Leniency Towards TTP Will Cost Pakistan Dearly

Growing Influence Of TTP Has Become An Existential Threat To Pakistan Main Points: 1. Increasing influence of TTP and religious extremists had led Pakistan to the edge of a civil war. 2. Successive Pakistani governments have compromised with the religious organizations at the cost of the countries already shaky democratic values 3. Extremist outfits, from ISIS to Al Qaida and then the TTP may wage a protracted war against the ‘Kafir’ Pakistani secular government ---- New Age Islam Edit Desk 19 January 2022 Chaman Border Gate between Afghanistan and Pakistan (file photo) | Commons ----- The increasing influence of TTP and religious extremists had led Pakistan to the edge of a civil war. For the last few decades, the successive Pakistani governments have compromised with the religious organizations at the cost of the countries already shaky democratic values. The current Imran Khan government had made many concessions to the extremist organizations especially the TTP giving them an upper hand in political matters. The rise of the TTP in Pakistan and its increased strength post the ascent of Taliban in Afghan has become the cause of increased extremist violence in Pakistan as there were about 300 terrorist attacks in Pakistan in 2021 killing about 400 hundred people half of them being security personnel. Though the Afghan Taliban has officially denied any links with TTP, in practice, the TTP has gained strength only after the rise of Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2014, the army crackdown on the TTP had driven it to Afghanistan but after last year’s victory of Taliban, the TTP have come back in Pakistan and have been calling the shots since then. The situation has come to this passé because the Pakistani government and the military have always banked upon these extremist forces for political benefits especially in elections to defeat their political opponents. As a result, these extremist outfits demand their pound of flesh to further their religious agenda. In 2018 elections, TTP drove out ANP from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by assassinating key political leaders. Gradually Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has become a hotbed of religious extremism. Last year, the state government had issued an order asking all educational institutions to make it Abayas mandatory for girls causing strong criticism from secular and liberal quarters. The government had to withdraw its order for the time being. Now it is learnt that the TTP is demanding the imposing Shariah in the state. Once it happens, the state will go the Taliban way where women will be harassed and persecuted and kept from social and political arena. Moreover, the state may become a safe haven for extremist outfits, from ISIS to Al Qaida and then the TTP may wage a protracted war against the ‘Kafir’ Pakistani secular government. Praveen Swami’s article gives a deep insight into Pakistan’s speedy advance towards a civil war, a war that could push Pakistan in a situation similar to that of the Iraq-Syria situation in 2014. The choice is with the Pakistani political leadership and the army generals who have been ensconced in their comfort zones. Hobnobbing with religious extremists will cost Pakistan and the entire region dear. ------ Pakistani State Won’t Collapse. Choice Is Between Civil War And Short-Term Rise In Violence Islamabad's new national security doctrine, calling for peace and trade, is good news for neighbours like India. But it doesn't address a critical question By Praveen Swami 16 January, 2022 “For fourteen years, they raised every part of Afghanistan against me,” lamented the country’s Emir, Abdur Rahman Khan, in an 1897 letter to the imperial commissioner in Peshawar, about the network of the mullah of Hadda village, Najmuddin Akhundzada, “both in the plains country and in the hills, till thousands of men perished on both sides.” “What calamities are there that they have not suffered, and what blood have they not shed, by his senseless commands?” Khan asked. Two centuries on, the sentiment may seem familiar to the generals in Islamabad who are grappling with their own ‘Hadda Mullah’ — Noor Wali Mehsud, the charismatic cleric who has rebuilt the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) jihadi group from the ashes of defeat into a resurgent force that has shown the resolve to take on the Pakistan Army. Even as the generals were still gloating about installing a proxy regime in Kabul, expert Daud Khattak reported that the TTP had brought about a sharp increase in jihadi violence in Pakistan. Last year, there were 294 attacks, up 56 per cent from 2020, of which 45 were in December alone. Three hundred and ninety-five people, half of them security force personnel, were killed — numbers much higher than Kashmir. The ‘forever war’ that America has extricated itself from is, clearly, far from done. This week, Islamabad released a new, measured national security doctrine, calling for, among other things, peace and trade with neighbours. This is good news for countries like India, but offers little guidance on the real national security question: should Pakistan go to war against its Jihadis, as it did in 2014, or buy peace, as it tried in 2018? A Gathering Storm Like an onion, the answer to the question of Pakistan’s next move has many layers. The first of these is proximate. In the build-up to the Taliban’s victory, the scholar Antonio Guistozzi had written that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) tried, ineffectually, to rein in its jihadist clients in Afghanistan. “The Pakistani military severely curtailed support — both in funding and supplies — to the Haqqanis, who resisted the United States-Taliban agreement