiple occasions in the past. The Pakistani Chief of Army Staff
General Raheel Sharif again spent no time in picking up the phone and calling
Afghan president Dr Ashraf Ghani directly. Whatever the veracity of the claims
– which have been swiftly rejected by the Afghan government – the general’s
call was a curious move.
The Pakistani COAS was not only completely out of line in
calling a foreign head of state, but in doing so he also trampled upon the
civil-military relations in Pakistan. The call could have been initiated by the
civilian government of the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, especially since the
premier was scheduled to meet the Afghan president within hours in Davos,
Switzerland. General Raheel Sharif clearly sought to assert his pre-eminence at
home and abroad by painting both Prime Minister Sharif and Ashraf Ghani as weak
leaders and divert attention from Pakistan army’s disastrous jihadist policies
and monumental failures to contain the monsters it has created.
The Pakistani
military leadership has claimed periodically that the TTP rump is now holed up
in Afghanistan’s eastern and north-eastern regions and has been calling for an
Afghan campaign against them. The idea seems to be to create a false equivalence
between Pakistan’s well-thought-out, decades-old strategy of harbouring Afghan
jihadists and the ostensible presence of the TTP elements, who escaped
Pakistani military operations, in the unruly Afghan frontier regions where
Kabul’s writ is skimpy at best.
It is a well-known fact that the current TTP leader Mullah
Fazlullah had escaped the Pakistani operations in Swat. On the run since, he
has reportedly been in and out of the areas straddling the Durand Line. Scores
of other jihadists similarly escaped the Pakistani army’s Zarb-e-Azb operation
in the North Waziristan tribal agency. In fact, not a single terrorist
ringleader has been known to have been captured in the Zarb-e-Azb operation.
Meanwhile, the identity of the more than 3,500 jihadist cadres, whom the
Pakistan army claims to have killed, has not been made public.
Analysts had been warning that the fanfare in the run-up to
the Zarb-e-Azb operation had given jihadists ample warning to flee and melt
away into the population. That several jihadists potentially crossed over into
Afghanistan was no surprise either. The Pakistani military still sticks to its
dangerous definition of the “good” jihadists who fight against the Afghan
government and India and the “bad” jihadists who attack Pakistan. The problem
is that the good, the bad and the ugly jihadists consort together and share
cadres, sanctuaries, recruiting grounds and training facilities. Chances are
that if the TTP elements are in Afghanistan, they are not exactly receiving
diplomatic protocol from the Kabul government but hanging out with their Afghan
Taliban counterparts. It is time Pakistan realises that it is not one bad fish
but a rotten jihadist ecosystem, almost exclusively of its own making, that has
inflicted such incredible misery on the whole region.
No on-off switch for jihad
Listening to the about 11-minute video released by the TTP
thug Umar Mansoor claiming the Bacha Khan University attack, it becomes
abundantly clear that jihadist terror is Pakistan’s homegrown problem and a self-inflicted
wound. Mansoor speaks Pashto in a dialect typical of Pakistani urban. His
diction and idiom are completely free of any Afghan or tribal area language
influences. He seems to be a man who has not spent enough time outside Pakistan
for his language to absorb any Afghan influence. His frame of reference is
quintessentially Pakistani too. I know this how? Well, because his Pashto is no
different than mine, and, like me, he grew up in the Pashtun heartland in
Pakistan.
According to media reports, Umar Mansoor went to school in
Islamabad and then worked with his family in the port city of Karachi. The
question is why did he take up arms against the Pakistani state and the army,
especially if the latter too has a jihadist bend. The answer simply is that
once indoctrinated to conduct jihad, individuals like Umar Mansoor remain
ideologically hard-wired for good. The niceties of Pakistani army’s duplicitous
policies, where it pretends to facilitate peace process between the Afghan
Taliban and the Kabul government while continuing to host the new Taliban emir
Mullah Akhtar Mansoor in the Quetta suburb of Kuchlak, are lost on the rank and
file jihadists. They see even a tactical retreat as the betrayal of their
common jihadist cause.
What seems lost on the Pakistani army planners is that
the jihadist cadres neither have an on-off switch nor do they conduct jihad
only in the bankers’ hours and take the weekends off. For the top echelons of
the Pakistani army, jihadism may be just another tool of prosecuting foreign
policy but for individuals like Umar Mansoor it becomes both a vocation and a
way of life.
Decommissioning jihadists is trickier than enlisting and
unleashing them. And it is not just because of their current motivation to
fight but also because of the ideological milieu that Pakistan has created over
the decades to support its jihadist venture. For 68 years of its existence,
Pakistan has either officially denigrated towering political figures and
champions of non-violent and secular political struggles like Bacha Khan or
banished them from the educational and public discourse. In 17 years of my
education – 12 of them at a civilian school run by the Pakistan Air Force – in
Pakistan I was not taught one single line about Bacha Khan and his monumental political
struggle against the British and then the military dictators of Pakistan.
On
the other hand, the Muslim warrior-kings like Mahmud Ghaznavi and Aurangzeb
Alamgir filled the pages of our history books. The boys in my school were
divided in four houses named after the Muslim warriors Khalid bin Waleed, Tariq
bin Ziyad, Muhammad bin Qasim and Salahuddin Ayyubi, while the girls were in
the Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Muhammad Iqbal houses. An anti-India or more
specifically anti-Hindu curriculum was taught in the name of Pakistan Studies.
I shudder to think about the curriculum of the madrassas that Umer Mansoor and
his ilk might have gone through.
The attack on the Bacha Khan University goes to show that
there are legions of indoctrinated Pakistanis who are willing to kill and be
killed in the name of religion and jihadism, supported logistically by a larger
network of fellow travellers and even bigger hordes who condone their brutal,
relentless and violent jihadism. The attackers were all Pakistanis as were
their accomplices. Unless the Pakistani army planners see the disastrous errors
of their ways and decide to roll back both the theory and practice of their
jihadist enterprise there will likely be more attacks like the one on the Bacha
Khan University. The first step would be to realise “if you break it, you own
it”; blaming Afghanistan for the Pakistan army’s sins and dereliction may be a
good excuse but makes for horrible solution to Pakistan’s terrorism conundrum.
The way Pakistan has dragged its feet on apprehending the
banned terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Muhmmad leader Masood Azhar who is blamed for
the recent attack on the Indian airbase at Pathankot, it seemed that despite
the lip service to the contrary the Pakistani brass has little or no desire to
dismantle its jihadists proxies. And now the way Pakistan is shifting blame for
its jihadist blunder to Afghanistan just reinforces the concern that it is
still in no mood to correct its deadly course.
Dr Mohammad Taqi is a former columnist for the Daily
Times, Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @mazdaki
