Win at all costs

Addressing the passing-out parade of the first Special Combat Unit in Quetta, the prime minister said that “the war against terrorism would be won at all costs” and also that “no one can defeat a nation with valiant soldiers like Pakistan”. Fine words indeed and doubtless the newly trained soldiers were pleased, even proud, to hear them, but this is a complex war on many fronts and advances are asymmetric. Terrorism does not come to the battlefield in battalion strength; it has no conventional army and is driven by an ideological position that in the case of Pakistan is at variance with the democratic foundations of the state. The many and varied groups that are fighting Pakistan all have a core objective — the overthrow of the democratic institutions in their entirety. One of the groups that is yet to emerge into the light locally is the Islamic State, thus far the only terrorist group to have done what no other in the region has done — occupy significant areas of land and govern that which it occupied. None of the groups that are being fought in Pakistan have done that, though there are areas which are under the defacto control of terrorist groups.



It is against this background that the fight against terrorism is being fought, and as the prime minister was speaking in Quetta, the interior minister was speaking in Washington, DC and laying out a five-point strategy to counter the violent extremism that is the engine of terror. The last of the five items on the counter-extremism to-do list was to focus on education to promote tolerance, and there lies the key. Pakistan, over the last 30 years, has become a profoundly intolerant country, deeply polarised along sectarian fault lines. Much of the terrorism seen in 2015 is sectarian in origin, and most of the major attacks so far this year have been sectarian. Sectarian terrorist groups operate despite bans on them, and they attract widespread support financially via individual donations at home and from abroad, as well as through significant ‘street power.’ To ‘win at all costs’ Pakistan needs to activate the sectarian kill-switch, and that is years away.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st,  2015.

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