A layer-cake operation

It was probably inevitable that Operation Zarb-e-Azb was going to displace not only more than a million non-combatants, but large numbers of militants as well, and that the logical place for them to go was north into Afghanistan. The future sustainability of militant groups using Afghanistan as their new headquarter area is dependent on the Afghan forces taking them on in the same way that Pakistan has. And Afghanistan has done nothing of the sort, the end result of which is going to be that there are groups of well-resourced and battle-hardened militants able to move at will back into Pakistan to continue their struggle to bring down the state. Whatever sacrifices our military may make — and more than 100 have been martyred in the course of the operation — they may end up being of little consequence, as Pakistan is a country where there is a significant section of the population, which is predisposed to sympathy for extremism and militancy, with no equally strong countervailing narrative. We cannot blame the military for this; it has done what was and continues to be asked of it.



If militancy and extremism are to be fought, the active cooperation of the Afghan government is necessary, and despite preemptive briefings by our forces of their counterparts in Afghanistan, this has not happened. Leading Taliban figures such as TTP chief Mullah Fazlullah are operating out of Kunar and Nuristan provinces of Afghanistan, with calls for the disruption of the mobile phone network on the Afghan side having fallen on deaf ears. On the plus side, there has been little of the expected blowback from the operation, and according to the ISPR, there has been a sharp decline in terrorist acts. The greatest burden remains the internally displaced persons, whose future looks to be truly bleak. They are at the bottom of the layer-cake, and there is no time frame for their return or any publicly-available plan for their rehabilitation, which is going to cost billions of rupees. They cannot go home until the military deems it safe to do so, and the tendrils of radical discontent will already be at work among their numbers.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 31^st, 2014.

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