Terrorism in Pakistan

Damage terrorism has caused our national social fabric is hard to estimate, the human suffering is unimaginable

Pakistan is reeling from perhaps its most brutal terrorist assault, and its citizenry in general is distraught by the indescribable suffering of the families of innocent schoolchildren who recently became primary targets of this latest attack.

Even prior to counting the casualties suffered due to terrorism during this current year, Pakistan is ranked third on the list of countries most affected by terrorism, according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI).

The recently released GTI is based on data obtained from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, which is considered the most comprehensive dataset on terrorist activity globally, based on a codification of more than 125,000 terrorist incidents.

Although a total of 60 countries recorded deaths from terrorist attacks in 2013, and around 18,000 people lost their lives, 80 per cent of these lives were lost in only five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria). In 2013 alone, there were 2,345 deaths across Pakistan due to 1,933 terrorist attacks.

Besides highlighting key global trends and patterns of terrorism, the GTI also points to the statistical patterns of terrorist activity and its socioeconomic drivers. From a multitude of socioeconomic, governance and attitudinal variables, three types of factors were identified by the GTI’s report as having a significant relationship with terrorist activities. The first of the identified factors was social hostilities among different ethnic, religious and linguistic groups. The second group of factors included measures of state-sponsored violence such as extrajudicial killings and poor human rights. The last group of factors considered to have the most direct relevance for the prevalence of terrorism included a range of other forms of violence including perceptions of criminality, violent demonstrations, and levels of violent crime.

While Pakistan has major issues in terms of all three groups of factors identified by the GTI, the dismissal of other potential correlates to terrorism does merit questioning. It is surprising, for instance, that the GTI does not see any systematic link of terrorist activity to poverty measures, including the Human Development Index or its sub-components such as years of education or income levels. These findings are surprising given the plethora of research, indicating how social injustice and poverty provide a fertile breeding ground for terrorism. Moreover, one suspects that the above-mentioned factors such as social hostilities, for example, are directly influenced by problems like rising inequalities and disparities.

Moreover, while the GTI report considers state-sponsored violence to be an important factor in exacerbating terrorism, it also does not pay attention to the ongoing role of foreign intervention in terms of creating more militancy and terrorism, including Nato’s inability to stabilise either Iraq or Afghanistan, or its use of drone strikes in Pakistan.

Given the myopic focus of the GTI report in identifying causes of terrorism, and its neglect of even current geopolitical influences on the phenomenon, it is not surprising that the underlying historical causes, such as the role of colonial legacies which created hurried national boundaries that have caused much intergroup hostilities subsequently are not highlighted either.

While the GTI’s claim to identify the correlates of terrorism needs a rethink, its quantification of terrorist activities provides a stark reminder about the senseless tragedies being caused by this phenomenon, which has seen no sign of abating in our own country during the current year either.

Given that the long-term indirect costs of terrorism are estimated to be 10 to 20 times larger than the direct costs, our high GTI ranking has several negative economic implications. The damage that terrorism has done to our national social fabric is harder to estimate, and the human suffering caused by such incidents is perhaps unimaginable to those who have not yet been directly afflicted by it.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th,  2014.

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