Its not a sweeping statement. What PA is doing now, targeting terrorists, they could have done when they were running from Afghanistan. Now they have extended their depth in Pakistan. I have made the most practical post.
Not only security, this Polio epidemic and people ignorant of Iodine salt will show its effect after 5 to 10 years. It will create a whole new generation of deformed children which will be more than a burden on society. Its the long lasting effect of terrorism.
Believe me, you can't see it because its a slow process and a non-linear one. It will jump so high in such a less time that it would be very hard to control then and will require hell lot of resources.
Its the biggest blunder done by Pakistani Army by allowing these extremists for such a long time. This concept of Good Taliban will hurt Pakistan.
Look at today's bomb blast resulting in death of 22 Shias. No one is discussing it on any thread. I haven't posted it as I am not allowed. Its just feeding the simmering anger. God forbid if they took weapons to protect themselves.
For once, try to see what will be the result of insufficient action of Pakistani Army and Civilian govt., both current and long term effects.
Sorry the internet has been a pain in the arse !
I would indeed call that a sweeping statement because it betrays a chronic lack of appreciation of the dynamics that Pakistan & Afghanistan have found themselves in the past & the present.
Lets us assume for the sake of the argument that there are two kinds of terrorists in Pakistan - the homegrown militants & the Taliban. Consequently let us begin with the homegrown threat; the Pakistan Army neither created them nor neutered them just like the Pakistan Army didn't create the militant wings of many political parties throughout the country. Such falls under the purview of the Interior Ministry & the security apparatus at their disposal; having said that these miscreants have been acted upon in the past & successfully subsided for long periods of time. Right now they are active because of an abysmal security paradigm that Pakistan finds herself in where we're besought by an insurgency on one hand & a militancy on another. In the same vacuum that is created because of the Pakistan Army's preoccupation with the insurgency & the militancy, other elements in addition to the homegrown militants have been created, petty criminals who've killed all & sundry in Karachi to get a piece of the ever so coveted Bhattaa Business that most Political Parties & even the Taliban themselves are engaged in.
These people will be crushed in due time & there appears to be action on them in the pipe. The militancy in Baluchistan is dying down & once the insurgency, which appears to have rolled back in recent months, is brought to an acceptably lower level, these miscreants, these homegrown terrorists will be dealt with severely & decisively in the coming year or two just as they were in the '90s.
Their presence or absence is contingent upon a vacuum that is created because of the preoccupation of most of the country's security apparatus - Civilian or military, not on a tacit support by the Pakistan Army for their actions.
Onto the second of the two kinds - the Taliban; to understand why we created them & why we see a use in them, one needs to harken back to the late '80s & early '90s. Pakistan's military & civilian executive were given a rude awaken by the absence of any rehabilitation work of either Afghanistan or Pakistan's Tribal Areas & instead, after being used & abused in the Cold War, we were greeted with sanctions, millions of refugees, an Afghanistan that was torn between proxy wars & warlordism & the entire social fabric of the Pashtun society irrevocably torn apart.
On that part we are guilty..guilty of our failure to preempt the insincerity of the International Community & the Muslim World in following up on the Afghan Jihad with proper Nation building in Pakistan's Tribal Areas & Afghanistan so that generations who had known nothing but death & destruction could be rehabilitated back into the comity of Nations. We are also guilty of joining the Anti-Soviet bandwagon & leading the Afghan Jihad - a mistake, in retrospect.
This is where the Taliban come into the fray; every nation on Earth that had a stake in Afghanistan was using their proxies by supporting their choice of Mujahideen turned Warlords to destabilize an already painfully destabilized Afghanistan & by extension Pakistan's Tribal Areas. The Taliban were created not as a luxury & certainly not as foot-soldiers for Kashmir or the much thrown about 'Strategic Depth' for we needed neither; between the Tribal Lashkars, the Paramilitary Forces, the Pakistan Army & the disgruntled Kashmiris, that side was covered & if anyone has traveled from Lahore to Peshawar they know that no matter how 'thin' Pakistan might be the topographical inter & intra Provincial barriers are enough to dissuade anyone to take advantage of that lack of 'depth'. The Taliban were Pakistan's attempt to make the best out of a really...really bad situation & for a time it worked but they were not our proxies or anything like it otherwise we would have been able to get them to affirm the Durrand Line as the International Border between Pakistan & Afghanistan, we would have been able to tell them to hand over Osama Bin Ladin to us ASAP or a plethora of other things that we could have done to benefit Pakistan immensely. The Taliban, however, offered us three things above all other :
(a) Peace & Stability in Afghanistan through an end to incessant warlordism, killings & counter-killings.
(b) Afghanistan & different factions in Afghanistan not being used by someone else as their proxies to the detriment of Pakistan.
(c) An Afghanistan that leaves Pakistan in peace without harboring Baloch Separatists or invading our territory on their Loy Afghanistan or Greater Afghanistan quest; two things that Afghanistan has done repeatedly in the past.
Does that, in any way, imply that the Taliban were the proverbial Knights in Shinning Armour ? No...nothing of the sort & they were just as bad as the Northern Alliance & other Afghan Factions but their creation was a necessity for the sole purpose of 'damage containment back then.
And now when Pakistan is accused of differentiating between the Good Taliban & the Bad Taliban, it is precisely because Pakistan sees a return of the above that we choose not to make enemies with those Taliban factions who are not fighting against the State of Pakistan, killing our soldiers or blowing up in our marketplace ! Does that in any way means that they (the Good Taliban) are our proxies ? No...they probably dislike us quite a bit for the part that we've played in the War on Terror but right now they're not attacking us & with the US packing up & leaving Afghanistan in 2014 & finally a little later after foOking up the country like the last time out, we can't afford to pick a fight that we know we've no chance of winning.
If you'd like to I'd go into as much detail as you'd want but mate your perspective is the atypical Indian perspective & the one that your Government has sold quite successfully to the International Audience otherwise it is a perspective that assumes so much, takes conjecture as facts & sees everything in a vacuum !
Dig a little deeper & try to understand things in their proper environment & time-frame !
