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| Pakistan caught in its own web | | |
Tuesday’s terror attack on the Shri Lankan cricket team in Lahore underlines the fact that Pakistan has emerged a new home to terror and is making up a case for direct and enhanced military intervention of United States and NATO forces in the region. For a variety of reasons, the United States has already formally decided to raise its troop levels in Afghanistan by about 17,000 men. This was a much-needed step. It signifies the augmentation of the fighting forces in that country to take on the Taliban who stream in from the Pakistan side with a view to destabilising Kabul. But it is clear enough that stepping up force strength in Afghanistan to take on the terrorists or, for that matter, using drones with greater frequency to target areas of Taliban-Al Qaeda concentration in FATA, does not suffice to bring back normality. These are instrumentalities without which no composite strategy can hope to succeed. But these means to the desired end need to be deployed in the framework of a cohesive plan. And that underlines the importance of the matrix of politics which the international community must devise in consultation with crucial elements of the Pakistani state to effectively degrade the brand of jihadism. It cannot have escaped the attention of the principal players in the business of re-establishing stability in the Afghanistan-Pakistan zone that major gains for the ideology of jihad have occurred even as American aerial attacks in FATA have increased. This is principally because the Pakistani state is not playing ball, although elements within it may desire to. Thus, we have the extraordinary situation of the imposition of the Shariat in the Swat Valley and the wider Malkand region. The Pakistani state has simply caved in. It is being said that this has happened within the confines of a "deal" or understanding between the government and the Taliban. Analytically, such a view is unsustainable. The imposition of the Shariat, or Islamic law, fundamentally suggests that the formal constitution or basic law of Pakistan has ceased to operate in a part of the country. This is a development of wider import that needs to be placed in the context of President Asif Ali Zardari’s recent observation that the Taliban have spread their tentacles to large parts of the country and could conceivably take over the state apparatus. This makes for dire prognosis. The situation that has emerged calls into question the steps taken so far in the so-called war on terror. It also urges the need for a shift of the political paradigm if the world is to breathe easy, or if the efforts of the new US administration to deal with the issue are to bear fruit. At the end of his recent South Asia sojourn, the veteran American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who has been named his country’s special envoy to the Afghan-Pak region, went on record to say that the slide into chaos of the Pakistani North-West posed a threat to Pakistan, India and the US. There is no acuity of thought here, only lazy thinking. Unlike Islamabad, crucial elements of the state in Washington and New Delhi have shown no proclivity at any time to be surrogates for the jihadi mould of thought. If this understanding is not factored into analysis and future policy through public articulation, it is unlikely that we will see the retreat of the Islamist forces in Pakistan, and by implication Afghanistan. The modernist forces inside Pakistan have to be given the confidence that the world is with them in their struggle for survival.
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