All or none

The air is thick with talk of talks. Talks with this or that Taliban faction — there are perhaps, as many as 40 — and talk of who might act as honest broker or interlocutors. Even talk by the PTI that maybe talks will not be possible with all the disparate and often feuding Taliban and that some of them not wanting to talk must be identified and ‘dealt with’.

Now a group of clerics from Wafaqul Madaris and adherent of the Deobandi school of thought have dropped a none-too-subtle hint that they may be able to constructively engage at the interface between the federal and provincial governments, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It appears that thus far, the federal government has not asked for their assistance although there are reports — denied — that a group of Deobandi scholars have already met with the Interior Minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, on October 1.

There may be much to and fro but it is all going on in the absence of any clear counterterrorism strategy and the government, beyond convening the All Parties Conference, has taken no obvious step in the direction of concretising policy or strategy and gives every impression of dithering and drift.

Furthermore, the question of who is to talk to who and under what conditionalities remains unanswered, but it is clear that not all the Taliban that sit under the TTP umbrella are willing to talk at all and therein, lies the rub. The TTP can call any number of ceasefires, but if not everybody wants to stop trying to overthrow the legally elected government, their calls are pointless. Wars are not concluded by having just a portion of one group agreeing to stop fighting; all have to agree, otherwise, the war merely continues, perhaps at a reduced scale. For this war to end, the Taliban — all of them — have to not only stop fighting but also agree to live in peace under a democratic constitutional government. Thus far, there is no indication of that willingness, and until there is, nobody is going to walk the talk.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 4^th, 2013.

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