War On Terror was a necessary initiative to save Pakistan but Taliban sympathizers have misled the Public with emotional rants:
One of the most contentious issues related to the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone campaign in Pakistan is the estimated number of civilians killed by these strikes. Those against drone strikes in Pakistan argue that the attacks kill a disproportionate number of civilians. Others, however...
ctc.westpoint.edu
Thanks to Taliban sympathizers, Pakistan has failed to curb the menace of terrorism:
Top Pakistani leaders, including then-Prime Minister Imran Khan, welcomed the Afghan Taliban takeover in 2021, apparently believing that a friendly regime in Kabul would promote Pakistan’s security interests. Khan said the Taliban’s return had broken “the chains of slavery”. High-ranking military officers, including Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, then head of the formidable Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), hastened to Kabul to meet the new authorities, calling on them to either rein in the Pakistani Taliban or kick them out. Instead, the Afghan Taliban told Pakistan they would mediate in negotiations with the TTP’s leadership. In October, Khan confirmed that the military was holding talks with the TTP in Kabul “so that its members may surrender and reconcile in return for amnesty”.
Negotiations continued, mediated by the Afghan Taliban’s acting interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who heads the faction perceived to be closest to Pakistan, even as the TTP kept staging cross-border attacks. The talks made little headway, as the TTP rejected Pakistan’s offer of amnesty, which required that they disband. The TTP delegation, led by Mehsud, would not back down on its own demands, either, though many of them were unacceptable to the Pakistani side. These included reversal of Islamabad’s May 2018 decision to merge the Federally Administered Tribal Areas – rugged borderlands that were previously under a special legal regime – into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which has extended Pakistani state law to those areas. The militants want the Pakistani army to pull out of these border regions and the government to impose Islamic law in all Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan’s Pashtun belt. Lastly, they demand a blanket amnesty, as well as release of their detained commanders and fighters, while still refusing to lay down their arms.
The Pakistani high command, then headed by Qamar Javed Bajwa, backed by Khan, reportedly bowed to some of the TTP’s wishes, deeming them confidence-building measures to advance the negotiations. More than a hundred TTP prisoners, including two top leaders, were released from Pakistani jails. Authorities also allowed hundreds of armed Pakistani Taliban fighters to come home from Afghanistan. In return, Pakistan got a tenuous and short-lived ceasefire. First put in place in November 2021, it ended a month later, as the TTP stepped up attacks in a bid to pressure Pakistan into accepting its remaining demands. Nonetheless, with the Afghan Taliban still adamant that Pakistan resolve its differences with the TTP, the talks went on.
Insecurity spread in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa over the summer of 2022, though the TTP had announced a unilateral “indefinite ceasefire” in June. Militants were much more visible in the province, setting up checkpoints, extorting fees from travellers, kidnapping police and army officers, and killing government officials as well as political and tribal leaders who spoke out against them. According to one estimate, by August, a year after the Afghan Taliban takeover, militant attacks in Pakistan had increased by 51 per cent, with more than 75 per cent of them taking place in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The province’s police chief has since disclosed that 105 officers were killed in 151 separate incidents over the course of the year. Calling for action to tamp down resurgent militancy and violence, civil society activists and politicians led mass protests throughout the province – from Malakand in the deep north to tribal districts, including North and South Waziristan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan.
The top brass became increasingly convinced that the TTP had little interest in a negotiated settlement. The first sign of their unease was the August transfer of Lieutenant General Hameed, who had moved from being ISI chief to being corps commander in Peshawar, to the Bahawalpur corps in southern Punjab. Until then, Hameed had remained the main interlocutor in the talks with the militants. In mid-October, with TTP attacks claiming the lives of scores of police officers and soldiers, the defence minister told a meeting of the National Security Committee, the country’s apex security body, that the talks “bore no concrete outcomes”.
On 28 November, a day before Asim Munir took over from Bajwa as chief of army staff, the TTP’s central command formally called off the ceasefire, which in any case had existed only in name. It insisted that it had taken this step because Pakistani forces had not halted their operations; the statement added, “now our retaliatory attacks will … start across the country”.
Two large attacks on police installations have rocked Pakistan, compelling the authorities to rethink their approach to countering militancy. Their dilemma is that the insurgents’ main supporters – the new authorities in Afghanistan – are also their long-time allies.
www.crisisgroup.org
It is these Taliban and their terrorist brethren who are killing Pakistani civilians and troops from time to time.
I have given my vote two times in my life and each to Imran Khan. And I am deeply disappointed in his view of War On Terror and Anti-American positions due to which Pakistan finds itself in such a mess today.
PTI should
NOT talk about troop morale at all. PTI politicians are all millionaires and billionaires trying to charm people with misinformed rants while Pakistani Police officers and troops continue to die fighting terrorists. How many families have lost their sons due to political blunders of Pakistani politicians and their favorite picks among generals?
