A creeping reality

It is an unfortunate fact that Pakistan appears on any number of lists issued by global entities and very rarely for good behaviour. The latest list issued by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is one such. It is a consolidated list of individuals named as terrorists and entities, and 139 of them have lived in Pakistan, operated from there or been associated with groups that have used Pakistan as a base for operations, and in some cases continue to do so. There will be those that disagree with the presence of some individuals and organisations on the list but in a majority of cases the evidence is clear. And growing. Such lists rarely shrink over time unless the state in question is successfully and longitudinally countering terrorism. Using this list as a basis for argument there will be those that say that Pakistan has failed in that respect, and failed consistently and over time.

There are stars of the terrorist firmament such as the putative heir to Osama bin Laden who is reputed to be in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan — al Qaeda’s Ayman al Zawahiri, as well as a range of Lashkar-e-Taiba associates and activists. The man who is ever in the news, Hafiz Saeed is also there, and listed as a man wanted by Interpol for his involvement in terrorist activity and a man who enjoys all the freedoms today like any other citizen.

Some of those listed have been arrested but many are not, and as time passes and terrorist and extremist groups continue to recruit many without let or hindrance, and the pool of future terrorist grows, so does the problem. Their names are not yet on any list but they may be in future. Therein lies the root of the problem for Pakistan. An ambivalent or equivocal attitude to extremism, in some instances a barely concealed sympathy for extremist groups, makes fertile ground for terror to germinate in and subsequently for entities such as the UNSC to point the finger so convincingly. The rest of the world reads these lists as well — and Pakistan makes its choices.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 5^th, 2018.

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