and were widely seen as trying to sabotage it,” he wrote. Estimated to make millions of dollars from trafficking narcotics and protection rackets targeting everything from mining to trucking, the Haqqanis simply deepened their relationship with Al-Qaeda to make good their military skills-set. Late last year, in an extraordinary closed-door briefing, Pakistan Army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa and former ISI chief Lieutenant-General Faiz Hameed warned the political leadership of the gathering storm. As victory neared, they said, the Taliban just wasn’t listening to the Pakistan Army; worse, the TTP was growing in force and influence. From experience, the generals knew what would come next. In 2004, as the CIA had begun drone strikes against Al-Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan, retaliatory terrorism escalated. The Army responded by making deals with the TTP, ceding de-facto control of territory. In April 2004, Noor Wali Mehsud’s predecessor, Nek Muhammad Wazir had even shared the stage with XI Corps commander Lieutenant-General Syed Safdar Husain, promising that in a war with India, he would be “Pakistan’s atomic bomb”. In 2014, the Pakistan Army finally gave up on deal-making and went to war. Thousands of civilians were killed in the bitter fighting that followed before the Army finally succeeded in driving the TTP into Afghanistan. Friends With Benefits Soon after, though, the ISI again began reaching out to the Jihadis, in a bid designed to wean them away from the Islamic State, thus becoming a perpetual terrorist threat to the Pakistani State. Through the Haqqanis, ISI agents succeeded in securing several deals with TTP commanders like Aslam Farooqi — who returned the favour by staging suicide attacks against Indian interests in the region. The TTP also proved to be a ‘friend-with-benefits’ to the Pakistani generals for their domestic agenda. In the summer of 2018, it coerced the secular-nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) out of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province’s political landscape, assassinating key leaders Haroon Bilour and Ikramullah Gandapur. Like military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1970s, the generals believed in shutting down politicians striving for democratisation and federal autonomy. The Islamists were a logical ally in that cause — even if there was a ‘bill’ for their services. Yet, things haven’t gone according to the generals’ battle-plan. A much-hyped ceasefire with the TTP, respected mainly in the breach by the Jihadis, collapsed in December last year. The Taliban, moreover, flatly refused to rein in the TTP. Negotiations between the government and Noor Wali Mehsud, announced soon after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, have gone nowhere and violence has steadily inched upwards. Inside The ‘Onion’ The core answer to why the TTP has again turned on its patrons, and why the Taliban isn’t willing to bail the generals out, is embedded deep in history. From the 1820s, what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa witnessed an extraordinary clerical revival, which led, among other things, to Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi’s famous, if failed, war against the Sikh Empire — the work of the eminent historian Sana Haroon teaches us. Sayyid Ahmed’s last stand was at Balakote — an inspiration to the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar Alvi, and many other South Asian Jihadis. Expansion of clerical power was enabled by generous cash subsidies from the regimes of Emir Dost Mohammad Khan and Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, as well as the British, all of whom competed to cajole compliance, purchase tactical leverage, or split adversaries. In the absence of competitive politics, the clerics also emerged as the sole mode of opposition to the often tyrannical rule of the maliks, or tribal chieftains. Imperial Britain was in a state of almost constant war with the border tribes, as it sought to secure its northern flank against Russian expansion. Independent Pakistan inherited its desire to subject the Pashtun to a central authority; indeed, the mess at the headquarters of the Waziristan Scouts in Wana still displays a portrait of its founder, Lieutenant-Colonel R.H. Harman, who was killed by a Mehsud tribesman in 1905. The lesson for clerical networks in the borderlands has been simple: War-making is a means of extracting concessions and revenue from both Islamabad and Kabul. The TTP and Taliban have now shown they understand this dynamic well. The TTP is, moreover, driven not just by ideology, but the products of three generations of conflict: Young men with little traditional tribal status but some limited education and, most importantly, a gun. For the generals, the moment of decision is fast approaching. Noor Wali Khan is now seeking a Shari’a-governed mini-State in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a demand that could be granted — but only at the risk of providing safe-havens for future existential threats to the country. The Pakistani State is unlikely to collapse, but a protracted civil war could lie ahead. The other option is to crack down on the jihadists and open the way to democratic political forces, like the ANP or Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. This decision, though, could lead to a sharp, short-term escalation in violence. Either way, the decision will guide Pakistan’s destiny. Source: Pakistani State Won’t Collapse. Choice Is Between Civil War And Short-Term Rise In Violence URL: https://www.newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/existential-threat-pakistan-ttp/d/126186 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism