Why are our soldiers dying in Tirah?
Mosharraf Zaidi ... The writer is an analyst and commentator.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Why are Pakistani soldiers dying in Tirah? At what point does this question become one that Pakistan takes seriously?
Ever since violence became a visible and defining part of life for Pakistanis, particularly those that live in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata, the tendency has been for us to answer questions in rhetorical ways that divide us and fail to deliver solutions.
One camp is a small, but vocal minority. In it, a range of thinkers, academics and commentators have adapted the George W Bush approach to conflict resolution. This approach is not without merit. Many of its advocates have seen Pakistan asphyxiated by decades of social engineering, and they’ve watched the corrosion of a pluralist culture in this society. The constant stream of terrorist bombs, bullets and shrapnel that kills innocent people in Pakistan has exacerbated and heightened the sense of insecurity and alarm in this category of Pakistanis.
The violent conflict since 2001 has hastened these Pakistanis’ definition of themselves and others in binary terms: you’re either with us, or against us. You’re either with innocent people, or you’re with the nexus of Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda inspired groups like the TTP and its sundry affiliates across the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
The other is a much larger demographic. It is the dominant social and political strain in the country and it is averse to clear and linear thinking about terrorist violence. It represents a remarkably inert philosophical approach to terror, because at its core, it argues that all the problems of national security and terrorism that Pakistan faces today are external to Pakistani society – and their epicentre is the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
This approach is also not entirely without merit. The inertia in this argument is really central to understanding this strain in the Pakistani imagination. Simply put, no matter how many Pakistanis are killed by terrorists and how far and wide this violence extends, the national discourse responds with inaction and indifference because of the externalisation of the source of these problems.
The demands of a 24-7 news media culture, and the intense competition at play between various Pakistani institutions, business groups, political organisations and powerful individuals means that there is a constant attempt to simplify and synthesise complex phenomena.
Rather than helping to resolve differences, this oversimplification ends up creating more space for each of the two major strains of thinking to dig in their heels further and refuse to engage, with the possibility of the other having a valid point.
Our national discourse consistently conflates three separate (but often overlapping or interlinked) phenomena as one – extremism, insurgency, and terrorism. We need to recognise both the distinctions and the overlaps in them to have any chance to parsing the macro-level narratives that make arriving at political solutions nearly impossible.
In the broadest terms, extremism has the broadest reach, because it is a way of thinking, insurgency or militancy are more geographically specific, because they represent campaigns to win political power in a given area, and terrorism is extremely specific to each act of terror, yet terror is designed to support the domination of specific political ideas over others.
If we try to approach all three of these problems with the same approach, we will invariably fail. Often, we speak about the absence of a clearly articulated counterterrorism strategy in Pakistan. But the problem is much more severe. We have no plan, no strategy and no policy for either extremism, or insurgency, or terrorism – and we have no sense of the accentuation of these problems by other phenomena, like ‘ordinary’ crime.
Pakistan does not have an organically developed counter-insurgency manual – with much of our tactics and strategy having been derived from the failed clear-hold-build ideas used by the British and the Americans in Afghanistan. This is why we have campaign after campaign after campaign in Fata.
The Tirah Valley fight is not new. It is the same fight that began in 2001 when the first tribesmen were convinced by Arab, Chechen and Uzbek ‘fighters’ to join them in a war against ‘the imperial US’ and its ‘subservient Pakistan Army’. It keeps moving from one tribal agency to another, sometimes moving into Kunar, Khost and Nuristan, sometimes spilling into Chitral, Swat, Dir and Buner. But it is an insurgency.
Pakistan also does not have a counterterrorism strategy. This is a vital national failure because it basically allows four terrorist ‘departments’ to act unchallenged. The supply of people for acts of terror (terrorist human resources), the money for acts of terror (terror financing), the propaganda that stokes terrorist anger (terrorist marketing) and the weapons of terror, like bombs and bomb-making (terrorist IT) are all doing just fine because no national articulation of how to stop these things has been attempted.
Even a revision of anti-terror laws took Pakistan a decade to develop, though we knew as early as 2003 that this would eventually be a problem.
Finally, Pakistan has no counter-extremism policy or narrative. In fact, extremism is growing, in part, precisely because we’ve not invested in a national conversation about the challenges posed by all this violence. The more violence there is, the angrier the ‘with us or against us’ crowd becomes. The angrier they become, the more defensive and inward looking the dominant national strain of ‘its all because of America’ becomes.
This tension may not be tearing Pakistan apart, but in Tirah Valley, it is tearing the bodies of Pakistani SSG officers apart. That is not a matter of opinion. It is a fact of the battlefield. If our answer to this problem of insurgency is counter-extremism rhetoric, we have a problem. Unfortunately, the answer right now is not even rhetoric. It is silence. This represents a wholly different level of problem.
Worse yet, the most vital question about Tirah Valley gets lost in a heated and angry set of meaningless and empty rhetorical devices. Would either Khyber or Kurram agencies be as vulnerable to insurgent takeovers, terrorist safe havens, or extremist sermons (three separate but interlinked problems) as they are today, if they were governed the same way Chakwal, Jacobabad and Multan are? The answer is emphatically, no. They would not.
Countless experts, both within and outside Pakistan have made appeals for the cessation of Fata’s ‘unique’ status over the years.
Fata is a cauldron of insurgency and a reservoir of Pakistani opacity because its people don’t have the same constitutional rights and protections that the system affords to all other Pakistanis. The Frontier Crimes Regulations are a national disgrace and the fighting in Tirah is the direct consequence of a consistent failure to address the constitutional and legal abnormality that is Fata’s status in the Pakistani state structure.
Major Mustafa Sabir and Captain Waseem ud Din Razi were killed in action in Tirah Valley last week – they are among at least three dozen valiant sons of Pakistan that have been killed in action. In Muslim tradition, we are taught not to mourn the shaheed. But we are also taught to value one human life as all humanity. Like the roughly 7,000 Pakistani soldiers and policemen that have died since 2001 in the conflict with Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups like the TTP, the martyrs of Tirah Valley remain unsung and dehumanised. At some point, Pakistan needs to ask itself the obvious question: Are we proud of the sacrifices our soldiers make to secure Pakistan, or are we ashamed?
One answer will assure us a deepening of what we’ve seen in Tirah Valley (insurgency), at PNS Mehran (terrorism) and ASWJ’s politics (extremism). The other will help us take the road to a self-confident, strong, assertive and free Pakistan. If you’re confused about which is which, spend a few minutes thinking about Major Mustafa Sabir and Captain Wasim ud Din Razi.
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