An interesting perspective. thanks for the insight.
End for Pak Taliban? Not quite
http://www.dailypioneer.com/197273/End-for-Pak-Taliban-Not-quite.html
Wilson John
Baitullah Mehsud’s killing will not change matters much because he has left a powerful legacy and in addition you have the Pakistani State which cannot be expected to give up its proxy war strategy
The killing of Baitullah Mehsud, head of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, early this month is undoubtedly a major victory for the Pakistani security forces. However, in the overall context of America’s AfPak strategy, it only merits to be termed as a short ‘operational pause’.
It would be useful to begin by exploring the importance of Baitullah Mehsud. Till early 2007, this man was an unknown diabetic gym instructor from the Mehsud tribe, one of the two prominent tribes (other being the Waziris) which hold sway over large parts of the tribal areas straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan. Six years after the Talibs were forced to flee from their new-found home in Afghanistan, Mehsud, who had taken part in the Afghan jihad, gave them shelter and protection and in turn became a trusted aide and commander of the Taliban in Pakistan. Mehsud thus became a key facilitator for the transformation of Waziristan and nearby areas into a sanctuary for the Taliban-al Qaeda combine. Not only did he establish Taliban rule in the federally administered tribal areas, he also brought together disparate elements under an umbrella group called Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or the Pakistan Taliban.
It would be facile to believe that Mehsud could have done this without the covert, if not overt, support of elements in the state, namely ISI and the Pakistani Army. The fraudulent war on terror which the former President and Army chief, Pervez Musharraf, enacted for almost seven years, punctuated with peace deals with Mehsud and his fellow
tribal leaders, was certainly instrumental in the rise of Baitullah and his Taliban franchise which led to the emergences of minor chieftains like Fazlullah, Mullah Nazir, Mullah Haji Pir and others.
It is important to understand how, and not why, Musharraf managed to play this duplicitous game so openly. Three reasons can be cited. One, the hunt for Osama bin Laden which consumed the Bush administration was like the blind leading the blind with Musharraf taking his strategic ally on a merry-go-round across the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. Second, had Musharraf not blundered into two of its calamitous follies — the sacking of the Supreme Court Chief Justice in March 2007 and the Lal Masjid offensive in July 2007, he would have continued grinning even today. Till these incidents, the Army enjoyed an image of inviolability, a bulwark of sorts, and no one thought terrorists would target home. Third, the series of suicide attacks and bomb explosions across the middle-class urban centres of Pakistan —Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad and Rawalpindi — brought home the stark truth that terrorists who have been ionised as ‘freedom fighters’ for decades could turn rogue and turn against the creator itself.
The unceremonious ouster of the once-invincible Musharraf last seen on YouTube singing ghazals, has led to discernible changes within Pakistan which need to be studied and understood clinically. In many ways, Mehsud’s death is part of this change.
Some of these changes are not difficult to delineate. The first is that Pakistanis are realising that terrorism is not a problem which happens across the border but has come home with a vengeance.
Second, the Taliban are not always (has never been in fact) the good boys of Islam as projected but can be brutal (the whip-lashing of a young girl played out on TV screens jolted the Taliban empathisers in middle Pakistan) and they almost came close to the doorsteps of Islamabad. Third, the Army is not as invincible as projected. Fourth, if the State of Pakistan has to survive and flourish, it must find an alternative system of governance and not one punctuated by military regimes of dubious distinctions. Fifth, worries of radical brigands threatening the status quo have united the civil society, the civilian leadership and the military leaders to fight the Taliban and other such extremist elements.
In many ways, these are unprecedented changes but they are not just enough to turn back the process of radicalisation and state failure haunting the state of Pakistan caused by historical fault lines and the criminally myopic ruling elite. The State has not given up its strategic option of using instruments of terror for furthering its foreign policy interests in India and Afghanistan in particular and the world in general. The State has merely, under the real possibility of an existential threat from the same instruments, decided to make a distinction between the good, the bad and the ugly.
Baitullah Mehsud fell in the ‘ugly’ category and hence his death is celebrated as a victory; LeT chief Hafiz Saeed is obviously in the ‘good’ books and remains free; Jaish-e-Mohammad leader Maulana Masood Azhar falls in the bad category and hence kept confined to the margins. Another distinction which has become apparent is the one between the Pashtun Taliban and the Punjabi Taliban. The Army, bureaucracy and the political leadership is primarily Punjabi and the Taliban being reviled as the State enemy is Pashtun by nature. The civil society, which is supporting the military operations against the Pakistani citizens, also happens to come from the Punjabi clique mentioned above.
The second implication, no less grave, is the growth of radical and extremist elements in southern Punjab which, in the long run, would have far more serious consequences for the integrity of the state of Pakistan than men like Baitullah. Terrorist groups like LeT and JeM are products of the socio-cultural milieu of southern Punjab, a largely agrarian society drawing its moral and ethical sustenance from triple Ms —madrasas, masjids and maulvis —that have grown in size and influence in the past few decades. For at least two decades, most of the jihadis for Afghanistan and Kashmir have come from towns and villages that abut main cities like Lahore, Jhelum, Multan and Gujranwala.
More than a lakh of people in today’s Punjab have had some training at terrorist camps run by a whole lot of groups which mushroomed in the name of Jihad. Many more are studying in madrasas and schools run by extremist groups like Jamaat-ud Dawa (JuD), the parent organisation of LeT, and radical political organisations like Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). JI, incidentally, had sent hundreds and thousands of students from its schools and colleges first to support Pakistan Army’s subjugation of the Bengali Pakistanis in east Pakistan and then for Kashmir jihad. JuD runs more than 170 schools and several colleges in Punjab and other provinces where several thousand students learn mathematics and jihad or science and jihad , and are part of the extremist group’s overall plans to further its cause. The Pakistani state’s failure to curb such educational institutions and their radical agenda could prove to be the country’s undoing.
These failures on the part of the State is not because of its inability to carry out measures necessary to prevent the growth of radicalism in schools and colleges but its aversion to do so. This unwillingness is encouraged by the predominance of the Army in the decision-making process in Pakistan which has traditionally viewed extremist groups like JI and JuD as expendable instruments of power to quell internal dissension and promote proxy wars in the neighbourhood.
It is therefore obvious that the death of one Baitullah will not change much in today’s
Pakistan. He is only a manifestation of the disease which has consumed Pakistan since 1947 — a Compulsive Religious Disorder which stripped a people of its social and cultural moorings.
— The writer is Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi
You’re welcome, and that newspaper, by the way, was once edited by Rudyard Kipling.