Getting our act together and taking on the Taliban

There is a need to formulate, declare a policy & road map to peace. If talks don’t deliver it, it will need to be...

A simultaneous manifestation of terror in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, Karachi and Gilgit-Baltistan, within the last two weeks, is as instructive as it is mind-boggling. Consider the list of targets: foreigners at Nanga Parbat base camp, Hussaini madrassa in Peshawar, a women’s university bus, a string of lawmakers, a funeral procession, and to top it all, the Quaid’s Ziarat Residency. It cannot get more perverse.

This string of murders and devastation through bomb detonations in Pakistan confound in the face of a likely resumption of the dialogue process between the warring factions in Afghanistan facilitated via the establishment of the Afghan Taliban’s Doha office. What makes the terror within Pakistan even more insidious is the fact that Pakistan, by all accounts, has had a lot to do with the enactment of this peace dialogue within and for Afghanistan. There is an occasional snide by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to belie this underlying truth but then, Karzai does little these days without betraying an increasingly frayed and idiosyncratic disposition. On a larger scale, though, at least in Afghanistan, there seems to be progress towards a likely ceasefire and the beginning of a peace dialogue. And that instils hope.

On the home front, the gory trail of blood that the Taliban enact on a recurring basis makes it seem that they are trying to position themselves for an advantage in a similar peace dialogue inside Pakistan. Of the intent to talk by the various political players in Pakistan, there is no doubt, just that the course as to how the talks will take place remains to be charted. Recall the oft-repeated mantra in the dialogue strategy: speak, but only from a position of strength. The deadly enactment of such terror by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and its allies is an attempt to do just that, especially when the government still seems largely confused on where to begin.

Without the government’s act in place, the initiative lies with the Taliban in Pakistan. Except in Khyber and Orakzai agencies, where the ongoing battle to establish control and regain the state’s writ in Maidan and Tirah valley has seen some of the deadliest combat after the Swat operations. Heavily wooded and mountainous, the going has been tough and has extracted its price in blood on both sides. While the US still searches on for al Qaeda, the terror landscape for the region has been unalterably redefined. That makes for a recurring recourse to death and destruction unless rationality is restored. The dialogue on either side of the Durand Line holds such a promise.

Is the Pakistani government happily placed for such talks? Given the run of events of the last few weeks, it surely doesn’t seem so but then, the Pakistani army has fought and succeeded to retake Maidan, too, within the last week or two. Such victories must be leveraged to create a more dominating sense of progress in this war and used to forge a consensus on a unified approach in dealing with terror. But when we let these occasions go unnoticed and unsung, we also lose a possibility to create a constituency for peace from a position of perceived strength. Else, as I wrote recently, such irregular wars hardly ever deliver a finite state of victory.

There is just one more lacuna in the government’s manner of thinking security: somehow the lead player in this effort to forge a National Security Policy has been arrogated to the Minister of Interior. Without trivialising his all important role in providing security from within — at best a counterterrorism strategy with some additional help — the National Security Policy has a far wider compass and includes, firstly, the external threats and then those that are internal, but goes on to include such sociopolitical and socioeconomic aspects that make not only the state but the society strong. That is why institution and the role of a national security adviser is so critical and separate from only mobilising and harmonising the internal security and intelligence apparatuses to that end. The worry here is that a policy that is meant to be fundamentally critical in conception of an integrated and comprehensive approach just may simply peter out to contain only a segment of the whole and pass for a national security policy. Each has a different intent and a different set of tools to achieve separate sets of objectives.

In a government that still sadly seems out of sorts and does not have a cogent thought on what must it do to deal with the immediate security issues at hand — the promise capital was huge when it first began — the hole on security seems wider by the day. That has given the other side, the Taliban, the space to force the issue on the government. When unprepared, and waiting to first develop a political consensus and then seek some strategy, it is akin to losing the moment and be faced with a fait accompli in both time and space. More often than not, the urgency of it all means the positional advantage in such a moment of engagement will lie with the other side, not you.

Why this recalcitrance? Simply, because security is not an inherent forte of the PML-N and little thought has gone into it in the preparatory phases of the then government-in-waiting. It must now find the wherewithal to lead it in the process to put together a national security policy. In the meanwhile, finding expanding space the Taliban force an agenda, at a pace, that is likely to push the government into a lag, forcing a strategic and physical paralysis. Such a state is out of sync with the prevailing trends in the region. This does not bode too well for Pakistan. There is a need to formulate and declare a policy and a road map to peace. If talks don’t deliver it, it will need to be won. That too will need a strategy.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2013.

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