Warfare in the Twilight Zone

A battle rages unseen and unheard, no gunfire or published casualty lists. It is an elemental struggle and it is gathering pace. It is the fight in cyber-space between the state and its various arms and a citizenry that wishes to expose the hypocrisies and anomalies that abound. Facebook is home to Lashkar-e-Islam for instance, one of the 65 organisations known to be banned in Pakistan. The social media — Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram — hosts over 40 of those groups that use these sites to recruit and raise money and promote their extremist agendas. They incite sectarian conflict and hatreds and extol jihad.

At the same time there are efforts by the state to suppress activists or journalists that put their head above the parapet and are critical of the government. There have been a number of well-publicised instances of harassment of these individuals in the last year. A reliable source has told this newspaper that more than 70 people have been interrogated for making critical postings. We suggest that the priorities of the state in this matter are skewed, and that to tolerate those that wish to see the downfall of the state through violent means, whilst seeking to silence those that are critical of that tolerance and those organisations are persecuted — is unacceptable.

Viewed in the global context of counter-terrorism the benign acceptance of the activities of groups that present a threat to the state is not uncommon, as it is a means to both monitor them and harvest intelligence. Such a move is not without risks, especially as the snakes at the bottom of the garden do not only bite one’s neighbours. Pakistan has a very active social media across all platforms and it is not difficult to find pages that are associated with extremist groups speaking to a society that has become radicalised over decades. A Facebook spokeswoman is quoted as saying that there is no place for terrorism on the site — the evidence before our eyes tells us a different story. The government is unlikely to mend its ways, so perhaps Facebook might care to look to its much-vaunted laurels.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 15^th, 2017.

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