March against drones

The longer PTI and its protesters stay in South Waziristan, the more they will have to rely on Taliban for security.

Holding the view that drone attacks are a violation of our sovereignty and counter-productive in the fight against militancy is perfectly reasonable, so long as it is accompanied by a realisation that foreign militants, too, are violating our sovereignty and that terrorists also kill Pakistanis like US drones. This, essentially, is the problem with the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) upcoming march against drone strikes in South Waziristan. The party’s silence on the crimes and brutality of the Taliban, coupled with its rage against drones, make it appear as an apologist for terrorism rather than a well-intentioned critic of US hegemony.

That view will be further solidified if the PTI goes through with the march. Taliban militants have a strong presence in South Waziristan with the military holding on to its cantonments and surrounding areas. The longer the PTI and its protesters stay in South Waziristan, the more they will have to rely on the Taliban to provide them with security, which it has already offered, no doubt — realising what a public relations coup the PTI is delivering them in the form of this march.

As disingenuous as the PTI chief, Imran Khan, is being over the true effect of his anti-drone march (especially given that Mr Khan would know where the permission for the strikes comes from), the government and the military are being even more two-faced. Instead of publicly speaking against them, and at times encouraging anti-drone populist rhetoric, both Islamabad and Rawalpindi could try and impress upon ordinary Pakistanis that they are an integral part of the war against terrorists and that this is a tactic that is the state’s prerogative to exercise, since it is at war with the militants. This double game — which we can call it because the drone strikes cannot happen without Pakistan’s consent — allows both the government and the military to maintain plausible deniability without actually alienating the Americans. The problem with this is that it continues to whip up anti-US sentiment in a country that already suffers from a surfeit of that malady. The far braver and wiser thing to do would be to explain to the country that drones are a necessary evil and if that is not possible then the government and the military should refuse the permission granted to the Americans.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 4^th, 2012.