Governing terrorism

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If one were to summarise the prevailing militancy landscape in Pakistan, two features notably encompass it - the routine perishing of soldiers in alarming numbers and stately discourses persistently characterising all non-state violence as terrorism and committing to meet it head-on. Multiple reasons explain this military-mindedness. Arguably, it is the path of least resistance, especially in states where governments are least called to accountability for their actions.

Second, the Western War-on-Terror discourse has afforded blanket legitimacy to centralising regimes to re-describe the fight against domestic opponents by valorising violence. Besides, the force-alone strategy incredibly entices because it widens the power of the police and intelligence agencies and leverages the state to abuse the Weberian monopoly-on-violence regime. Conversely, the governments eschew conflict resolution approaches that call for addressing root causes but can potentially expose among other violence-enablers the excesses of the ruling elite.

Pakistan is currently faced with two powerful social movements in its western provinces that share an explicit separatist agenda, interweave victimhood rhetoric, and have strong backing of foreign states and diaspora. One is a Marxist secessionist movement firmly grounded in parts of Southwest Balochistan. The other is an ethno-religious Taliban-led movement seeking the seizure of tribal territory. The former is a grassroots-inspired revolutionary insurgency, the latter a typical clandestine terrorist movement. Apart from imbibing particular warfare methods, the difference between the two is the emphasis or absence thereof, of the cooptation and political organisation of the masses. These post-modernist modes of violent expression in Pakistan including terrorism derive from deeply convoluted historical, anthropological, socioeconomic, normative and political processes, institutions and contexts. In this milieu, terrorism is neither a pariah, or a 'fight between peer competitors', nor is it an anomaly. Instead, it is a (and not the) meta process embedded within, among and between many sociopolitical processes entailing a range of actors. Thus the phenomenon cannot be easily separated from these dynamics unless professionally broached. 'Strategic thinking as pursued in military planning is unsuited to address a terrorism problem', necessitating instead engaging each (non)violent context on its own merit.

Baloch insurgency employs sophisticated tactics with an equal focus on indoctrination and political agitation. The movement has become sharply more politicised of late due to the increased susceptibility of males to persecution spurring Baloch women to shrug off patriarchy, and its exacerbation provoked by the ill-treatment of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. The stark emergence of Baloch's suicidal-feminism likened to Kurdish sisterhood communes, its wider resonance among young literate women and xenophobia against 'occupiers' manifest the gendered mobilisation.

A terrorist movement bypasses the political organisation imperative by prioritising military strategy to achieve strategic objectives speedily. Instructively, following in the footsteps of its mentors, the TTP is now remodelling itself into an insurgency. It situates its narratives, commentaries, critiques and discourses within ethnonational grievances, writes religious polemics, partakes in local politics and avoids targeting civilians.

Is this entire conflict anatomy susceptible to a military solution or does it warrant multi-prong policy, social and medical science (like chemoembolisation) approaches undergirded by a critically pro-people vision? At any rate, the resolution of the existing challenges is beyond the capacity of a single institution which only risks more human, reputational, moral and material loss with diminishing returns. In contrast, assuming prevailing violence as a form of conflict can re-channelise the movements' energies into more congenial political processes. This will libertarianise the disenchanted and conserve national resources. Nevertheless, for that to happen, Pakistani body politics must renounce the all-is-terrorism mantra, the earlier the better than chasing a costly chimaera.